BigCityLib on Vacation

This will be one of the last posts I do for awhile, as I am off on vacation to the beautiful Left Coast for a couple of weeks, to visit Ma and Pa Liberal and my brother, LeftCoastHipster.

I will try and check in now and again during my trip, if I am around a computer, and may do a couple of short posts. I may even upload a few shots from the digicam if I see anything notable (Ma and Pa used to have a Kingfisher living in the trees above Millstream Creek, and occasionally get visits from Great Blue Herons, deer, raccoons, and the like).

But before all that I am going to have to get on a airplane, and I have to admit that BigCityLib really, really doesn't like getting on airplanes.

Now, I'm not like William Shatner in that episode from the Twilight Zone. I don't scream or loose the old bowels or curl up in a fetal ball. They haven't ever had to medicate me.

But I always try and get an aisle seat so I don't have to look out the window, and I always ask if the window nearest me can be closed for take-off and landing. Furthermore, I always book a seat towards the forward/rear ends of the plane; I never want to see what the wing is doing. If you're ever aboard the same flight, I'm the pale-looking guy whose reading his newspaper upsidedown while the plane taxis onto the runway. I used to do the drink-until-you-pass-out routine in an attempt to sleep through my various plane flights, but it occurred to me that if something really went wrong, the screams of the other passengers would probably wake me, and the idea of dying hung-over just didn't appeal.

As the months and days to my vacation have counted down, my mind has begun to wander morbidly. For example, I've been asking myself, is it better to have your body hosed across the flanks of Mt. Robson, or to be clutching a fragment of rudder, floating in oily water as the shark circles closer and and closer and eats the last flight attendant?

I know people say its much safer flying than driving, and I suppose that's true. But if you crash a car you usually live long enough, as you bleed to death in the wreckage, to flash back more or less leisurely over your life and evaluate what you've accomplished. When a jet plane goes down, its all screaming until the big SPLAT!

So, once again, no posts from mid-Sunday, July 2nd until at least Tuesday the 4th, and then maybe the occasional short piece with, maybe, the occasional pretty picture. Assuming I walk away from my flight.

Meanwhile, there is an old Russian proverb: when you meet a Bulgarian in the Street, hit them. They'll know why.

So keep stomping those Tories. In their souls, they are Bulgarian.