My flight came in on time, but Greg’s was 1 1/2 hours delayed, so deja vu — once again sitting in the LA Airport. Or LAX, as the baggage tags say. Where do they get these acronyms from anyway? Where’d the ‘x’ come from? And if I was sitting outside of the airport, would I be ex-LAX?

Well, as we all know, I could go on with this all day, but LAX is, in its own little way, enforcing brevity into my prose by giving me this little internet booth that (a) costs like a dollar a minute or something and (b) forces me to twist around in order to type on this little-bitty, thoroughly annoying keyboard. As far as the first one, they can’t scare me.They have no idea how much I’m willing to throw away before I consider it an extravagant waste of time. It’s a small enough talent to have and doesn’t guarantee I wouldn’t be voted off the island in fairly short order, but it’s all mine.

But as for asking me to torque right at the ribcage while still somehow lowering myself down to optimal viewing range just in order to type on a keyboard where some of the keys are sticky and others are in the wrong place … well, that’s just where we separate the true blog-heads from the posers. (ouch!)

But, brave stands notwithstanding, I do feel like being economical with words. I’ve got some thoughts about my stopover in Albuquerque (city motto: We’ve got more Q’s than anybody!) but I’ll save it until I can scan in some things. For now though, we’ll just say that going from a relatively calm, relatively quiet airport like that one to this one is a bit of a shock.

Unless I’m wrong, there’s nothing particularly difficult going on right now. It’s Friday, but it’s only early afternoon. Things will get more hectic and more tedious at the same time, which is the specialty of airports. But already there’s such a crush of people, and most of them look pissed or sad or worn out. There’s a starling that’s trapped in this terminal and has been flying around to all the windows non-stop. If I were writing this scene instead of living it, I probably would’ve put it in there just to highlight the feelings of anxiety.

There are interesting people I could sketch, but it wouldn’t work. People are usually too aware of being sketched to let you do a decent job anyway — hence my predilection for cartoons, which I try to do based on a glance or two — but right here, they’re way too aware. I never noticed it when I’ve been waiting in airports, but apparently when you don’t know what to do and you don’t have anyone to talk to, staring around at other people is the thing. By sitting in this silly little internet booth, I’ve already elicited what seems like an unusually high amount of attention. (Or maybe they’re all thinking of how sore my back is going to be tomorrow.) To start looking around with even the littlest sketch book and pencil in hand is just asking for it. So I won’t.

Well, speaking of my aching back — ouch again. Ouch times two. And that, plus the fact that my frappaccino is running low, indicate that it’s time for this little farce to end.