Dedicated to all The Nobodys & The Somebodys

“At long last love has arrived,
And I Thank God I’m alive.
You’re just too good to be true,
Can’t take my eyes off of you.”
- Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons

We open on a jetliner, suspended mid-song.
Playing courtesy of Phil Spector before The Wall of Sound Shakedown. It's a veteran theme, an orphan angel in the zeitgeist, lowering his bow to the young in love and newly emanicpated. It should be a fanfare for change, but you hear it as an oath of good riddance should the plane shake-and-shudder to its fall somewhere between Southeast Pennsylvania and the modern dregs of suburban Jersey. Not that these are thoughts which you, yourself, can account for. You've been drinking bourbon and soda since you crossed the Mississippi River. The coffee must have rattled your nerves this time, but that bitch sitting behind you reading The National Review certainly isn't helping. (Why is it men, and always men in planes are reduced to the back of their furniture?) She's crushed both knees into your seat, killing your stereophonic bliss, leaning invasively into that disparity that splits your dream from imminent suspicion. You keep listening to the song until it barges in from the left like a sprawling citadel--that view of Lower East Manhattan which hints at the beginning of the end. And its here where the woman behind withdraws both her knees to release you into the mystery. And there she has left you, in that space between to swim and retrieve how your story is to begin.

This will be a story, you've decided, of wishes and exonerations. A story of cosmic retribution. A story of arrivals and departures. Of disappearance. The belief in magic. Of small-tales, tall-tales. The search for paradise. Of half-lives and the flight of angels. Of past, present and future converging at a streetlight. Of resistance, then the courage to give in. Of friends. The music of an accident. Of foiled rivals. Of lightening storms. Of rain on the rooftops. Of requiems. Of premonition. Of trains and boats and planes. Of big cities and small towns and put-upon accents. It’s the story of the big balloon, and the man who gave up trying to save the world.

It’s a simple story, really.

You probably know it already.

And this is not what happened, but it’s how I remember it.