Cabin Pressure

Originally written October 30, 2006

There is an idea of a James McLaughlin. With each new storyline, that idea evolves, every so often. I want to believe I am going to be around to see how it all ends, how the storylines eventually come together and all those different lives blend together seamlessly. The make of a man.

But that is just a thought I have in the moments before I fall asleep. I just have this feeling that idea is not going to make its way home.

The saying goes, it is better to burn up than to fade away. Often repeated in the last testaments of those unfortunately blessed with a lineage not known for its wealth of forward thinking.

On the menu tonight was a group of Brits and Americans playing monopoly together at another table in my neighborhood café. One cannot help but overhear a conversation when the only competitions their voices have are thoughts you dream up. It was apparent that these kids, roughly our age and place in life, did not know each other. For all coincidences, they were strangers, socializing together as foreigners abroad on the island where the good and the bad shine like gold dust around every corner. Finding solace in their similarities.

I was consciously present in everyone’s minds. I sat in silence and read my Dickens. I could understand the meaning of it all. At one end of spectrum, for some, it would be a welcome change of pace to strike up a conversation while playing cute little games, to talk about the lives we led and left behind on the far side of the moon, to remember what it was like for starla dear, for the red and the black.

We know how this story will end. You could look the world over for me, I would never be found at that table. I am not one them, and we have nothing in common. Sitting with ex-pats, talking about the way it was and will be again. My vices are far more reckless than playing board games with strangers.

It must work for someone out there. I would wish them many returns if our paths would ever cross.

You won’t find me playing board games. You won’t find me grasping at the life I left behind. I said amen.

You will find me fighting those around me the way I know best, you can find me running political groups contrary to the laws of the people’s republic, I’ll be there, creating the entire student environment of a law school, I’ll be there, growing my legacy every day, escaping in that idea that I can do no wrong, playing the big bad and big brother because that’s the only way I know how, until that day then.

We have just lost cabin pressure.

Will there be enough left of that idea to see this through to the end?

The saying goes, it’s better to burn up than to fade away. And I’m burning brighter than a funeral pyre against the night sky. I’m using it all up, and for what?