I love flying from Nashville to Los Angeles - there’s something about the juxtaposition of disparate walks of life, thrown together involuntarily in a metal tube occupying real estate somewhere between the nearest Starbucks and outer space.

An elderly Tennessean on his first-ever flight is wheezing and twanging like an untuned banjo as he espouses conspiracy theories, the “gumn’t” this and “talm bout” that. He’s eyed incredulously by an LA finance type, impossibly awkward in his designer suit, as if a rolled carpet were reluctantly ambulant. Crew dudes are CrossFitting pelican cases into overhead compartments, nervously speculating whether this flight will unlock that coveted Gold status. And me - sleep deprived, but fortified by enough nuclear-strong French Press to pass as respectable company, typing this in my four inches of available space. But even the indignity of modern travel’s kinda awesome - BNA to LAX in three and a half hours, after all, even though I’m pretty sure the guy next to me’s watching porn.

Sammy Hagar, the Great Poet of Our Time, once sang “there’s a time and place for everything, for everyone.” There surely is.

Then again, he also sang “hey hey, hey, hey, MAS TEQUILA,” which of course means we must take life’s absurdities as we would our agave booze - with grains of salt.