Flying To Hong Kong

JFK TERMINAL 8, New York City– I haven’t paid for a flight since June. Armenia, Denmark, Hong Kong — three trips, two projects, one speaking event. Not bad. On this flight to Hong Kong I was booked in premium economy. There’s more leg room and arm space than I need — I’m used to sitting with the cows and chickens — but I take it.

I’m more exited that I anticipated to be going to Hong Kong — back into the Chinese world, a place that I have been nearly a dozen times, on the threshold of the east and west, the old and modern, new type governance vs. the wild west. I miss China bad. That’s where I established myself as a writer; that’s where people first started wanting to hear what I had to say. I transformed there — I went in a travel blogger and came out a whatever I am now. I like whatever I am now. It’s pretty close to what I imagined doing when I would pace around in the fields of WNY as a kid daydreaming about the adventures I would have in far off lands … If those visions were my bull’s eye then I guess I hit the red ring around it. Not bad.

I sat in that big, comfortable seat on that plane for three hours and went nowhere. Flight cancelled.