Okay. The writing genie is still on vacation, but there have been some, okay one, and you know who you are, who has been pestering me with guilt-inducing, whiny emails about the paucity of my blog entries. So to quieten the madding crowdette, I post a short journal entry I wrote while waiting for my flight in Laguardia, circa 2006.

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I just had a nice hour of people-watching. One very large woman made me hungry as I watched her wolf down a pretzel dog. Never having heard of a pretzel dog, much less eaten one, I was seduced by the warm soft look of the pretzel dough with just that touch of salt, wrapped enticingly around one of those fat juicy, bad-for-you dogs that one remembers from school sporting events or state fairs. I easily succumbed and bought one. Oh my. The trickle of mustard I added to the top of the bun lifted it from merely tasty to absolutely Divine. I blotted out the fact that my Ellen underwear was a bit snug as I savored every fatty, succulent, hot bite. Also to entertain while we waited for our plane to arrive was a real live mouse family scurrying and darting out from the wall directly under the large, plate glass tarmac windows, and 2 feet from my chair. I kept sprinkling the area with bun crumbs and they would zip out of the wall and back, quick as a snake's tongue. They must have been pretty hungry to come out around all those pairs of shoed human feet within easy stomping range. A few women who sat next to me saw them, shot their feet out as if they were on springs and, waiting for the beasts to disappear into the wall again, moved away to creature-free territory a few rows away. I thought the mice were cute and even took a few photos.

After boarding the plane, there was a full fifteen minutes of taxiing, and my eyes were drooping. I truly suffer from motion-sleepies. Better than pills. Just plop me down into a moving vehicle of any description and I'm drooling on my pillow in no time. Thank goodness there are no screaming children or chatty cathy's on this flight. Being a night flight, it's not very full and I do my usual scoping of those sitting around me. No one of real interest, just the typical couples, businessmen headed home, studying company papers and clicking on their laptops, face bluish in the monitor screen light. Am I the only person who takes in and studies everyone in my immediate vicinity thinking, "these could be the people I die with? These faces could be the last ones I see when we fall screaming to our fiery and horrible deaths?"

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Quote of the day: Life was, after all, like air. Seemed to be no way of keeping it out or at a distance and all he could do for the moment was live it and breathe it. How people managed to draw it down into their lungs without choking was a mystery to him. It was full of bits. This was air you could almost chew. Hornby - About a Boy.
Chosen for the wonderful last line. Who hasn't felt that occasional thick air that was hard to swallow for any variety of reasons; adrenaline of fear, indignation of rage, the heartpound of new love.