‘When I start thinking of my life as an event, rather than a thing, I feel better.’

I thought after a TSA pat down in Portland, Oregon.

Further down the airport terminal, there is a piano player. Portland would put a piano player in an airport.

I slide my Bose QuietComforts off, hanging them around my neck like a laurel. I don’t enjoy live piano, but acknowledging it felt like an act of artist-solidarity with the player. It had to be a tough crowd, an airport terminal.

It was only for a minute anyway, or a 100 yards.

‘No speed without time.’

Another weird thought . . . or fact maybe. I don’t know, I don’t care for science.

A metal sign propped up next to the piano player bears her headshot. She is gazing aloof at the upper right corner. Mt. Hood is superimposed behind her. The light hits the mountain and her face at different angles. She looks like my high school friend, Thia. I fell out of contact with Thia a few years ago, around when I turned 25.

‘She looks so much like Thia.’

The san-serif paragraph on the sign, printed in the sky above her and Mt. Hood tells me her name. Sarah, not Thia.

Sarah is here on behalf of the Portland Music for Everyone Volunteer Organization. Portland would ask someone to play piano in an airport for free. Thia would’ve never. She balked every time I did free graphic work, even for friends. She was of the opinion that until all creatives charged a price, none of us would make a living. I was sympathetic, but ‘FUCK-YOU-PAY-ME’ sensibilities pushed art too close to ‘GRINDSET’ for my comfort. My art practice felt like a grind more often then not, but ‘art is a grind’ was not an admonition I felt I could survive. I need creativity to be something I wander through, however fruitless. Plus, Ai? I don’t know, I don’t care for science.

Sarah was playing a minimalist Ode to Joy. The melody slowed down. The notes rationed out like water on a life raft. I slid my headphones back on.

When I was a kid, wandering around the grocery store, Mom used to have the checkout lady call me over the intercom . . . 

“Would Sam please come to the front of the store, it’s time to go home.”

Mom knew it was both a little fun, and a little embarrassing. I wish I could call Thia to the front like that.

‘I’m heading to Phoenix to reconnect with Cousin.’

I think as a knee-jerk consolation. God never closes a door without opening a window. God loves watching humans clamber awkwardly through windows.

Cousin and I haven’t been close since high school. He, Thia, and I were squaded back then. He’d been working for Mckinsy Group since he snagged his MBA in 2015. Mckinsy Group is a management consulting company with a strong ambiguity-of-purpose. Their website is all profound(less) non-statements like,

Hypergrowth: It’s about people

Cousin lived in a Seattle penthouse like a Frat-Boy-Fraiser. He married his strawberry-blonde personal trainer in 2017. He liked to brag about how much she loved anal at family gatherings, when it was “just the boys” out in the backyard before dinner.

The explosive power of an early-onset midlife crisis shot him back into my life. In the last 3 months he’d lost his job during a downsizing—Hypergrowth: It’s about people—and discovered that his wife had been cheating on him with her clients since pretty much forever. By discovered, I mean she texted him a photo of her riding reverse on a hard-abed college athlete a few hours after they’d had a fight.

She took their pug, Bacardi.

Cousin called me a few days ago, bawling. After lamenting his tale, he told me he felt like he’d wasted his life on career striving. He didn’t know anything about, “books or art or that shit that we used to be into, but I started thinking was gay once I went Greek in College.”

He invited me to stay at his new spot in Phoenix to help him with the vague goal of learning about whatever the opposite of Mckinsy-hot-wife-GRINDSET-MODE is.

Mostly, he seemed lonely.

This whole thing was a real grass-greener short-circuit for me. Hearing about Cousin's beautiful, horny wife and growing salary every Thanksgiving, I’d feel jealous. I’d learned to counter the jealousy by focusing on how broish Cousin had become since high school, when him, Thia and I were sci-fi/techno nerds — trading ear buds and paperbacks. Him being jealous of me meant that we still shared something. It’s like we’re the two color fields in a Ying-Yang, with dots of longing for each other's lives.

It made me think of Thia again. She’s a nail artist making 100K+ view tutorial vids. She’d found a way to paint a hundred thousand paintings in one lifetime. She was thriving. That was part of our rift. I’d never found my thrive hack, and I’m insecure about it.

The last time I saw her, I didn’t really see her. I’d just had a rough-go appendicitis and was sedated at the hospital. The morning after the surgery I woke up with the book, Snowcrash, resting on my chest. There was a note written on a bookmark. It said she knew I could read this book 1000 times (true), and there was no need to give it back. I wish she’d wanted it back. It would’ve been a good excuse to see her.

Right before the plane boarded I popped a psilocybin microdose capsule this witchy friend gave me for my 30th birthday last month. It was stacked with hawthorn root, cacao, and rishi. It was heart opening. Half an hour later I keep looking at the landscape passing 35000 feet below, trying to have profound thoughts. None came.

The plane enters dark clouds and the desert below fades to gray. When we exit the clouds monsoons glide around us, dragging great tendrils of rain. They float like jellyfish.

"Good afternoon folks, this is your captain. Looks like we’re about to hit a patch of turbulence. Shouldn’t last long, but for everyone’s safety I’d ask that you return to your seats and make sure seat belts are securely fastened. We appreciate your patience while we ride this out. Thank you.”

I watch the wings flex and wobble as they endure increasingly violent jolts. It’s disconcerting, but I assume flexion is built into the wings of planes — seems intuitive.

I think of Confucius . . .  

“when the wind blows, the grass bends.”

A few minutes later, the wing breaks. It doesn’t brake all the way, a tear appears on its midsection like a buzzsaw across the equator of a beer can. It sends the plane into a wide spiral. I feel g-force pulling the side of my face like an endearing pinch on the cheek. The masks drop. A little plastic panel falls in my lap. This seemed silly to me. I thought,

‘I'd have put that on a hinge.’

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. We’re dealing with an emergency situation. Please stay calm, fasten your seatbelts, and follow all instructions from your crew.”

The mix of mushrooms and years of practiced detached observation glazed me. The panic, prayers, tears and screams of others felt like a wind bending around me.

“We’re coordinating with air traffic control to secure a safe expanse for landing. Your safety is our top priority. Thank you for your coop—”

His voice was cut off by a horrific wrenching noise. I could feel our spiral tighten.

The captain's calm shocked me into action. It was the calm of hospice nurses and of lullabies. When that wing snapped off, the g-force would probably knock me out. I would die unconscious in a crowded coffin of strangers. That felt predictable.

I got up and made my way to the back of the plane, gripping headrests for stability. One of the crew shouted at me, but a jolt threw him off his feet. He hit his head on an armrest and lay in the aisle. I hopscotched around him. At the back, I tug the handle of a ceiling panel. A yellow rectangle thunks to the floor. I dragged it next to the door. I was gonna try to pull an Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom — jump from the plane, deploy the life raft, and sail it to the earth. Bad artists copy, good artist steal, and I am an artist, I will die creatively. If may even live. I have the same chance artists always have, a slim one.

The woman in the seat in the last row slumped over, passed out. A baby slid from her arms and into the aisle. Its tiny body was strapped in a deployed life vest. It wrapped around them like a donut. An air bag. Another creative thinker.

I take the baby and placed them on my raft, no, our raft — our ship of fools — pinning them there with my foot while I read the deployment instructions. Educated, I wrestled one arm between the baby and their life vest, and, with the same arm, grabbed the raft by its rip-cord. The plane has quieted down – a prayer here and there, one gentle sob. It was midnight mass. It stank of early surrender. I say,

“Yawn.”

. . . and opened the door. 

The force sucks our strange assemblage out in a flash. The air is crisp and rushing, we’re bathed in the golden light of dusk. Out of that dank womb and into a bright world. This baby and I shared another birth. We’re twins.

Our plan was proceeding elegantly. The force of the exit pulled my body against the ripcord, deploying the raft. Within seconds my twin and I were in the center of a large gold octagon, pinned there by the air pushing up beneath us. Above, the plane's wing finally rips free, sending the fuselage spiraling off like a boomerang. 

‘It’s working,’ I thought, ‘We’ll survive this, I’ll adopt you, our lives will be a stolen work of art.’

But the clouds we fell from were receding too fast, and air rushed at a rate the spelled 𝗜𝗠𝗣𝗔𝗖𝗧 in bold.

I’d lived in Cambodia for a while once — one of my lost-boy gambits. A Buddhist Monk told me something there. He said it was impossible to call even the emptiest life a failure, because our entire incarnation might be meant for a single moment, a single decision — one stubbed toe or held door — that, known or unknown, saves a life, or even the entire world, for just another moment.

I’d not thought much of it at the time, but it felt true now. It turns every life into an artwork. It makes us all artists of a collective salvation.

“We’re falling too fast.”

I say to the baby.

I get out my phone and set up a group text with Thia and Cousin. I tell them I am falling from a plane in a life raft somewhere around Flagstaff, like in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I say they should use my phone to locate the raft — I felt sure there was a way to do that. I took a picture. The baby is looking up at sun the with that dumb awe baby’s have. It’s a cute pic.

I say Thia and Cousin should get a drink. I think it would be good for them to reconnect. They both have that GRINDSET MINDSET. I say I love them.

I tuck my phone into the baby's onesie and buckle their vest to a canvas eyelet at the center of the raft. I look at their awe for another second. Then I roll over the side.

The raft lifts away from me at a reassuring rate, my twin might just make it.

‘No time without speed.’

. . . and how far and fast and free I travel now. So much life packed in a plummet. The air was warmer, the ground was close. Good. I was eager to burst out of my body. I kept my eyes up. My life flashed before me not as vignettes of the past, but as a bright expanse of sky — I didn't know where it stopped and I began.

“Would Sam please come to the front of the store, it’s time to go home.”

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