rex lives

I always feel as if I've cheated death when I walk away from an airplane, and last night was certainly no different. The cold front that brought Nashville these crispy fall temperatures is the same one that was sending lightning bolts from cloud to cloud right outside my window seat some thirty thousand feet over the swampland of northern Florida last night. I don't need to see that shit. I have done a terrible job of living like Skynyrd, and I do not deserve to die like Ronnie Van Zandt.

We were in the thick of it by the time we reached the skies over Charlotte, and there was nothing but soup out the window as we descended with little time to make the connector flight to Nashville. I had thought that the choppy skies on the way down were too much to handle, but they were nothing like the choppy skies on the way back up. A woman on the flight said to think of it like a roller coaster. I hate roller coasters.

Everyone else on the plane always seems to take it better than I do. I don't scream like a little bitch or make a scene when the turbulence hits, but I want to. Meanwhile, everyone around me is reading a book or playing cards with their kids. The young couple beside me was sleeping atop one another like cats--which was a good thing, as each of them had an accent so think you could plant a Confederate flag in it and then fly that flag at half mast when the plane plummeted to the Earth and left a small town back in North Carolina short a couple of recent high school graduates, of which there may be few. Nice folks though. Let it be known that I have much love for a good southern accent, but they do not mix well with frayed nerves.

However, it was great to find the beginnings of fall when I returned, and I am certainly happy to be alive and well and sitting here in my flannel pajamas on my birthday.