I'll Fly Away

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”

―Winston S. Churchill

Having a lot of trouble getting going this morning, after a crazy Monday that lasted nearly into Tuesday.

We woke up early at 407 yesterday morning so I could drive P to the airport for her flight on Delta back to Corning. It was a quiet, lugubrious drive, our separation caused by the judge in Charlotte County declining to rule on my motion to continue a trial set for this Friday in Punta Gorda. I had a pretrial conference scheduled in the case later that morning, where presumably he'd consider the request for a continuance, but we couldn't wait for him to decide the issue before P needed to fly back to New York for work.

Immediately after the pretrial I was to defend a Zoom deposition, but at maybe eight in the morning I received word that opposing counsel was having some sort of internet issue and needed to cancel, thus freeing up my afternoon. Then I joined the Zoom pretrial, at which the judge, who has the look and demeanor of Buster in Arrested Development, announced that he had a conflict on Friday and so we'd need to be in Punta Gorda Tuesday morning (as in right now as I write this) for our trial. I could see myself turning beet red on the Zoom screen, as I explained that I was in Panama City, and my client's office was in Dothan, Alabama. Opposing counsel chimed in that his clients lived in Missouri, and were only that day beginning the long drive down to south Florida for the trial.

"How about Wednesday?" the judge asked.

This is why I'm getting out of litigation.

Finally, after a long silence pondering his computer screen, the judge continued the trial and ordered us back to mediation in the next month.

With that, I had no in-person events until next Monday. Why not fly back to New York?

I raced to pack clothes and cats into the Ram, and by around 2:30 eastern swept through the Popeye's drive-thru in Perry to ensure there'd be a meal on this flight, then off the ground at 3:07 enroute to Lynchburg, VA on a glorious afternoon.

Meanwhile, Delta had stranded Peg at Hartsfield, causing her to miss her connection in Detroit and thereby sticking her on the 9:30 connection from Detroit to KELM. She made the best of it in the Sky Club as near as I could tell, while I read a novel while coasting along over the southern midlands.

The novel is Infinite Jest, which a NYT essay (or maybe it was the Atlantic?) listed as one of the ten novels of the last three decades that's actually worn well with time. When PT saw it on our coffee table at 407 on Sunday he laughed out loud, and commented I'd apparently joined the scores of readers who started but could never quite finish the book. It's a running joke, he said.

I could see how that might happen. The book is a little over a thousand pages, a War and Peace written by someone every bit as brilliant as Tolstoy but with psychological issues that manifest in the disjointed narrative, the obsessive attention to detail in evoking a locker room scene at a tennis camp or the interior of a drug dealer's trailer, and the footnotes. Holy crap, the footnotes. There are hundreds of them, in a work of fiction. He provides a detailed pharmacological and cultural description of every drug used in the story, and there are lots of them. He mentions that the parent of a protagonist went from scientist to avant garde filmmaker and documentarian, then goes on to list in a four page footnote each of his movies with descriptions that are disturbing and hilarious.

I will be chewing on this book for a very long time, or join the mass of readers who never quite reach the end.

Whew, that was a digression.

Landing in Lynchburg is a pain in the ass for an experienced pilot. As you may recall, Lynchburg is the home of Liberty University, the faux institution of higher learning founded by Moral Majority troll Jerry Falwell. Among its myriad phony baloney degree programs, Liberty offers a bachelor of science in aviation that includes a flight instruction program there at the airport. Hence, the traffic pattern is cluttered with little Cessnas, all bearing the callsign "Liberty [insert number here]", all too prolix on the radio and clueless about managing traffic sequencing. The tower controllers are some of the surliest I've encountered, spending their workdays in a living hell trying to keep aviators who really love Jesus from pranging together a thousand feet above the field.

So why stop there? It's a shade under three hours from Perry, and a shade under two from Elmira, almost directly on a straight line course between the two.

When I parked at Freedom Aviation, the FBO, a Citation next to me bore a huge Jesus fish emblazoned on an engine nacelle. Welcome to Lynchburg. Usually the counter help at an FBO is a pretty girl in her 20s who's mastered the art of seeming ebulliently enthused at seeing some paunchy 61 year old shuffle through the door looking for the john. Not Freedom. Instead, my host was a grumpy woman roughly my own age with a shapeless haircut that defied easy description, sort of a Cromwellian bowl but shorter and without the bangs. I'm pretty sure she loves Jesus, too.

On the plus side, they had me fueled and taxiing back out in maybe 20 minutes, and at 7 pm I was on my way into the darkness to KELM. The tower controller called out thinking I'd forgotten to raise my gear, but I assured him the plane had a fixed landing gear and all was well. Later a controller with Potomac Approach, which is in charge of the arrival routes into Dulles and National, asked during a lull whether a Columbia 400 and a Cessna Corvallis were the same plane. I assured him they were, with the distinction in nomenclature signaling whether the plane was built before or after Cessna bought the Columbia line out of bankruptcy. I told him the TTx was also the same plane. He thanked me and sent me along to Cleveland Center. I marveled at the sensation of speed as the Mighty Columbia skirted the very tops of a stratus layer at 185 knots, darkness descending all around, and remembered the same feeling watching the gray Atlantic clouds dash by at 350 knots in the Eagle over three decades ago. Tempus fugit.

Meanwhile, Peg was trapped at the Detroit Sky Club getting progressively angrier at Delta, which coincidentally had spent copiously in support of Treason Boy's election in exchange for his administration scrapping the Biden order that would've made the airlines pay for this sort of inconveniencing their customers. Now Delta doesn't give a shit. Enjoy your jug wine and crudite in a crowded lounge full of widget salesmen barking like schizophrenics into space, earbuds giving away the game. And to top it off, she had to dash .8 miles through the airport to her flight, and was nearly bumped off and consigned to spend an evening on the airport floor.

I landed within one minute of when the flight computer said I'd arrive, as usual at night with a little firmer touchdown than I or the Columbia would prefer. What became of my depth perception?

Peg's flight had begun to taxi from Detroit as I was leaving to take the cats back to the condo. I hung out with them, responded to a few emails, then drove back to the airport, Peg's flight passing directly over me on short final as I arrived. She was in high spirits for all the inconvenience, and we sat up for a while debriefing our day that ironically began with her bidding me goodbye so I could work in Florida for another couple weeks, and ended with me picking her up at the airport in New York.

A foggy one out there. Glad I didn't go with Plan B, and take off predawn to get here this morning.

In other news, Stephen Miller is promising to start rounding up the libtards over Charlie Kirk's demise. We may not have been the shooters, and in fact the boy assassin comes from a family of Mormon MAGA gun nuts, but our incendiary words were the real catalyst. Sort of like blaming a rape victim for wearing too short a skirt.

Which leads to this morning's entry in the "Where Does One Run to Escape the Coming Darkness" sweepstakes--Mauritania.

No really, hear me out on this.

The island, off in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar, was uninhabited until the Dutch got there in the 18th century. So no natives angry that your arrival screws up their good thing. The golden visa is a paltry $350k, as opposed to up to a million, or more, in most marginally desirable places. The climate is Hawaii, never too hot and never too cold. A villa that looks like something out of a Michener novel will set you back about $800k. There's regular air service from Europe, Singapore, and the UAE.

And it looks like this. Yes please.