My brother and I were a bit late getting to our flight with Sun Country airlines. We hadn't really eaten anything, and we were pretty tired because the flight was early in the morning. Had we not been in such a state of unrest and stress and low bloodsugar and the like, we probably wouldn't have payed a lot of mind to what follows in this post. But we were in exactly such a state, and this was pretty hilarious.

Looking to occupy myself in some way, I semi-consciously took out the passenger safety manual from the pocket of the seat in front of me. At first glance, nothing seemed out of place. The illustrations on those things are always pretty funny to me for some reason I can never seem to nail down.

But then,


Explicit warnings against remote control car use in the cabin?


A ballerina complete with pink tutu bracing for a hopeless crash into the side of a mountain?

And most importantly,


Willy Wonka?

Or at least some poor chap in a plum colored late Victorian suit with tails and a top hat and ascot? How did he get so far removed from the 19th century? Did the Murlocks strike down the flight to San Juan?

Why the hell is he on this?

I figured it's like the whole Concorde thing a couple years ago. The glass elevator, innovative and cool as it was, failed to draw enough of a significant consumer base, so Wonka had to pull its plug some years back, which is a feat in of itself, as the great glass elevator isn't even plugged into anything. Now he's riding high in upstart airline funds, though clearly some of his pilots are a little unexperienced or something. Because he's crashing. And freaking out about it.

So I stole the safety manual and decided to write about it. I took the above pictures in New York out of a fear that somehow the TSA would figure out what I had and would take it back and yell at me. Nothing happened though, so I naturally figured that I totally outsmarted them with my wily smarts and all, hahaha. That should learn them well for cutting off my $8 TSA approved lock in Chicago, those goddamned approved-lock-cutting bastards.

I showed it to my family; some of them thought it was funny, others only that it was only strange. It's all very confusing, you know. I haven't a clue what to say.

Dear (Comma) Bob (Comma)
Originally uploaded by quicklyfailing.

I went for a walk in the park a while back.

Outside the tennis courts on a piece of grass that's usually just a place where empty Mountain Dew bottles, DQ cups and cigarette butts can wile away their states of caducity, I see this large piece of white construction paper loosely rolled up into a tube. It's something out of the ordinary; I pick it up.

Somewhere close to my house, Bob, Megan and Ellie are involved in an intricate and tragic story about miscommunication and unrequited love, and I stumbled into it. Few times have I ever inadvertently seen something this personal. Most of my found objects are pretty lame notes and homework assignments that I find in the halls of my highschool after the last period ends and before the janitors have really cleaned up. Usually they tend to be misdirected appeals to people who may or may not have cigarettes or pot or large quantities of alcohol, or they're some 9th grade video observation worksheet regarding a History Channel documentary on Little Big Horn. It's kinda unfortunate; nothing's ever really of note; nothing ever has a strong sense of humanity to it. Then again, I could just be looking at 9th grade assignments a little too cynically...

Anyways, this letter is huge. It's 18 by 24 inches, and I've never gotten any correspondance that huge. It's essentially a book report poster in its size, which is perfectly suitable for the kind of writing you can get done with a couple of fat Crayola markers.

Also, Megan seems to be telling Bob that she would really love it if he was her girlfriend. I don't know if she just didn't totally think through the semantics there or is subtly implying something about gender roles.

I'd also like to point out the crossed out 19 before the 20. Perhaps this was the kind of thing that Megan would pour her heart out on over a very long period of time. Perhaps she's just confused about her age. Perhaps she's really 12 and decided after writing 19 down that she really needed an age that didn't have that crappy crappy immature "1" at its front.

Bob and Megan and maybe Ellie, if any of you somehow see this thing, please don't leave me here in a morass of unfounded speculation, because it sucks to be in the dark. Tell me how things are! I hope you don't feel like you're being exploited.

I should send this thing somewhere.