Unexpected Travels
what's all the buzz about?
Space and time are such strangely obscure concepts. We live in a day and age where we can hop on a Zoom call and hold meetings in real-time, and somehow manage to still feel the presence of the other person sitting inside our computer screen. I feel it in email exchanges with friends, too—sometimes more profoundly. Inside the machine, we are both real, and not real.
And time? My god. What a fucking illusion time is.
[Case in point: I wrote this three weeks ago, and a lot has happened since then. Content in brackets = updates since the initial draft of this absurd semi-existential brain purge.]
Dave and I flew to San Diego last weekend [so many weekends ago!] — a last-minute trip to visit my ailing grandmother [who passed a few days ago].1 As the pilot warned of the impending turbulence we were to expect for the duration of our flight, I noticed a fly buzzing around my head.
Don’t worry, the fly was indeed real, and I haven’t completely lost my mind. It buzzed around the straw of my empty smoothie cup, the only airport offering I felt I could stomach after my morning’s 18 mile run2, for the vast majority of the 2.5 hour flight.
At first, I was reminded of the Breaking Bad episode “Fly”. Upon my initial viewing, I remember thinking about a fly’s life expectancy, and how that particular fly will live forever in my head and in the digital footprint it left behind, but was not long for this world. I thought about how both the fly and its brethren were entirely unaware of the fame and fortune, a potentially illustrious career and ample notoriety, that could have been had the fly been a person.
The fly in Breaking Bad is familiar to every person who watched the show, but the fly on my flight is probably not taking up mental real estate in anybody else’s mind.
Until now. You didn’t even know this fly, but here we are, thinking about it3.
Can you imagine finding your way onto a time-and-space-traveling vessel, blissfully unaware that while you’re flying about the cabin, the cabin is flying about the country?
It’s unlikely that a fly experiences consciousness in a capacity similar to humans, but in the off-chance that they do indeed experience any semblance of thinking, I’m left wondering what it might be like to enter a fly zone (the airplane), buzz around for a couple hours, and then leave the fly zone only to find that you’re no longer in Denver, you don’t know anybody, and the air feels different under your wings. Maybe it’s easier to fly at sea level, and maybe the fly never had any emotional connection to other local Colorado flies and will do just fine living out its short life by the beach.
I don’t have the energy or bandwidth to delve into the complex emotions churning within my core; I’m still trying to recover from all of the other turmoil I’ve experienced this year.
A nauseating number, and an even more nauseating endeavor.
This is a aptly surreal reflection on the batshit insane surreal year you've been having. I've noticed that turmoil seems to make space and time and the fabric of reality itself (such as it is) increasingly bendy, and you capture that perfectly. I hope you find the time and space and breathing room to deal with everything that's happened, and I'm sorry about your grandmother.
Great perspective! Nice meditation on both the space time continuum and dipteran celebrity.