Pouring Music From a Cup

REVOLUTION, I SAY!   It’s time to stuff the profit-swollen airline swine back down into the deep dark corporate pit where they belong! Time to put the genie back in the bottle and cork it forever! Listen. Over the years I’ve flown quite a few times. Many times, in fact. I’ve flown all over the United States and I’ve flown internationally. As of this writing I’ve flown to, I think, 23 countries, plus any number of times internally in several of those countries. The most harrowing of all those internal flights was in 1986 on an Air India jet from Arusha, Tanzania, to Kigali, Rwanda. We’d only been in the air for about an hour and weren’t terribly high above the mountains when there was a sudden boom! and a great shuddering of the entire plane. For half a minute the cabin rocked and vibrated to the sound of grinding gears. It scared the hell out of me, but none of the flight crew seemed particularly alarmed— maybe that sort of thing was a common occurrence for Air India, I don’t know...

  There’s no escaping them, those bureaucratic panhandlers on every corner and intersection of our lives. You know the ones I’m talking about. It’s Ticket Master and Stub Hub charging “handling fees”; it’s your Airbnb charging a “cleaning deposit” or a “late fee” if you’re out the door just twenty minutes after check-out time; it’s the electric company charging a “convenience fee” because you pay your monthly bill online; it’s Budget, Penske, and U-Haul charging a (supposedly) refundable damage deposit up front when you rent one of their obscenely overpriced trucks. It’s “maintenance fees” on your checking and/or savings account. It’s a hundred different ticky-tack fees and add-ons that companies charge the customer as “the price of doing business” while hiding behind the mask of inflation just so they can dip their ladles ever deeper into our money buckets over and over and over again. They’re fee-festooned malefactors, deposit-fattened jackals, toll-bloated ticks, and there’s no ...

First published in July 1998 .            I came to Texas kicking and screaming. Stepped off that 727 at Houston Intercontinental Airport on July 19th, 1973 after having spent two weeks in Sarasota, Florida, with my grandparents, their grapefruit trees, and swims in crystal blue water twice a day at their beachfront cabaña. I’m not sure I ever knew exactly why I was spared the cross-country move from Knoxville, Tennessee to Humble, Texas, when my mother and brother were forced to pile in the Blue Oiler— packed window-to-window and its tailgate bulging with shit that should have been thrown out in the back yard and set on fire —and endure two and a half days of ever-flattening Tennessee, through Memphis, and then the Arkansas state highways, eternally reduced to a single lane for the entire length of the state . . . but they did. Listening to my old man swear at the “ sorry sombitches” at Ford who designed the Torino, at the truckers clogging the left lane,...

Sometimes you feel so low you just want to let it all go. Rain keeps falling and falling and you’re sure it’s useless, there’s no point in going on. You wonder why life is the way it is and if you’ll ever find peace of mind. You never seem to learn from your mistakes, and when you need that Someone more than ever before, there is no Someone, there’s no one around to take your hand or understand. You walk the dark and empty road that leads to nowhere because being alive means moving on, ever on. Your concrete smile is hard and fixed; no one will ever know what’s behind it: the iron heart, the fragile spirit. Lost and empty souls stumble through their own lives on every side of you, their hollow eyes staring straight ahead, unaware of your existence. You are, and forever shall be                alone. You’ve been through so very much, such heartache and disappointment, that this road has become familiar, its dark forest the only way t...