Dialogues a-Lined

I met Polly at the Bangkok airport. You know Polly, from that Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston movie, "Along Came Polly"?

The airport was chaos and the Air Jordanian flight to Amman at 11:15 pm was fully booked. Which means that when I finally ran to the right terminal, I was stuck in winding line of frustrated passengers with more B.O. than sense. Standing in line was a forty minutes affair.

Then I met Elyse, a Brit who just finished a session with her yogi in Chiang Mai, Thailand.  She and I both hopped into the 'short' line, full of screaming kids and bored parents. Elyse had been following a yogi around the world, from India to Tibet to Thailand, on and off for the past five years. The result? She and I both started off complaining about our lack of mortgages and our bounty of debts. And then:

"Hey, have you heard of the Mayan Calendar Prophesies?" she asked.

Oh boy, this was not going to be just another round of small talks.

[Here, I may be making details up, as I relate the Mayan stuff.] The world as the Mayans knew it was divided into 16 or so epochs. The first began 16.4 billion years ago.

"Isn't it amazing?" she gushed.  "Only now has science just begun to discover and prove this knowledge that the Mayans knew, only now has science begun to approach 16 billion years as the point of the Big Bang!"

I said, "Oh yes – of course."

The 16 epochs increasingly get shorter – the Mayans used a lunar system to calculate their dates, with decreasing chapters as time goes on.  It's like a speeding train rushing to a dead end.. as time passes, the distance between the passengers and a major headache shortens considerably: the epochs lasted billions, then millions, then thousands, and now, years, and finally months and days.

"It's incredible to think of – according to them, we're in one of the last, maybe next to last epoch, right before the cataclysmic end of the world!" Elyse crooned. She had nice blond hair and hazel eyes – with only a mark on her left cheek – she looked normal enough, I thought. Who woulda thunk... "The Mayans predicted it all! The plague, the world wars, Crusades, 9/11 (!!) – by the way, do you think there's a conspiracy about 9/11? I do!"

"Well, I'm from New York, and if we're all going down, I think I'll have a front row seat!"  Ba-da-boom. Elyse laughed. A throaty, chocolate trill.

"England's in America's pocket anyways, so I'll wave from the second row!" she quipped.

We rushed headlong into the crazy dialogue. In fits and starts we began, eyeing the line that crawled to the flight attendant, careening from the silly to the sublime, opining on crazy Elyse's beliefs and surviving on my own desire to escape the tedium of the airport... We bounced from 9/11 controversies to the psychotic American hegemony, from life in Bristol and New York to living in India and Vietnam, from chakras and the power of auras to the rampant materialism of the West the the lavish one-upsmanship of the East, from Looney Tunes to Public Access weirdness...

I remarked how she reminded me of Stellargirl. She said I was like a Vincent who lives next to Hyde Park.

The conversation, mad and temperamental, continued on the plane, when she requested that we sit next to each other.

She grew up a Mormon, now vegetarian and Buddhist, having never lived in place for more than 8 months. I survived evangelical parents, now unabashedly (sort of) agnostic, wanting to live in more than 8 places. She stumbled over Theravada, Mahayana and the higher ascetic levels of nirvana. I said, "Oh, yes" and played on about how truth becomes universal and how dharma supplants ignorance to the willing seekers.

"So true," Elyse-Polly mused, between bites of saltines and cheese. "Truth is inside – God is inside all of us; it's like – like a menu – you don't just choose all the items on it, you choose only the ones that fit you, that you can handle!"

"This airplane meal isn't so bad," I said, between gulps of broiled beef and potatoes.

Our bodies finally succumbed to the drone of the cabin as our spirits continued to debate the merits of moral commandments vs individual awareness.. Two hours later, we woke up, in Amman, at last.

She gave me a mint, we parted ways, and our auras unplugged from one another at customs.  She went to the sleeping lounge, where 8 hours of boredom awaited before her connecting flight to Heathrow came in.  I took the escalator down to baggage claim, where I found that Royal Jordanian Airlines had lost my bag.

Traveling alone sure is different.

Dude, sounds awesome over there. ARGH, more place to visit!!!!

Wanted to recommend this book to you: Delirium by Laura Restrepo (Colombian). Was one of the best I have read in at least two years. I'd like to see what you think. Also, finally read One hundred years of solitude. It was OK. Kinda boring, but somewhat interesting.

Later.

Posted by: Vinny | September 01, 2006 at 04:37 PM

Hey Vinny.

I'll check it out. Really? OYS is boring? I loved it – it reminds me of being half asleep in the hammock on a hot summer day – you sort of drift in and out of consciouness. The events are real, but because of the state that you're in.. they take on mythological qualities.

DUDE – Jordan rocks as my top three destinations.. although I hear that April - May here is amazing.

Posted by: j.fisher | September 05, 2006 at 03:07 AM