I’m feeling like I’m in a David Mitchell novel: I’m stuck at an airport and the reality is coming apart at the seams.
There’s a TV full of talking heads and nauseating jumpy moving pictures (I’m not used to tellys). For the last several hours is has been displaying the very same streets I’ve walked this morning, and yesterday, and the day before, and the calm, warm, friendly stones are now teeming with people. Angry, concerned, exalted about something — thousands, *tens of thousands* of them on the streets of Paris. There are signs which wiggle too fast for me to read. The’s a scrolling ticker at the bottom of the screen which is telling bits of vaguely related stories. Something something brexit something something communist party something someting.
My flight is held up because the plane is broken, or something, no one seems to know what. When I stand up from the piano — oh, of course there’s a grand piano, all red velvet and white lacquer — to check up on my flight, someone comes by and *breaks* it. Like, how do you break a grand piano?
I come to the business lounge, pour myself a glass of ice and settle down to write. My spidey sense is tingling and I feel a story coming.
A guy across me asks if we’ve ever met. We talk and figure that we didn’t. I don’t know anyone named Muhammed, not personally, and I haven’t been to London, like, ever. We both write code. We both like Omar Khayyam, but Muhammed’s lucky to be able to read him in original Persian.
We chat some and hit on a project we could do together. He’s got an idea and is working on the backend, I can work on the frontend and as we sit I sketch out strategy — turns out I’m familiar with the problem domain and he’s pleasantly surprised with the articles I send his way and my overview of the competition.
I remember that I have a postcard to send. I have an empty postcard on me, I even have a postal stamp, but there’s no post office in the airport. One of the business lounge assistant kindly offers to take it outside and post it for me, so I draw a picture of the divine Parisian architecture — partly from memory, partly from the photos I’ve snapped, even though this sort of thing should be drawn from nature — and off she goes as it’s the end of her shift.
Hours pass by, the TV is getting more feverish — is there a revolution at hand? — the discussion turns to psychiatry and dealing with depression and CBT workbooks, I ping my brother’s roommate who’s doing research in Sonology in Den Haag — I’ve *taught* that, but I’m in my own little bubble, so wouldn’t it be nice to have someone to talk shop — and there’s 80000hours career guide I’ve earmarked for reading as wait for my plane so might as well do that.
romaincrisis
jbbartram-illu
jacobvanloon
