Airport book browser, coming or going, inhabiting the interstitial space of travel, pursuing a task in order to be paid for having pursued a task, equipped with peppermint gum and a five dollar bottle of water and scanning for a book that might help the self without making the would-be-helped self ashamed at needing or receiving mass-marketed assistance. Picks out and purchases the Subtle Art of Being A Joyful Badass with No Fucks to Give and A Hustling Heart. Reads it on the way to the yet-to-be-performed task, distracted for the time being from the futile incompleteness that will come when it is done and consigned to the vacuum of tasks performed, boxes checked category that seems to be the dubious purpose of this beating heart’s empty avocation.

Calumny of self, abetted by an appetite for imaginative romps in the Something Else, Anything Else, and the pithy candor of a best-selling ode to breaking free from the gaping void of a life of quiet desperation. And airline peanuts. And the indignity of waking to a shaken-seat admonition to return to the upright position, mouth dry with residual Heineken, afire with the need to get a square wheeled receptacle from the overhead bin before the stranger on the other side.