A strange month, March was, stranded in Oaxaca and then Mexico City for five days by an unforgiving airline (American), missing a second Omaha blizzard. There are worse places to be stranded, especially in March, but we’re little different than our luggage to the airlines, and that’s a bit too dehumanizing to bear after three days of gaslighting, of promises, of feeling like an ass for believing the promises. And of course there were all the kind people—the fellow passengers, the Oaxacan cabbies, the patience in that country, the knowledge it will work out in the end. A country with its special strain of comedy. We took an overnight bus from Oaxaca to Mexico City, the final stretch a climb between Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl where the temperature crashed and woodsmoke from the surrounding villages drifted throughout the bus. Hey hey we vacay and we complain about our vacations, our absences, wishing our beds back, cranky, tired. I’ve tried to read Under the Volcano a couple of times but bailed twice. Maybe I’m not that depressed (or depressing) after all.

But lesson learned (and soon forgotten and so on and so forth): the worst thing you can do is make it about you. The Milky Way galaxy is warped like an old record spinning on a teetering spindle. These sentences are most certainly related.