The Inspired Egg

Good morning, y'all!  I have a lot more time to get these posts together when I finish flying at 7:45am!  I'm really energized this morning for some reason, how 'bout y'all?!!

I have two major inspirations this hitch.  One has to do with a needle and thread and beautifully felted wool, and the other has to do with discomfort and pinching.  That's right, around my midsection.  There's nothing quite like a uniform to let you know that, no it's not just in your head, yes you are actually getting literally too big for your britches.  It's embarrassing when, besides squeezing me in at the waist, my pants compensate by drawing up at the bottom, making me look as if I'd been stuffed into a pair of pants made for someone both thinner and shorter than me.  Shudder.

Look! It's me at the airshow with a Bell 206 B model! Last month! When I was, apparently, thinner and cuter!

I'm wondering if that's a good enough reason to want to lose some inches...not really so much for vanity, and probably not even as a healthy goal of self-improvement, but mostly just because...I don't want to have to shell out the money for clothes.

Well, not for ugly, brown, uniform pants, anyway.

Look!  It's Dave at the airshow! When he had long hair!

I was attacked by a book at the airport the other day.

It was lying there by the window, abandoned, without a bookmark, without even a dog-eared page to show that anyone cared about it at all.  I looked at it, then set it back down.  I looked around.  I read the back.  I googled the author.  This book, apparently, was a "Pulitzer prize winner," "a comic fugue," "genius," "a wealth of original, hilarious characters," "astounding, life-changing," and on and on, and it was set in New Orleans.

The Blue Angels

"Huh," I thought, "and someone just left it here.  I guess they finished it and didn't care to cart it all the way home to drop off at Half-Priced Books.  Well, don't mind if I do!"  And I took it with me on the plane.

This brave lady is a wing walker...with her ex-husband flying the plane. Talk about brave.

I read half of it.

People.  I'm a hopeful person.  I don't abandon books.  But at about half-way, I flipped to the end and read the last five pages.  Because I was getting worried.  I was worried but hadn't quite given up the hope on this book...and let me tell you, the last five pages killed that hope.  Seriously.  Bang, dead.  Have you ever read a book or seen a movie that was supposedly "hilarious," "genius," etc., only to find that the central comic figure was someone you knew in real life, someone whose presence in the room made your skin crawl and your eyes burn?  Someone who never got any better (that you saw)?  That was this character.  I've known this person.  This character's essential "comedy" consists mostly of demeaning everyone around him, ridiculing his mother particularly, and displaying such an awesome arrogance and conceited contempt for the world at large coincident with an unbelievable cowardice, childishness, sloth, and petty malice, that I can hardly find the words to contain my horror.  How could this possibly be funny?  To anyone?  Having read only that first half of the book (plus the last five pages), I felt beat-up and sore on the inside.  Like living through half a cage fight where I'd been expecting to see a puppet show.  A "comic fugue."  Incredibly, this book won a national literary award for its so-called comedy!  I just. don't. get it.

I'm also thinking that's why this book was left abandoned at the airport...its owner, having discovered its true contents and probably having read no further than I did, ditched it.  I wonder if he knew that he was planting a landmine.

Golden Knights, hey!

And yet.

I told my story in the admin office yesterday, and you'll never guess...one of the ladies there knew what book I was talking about.  Oh yes.  It's one of her favorites.  It's hilarious.  She keeps it in the car as her go-to distraction when she has to wait for something or someone.  In fact, after I left, she went and got it out to start rereading it right then and there.

I don't mind saying...I still don't get it.  Anyone here get it?  Give me a clue?

Blue Angels!  Again!  Seriously, help me out with the book issue?