Row 14 is an Exit row, a hotly coveted spot with a few extra inches of legroom on this mislabeled ‘regional jet’. In recent years, the jet and I have been on a national tour, and ‘region’ becomes far more muddled in the subtle moves from Florida palms to the grayness of New York—a haughty weightiness that let all know they were in a city of global consequence. But, I digress, and today, Row 14 is my spot in said jet on the jaunt to Louisville, where I spend much of my work week, working as it turns out, in a city fastidiously committed to play. Leaving on the weekends to play in those bleakly frenetic cities up North, clearly I had missed the point of Kentucky living.

I woke up this morning at 5:00 in my parents’ home, in an enclave tucked somewhere between Fort Myers and Naples—and with a hodgepodge of Italian, Spanish, Greek, influences stirring with an American lust for comfort and luxury, it was both everywhere and nowhere all at once. My bed was like I had seen in those catalogues, replete with those mountains of pillows—all various shapes and sizes. Every time I see them all tossed there, it makes me think of a pile of gumdrops I could splay my limbs across, picking them off as I got hungry.

Beating the church rush in to my favorite brunch spot this morning back in Louisville—yes, many people were in fact likely still sleeping as I had crumpled geography like a ball of scribbled notes. There was, of course, a brief foray in to the carnival that is Atlanta-Hartsfield, a noisy mess of trinkets and stimuli. My first plane was continuing on to Aruba, and after letting my mind wander for a moment about what my life would look like in Aruba right now, I plunge into the terrazzo maze and find my next gate. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution replaced the Fort Myers News-Press in the hands of business travelers and addled dads, looking for a nugget of escapism from their holiday travels, in the day’s news.

A dash to the next gate. Row 14. An exit row. Wheels up, seat back—lulled in to a sleep with the steady hum of jet engines. I awoke less than two hours later in Louisville. “Good morning”, the friendly voice billowed overhead. As I caught glimpse of the lineup of UPS planes (Louisville maintains an impressive hub for the parcel carrier), I knew in fact we were back. “How did this happen?”, I thought. It all just seems so unnatural and yet wonderful.  Liberating if not incredibly confusing.

I may be an avid flier, and a frequent one at that, but I never get too old, too frequent, too hardened in ways to not notice the wonderfully bizarre fact of it all: I woke up in Florida, sat in a steel tube for three hours, and now I am in Kentucky.

Back in high school, when I fancied myself an intellectual, I realized I could endear myself to my English teachers (objectively to be regarded as ‘cool’, after all) by embracing my emotional sloppiness and erratic curiosities by writing. Writing earned me an admission ticket to an elite club—the English department office—and they ate their lunch, shit with a lot of sprouts on it—in a big, glass-walled room overflowing with books.

I cleverly whipped up half-baked poetry and prose, moving, as they did, from unit to unit. And as they tossed about names like Yeats, Borroughs, and Williams—I would leave lunch with a steno pad full of references to check. One of my dumber ideas was roping my entire high school in to the farce that was my foray in to playwriting. Having a penchant for style over substance, I slickly set the pages in a Courrier font and titled my 30 pages of drivel, Pharmakon, from the greek word for “poison” and “cure”. Death and life in one! I am so fucking brilliant!

Of course, the word nor its meanings were mine. I was simply carpet-bagging both under the guise of loftiness. My Pharmakon, a short play inside a cancer hospital was heavy on the “poison” and not so on the “cure”. It died that spring, but I still felt an odd possessiveness when I found a book in Champaign, Illinois that just debuted called—well, you guessed it. Seeing that book there, it looked great. And I’ll read it, I really will. And when I do, it will clearly be accompanied by the pangs of wist about my high school days, how incredibly supercilious I was, and how much I hid under other people’s brilliance.

I can’t suggest to be free from the shackles of such insecurity—the visual here is my true self as the Nicorette box that magically cuts the chains—but if that damned title was to mean anything, if it’s to actually be ‘poison’ and ‘cure’, well, then it provides, in moments like today, 2009 in Illinois, permission to be honest and self-aware. All that from a book I haven’t even read.