Wham

Sixteen hours ago, I watched a very large fire burning merrily along at Baku, on the western shore of the Caspian Sea. It might have been the suburbs of Baku, actually, because it looked like it was, maybe, fifteen or twenty miles from the middle of the town. I saw it from about seventy-five miles away, from thirty-four thousand feet. This, just as the sun began rolling up behind the jet at about five o'clock. That angle torched-off the #1 engine with a blazing deep amber glow on the white paint, hanging in space over land and water down in the depths where the sun hadn't been yet. Holes in the cloud deck; hundreds of square miles of dark land out there under plates of cloud framing them for depth to the scene, perhaps fifteen thousand feet, which would be four miles below us. The fire danced off the cloud bottoms out there past the city lights, it danced like you would see a campfire jumping and flaring. I watched it for eight or ten minutes, I think, and it was a good seventy-five miles away. It was tall, not broad, and it was the sort of thing one might imagine in a gas-flare, but it was enormous.

I'm still on Jakarta time as I sit here; in the same day and time as when I was on the other side of the world, only having skipped from there to here, through Singapore, Frankfurt, JFK, LaGuardia, Ithaca. That's four airplanes and a car to bolt through time and space from door to door, like I didn't even need four or five hours of bad-dream sleep with my head on the bulkhead by the window-seat, now and then along the twenty-six or eight-hour way.

Took nice shots of the white cliffs of Dover at mid-morning, this morning. Well, local time, that is. Today, it was blasting steaming heat in the evening on the polished marble sidewalk of the auto lobby at the Hotel Mulia Senayan, and then it was pretty much variable air-conditioning from then on, because it's like space travel. In time. In a crowd. Today was today, everywhere, in fits of daylight and darkness, for about thirty hours.

I know it was supposed to be yesterday ("Thursday"), but that didn't matter once we got rolling on today, the other day.

Woo.

Bedtime.