st. valentine's day massacre

i disconnect the autopilot and gently ease the yoke forward, bringing the swiss miss reluctantly out of her natural habitat at 23,000 feet. letting down slowly, high above the tropical jungles of uganda.


glance at the weather radar and find my line between the yellow egg-yolk and blood-red splotches of growing thunderstorms. tell the aminals in back to buckle their seatbelts. deftly weave my ship on the smooth seas between cells. with the tailwind, our groundspeed is 311 knots going downhill, and we're catching up quick to a caravan that's also landing in entebbe. i do some of newton's calculus in my head and it's apparent that we should overtake him about 30 miles from the field.

i'm more or less tracking inbound on the 314 degree radial (northwest of entebbe, heading southeast). the caravan answers approach control's query: they are inbound on the 290 degree radial (south of me).

on this trajectory, it looks like we will slide by them with at least 10 miles of lateral separation as we each ride our spokes into the hub. suddenly, i hear a voice calling, telling me what i must do.

"god? is that you?"

nope. it's the controller, asking us to turn right and join the 270 degree radial for the arrival. a glance at the tcas confirms that this will point us directly at the one other airplane in the sky whom this man on the ground is supposed to be separating us from. further consideration shows the weather radar painting a full spectrum of the skittles® rainbow of nastiness over that way. i look out the right window and can see a number of big dark scary smoky mushroom walls of water where the controller wants us to fly. i instruct my co-pilot to ask for a better deal.

there is much confusion, and multiple repeated requests for confirmations. weeping and gnashing of teeth. very little actual, useful, communication.

i continue on my own course, not allowing the blind man below to steer my ship. half of the controllers here are decent, but if you did what the other lump routinely asked you to do, you would shorten your own lifespan considerably. it's unreal that people with absolutely no spatial intelligence whatsoever are allowed to do this job.

as predicted, we slip slide past the caravan who is not quite doing half our speed. i resist the urge to tell him that he'll go faster if he puts his gear up.

breaking out into the clear, flying above the brush fires of dry season. visibility is good though, and i see what appears to be plumes of smoke swirling off of lake victoria to the south. but these are actually swarms of mayflies rising from the dark waters; twisting together in a tornado of carnal congress.




******


after dinner, we shoot some pool at the red rooster. after a couple of hours change venues to 4 turkeys. the mozzies and prozzies follow our peregrination. so do the mayflies, who have been blown ashore on the evening's breeze. it is a plague of biblical proportions; literally millions of the sticky annoying white-winged aviators everywhere. landing on your face, drowning in your beer glass, flying into the table's candle flame.

when these creatures molt into adults and grow wings, they live for only one day and of course spend it obsessed with spawning in an aerial orgy of frantic tantric madness.

the ancient greek poet wikipedia tells us that in most species, the males' eyes are large and the front legs unusually long, for use in locating and grasping females during mid-air mating. in some species, all legs aside from the males' front legs are useless. uniquely among insects, mayflies possess paired genitalia, with the male having two penises and the female two gonopores. are they happier than a puppy with two peters? only the entomologists can say.

back in the bar, the ladies of the evening are mingling about as well. one of the nocturnal pros, kate, is making her way over to where my buddies are playing pool. i watch the eternal ritual play out, sitting in my dark corner like a voyeur.

kate is an all-natural spectacular beauty; a woman with satiny chocolate-milk skin, long straight raven-colored hair, and searing black x-ray eyes that can bore a hole through your pants. her curves approach a magical mathematical ratio, much like π or e. they would make leibnitz and euclid weep for an incontrovertible mathematical proof of a loving god.

however, any observant male can detect a hint of crazytown in her twitching mannerisms and wild glances. like a moon-eyed horse, you never quite know what she's about to do, or what she is capable of. but still, you have a morbid fascination to find out. towed forward by your wiener, like a speedboat pulling a water skier. fast and taught, and quite possibly to your end.

malted barley has the tendency to make me more philosophical, and i curl my paws around a guinness and try to wrap my brain around the situation. i take a quaff of the bitter black liquid in its brown bottle. medicina de la vida.

what drives a woman of kate's stunning beauty into this kind of life? was she a victim of circumstance? of economics? was it, paradoxically, her very own allure that led to this addiction to male attention during those formative years? that purely shallow ideal of physical attractiveness becoming the core of her self-esteem, neglecting the development of any other attributes of her womanhood? what tiny event in her past irrevocably altered the course of her life?

i swat at the mayflies. i can't blame them for wanting a sip of my guinness, but skinny-dipping is inexcusable. the night is warm, the air heavy with humidity and pregnant with potential. my dark bottle is sweating condensation, and a small pool is forming on the table. other mayflies have already drowned there, meeting their ends chasing shiny reflections of sparkly buzzing neon beer signs. a candle in the middle of my table guides them in like an airway beacon; inbound on all radials.

i think about the strength of the sexual urge. the swarming, the spawning, the yearning. the desire to love and be loved. the self-respect women will sacrifice for 'love.' the sweet-hot lies men will whisper for sex. and the millions of unintended pregnancies that result. and how, in the process of conceiving new life, subsequent generations are created that will share this same overpowering urge.

thumping bass and the relentless UNTse UNTse UNTse of distant club music providing a looped soundtrack for alcohol-soaked mating dances every night on this planet. in how many towns, in how many cities around the world are these same sad sappy antics playing out right now?

on my table, a mayfly is urgently trying to mate with a drowned female in the beer condensation puddle. it is humping away at a crumpled soaked lifeless form, unaware that its efforts will be in vain. oblivious that it won't have another chance before it dies. molt, spawn, game over. a bitter truth, straight from the whorse's mouth.

white threads of cigarette smoke curling up across the room; rising over puddles of spilled beer in a whirling, charmed-cobra copulation with the atmosphere. i think of the riots in tunisia and egypt and yemen. of people yearning to throw off the yokes of theocracy and corruption and economic disparity. of the murder this week of ugandan gay-rights activist david kato, who was beaten to death in his kampala home with a hammer. for being homosexual.

i finish my beer and set it down as another mayfly heads right into the candle's flame. driven to madness by his twin penii.

i look back at my buddies shooting pool. kate has grown bored with their indifference and has flitted off in her eternally-desperate search. now, a well-endowed congolese female is displaying her barely-restrained chest in a peacockian fashion show. just like men flexing muscles or berating their challengers: locking horns, crossing swords. more meatheads trying to lure females into their caves with promises of hunted deer. only now it's an übermensch display of buying girls a michelob ultra beer. the whole business is absurd and ridiculous.

my eyes wander. across the room, a bug-covered television beams signals from outer space. on the muted tubes, stock footage of rockets blasting up into the celestial void. a passing news story graphic of the space shuttle challenger with the caption 25 years.

a memory hits hard. a young boy in kindergarten watching the first teacher going into space; live on t.v. with his classmates. i recall that weird twitch in my guts, 73 seconds after liftoff; the solid rocket boosters flying off in a drastic spastic curling, the announcer going quiet. explosions in the sky. my teacher hurriedly turning off the television in an awkward gesture of maternal protection. and me, age 5, knowing definitively that something was going horribly wrong in the world.

the sight of kate wandering around makes me sad in some inexpressable way. all these ephemeral things (from the greek εφήμερος - ephemeros, literally "lasting only one day").

women with so much budding possibility, now lost and gone forever. something as small as an o-face or an o-ring sufficient to dissipate their potential: unravelling debris all the way across the sky.


i walk home through a midnight tunnel of stars, as the mayflies continue to swirl all around me in their roadside ghost dance.