airports

in lieu of my flying adventures yesterday, i've chosen to share a piece of a book i'm reading:

"
Cotard's syndrome is a mental disorder where the victim concludes that he or she is dead. Sometimes the victims of Cotard's syndrome think they can smell their own flesh rotting. I must concede that this has never happened to me. I probably don't have full-on Cotard's, but there are moments when I feel like I'm dead. This is especially true when I'm in airports. Anytime I'm in a foreign place with lots of strangers who share an identical (yet completely unrelated) purpose, I start to think I'm in purgatory. For as long as I can remember, I've had a theory that life on earth is purgatory, because life on earth seems to have all the purgatorial qualities that were once described to me by nuns. It's almost like we're all Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense, but nobody on "earth" has figured this out yet, even though it will suddenly seem obvious when we get to the end. Sometimes I think that the amount of time you live on earth is just an inverse reflection of how good you were in a previous existence; for example, infants who die from SIDS were actually great people when they were alive "for real", so they get to go to heaven after a mere five weeks in purgatory. Meanwhile, anyone Willard Scott even congratulated for turning 102 was obviously a terrible individual who had many, many previous sins to pay for and had to spend a century in his or her unknown purgatory (even though the person seemed perfectly wholesome in this particular world). This hypothesis becomes especially clear inside any airport. It's like a warehouse full of dead people rushing from gate to gate to gate, all of whom are unaware that----if they are lucky---they will have the good fortune to board a 727 that crashes into a mountain. Then they will be out of purgatory.
These other people don't know they're dead, though. They think they're alive, wordlessly walking through the airport chomping down three-dollar Cinnabon cinnamon rolls. I might be the only one who's aware of this, which means I am quite possibly a prophet. It also means I quite possibly have Cotard's syndrome. It's always a 50-50.
"

(Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman)

it's such an amazing perpective and i love reading klosterman's work. he's hilariously brilliant. so think about that next time you find your self in an airport. (by the way i DID have a cinnabon yesterday....lol)