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The sermon for Dec. 27, 2002 is: airport 8:42 a.m. Dear Diary, it amuses me how much search engines with the keywords "lactating lesbians" pull up my diary. I thought I had made up that literary sub-genre. Anyway. Last night I was at the airport again, this time picking up my friend Lily. Valerie and I had a fight over this, so I wound up going to the airport early and alone. I brought Paul Auster's "The Red Notebook" with me (I had bought it for Valerie's Christmas gift) and chain-smoked and read. I had hours to wait. I thought about airports. I thought about the airports in my past and the girls associated with them. Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires, and Clara. JFK in New York, and how one snowy eve Therese took a cab for an hour and a half to meet me there for a 15 minute layover. Midway Airport, and Yong and Stephanie Marie. Oakland terminal, and Kristin Chew. Lindbergh Field, and Valerie again. This sorta reminds me of that bit in "Einstein on the Beach," when one of the narrators intones radio stations and announcers. I kept going in and out of Terminal 2 at Lindbergh Field, in to think about smoking, out to actually smoke. There were a heartbreaking number of pretty girls planing and deplaning. I went outside to smoke, and sat next to a pretty girl. She looked heartbreakingly like Colleen. She sat on the bench calling numbers on her cell phone. I sat next to her and smoked and read Paul Auster. Finally she looked up, and I saw that her eyes were as startlingly blue as Colleen's. "Jonathan," Colleen said, a little wearily. "What are you doing here?" "We keep meeting at the strangest places," I said. The last time we had run into another was when I went to see a sneak preview of Soderbergh's "Solaris" with Romilya. A girl who looked like Colleen sat right in front of us. "Isn't that whatsername?" Romilya said. I said, "Colleen, yeah, I was just thinking the same thing. But this girl's prettier. Colleen's neck is fatter. Much more fatter." The girl turned around and looked at us. "Hi Jonathan," Colleen said, "hi Romilya." Oh wait, there was another time I saw Colleen-- it was a Christmas party a couple weeks ago. I had brought Valerie to it. We ran into each other at the salsa and chips. The whole party Valerie watched Colleen danced. We left early. "I can't believe you had sex with that girl," Valerie said. "She's so pretty." "What does that mean?" I asked. "And I didn't have sex with her." Colleen looked away from me and started talking into her cell phone. I shrugged and looked to find my place in "The Red Notebook." As Colleen kept talking into her cell phone, her cell phone rang. Oh dear Diary, I had wanted to write here about all the people I saw at the airport terminal. (I had once written a story taking place in an airport, but then I remembered the silly sequence in Kevin Smith's silly Dogma wherein he clumsily tried to say the same things I wanted to clumsily say.) As I sat inside waiting for Lily, I saw one family sitting in the closed Rubio's restaurant, a fat mother, a thin father, and a silent little girl. The fat mother kept shouting, "Zip it! Zip it!" As far as I could tell, the little girl was zipping it, and didn't need further reminder. But just as I despaired over families and sad children, Lily's flight came in and I saw flight attendants wheeling out children in wheelchairs, and mothers in wheelchairs clutching their tiny children. And then finally I saw Lily.
 
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