Moodswing - To be truthful

To be truthful — and complete truthfulness suddenly became a genuine goal of mine recently — the last place I want to be right now is three miles in the sky in a fully fueled Boeing 767 aircraft on its way across the country just days after it happened. The massacre. It happened.

But here I am. My bosses called me immediately following the reopening of the airport, and regardless of the fact that it happened, they are going to try and maintain the illusion that life goes on. That, hey, look, Starbucks is open on E-concourse, so maybe it didn't happen after all. See? Would Burger King be shucking combo meals in the food court if it really happened? For everyone's sake — please Jesus, golden, good-looking Jesus with the goatee — maybe it didn't happen after all. Maybe it didn't. But to be truthful, it did.

It happened.

So I'm here, and if I wasn't, they'd have easily sent someone to replace me and I can't comfortably live with that. They'd have found a co-worker desperate enough or loyal enough or stoic enough, and that person would've been here when I should have. So I just said yes, I'll go. Don't call it bravery. I'm a coward. I'm scared to death. I cried like an infant in the shower this morning. But I know I can't live with letting somebody board the plane in my place when something else might happen, understand? So it's selfish, really. I'd rather live through an hour of hell than a whole lifetime of it, if that's the way it plays out.

So I'm up here, thinking about my parents and how they're both dead, and how I'm almost glad they went ahead and got that out of the way before that Tuesday. Ironically, through no power of my own, my job is taking me from Atlanta to San Diego, which is my hometown, kind of. To be truthful, it's where I like to tell people I'm from, since before I moved to Atlanta it was the place in which I had lived the longest, and it's where I graduated from high school, kind of.

To be truthful, I got kicked out of two high schools in San Diego and ended up graduating from a remedial high school in San Deguito, which is way north of San Diego. I thought it was easier to just lump them together when people inquired. But I've reconsidered the convenience of little lies like that, and I've come to realize the truth is forever much simpler. I've really come to love something Clint Eastwood once said. "Always tell the truth, he said, "and then it becomes the other guy's problem.

And to be truthful, I don't even know if Clint Eastwood really said that.

So I've been thinking about truth today up here a lot, and I've concluded I want to know it. It was a hard decision to make, because denial is such a savory temptation, but I want to know how bad it really is. I want to get comfortable with the crap basket the world has become, and then go about creating a path to get through it, because I don't think you can get through it by refusing to believe it exists — the crap. It's there. Figure it out. We're all in the basket together.

And here I'll digress to tell you about my friend from high school, not my San Diego high school — because to be truthful I attended four different high schools before graduating — but another high school, and she wasn't even my friend, she was just a very beautiful, popular and slightly arrogant girl until the day she flew through a windshield in a car wreck. Her front teeth were torn out and a part of her face became a miasma of scars. After that, she hid her face in her hair. "It can't be that bad, I said to her one day. Then she parted the long hair that hid her face, parted it like a curtain.

To be truthful, it was bad. Really bad. Angry scars clutched her cheek and brow like her whole head was in the grip of a big red tarantula. But the truth is that her scars were still fresh, and eventually they lost their scarlet coarseness and became beautiful in their own way. She became more beautiful than ever. Really.

So let's toughen up and take a good look at how bad it really is right now. It won't be so hard if we do it together. Get the fainting and freaking and screaming and crying out of the way. Now. Look at the Manhattan skyline with its two front teeth torn out. Look at our capital with its nerve center assaulted, the horror of how it's almost flailing like a naked snail. Look at all this until the revulsion passes and the crap is parted like a curtain and then you will see. I swear you will see. You will see it's still beautiful. America is beautiful. We are.

That's the truth, and now it's the other guy's problem.??