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The sermon for Nov. 13, 2002 is: terminal 1:00 a.m. i'm living in airports. at some point, i don't remember, i thought it would be interesting to wander about and freeze somewhere in the midwest. i had no idea that freezing would take so very, very long.1 anyway. a little bit ago i decided to buy some books, because i suddenly had an intense craving for friendship; and some books on their shelves instantly seduced me, Haruki Murukami's "Norwegian Wood," David Thomsen's "New Biographical Ditionary of Film" and Irvine Welsh's "The Marabou Stork Nightmare." I took the books over to the gift shop cashier and, in a taxpaying mood, asked for an $8.00 pack of Newport cigarettes. The cashier put the cigarettes on the pile of books and I unfolded a $100 bill to give her (oy, the Thomsen book alone is $50.00). She glanced at me and shrugged, and gave me back 92 bucks in change. Um, the books, did you get the books? I murmured in a kind of are-we-invading-Iraq-yet-by-the-way way. The books, the cashier said. They're yours? Um, yes? I said, this time in a kind of why-didn't-I-vote/have-a-V8 kind of shocked whisper. I paid for them? Yeah, your books, the cashier said, turning away from me with a kind of mild distaste at the idea of anything bookish approaching her cigarette counter. (Here, if my life was a movie made by Godard, is where Anna Karina and I danced the Charleston to the sound of distant traffic.) So here I am, mere decametres away from the scene of those shenanigans, awaiting a 6 am flight to yet another airport, with 15 pounds of lavishly free prose and accomplice Newports. The tile is shiny and gleaming, though I don't remember seeing a cleaning crew or anything like that within the 10 hours I've been squatting. A little way from me is a long empty corridor festooned with limp wizened flags of all the nations; a metaphor resides there, somewhere, but I'm too tired and airsick to puzzle it out just now. I hope I sleep soon.
 
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