I have a really stupid question. Maybe it is so stupid I shouldn't even ask it. My stupid question is about the evil people, the really bad ones, the ones who are fucking everything up. The oil people and the defense people. My question is: Why can't they just find a new way to make money?

I try not to spend money, but I still do. Plenty. I spend money on ice cream and tuna tartar. I spend money on DVDs. I spend money on clever gadgets I mistakenly think will improve my life. Sometimes I spend money on gadgets that actually do improve my life. Gadgets break and are lost, so I spend even more money. Some things can be easily stolen or wheedled with smiles or made myself, but most cannot and so money is spent by me and therefore made by someone else. This says to me that there are other ways to make money, other ventures these fine fellows, these fucking assholes can pursue.

Can't the oilmen just make iPods or iPhones? Can't they make leather purses and sell them to rich ladies? I have read that rich ladies will go on fifteen-month waiting lists just to pay as much as a car--a car!--for a leather purse designed by the right temperamental gay man. But I know a lot of vegans who won't like the leather purses. In that case, can't they make up some new substance and kind of wind it around Kate Moss's body a few times? Anything you wind around Kate Moss's body is bound to be appealing to lots of people. She's had a kid and done tons of blow and she still looks great. (Remember that, when they caught her doing the blow and vilified her? Models! And rock musicians! Do drugs! Scandal! But it's all okay now. She can still sell stuff, like clothes and makeup that intimate the concept of doing cocaine with rock musicians that will instead be bought by middle-aged women in the suburbs who hate their husbands.)

Or maybe Kate Moss doesn't look so great. Maybe it's all done with computers, but if that's the case, can't they just wind something around her body with computers?

Maybe they could clone Kate Moss, and wrap her in titanium. Everyone loves titanium! Titanium-wrapped Kate Moss! Think of the profits!

And what about diamonds? Sure, it was DeBeers who invented the diamond as precious object, but now it is one. What if all the oilmen got together and made just a gigantic diamond and sold it back and forth to one another? Would that be satisfying to them? Could they stop now?

What about the workers? What about the workers? I got a plan for them, too, since you asked. Roller coasters, in every city park. And the best part of roller coasters is they don't even use fuel. These roller coasters will need to be built and maintained, and we can prove that the economy will not collapse without oil and war, and oil wars.

I'm not saying my solution is the best, I'm just saying we need to start thinking outside the box.

Labels: Kate Moss, money, oil, roller coasters, war

I had skipped ahead to the end of the Hemingway novel and knew it was sad. The soldier's lover hemorrhaged after their baby was born dead. I read slowly from the middle after that, dreading the ending.

But now on the train to the airport I was close to the end. The soldier and his pregnant girlfriend were together one last time in a fancy hotel. He had deserted the Italian army while they were in retreat and come to find her on the lake in Stresa.

I hadn't realized that they could have more time together before the end came. Before the certainty of death there remained the possibility of sex. It was like the fine white wine on your tongue before the heavy red that tasted of metal and acid. In the wine country they poured the sauvignon blancs first and you sipped them while you made up your mind about the other things, and often they were the best and you loved them because they were light, and first.

As the train came to the airport you felt light, weightless, even. You existed only in the in-between places, in the airport, in the sky. You knew you might die and you made peace with it. Whether this was true all the time or perhaps even more likely on the highway or the street late at night did not matter. In the airport, on the plane you knew it might happen.

The day before a man had driven a flaming car through the gate of the airport in Glasgow. Noah told me about it while we drank vodka made from sweet potatoes.

"The car was on fire and he was on fire."

"Were many people killed or only some?"

"I don't know." He shrugged. "Maybe some. Maybe none."

I poured more vodka into the small glasses. It was cold on your tongue and burned as you swallowed.

Getting to the airport this time you felt a stillness and were not on fire. You loved no one and no one loved you. Or if you loved anyone, it was only in vestiges, like antibodies after a vaccine or virus. If someone tested your blood they would find evidence that you had had a fever once, but only from the microscopic cells you always carried that would try to fight it off if it came again. Some of the viruses you could get again, full-blown, and others you had fought off once and for all. You remembered what it was like to be sick, but only in those old soldier cells. By now it had been long enough that it could have happened to someone else. It could have happened to someone in Glasgow.

The mechanized voice in the terminal announced that the threat level was orange. Orange came before red, and maybe even amber. Amber was what dinosaur DNA could be preserved in, for millions of years, in a droplet of blood inside an ancient mosquito. Amber was worse than orange, but better than red. The voice did not say what the threat might be, only that today the color of waiting for it was orange.

Labels: airports, blood, death, DNA, Hemingway, immunity, love, sex, terrorism, travel, vodka, war, wine