Palm Beach

Hello readers of blogs.

I am currently sitting and typing adjacent to a second-floor balcony with slightly-ajar sliding door, because i am located in Palm Beach, Florida, and it is much warmer than minus twenty-five degrees Ridiculous, which is the same thing as Fahrenheit, except that it applies to digits less than zero.

Why i am here has to do with my job, which is not exciting. What is more exciting is the sidereal dramas involved in arriving here, starting at 5 pm yesterday, at which time i was sitting at gate 10 at BUF, silently agape at the combined height of the UB Bulls basketball team, who were apparently getting ready to share my airplane to DC. I was swayed by the physical presences, and became convinced that they must be an undefeatable basketball team, but maybe they are not. It is a UB sports team, after all.

The UB Bulls are playing Ball State tonight, i think.

They will probably win, because they were graced by a goodest good luck charm yesterday, whose shortened head hair and not-quite-sickeningly-proceeding facial hair combine to form a fresh look, allowing a level of self-esteem which in turn allows for fleeting minutes of determined assertion, in certain situations. I know of whom i speak.

Anyway, my United flight sat on the tarmac for an extra hour, being sad, so i promptly missed my connection to Palm Beach and assumed i was screwed. But United hooked me up with an alternate route via Charlotte. So i flew to Charlotte, adjacent to the jet's furnace, i guess, which kept me at a beyond-comfortable temperature of 105 degrees Insane, which is the same thing as Fahrenheit, for digits more than one hundred. For the temperature gradient i had exposed myself to yesterday, i will surely contract four flus, one on top of the other.

I just checked the score. UB is only down by two points at the moment.

Anyway, my flight to Charlotte also decided to sit on its tarmac for an hour, and as a result, i was coerced into some unintended exercise:

Determined not to miss a second connection in two hours, i exit jetway at A15, and begin sprinting across the Charlotte airport, fastly past all of the moving walkways with slow slow folks, past the comfortable looking rows of rocking chairs which i have admired so many times and never sat within, down the Terminal C corridor, all the way to the end, handing my boarding pass to the ticketing agent who was in the process of announcing the last call for passengers, as i dove into the jetway, tasting blood all up and down my trachea, which cannot be so super.

We sat on the tarmac in Charlotte for an hour.

I sat next to a batshit insane old lady on this third and last flight. At first i thought she was talking to me, but it turned out she was talking to herself, wondering out loud "We're flying so low i've never seen a plane fly this low before i wonder if they know how low they are flying." I took a peek out the window. We were very obviously at twenty-thousand feet or more. When she failed to be assertive enough to show her plastic cup and garbage as the flight attendant passed with a trash bag on three occasions, she assumed, out loud, that she was being snubbed, and dumped the ice, the cup, and maybe a shot's worth of vodka into her seat pocket, justifying with "That's what you get..." When we landed, she removed her buckle and began to climb over me to leave the plane, only to find that no one had begun to move yet. Also, she smelled like piss. She had said something very loudly to herself every minute or two for the entire flight, i wish i could remember some of her other comments, but i was concentrating more on how awkward it seemed to ignore everything she said so utterly and completely.

Anyway, when i got to Palm Beach at midnight, it was warm. And immediately i felt my moistureless arcticidic skin begin to heal its deep cracks and jagged craters with the merciful humid air, and i was content.

Tonight i walked to the beach, and had it all to myself. Apparently, no one goes to the beach in Palm Beach. Maybe the entire population of the city is in their pajamas watching Wheel of Fortune while i am claiming the beach. This was my theory. I took blurry pictures of the ocean and stars and city lights. They were all blurry because the exposures were long because the light was so dim because it is a winter evening. Maybe i will show some pictures after i get back home tomorrow. Maybe i willn't.

Twilight, bare feet, sand, short sleeves, wave sounds and lack of human presences were things i was able to check off of my list for 2/7.

Ball State is up by ten with seven minutes left. How ruinous those heathens are.