I’m having one of those moments where the “real world” suddenly seems utterly surreal — a friend of mine is getting married in Hawaii on Monday, so I’m sitting in LAX waiting for the plane. There’s a muzak version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” playing, and I can’t help but wonder what committee, focus group, or other ambiguous mass of individuals concluded that this was what should be playing in airports. I’d bet large sums of money that not a single person in that focus group preferred the muzak version to the original, but groups have a way of doing things that individuals never would.
Meanwhile at least half of the passengers are wearing these god-awful Hawaiin shirts, and while I’ll laugh along with the people who wear them as a statement of leaving everything behind (“I’m wearing it because I can“), I’m disturbed at the thought that some of them are wearing something like that because “this is what you wear in Hawaii”. Maybe having just finished re-reading Atlas Shrugged and watching “Fight Club” has made me cynical, but sitting here I just can’t make this environment feel like it’s in any way grounded in reality… Luckily tomorrow I’ll be on a volcano with the jungle and the Pacific spread out around me, and there’s no doubt as to the reality of that environment.