On the Road Again

To complicate last weeks travel plans I have some kinda weird inner-ear / sinus thing going on. When I roll over in bed my head sort of spins and it feels like my brain is siphoning over into the other half of my head. Decongestants help but for the past couple of weeks I feel just a little wobbly most of the time, like I just got off a merry-go-round, like I might tip over to the left....or right....at any moment when I'm walking around.

In a tippy world where my head is spinning like that sad little Exorcist chickie it further complicates matters when everything around me is...slightly askew. I'll show you what I mean, but first consider this.......I come from a land where everything is pretty much blocked off in nice little squares. The streets in my city are laid out in a grid, like a neat and tidy checkerboard. The buildings are pretty much up and down............this side of this building is perfectly up-and-down-parallel with that side of that building. Even way out in the country all the farm fields are neat and tidy, laid out in mile-by-mile squares making our 99 counties look like a perfectly stitched patchwork quilt from the window of an airplane at 30,000 feet.

I'm an artist, it's not that everything has to be squared-up ordinary to appeal to me. I'm just sayin' my world lines up pretty nice in front of my eyes most days in a way that makes proportional sense.

Take one tippy-head chick with an overstuffed suitcase, point her in the direction of an airport with a ticket for Atlanta and you've got a recipe for complete, mind-numbing vertigo.

The terminal.
I try not to look up.

Moving sidewalk.
Moving walls.

Moving neon.

Hold. On. With. Both. Hands.

Don't look down.
Or sideways.

And that was just the airport.


The hotel is 50 floors.
For a girl that doesn't like heights those are just
50 opportunities for one to go plummeting to an untimely death
while rummaging in ones purse for the room key.

Wasn't kidding.
Not a square corner in the place.

245 steps and two elevator rides from the front desk to
my room at the verry end of this hallway.

One entire wall of my room was glass and I swear to you the floor was slightly tilted toward those windows ~ untimely death via a middle-of-the-night stumble in the wrong direction. Tough to sleep when you're worried you're going to end up 50-floors down on the pavement in your nightie if you need to get up and pee.

So I didn't. I just took my decongestants, slipped under these covers with the remote control, kept the curtains closed the whole time and pretended my room was on the first floor.

Even when I'm feeling a little dizzy in the head, I recognize a good thing when I see it.
A six-pillow week is generally gonna be a pretty great week.