I flew to Seattle on Sunday.  Being bored, I shoulder surfed the laptop of the man sitting next to me.  He appeared to be writing a speech about how he handled being abused as a child.  The writing wasn’t especially good, but the content was interesting.  He got to a point where it would be natural to provide insight to his audience about his experience but he squandered the opportunity and rambled about how great his god is for a few paragraphs instead.

He closed the document and opened another.  He clearly wasn’t writing a speech –this seemed more like a journal.  This installment was about how his wife died leaving him to raise his son alone.  His son is in his late teens, an athlete, does well in school, and is well-adjusted apparently.  Stanley (he mentioned his own name in the text) got a lot of his strength from needing to be his son’s role model.  Again I was disappointed to see that the natural place to put personal insight was instead filled with praise to his deity.

Another document was opened.  This chapter was about how Stanley went from being an alcoholic to a recovering alcoholic.  Sordid! 

Stanley was editing the document as he read it and I realized that he wasn’t working on his diary but on his autobiography. 

Stanley’s opportunity to give his reader insight about overcoming alcoholism was again spent pontificating about Jesus.

Stanley’s writing style, spelling, and punctuation were atrocious.

I looked at Stanley carefully.  He was a black man in his 50s.  He had a well trimmed, greying beard and looked respectable, intelligent and friendly.

I was dividing my attention between Stanley’s book (which got dull in places) and the in-flight movie, Breach (which got dull in places).  I got the impression that Stanley knew I was reading his book.  For no reason that I can explain I had a sudden feeling that he was a serial killer.

The last chapter that I read was about Stanley meeting a woman on the internet and going on a coffee date with her.  For once I could relate to Stanley’s descriptions of how he felt (nervousness, awkwardness, exhiliration) as he found out that the woman was beautiful and that she was into him.  He didn’t blame his success on the super natural either (although he did thank his god).

Seattle seems like a pretty cool city.  I only had one night to go out and I went to a bar called “The Fun House” which bills itself as “Seattle’s Oldest Surviving Punk Club”.  I had to pay a $6 cover to get in, but it’s always nice to drink a pint of $1 Pabst while listening to Fugazi, Bad Brains, and the Dead Kennedys.

It was a Monday night so I wasn’t expecting much, but it turned out okay.

For example, I had never seen a two piece death metal band before.  Rukut is comprised of the standard shirtless drummer and a female guitarist/vocalist who sounds like she could be in Napalm Death.  Their music was a blend of dreadful and awesome.  Their set was mostly original music although they did play a decent cover of Pantera’s “By Demons Be Driven”.

I had a hard time seeing the band because there were two dudes sitting on the stools next to me who were in my way (and I didn’t care enough to move).  One was some blonde guy who I named “Dr. Oaf” and his friend who had the face of Henry Rollins and the early 90s Metallica hairstyle (long on top, shaved on the sides).  From time to time Flatsides would run out into the abandoned dance floor and freak the fuck out.  He’d stomp around and jump and wind up diving into the floor. Every time he did this I watched to see if he spit out any of his teeth but somehow he kept his dental work intact.

On the last flight of my journey home from Chicago to Toronto I sat next to a woman named Christine who was going home to Toronto.  She was a nervous flyer and she white-knuckled the take off and squeezed her eyes tightly shut so that she could concentrate on keeping the wings attached to the plane with her will power.  I was surprised that I didn’t find this annoying.

During the flight she mentioned that her husband is a vegetarian but that she eats everything except fish.  She explained that when she was a little girl, her father drowned and it took a few days for the body to be found.  When she asked an adult why the casket was closed she was told that fish had nibbled on him and that he wasn’t a pleasant sight.  Christine pointed out that lots of people drown and that you can’t be sure that the fish you’re eating hasn’t eaten a person.

Across the aisle was an annoying woman from Minnesota that had a ludicrous tattoo of Toucan Sam playing pool on the back of her neck.  As we circled over Toronto she kept marvelling at how many lanes wide the highways were.  She kept saying really stupid things (”Lake Ontario isn’t a Great Lake is it?”).  I wanted to hurt her.