This is from a stack of partially finished blog entries that, after years of collecting dust, I do not expect to finish.  Unloved fragments, wayward children; the sort of pieces that glow briefly after the spark of a Good Idea, only to fizzle down to stubs by the time you’ve unspooled the first page.  None of them are finished, and some never even made it far enough to describe why I started in the first place. But like any negligent parent, I feel a certain, sullen responsibility for having brought them in to the world, and I don’t want to just let them die quietly in the dark of this hard drive.  

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I'm on my way home for a few days.

It is a clear evening, and as we lift off from Milwaukee the western sky fades from dusky red to molten pink along the horizon. The huge mounds of snow dotting the tarmac shrink as we rise, and a few seconds later a dollhouse Wisconsin stretches out in all directions, resolving, finally, in to a complicated patchwork of midwestern farmland: long rows of circles, bounded by squares; clean shapes broken by the odd vein of gray that snakes between clusters of flat roofs and icy parking lots, reflecting back the last of the day. Until a few hours ago, I hadn't been in an airport in over a year, and the past few hours have been a familiar run-through of nostalgic pangs: astonished looking children at the window as what must look like a cross between an oil truck and a boat lumbers by before scooping up off the ground, weightless; the freshly-pressed flight attendants and their sticky red smiles; the strange tendency for first class passengers to already be deeply engrossed in a book or text message by the time you squeeze by; the tightness of air in the cabin itself and that sound - that hissing inside your skull - which accompanies the change in pressure. This is your brain, shrink wrapped and leaking.

After a few minutes of sitting next to an empty seat, a middle-aged man in a suit stops in the aisle beside me and begins unpacking. He sits down and asks what I do. I answer with my standard "graphicdesignhowaboutyou", and he responds with "medical equipment", nodding with pursed lips. "Ten years of medical equipment." I nod too. For some reason the way this man is nodding suggests that he would like to talk some more about medical equipment, so I rather purposefully return to my book. He pulls out an issue of Money magazine and we spend the rest of the flight in silence.

At a certain point, I glance over at Mr. Medical Equipment's magazine and my gaze is caught - held captive in fact - by a stunning piece of editorial illustration. God knows what the article is about, but the initial spread is covered with these elaborate, swirling shapes that communicate what appear to be marbles, the manhattan skyline, a charging bull, the protective hunch of a moody looking eagle and the tightening squares of a thin green web that pulls it all towards that first line of text. The focus of each section is balanced just right, such that the text completes the image without overwhelming it, and the whole thing must have involved an absolutely heroic amount of effort. It's beautiful work, and knowing the little bit I do about the production process of a publication the size of Money I'd bet it took a good month to get right. And this fact (well, presumption) strikes me as sad all of a sudden. Perfection, only to buttress an article in Money and be tossed in a million recycling bins by morning. The change in pressure - or the rise in oxygen- tends to foster strange sensitivities.

Around us, the evening is clear below a waning moon and what I imagine must be Iowa splits along seams of yellow that twinkle up through the distance. It's temping to subtract the horizon from views like this; to try and forget the difference between stars and farms and focus instead on the common, calming effect that shards of light at night can have on a mind, no matter how abstract their source. Of the many ways in which flying can insulate you from reality/time/place/etc, I think this is my favorite: the vague sense that you are seeing the world in a way that it was not meant to be seen; that you have a brief sliver of access to that godlike perspective which can disconnect you, somehow, from the frozen slog of a flightless life.