Meditation on Birds in Airports

Number one, top ten feature to love about the Miami airport? Bird shit.  That's right, bird shit. Fresh and wet. In the seats.  I did not sit in this little chair mine, so I can view it with amused philosophy.  I've decided that the presence of bird shit on the seats in Miami-Dade international airport is an encouragement to all travelers.  It is proof that there are still some creatures on earth that the TSA can neither bully, nor frisk.  Creatures that sore above the sad masses, dropping warm opinions on what's going forward below.

      I like to think of them as rebellious rather than suffering, trapped things lost in the world of industrialized travel.  They refuse to obey borders.  Entering where no birds are allowed.  They ignore toilets.  Pooping on chairs like shit happens all the time - just flies through the air like feathers, foul odors, or dust.  Their tweets cannot be confined to 140 characters, and as I listen to their chatter, I feel better about carting my belongings from gate to gate, feel better about the inevitable hours that I will spend sardined into a comfortless flotation device, desperately awaiting touch-down.

     Maybe that's why I prefer window seats to aisle seats.  Despite the likelihood that at least once during flight, I will crawl over grumpy strangers on my way to the toilet, I still fight for the window every time.  I want to feel like I'm really flying.  Like I could drop a warm opinion or two upon all I see.  From up here, the window seat, I can see so much waste amid the beauty.  The jet stream toward Miami showed the drained Everglades beyond the brimming cookie-cutter ponds of suburbia.  I imagined myself as a hurricane, wiping all the grime from the face of the planet - sort of like a massive anti-poop.

     And then, we're too high to see the earth below.  Fluffy plains of cloud stretch to the horizon, the blue sky above.  Some pleasant flight attendant offers to sell me a meal on this five hour flight to Las Vegas, and I'm back in the present moment once again, thinking: what exactly DOES my ticket buy me?  A great view, I suppose, from point A to point B, and only bird droppings in between.