I could have reached across the counter and kissed the airline gay who moved me from my middle seat in the back of coach to an aisle on the exit row upon realizing that I was also an airline gay. I could have kissed him because it might have made me feel better, feel like a little bit less of the basket case that I always am at the Northwest Airlines counter at the airport in Minneapolis trying to check in for my flight back to San Francisco. My Mom cried again when she dropped me off in front of the terminal. Though I put on more miles every day, with the gray hairs and bags under my eyes to prove it, leaving home never stops feeling like shit. And it is always utterly disorienting to be standing in an airport, that space with the least sense of place on earth, feeling miserable for leaving my home in Minneapolis to go to my home in San Francisco.

If only I could have vanished from my hungover, airport-pizza-to-go disgusted state and lept back in time to the previous afternoon. It was one of those unheard of days in Minneapolis, where it was actually bearable to be outside. As my friends and I walked down Franklin Avenue in South Minneapolis, we weren't being immolated by a tropical inferno, devoured by bees and mosquitos, or cryonogenically preserved by by the normal winter temperature of absolute zero, as we could assume would be the case on the other 364 days of the year. So we took advantage of our mutual day off and headed over to this coffee shop on Lyndale Avenue, the hub of the sort of half-gentrified half rock-n-roll Wedge neighborhood. Since most of San Francisco's coffeeshops are pretty dead during the day, I was glad to see that all the tables in the front were filled with the hipsters, punk rockers, nerds, and intellectuals that are usual in Minneapolis. But when I went inside I almost fell on my knees and praised god. It was like the nicest day of the year, and the entire beat up interior of the coffeeshop was packed with people, their noses buried in books, their hands shakily moving between their third free refill and the dozenth cigarette of the afternoon. I could barely see through the smoke or hear over the jangle of the early 90s Tanya Donelly song playing, but I could make out a delightful boy with glasses who I just wanted to fondle reading the same novel I had just bought at the bookstore up the street.

But coiffed hipsters weren't the only folks to consider as we found a table and sat down. There were also quite a few dowdily glamorous people in the 18th year of their Ph.D. programs at the University, re-writing their dissertations once again. And there was the ubiquitous crowd of rehab kids from hazleton, binging on coffee and cigarettes to replace the heroin, trying to get used to this cowtown that is a whole lot more provincial than New York. And of course there were the lonely older guys who never seem to be at work and who are always playing cribbage with high school kids a few tables away at seemingly every coffeeshop in the city. So I couldn't have been more happy to just sit there all afternoon, bullshitting in this middle size Midwestern town, dulling the pain of the newspaper headlines and news stories that forget that scenes like we were watching even exist.

Eventually the caffeine buzz started to drag, and we headed down the block to the CC Club for a drink. All the local drunks and punks hang out at this bar which is most dear to my heart. Once a bar tender sold me a pitcher of beer as he turned up the lights for closing. He told me to drink it fast, for I had to be out the door in five minutes.

On the way we passed this hilarous scrawling that looked like an amateur grafitti piece that said, "The queer revolution will not be televised, rainbowized, and sold to the enemy." It looked perfect on the side of the old auto supply store it was tagged on, as if the old man who worked inside was the enemy trying to buy the queer revolution.

Upon leaving the beautiful azure blue midwestern afternoon and entering the beer-drenched, smoky cavern of the CC Club, we were presented with our usual Leinenkugels beers, and greeted unfortunately by the President speaking on the TV in the corner. It was the day he was unveiling his plan to end forest fires by cutting down all the trees on earth. No one stood up and shouted or hissed as that would be beyone the demure nature of most midwesterners, but everyone just seemed to look at eachother in silent acknowledgement that this is the very reason we were sitting inside getting drunk on a beautiful day.

But I felt such solitude watching that embarassment of a know-nothing president from my torn booth in the CC Club. As our country has become so out of control, there is a certain peace in being in the midwest. After all, short of those of us who love every cheep beer and iceberg lettuce salad with thousand island we consume there, who really cares about Minneapolis? I was on a layover in DC recently, drinking a beer at some corporate clone bar in DuPont Circle, and this woman from somewhere outside of Sacramento I was working with said, "God isn't it nice to have a layover in a decent city rather than the usual being stuck at the Goddam Corn Palace in Minneapolis." I laughed in indication of agreement, thinking conversely of a trip to visit the Corn Palace (which is actually in Mitchell, South Dakota) as a kid. But seriously, the center of cultural, political, and economic capital in the United States is on the two coasts. In an American culture that grows more odious by the moment, it is rather freeing to have a center of my personal political and social consciousness lie a thousand miles from the pilot house of this miserable ship. In an era when it is treasonous to solve problems with our intellects rather than our weapons systems, I feel like the conversations I have at the margins, rather than in the "center" of the United States may be closer to the roots of a third path out of the chaos we find ourselves in.

I started to get past my immediate misery once I was seated on the airplane to come home. I even started to laugh outloud when I thought back over my days in Minneapolis. I wanted to reach through my mind and kiss the girl who cut my hair right after I arrived in town who, with her double-dipthonged Minnesota accent said, "California is so-uh pretty, but aren't the people so-uh to-uhtally snotty?" Totally, I thought. But I know a few Californians who like the piece of that girl who lives inside me, and that as fast as the airplane flew, it would never take me far from Minneapolis.