and feel something constant under my feet

In yesterday's post, Brooklyn Brown asked me how I like being back in San Francisco. When I read that question this morning, I could not help but smile. Because, hi, once more, I'm not in San Francisco, even as I am typing this.

Here's how it played out. I got off the plane from Texas, feeling like death warmed over. Over the next few days, I got back to competition health. I went to work for one day- yesterday. Then, I came home, dumped out my suitcase of one set of clothes, in order to replace them with another, more professional set. And today, I am sitting in a hotel room.

Oh yeah, and somewhere in all that, I managed to watch Croupier, mostly because I wasn't feeling up to seeing Children of Men, but was in desperate need of a Clive Owen fix. It's sort of wrong to like Clive Owen. He's always playing these characters that seem completely unapologetic- like he might slap you and just shrug that you shouldn't have made him so mad. Not exactly someone to put up on a pedestal. I think he has played good guys, but I do not think I have ever seen any of those movies. Instead, I catch him in all these dark films where he is dropping the f-bomb with such vitriol that it can give you the extended creeps. Like Croupier.

The cool thing about the movie is that it's constantly narrated, because the protagonist is a writer. I wonder if that is some kind of a phenotype of a writer, to be constantly recounting, redescribing, reinterpreting, in your head, events even as they unfold. When I am alone, that is one of my favorite pasttimes. But of course, that never really comes through when I write, so I am clearly not a writer.

One advantage of all the flying all over the place over the past months is that I have amassed enough miles that I got upgraded to first class today. But, I always feel strange in first class. It's times like this that I realize I could never really be rich. It doesn't suit me, makes me uncomfortable. I feel like I ought to act a certain way, but I find myself incapable. In first class, I keep waiting for someone to kick me out, though no one did. Instead, they gave me this look, like oh, how cute, one of those ordinary types got bumped up in here. An elderly woman in the seat in front of me did serve to amuse me though- she ordered no less than four bourbons on a 5-hour flight. I kept waiting for the flight attendant to cut her off, but then I remembered that we were in first class, where apparently it's okay to get smashed.

Well, now I have to talk myself into getting into this new time zone, so that I do not oversleep and muck up the entire reason I am once again away from home. Home that will not be home for that much longer. I think I might have to put a hold on all further travel after this, until I quit the grind.