Want to know what crushing guilt looks like à la UD? Guilt that she can’t lift the morning, afternoon, and late afternoon after?

It’s last night. We’re at Boston Logan Airport, and our Southwest flight to Baltimore is delayed an hour. Posted departure time, 10:50 PM. We’re sitting alongside one another – UD, Mr UD, La Kid – in those hard black chairs all in a row at our gate, and we’re tired and grumpy and overheated.

Suddenly a skinny young man dressed all in black bounds up before us and excitedly says Are you going to Baltimore too? Guess where I’ve been? He’s euphoric, in a state of bliss he has to share. His skinny black t-shirt says something that seems to be a pun on the word censorship.

I was just at the anime convention and guess what happened to me?

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Now understand. UD flies. She flies on planes. UD‘s a reasonably functional postmodern humanoid. But she is a bad flyer, and among the things she worries about when boarding is the possibility that her flight will include a disturbed person. A disturbed person who in a state of euphoria or rage or something will act in frightening ways…

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So who knows what she might have done if they’d been at an outdoor cafe or something but UD simply put her head down (she had her laptop out) and did not respond. Mr UD got up and went to get some food for the flight. La Kid, bless her, said What? What happened to you? He paused a bit, daunted by our unfriendliness. I… I got interviewed twice… His voice trailed off and then he trailed off. He took a seat by some enormous windows and was very quiet.

UD took a deep breath and felt terrible. She looked over at him and noticed that outside his window an amazing huge golden-red moon (a blood moon?) was rising, so she went over to where he was sitting and said to no one in particular Look at the moon! and the guy looked and smiled a little.

But this didn’t make UD feel any better.

She had taken the wind out of the guy’s sails, and you should never take the wind out of someone’s sails.

This guy, I realized, as I looked around, was one of many funny-looking anime convention people on this flight and I love their bizarrerie, I want to reward their bizarrerie. I want them to know I love their blue beanies that go round and round and make little whining noises (a woman on board the flight had one of these) and I love their socks that are designed to look like shoes. The weirder the better for the love of god!

Had UD‘s (fear-induced) coldness taken this young man, at the height of his bizarrerie self-confidence, to the I guess I’ll go crawl off and be a conformist for the rest of my life depths?

GAAAAHH!