The morning’s limp & pallid & feels like it’s been doing this thing for years.

Practical business-travel tip #1: Avoid weather
metaphors if possible.

If it were a man, it’d be the kind of guy my dad worked with,
over in the industrial park in West Caldwell,
warehouse-jumpsuit-clad, muttering “same old, same old,” maybe over a beer.
But not like I’d know.

I’m the one who’s poorly cast for this living-history museum of childhood.
My phone confirms this along with the
return flight from Newark to sunny San Francisco.

Practical business-travel tip #2: Always check to see
if you’ve been upgraded to some higher
plane of being but don’t hold your breath, either —
platinum doesn’t mean bupkis anymore & chances are
your life is & will always be economy (plus).

I view air travel primarily as a literary device. Paul de Man teaches
that distance is irony & what’s more distant than
hoops of farmland thirty-six thousand feet below? Don’t
answer that — he was a Nazi, & anyway, we’re somewhere over Nevada now, only forty-five minutes remaining of United
poetry.

Have we gone anywhere? Who knows, but Practical business-travel tip #3: Sit close to the front of the plane, that way you can jump into the aisle, grab your bag from the bin, and beat yourself home.