Height 1

In the sky are usually more hot air balloons than Chad can count, many of them unwittingly owing their transportation to the Doldrums we talked about before. Autumn is a season between fall and winter that never ends and is more common than both. It was from all the hot air balloons that it formed, wind currents began to determine seasons more than the calendar, and it's always cold up there, impossible not to bring a bit of autumn down with you, what's a wicker basket but a tree with no leaves. The icy flowers might be a result of the balloons, too, they confused the burners for the sun, tried to grow with just that light, it looked like the real thing from where they were. But even if you're in the basket directly beneath the flame it isn't that warm. Chad thought of warmth in terms of analog and digital. It took him a long time to accept that Graceland was a good album due to its sterile-sounding production, felt the guitar sounded too wishy-washy. But sometimes smooth 80's studio sounds work out well, like when you're proudly walking to your car, or when you learn a moral, such as when Bob Dylan's song Most of the Time played in High Fidelity. You think about these things in a balloon, when you're just in a basket, when your altimeter is broken. You catalogue things and make lists, just as you're different people at work and home, so too are you on the ground and in the air. From the air it's easy to consider the Golden Age, whatever your version of it may be. My own father once asked "What is it about height?"
I didn't know at the time, couldn't answer him specifically. But there is something about it, it's tough to rest your head on your fists and look out the window of a basement apartment, who wants to spend their life watching shoes go by. Up in the air is the closest we get to time freezes and postcards, we can suspend any notion of death (except our own) when we're high enough that we can't see life. Once when I was in the air, I saw a huge flock of birds, and geese, too, all fly out in front of me and I realized that was it. I had seen so many photos, clips of exotic locations, and there is always that flock of birds that flies indiscriminately through the frame, they are, apparently, what signifies a location as the Place to Be. This is because when we see them, we don't see a generation of birds, ones whose parents have died and whose children will outlive them. Instead we see that flock, the one in all the pictures, those very same birds that travel frame by frame across paradises the world over to let us know when we've arrived. Every day it becomes even more tempting to shoot at them, I can feel my rifle across my back right now. But hey now, I don't want to be a showboat, even though I am a crackerjack shot.