America, The Sad
I rarely travel for business. It’s a waste of time and the client’s money. Some clients seem to like to know that I’m not a virtual entity, however, and seem to not mind paying through the nose for my physical presence. So, when a billion-dollar client says, C’mon down, son, I’m likely to comply.
So, now I sit in a mid-western hotel room, beating out this entry because if I don’t, my soul will simply drain away. I will be heading out of a regional airport in the early afternoon on a plane with propellers, for G-d’s sake, to connect in another mid-western city with another small plane for the cumulatively short haul back to heavenly New Jersey. I see now from the local network news that there are delays expected due to weather around New York. Great.
My driver this week is a pleasant, friendly Kentucky-bred southern feller who is the epitome of what North-Easterners would expect to be attached to the name Bubba. In fact, he closely resembles Budai (not Buddha, friends – different guy) although he is considerably more taciturn. He also drives in a manner most sociopathic. Perhaps it is I who must grow a pair, but I have glanced death’s shining scythe several times this week, usually in the form of a late-nineties, high-mileage sedan most ready to side-swipe me to the afterlife.
Since my rendezvous with Amelia Earhart isn’t until later this afternoon, my driver has to wait until I depart. He then has to drive hundreds of miles back to his home below the Mason-Dixon line. I feel very bad for him. He’s trapped by his job, which keeps him from his non-job responsibilities and his family, which are also a trap. He’s a captive in the Land of The Free.
Robin Meade is pitching her newest pseudo-country CD on HLN in between “reporting” on the Treyvon Martin murder trial and the arrest of Patriots football player Hernandez for murder. Her teeth are blazing white in the direct-front softbox lighting at the HLN studio and this monolithic display of her enameled calcium omnivore ingestion toolkit most resemble the single swipe of white paint applied by a skilled Asian factory worker to any variety of Barbie, Tee Em. She offers many conspiratorial “right, you guys?” side-glances to the camera, which is an extension of us, gag gag, with the only thing missing as being a bowl-sized serving of an artificially-coloured key lime margarita between us to cement the sense of festiveness. But she is giving away four whole CDs a day if you log on to something or other and share your precious contact information to sign up to her mailing list which no doubt links to her Facebook (Tee Em again) page and her Twitter account and her Pinterest page and her Tumblr and whatever else she’s forced to use to promote her creative side since the old-fashioned modes of selling an artist are, well, old-fashioned and not tooled for the borderless, odorless and very colourful world of digital media. She’s trapped in a television screen, wearing so much make-up, because this is HD, after all, that her skin no longer has any visible texture whatsoever. She’s trapped by whatever pluckiness got her to an anchor spot on a major cable network, reporting as she must on Omega-3s and tornado survivors and pot-bellied pigs, her face frozen in a sincere-looking but ultimately wan smile that betrays no emotion, certainly not happiness. She’s trapped by her success, moderate in a world of similarly successful people with whom she is forever at battle in competition for at least the retention of that success, the way a lioness must not only take down the wildebeest, but also guard it from interlopers with the same ferocity as the challengers may offer.
Traverse the socio-economic food chain in either direction from any point and it becomes clear that all are trapped in a daily struggle to remain relevant, to feed the furnace of survival, to kill or be killed, if not literally, then most certainly in the apotrophic sense.