I Ride in Your Slipstream Monday, September 08, 2003

A decent morning after a wheezy night, wheezy to the point that I started paying nervous attention to how many hits were left on my little disk of antihistamine. ("I know what you're thinking, punk--did he fire six shots, or just five?" --Clint Eastwood, "Dirty Harry") After I coughed up a lungful of gunk it was almost peaceful. Forget sutra-gasms, forget thundering symphonies, forget the cafes of Firenze: There's nothing like waking up the morning after a migraine, and there's nothing like laying quietly and breathing after an asthma attack.

As I said, a decent morning. A cool misty morning at the track, and music is starting to sound good again. My new philosophy: I'll just listen uninterrupted for the hour, I won't flip through the songs. It paid some dividends. I got one of my favorite Ron Sexsmith tunes, "Thirsty Love," and it sounded even better with a lead-in by Frank Sinatra: "Hot damn! I wish you love!"

A moment on the light rail. Chuckling through "Love in the Ruins"--including three extraordinary pages that I'd love to post but am afraid would give a very wrong impression--when something made me look up. There, right at eye level, a bug was clinging to the outside of the window. A tiny, tube-y little guy, with six wiry legs and stripes on his belly like a pedestrian crosswalk. His thin wings were quivering against the wind. There were a couple of speckles on the underside of his head that I imagined were eyes. I looked into them and tried to transmit some fellow-feeling: Another commuter, along for the ride.

Then the wind got to be too much. We were on a straightaway, through overgrown fields and drainage pools, and the train was moving as fast as it could--fifty miles an hour, maybe more. The rush of air knocked one of the bug's legs free. Half of his body went with it, bending like a palm against the furious current. He struggled to get back up. He flicked out his tiny front leg, searching for purchase on the window. But the wind kept knocking it loose, snarling it against it his other limbs.

He fought for a good ten seconds--a long time to me, the flicker through iPod songs; how long to him, with a lifespan of hours?--before he got his bristly foot back against the glass. Good for him! We'd be pulling into the station soon, he could take a rest.

I was just wondering if bugs had lungs, and if so, were his pumping hard with all the effort, when the wind struck him and flung him off the window, into the slipstream. Or maybe he let go: It didn't seem like the train had speeded up, and there was something almost volitional about the arc he cut through the air, like a paratrooper whipping out of a plane.

Hot damn! I wish him love.

@ 9:35:00 AM,

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