#travel

People Hold On - Noah Reid

These days I get up on Saturday morning and drive to pick up the boys in Callicoon and turn around and drive back to Manhattan, then Sunday evening drive them back upstate and turn around and come home. But until a couple of years ago I kept an apartment in Cochecton and I would take the train up Fridays after work, and we would spend our weekends upstate mostly, and I would take the train back Sunday night.

I remember YouTube Music randomly playing this song one of those Sunday nights when I was on the platform at Secaucus just before midnight, and it struck me and I listened to it regularly for weeks.

Just a few days ago I thought of it and tried and failed to remember and find it. I could only summon some snippet about a last cigarette, and it wasn't enough for Google to help.

Then just tonight it magically popped up in my YouTube Music recommendations. Funny how these things work sometimes.

View from the inevitable Hampton Inn in Monticello. Fun contrast to an Instagram post a couple of weeks ago at the Four Seasons in Casablanca as though that were real life.

I've wanted to write about the past couple of months. Fasting through a Lent that encompassed my fortieth birthday and the thirtieth anniversary of my dad's death and concluded with falling in love and finding myself alone again in the cave Mary Magdalene lived in somewhere outside Marseilles. But you flip through Netflix and feel so overwhelmed with the sheer volume of stories; of what value is ones own? I think Ayn Rand had a quote that was something like "Just because it happened to you does not make it interesting."

On the flight back from Morocco I sat next to a girl who journals then throws them away. I always felt like those were the real writers. It might represent a larger flaw of mine, that if no one reads it and loves it, it (and by extension I) has no worth.

Walked into the Harry Potter Store amid a light drizzle and somehow emerged to find a blizzard.

Just finished Graham Greene's Ways of Escape. My favorite author, along with Christopher Isherwood, I've since read all of his novels and have been reduced to his latter-day autobiographies. They sort of read like the fat cut off from the meat of his fiction. Nothing more than lovely travelogues, as from his account of Israel after the Seven Days War:

"Only an occasional group of Egyptian tanks retained a scorched, upright dignity and sometimes even faced in the direction of their enemy. Some trucks had started through a grove of date palms towards the blue still sea as though their drivers hoped to escape from war. The bouquets of dates hung overhead out of reach, brown, orange, yellow, scarlet: the trucks failed to reach the white beach before they were sent up in flames."

Occasionally when I pick up the boys for the weekend, I drive up the night before and stay at a rundown Super 8 in Monticello.

It was all booked up tonight so I got a room at some place across the river. It seemed empty when I got in around 10pm and I was really caught off guard. Don't know if I've ever been so charmed by a hotel.

The Darby Hotel, Beach Lake, Penn.

Solo Thanksgiving trip to Cape Cod.

Scenes from the a quick weekend getaway to Princeton to see a friend row for Cornell at the 3-Mile Chase Regatta

New York To Paris In 90 Minutes. Can This Startup Make It Happen?

The stewardess tightens my five-point harness and straps an oxygen mask to my face. I try to peek down at my Rolex, but the headrest restricts my neck movement to reduce the risk of internal decapitation when we push 5 Gs.

"I can already taste the foie gras at Allard," I say to my mistress, but she is shaking uncontrollably as her breathing exercises fail to stave off a full-blown panic attack.

The stewardesses do not provide information on emergency procedures and there does not appear to be an emergency exit.

I pass out almost instantaneously on take-off, but am quickly revived by the sonic boom as we break the sound barrier. Approaching Mach 5, the view out the window is surreal as oxygen and nitrogen are separated into a brilliant plasma coating the wings.

The vibrations are difficult to describe, but they seem to relax my bowels so that I understand why we were ordered not to eat for forty-eight hours prior to the flight.

The pilot executes a barrel roll that exerts seven times the force of gravity and I am unconscious again.

Whirlwind Dallas weekend.

Sullivan County