We are flying from Phoenix, Arizona, to Portland, Oregon, tonight. We are on today’s last non-stop flight that will have us arriving at midnight. After we fetch our rental car our hotel is just a couple of minutes from there. The plan is for an early wake-up so we can get moving south on Interstate 5 to hopefully reach the coast by noon. If weather from the interior to the coast looks like we could hit icy roads, we’ll instead head out the Columbia River towards Astoria and then south, which will require at least 8 hours of driving.

As I said in a previous blog recently, this is our 18th trip to Oregon over the past 17 years. We are surprised that after this many times and our ability to venture nearly anywhere we’d like to, we are still as excited as ever to be encountering this beautiful corner of America yet again.

At the airport, I start to become overwhelmed with my social anxiety, seeing that the masses are a corruption of sniffling convulsions who have no idea they are in public. Their tics are on the verge of Tourettes, while their vulgar displays of what is measured in their minds as fashionable drive me to the edge of losing my composure and returning to the car so we can have a pleasant drive north. This temporary clan of people only has one thing in common with me: we are at the same airport; beyond that, they are barely human. I make this assessment from the pedestal of advantage as I’m able to see through their insipid artifacts of fake personas that attempt to show aspects of a thing they find relevant, but this act is transparent. This facade is an illusion, allowing their shallow meaninglessness to scream at me, “Look, look here! I have these things that give me the appearance of relevance!”

I can’t shrink at these antics and allow their greasy lather to simply flow off my back. I become entangled by their creepy web of superficiality that can be read as a plea to become meaningful if only they could cast off their hostility toward knowledge and ditch the banality. Their consumption of media defines their shape, and their future is a custom-made straight jacket subliminally created by their lack of personal intellectual responsibility. This nothingness they embody oozes out of them, dripping like hot wax into my sense of well-being. This is how I fly.