chase scenes serial #13
sign for airfarers such as myself, I would have been surprised. That was quite a closed episode. I set up with the sign and the flight and closed with a nice return to the initial image. But I am still on the plane. We must be taking a different route back because we are flying over a fairly large city. On the flight in we saw nary a bulb or auto. It disturbed me. The blackness. I believe this might be Fargo, ND. Let me look for a planted monogram. I have no clue. I haven’t seen the film recently enough to make a judgment. The clouds have thinned out so I can see the ground. Although my internal gyroscope is thrown off by the haze at the horizon. I think I feel out of control‡ flying. I have a helpless sense that were I to see something amiss. As we took off from Bismarck I noticed that the flaps were down. I had a fear that this would not allow us to accelerate fast enough or it would drag us to the ground shortly after takeoff. I wondered whether I could shout to get the flight attendant’s attention. Or whether I should. I did not. And here we are twentyseven thousand feet (27,000′) over eastern ND, and I am about to order a tonic water. I have drunk the following things on this trip,
‡ I have been thinking about these pieces of writing a great deal today, in fact thinking of the writing more than the portions of the trip which are fading from my memory. Perhaps it is that the running text has diverged so far from the keys that might have recalled to me some moment in the trip or that as a source of urgency the trip has petered out. I recall continuing to work on documentation about my trip to Mexico City some two weeks after I had returned to Los Angeles. At some point, maybe about the same distance I am at from the trip to North Dakota, the concerns shifted from actually remembering the trip to a material concern for the process of memory, would these memories be safe, was I already losing them? And after this short spell the remaining stragglers in my documentary process turned back outward, but to a different and more banal locale and theme, my daily life in Los Angeles. This transition, or transformation of my interests is not to say that I had forgotten the details of the trip, or that I am forgetting them about North Dakota, but that these experiences, and the delusion that you are still living them, that they have not yet turned to memories, which I regard as rather safe storage now, has a relatively short half-life.
