Predictions (as a business):
The truth of the matter, I recorded the weekly audio/video feed before I left town.
I left the files lingering on a hard drive, and I got around to the upload and update process Monday morning. As I was doing a final sound check, I was amazed. Either I’m really predictable, or the situations at hand fit a very predictable pattern.
I was marveling at myself, happens frequently when I do this, I scared myself. As I watched and listened to me streaming off the streaming off the site, I thought about the travel interruptions from the previous evening.
Midland-Odessa’s airport to Austin’s airport is only about 30 minutes’ flight time. The flight was on time until 20 minutes before the scheduled departure. Then it was a comical series of interruptions and miscues.
I had that cup of coffee. The plane was three hours late. It was a bumpy ride.
I missed the last bus. I had a scary cab driver who didn’t speak much English. Nor Spanish. A torrential deluge hit just as we turned towards town. Eventually, I threw him a twenty and crawled into bed with my mistress (the cat: remember, I live like a monk).
Everything takes three tries, lasts three times as long, and whatever can go awry, will.
What was different from the ‘cast cast, is that I was totally unperturbed at most of the events. There was a loud and annoying man, I think a high school physics teacher, a few rows behind, and he started to debate to relative merits of Shakespeare versus science. I was too tired to join in; one “Plan II” student was engaged, and losing, I’m guessing. He clutched a copy of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
I remembered what TFG had written about a stretch of Texas highway unspooling while listening to Hank III’s second side to the new album, and I searched, but I couldn’t find the untitled cut on my traveling music thing. Bummer. Then there’s just something missing when flying as opposed to riding in a truck. Not the same feeling.
I’m starting to get notes from the one of the places I graduated from, classified as CLAS: College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. In my mind, Physics and Shakespeare belong together. Math without exposure to art is useless, but then, art without any science is also meaningless. After a full day of clients, though, and travel disruptions, I was in no condition to make a case. And while I don’t agree with everything that Bloom writes about Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human, I do agree, at least least on some philosophical levels, with the concept.
But I would take Thersites (Shakespeare’s Troilus & Cressida) over Falstaff (King Henry IV, part I & II) most days. Or evenings.
“Ah, from Phoenix to Tulsa to the Astro Dome;
New York City down to San Antone;
There’s boys that are ridin’ for legendary fame,
And our money’s all gone but we ride just the same.”Radney Foster, Texas in 1880 (?)
