airports.

I used to get great work done at the airport. Amazing work. Such good work that when I could swing it, I would get to the airport even an extra hour early, like sometimes after getting through security giving myself three hours to sit and write, read, think. No longer.

I moved to Boston two years ago, started coming to visit Boston almost a year before that. It was the silence of airtravel between Boston and Chicago that helped me write my thesis. I took night flights into Boston, sweeping in to meet my advisor. I took day flights over the mountains when I looked at apartments. I read long, theoretically complicated books on these planes. I wrote term papers.

The airport is a nonplace, a liminal space, a space that is neither here nor there. And an airplane is even worse. There are no electrical outlets, no internet, no telephone. All you bring on your carry on is all you have, that and the SkyMall.

Though I can't recall when the shift came, the airport in Boston now plays radio. Boston Logan International Airport has its own radio station. It sounds like radio in the movie theater. Chicago O'Hare plays CNN. No longer do I have the silence split only by a stranger's conversation.

Yesterday I read a quote from Bob Dylan about young people listening to earbuds when walking around, young people always behind their iPhone. He said we were not living like that. We are disconnected from the real world (I don't put real world in scare quotes because I don't think Dylan would have, I think he must genuinely think there is a real, able to be felt and understood real world). This morning on the subway to work, I looked across from where I was standing to see a grey haired middle aged man with bright orange sticking out of his ears. Earplugs. How funny not to hear the roar of the subway tunnels. Across from him sat a young woman, she also had bright orange coming out of her ears. They looked at each other and smiled while everyone else on the train avoided gazes, read the ads, or read their books. Today in the airport, I pulled my earplugs out of my messenger bag to drown out the Coldplay and conversation. I molded the earplugs so as not to hear you. And so, I wonder, does the beaming radio make our insularity worse?