We Hope You Enjoy the Selection Chris Campanioni Munich is all green fields & beige brown mounds of earth. A slab of ash-gray sky. Homes of slanted red squares, black tops. Rolling hills like the image on the cassette sleeve of The Sound of Music. At least from the view of the Airbus 340. Reclining, inclining, uncertain where to place myself, & how. Ten emergency exits on board, & if I paid more attention, I’d be able to describe their whereabouts. Red from France & Austria, Johnny Walker Blue, two champagnes I only take photos with to begin & end the flight. A hot towel over my face if I occasionally open my eyes. Business Class is so good you actually don’t want the flight to end. It’s like life. With two minutes to land, I finally learn how to properly use my mechanical-massage seat, seven buttons which control seven parts of the average human body. I watch the 3-D image of the plane’s nose on the monitor of the person diagonal to me, imagining my position of sight as being outside myself, simultaneously inside the jet of which I’m watching from afar. A bird’s eye view, as a bird. The effect is, like all things post-Internet, so real it seems fake. Unless it’s the other way around. Flattened, compressed, reflecting itself as hall of mirrors; & over the mountains, mountains. So many vantage points from which to view experience, yet I hardly ever experience anything but inert alertness; a desire to think through things as if I’m still standing still & still I’m always moving. All of us & everywhere. “They are also lands of ethnic diversity: the traditions & innovations of conquerors & Native Americans, & of settlers and city dwellers, have shaped American cuisine into a taste sensation. … The forested Northeast is arguably the most European part of the USA. The Italian, Spanish, & British roots of immigrants are still noticeably today alongside Greek, Syrian, & Chinese influences.” I’m reading “The Best of the Northeast” section in the Lufthansa Business Class pamphlet that was provided by an air stewardess. I enjoy reading about where I live from the perspective of someone outside of the place, because it makes me feel even more of an outsider than I already am; defamiliarize the familiar & all of us eventually realize we are strangers, to each other & ourselves. “Vast landscapes, mountains & forests. The Pacific, Atlantic, & the Great Lakes. Journey through the USA or Canada & admire what nature & the vastness of these countries have in store.” A friend asks me what I’ve been daydreaming about. If I knew what, I wouldn’t be daydreaming. I tell her, three quarters of the time I’m halfway here. I underestimate but she gets the point, because we’re not even looking at each other as we talk.
49.
