Flying and Sleeping

Today is the birthday of my father. He would have been 78 today. But he died over two years ago before he could turn 76. I haven't visited his grave for over a year. I must go and visit at the beginning of the new year. I won't have time this year, which is drawing to an end. And with my ass in Melbourne and soon in Adelaide, I can say that this year is out of the question. But I remember you, Daddy. Help me to be strong as you had been.

I left work at 4:40 pm. I rushed to the airport to catch the plane to Melbourne. Arriving at Terminal 2 at the Domestic Airport, I saw miles and miles of queues, making me wonder: do I have enough time to catch the plane? I still had to go through security. Reluctantly I joined a queue. I had to start with this, or else I would be going nowhere. A ground staff was announcing that people in the flights almost boarding should join the priority line. But even this line was long, full of people eager to get on the plane, people returning to their home city after work in Sydney, people going for a visit, people going to work in their destination cities. People like me, combining work and visit, all in the name of Christmas and spreading a bit of the Christmas cheer, and at the same time, getting away from the surrounds of Sydney that have become blasé, bland, unrelentingly familiar, bombarding my dull senses with aggravating images of toeless pigeons in the little food court near work, scavenging around the tables, sometimes leaping on the tables, brazenly spreading their dusty wings landing of tables for crumbs and annoying fat ladies during the lunchtime break. After over half an hour, almost giving up but nonetheless still hopeful, I got where I wanted to be, being attended to at the check-in counter. Flight DJ882 to Melbourne boarding at 18:45, departing at 20:55. It was already 19:00. There’s still the security barriers to go through My boarding pass looked more like a docket from Coles supermarket. The check-in lady circled the gate number (34) and the boarding time. I was assigned Seat 7D, aisle seat, which would make it easier for me to go to the toilet. But I didn't think. For such a short flight, I didn't need to go to the toilet. I could have enjoyed instead the view from a window seat but I couldn't be bothered anymore. It was more important just to get my butt in the plane and look forward to flying and reading a little Chaucer on the side, with the strange but intriguing Middle English. I hope to learn a few Middle English. Sikerly (surely certainly). That's very close to German sicherlich. Oh well at at that time, English sounded very close to German.

The flight was boring. On the other side of the aisle, a man with a curly pony tail was reading a book. On my right, a woman in an orange T-shirt was reading some celebrity magazines. I was reading Chaucer's “The Wife of Bath's Tale” but every now and then, I'd fall asleep. Pretty much when I'm watching TV movies, I'd be sleeping half the time even on exciting movies. The flight was a little bit delayed but still managed to arrive in Melbourne maybe 5 minutes later than targeted time. I said my usual thank-you to the flight attendant by the exit and went to fetch my luggage, wondering about the last time I was in Victoria which seemed like ages ago, like during the Jurassic era when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, and the Daimaru was a great shopping centre, with its giant clock and an old heritage building under its glass roof. I was wondering if it would be the same. But of course, nothing would be the same, not the places you've been to, not the people you used to know, not what you missed and sort of expected again. In time people change a lot, some for the better, some for the worse. Structures get razed down, built upon, renovated making it look like nothing like the original. Or we try so hard to make it look like it used to but functioning as something else. Like some churches in Adelaide, the City of Churches, where you’d see a little church at every corner, But I have seen a couple of these churches with the unmistakable character of churches but have been converted to a night club or a watering hole for beer- and wine- drinkers. Changes happen like the crap you make in the morning, and there's no stopping. The secret to life I believe likes not in inventing new things, but in how to live and flow with the changes happening around us. We live, we survive, despite of them, not because of them. Life goes on, and there's always a little voice that tells us to move on, to press on, that somehow we'll have to live this life until it's time to say our thank-you to the all the people who have touched our lives who are waiting at the gates just before you leave for the much better place.

I have a little sense of this much better place when I have had a good night's sleep, feeling so rested and relaxes, protected from the world with all its pain, misery, and the box-of-chocolates surprises that either paints a beaming smile on your face, or casts a spell of doom and desperation. But after a good night's sleep, I'd wish sometimes for it to just go on, let me sleep some more, let my senses be dulled a bit more, or maybe for much longer. Sleep becomes some sort of a drug, that makes you escape the harshness and brutality of reality. Sleep becomes a kind of fantasy, which can take to to different beautiful universes in your dreams, or there to finally meet your fears and obsessions and do something creative to them, or experience them in craven fear. After a good night's sleep it makes me wonder, maybe that's what dying is like, a gigantic sleep, giving you absolute rest, happiness, or perhaps nightmarish, ghoulish je-ne-sais-quoi. Heaven or hell. Paradise or Hades. Love or fear.

21 December 2005