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Getting to California was a bit of a fiasco. A three hour delay pushed me from making a connection to Oakland that night to a 6am flight to San Francisco the next morning.

UPDATE: wow, I wrote this (and in fact was safely home) well before all the Heathrow Bruhaha... I'm glad to be home before the security got cranked up another notch. I did have my shoes selected off of the conveyer belt for what seemed like some sort of chemical test, and my sympathies are with the security personnel who had to run that.)

On the flight over, I thought I'd forego the inflight entertainment "Mission Impossible 3" (worried that the sheer charisma of Tom Cruise might turn me into a scientologist, and besides, being an airplane screening, they'd cut out any interesting naughty bits) and carefully perched my oversized work laptop to watch that utterly bizarre David Lynch (if you'll pardon the redundancy) film "Eraserhead". Ksenia and I had started watching it, but it was starting to freak her out, understandably so.

So watching that movie was either a huge mistake or a huge...err, whatever the opposite of a mistake is, (Sorry I'm typing this bleary-eyed on a jostling bouncing hotel shuttle bus, though the transferal to kisrael might end up delayed)

Anyway, the synchronicity between "Eraserhead" and "my flight" was impressive and threefold, to whit:

• ambient noise -- vaguely electric or mechanical humming at various volumes permeates the movie and, lo and behold, an aircraft in flight.
• the theme of insomnia -- the central character of Eraserhead was restless and bleary eyed through pretty much the whole film, as was the central character of this very website. Partially because of...
• crying inconsolable babies! Oh yes. Some darling too-young-for-this-flight child was bawling pretty much the whole way, and was in the seats directly across the aisle from my own. To be fair the child was more attractive than the alien-looking-head-sticking-out-of-a-bundle-of-bandages baby mutant in Eraserhead, but I swear there were times I wasn't sure if the crying was live or coming over my headphones. (I think I noticed this more after reading the Wikipedia article mentioning the Dead Kennedys line "But in my room/ Wish you were dead/ You bawl like the baby/ In Eraserhead.")

There were some other minor passing similarities too, like the hair of Mr. "Eraserhead" and mine after trying to sleep a bit by resting my head on the seatback in front of me, but those were really the big three.

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Art of the Moment

click for fullsize "October", by Timna Woollard from Where The Heart Is.