October 5, 2007

Detroit airport. The wireless in the Charlotte airport allowed me to read messages from Ganymede Arts about The Loves of Mr. Lincoln. The substance of the queries was routine, but it is wonderful to be receiving messages from a theater, about my play, with some measure of urgency behind them.

I lay down to sleep last night, but I knew I had to wake very early, so the sleep was all REM, dream after dream of great vividness, near-the-surface dreams through which the sounds of the real night occasionally broke. I was thinking of my students, of the extraordinary ways they are trying to relate to me, trying to enter the sphere they perceive around me, of my too casual reception of this interest, as though it were amusing or of slight account. I must stop this. I must take their attention seriously, as they intend it.

In the end I rose far earlier than I needed to. When I drove to long-term parking at the airport, it was not open, and I pulled under a light at a closed service station and studied my lines for Virginia Woolf until the airport started up again at 4 AM. Contemplated the likelihood that such a thing had never happened on that spot in all the history of the world.

A boy and his father karate-spar in the concourse. There is the woman with the largest butt I’ve ever seen in the world. Her face and torso do not seem fat, especially, but her butt is colossal, and one cannot help wondering if she fits into one seat on an airplane, or has a row to herself, or what.

What is I had stayed in Akron? What if I made this trip again and again?