Sometimes people find out I am writing a book, and sometimes they ask me what my book is about, and sometimes I tell them: airports.

When I was a student, I worked multiple jobs during the school year: a janitor, a cashier at the local health food market, a youth soccer coach, a Russian tutor. I would save money and then, in the summer, spend all of it on traveling. I used to save money by sleeping in airports. Sometimes two days. Sometimes three. 

A well-lit place.

At an airport, a stranger confessed to me that she practiced witchcraft and often put curses on her biological quote-unquote father. What kind of curses? Curses on his bank account. Curses on his bowels.

Another stranger confessed to me that he had self-published a book about “super-violent volcanoes,” “zombie ground zero,” and “scorched earth” theories as an attempt to “meet the right woman,” that is, a woman who takes the end of the world seriously.

I use my good American accent. 

I ask three questions before I allow myself to answer one.

The most useful conversational skill is not talking—nodding, humming, agreeing, asking for clarification.

There are things I will only tell people I will never see again, and I feel more comfortable sharing intimate secrets with strangers than with my closest friends, and certain confessions cause strangers to trust you.

For example, my daughter was conceived in a family bathroom at the Charlotte airport.

I wrote a novel set in an airport but lost it when my computer was stolen—six Americans, all leaving their country for good.

The cheapest flights sometimes require long layovers. 

Once a stranger in an airport told me about the “Benadryl Hat Man:” Many people—after taking a high dose of Benadryl—see a tall, shadowy figure wearing a top hat. Sometimes he stands at the foot of their beds. Sometimes he follows them around the house.

You have to find the ones who aren’t in a hurry.

Sometimes I talk to strangers about my disease which is called epilepsy. It is a disease that forces me to question how well I remember anything.

I have most of my seizures while sleeping. Every night before falling asleep, I am afraid I won’t wake up in the morning.

Have I lived a good life?

When I do finally wake up, I feel victorious having made it through the night.

I am always aware of the nearest exit. From inside any building, I count the ways to get out of it.

At a young age, I developed a shoplifting addiction. It started because I had no money, but it continued even when I got a job. It became a thrill and a pastime. I stole candy bars mostly but also gum and bags of chips. 

Once on a jet bridge I saw a woman strip fully down to change into a clown costume before she got on a flight to Las Vegas.

Another woman confessed to having a rare condition that made her occasionally incapable of recognizing household objects.

One man explained to me “the dead internet theory” which asserts that most of the internet is fake, generated by AI in conjunction with paid media influencers to manufacture newly normalized attitudes and behaviors.

Another man, who claimed to be a former CIA agent, explained to me that by the year 2035 the power grid would fail and approximately seven out of ten Americans would be dead after four days.

I read that Saint Teresa of Ávila described losing control of her speech. She believed her episodes were evidence of divine proximity. She described one episode as “almost” “erotic.”

Once a woman seated next to me recited the names of all five of her husbands in alphabetical order and said she preferred the third. The one who got away. An amateur golfer and a roofer. She only divorced him because he was secretly taking money from her 401K to make her think his salary was bigger than it really was.

A man confessed to me that he used to wear his wife’s clothing while she was at work.

I saw a woman with a tattoo of the word VANITY across her forehead.

I saw a wedding party of twelve women wearing bright orange shirts that said: CATCH OF THE DAY.

I saw a family with six children all wearing bunny costumes.

I saw a man carrying a six-foot cross on his back, which he was forced to check at the gate.

I saw a man arrested because he refused to pay for a sandwich he believed he had already paid for. He wore a shirt with the words: FUCK COMMUNISM.

Sometimes, to keep a conversation going, I make things up.

Once I told a stranger that I had died in a car accident and been brought back to life at a hospital. What was that like? he said. It’s all real, I said. Heaven and everything. All of it. It’s real.

At an airport, an Orthodox Jewish boy approached me and asked me: Excuse me, sir, do you happen to be Jewish? You look like you could be. 

When I am embarrassed, I immediately repeat the action that embarrassed me.

I smoke cigarettes whenever I don’t have to pay for them.

On a plane, I had to pee in a Gatorade bottle on an airplane because I was in the window seat, the turbulence was terrible, and the two people next to me were in a sleep so deep I couldn’t wake them up.

When I told my friend R (a public defender) about peeing in the Gatorade bottle, he warned me never to do that again because, if I were caught, I would have to register as a sex offender.

Once I took a class at an experimental school for young people who had recently lost a loved one. We had to do these “exercises” where we pretended to sell things to each other. The things we had to sell to each other were emotions and psychological states of being.

In an airport, I told a teenage girl and her grandmother about my epilepsy, and it turned out that she—the girl—had epilepsy, too. Her epilepsy was much more severe than mine. She had about twelve tonic-clonic seizures per day. In response to this news, I pretended that my epilepsy was just as severe and that I understood her suffering. After a long conversation, we all hugged.

When I was younger, I was afraid of boredom. Now, as an adult, I feel an ethical obligation to be bored as much as possible.

In airports some people dress for sleep. Pajamas, neck pillows. Others dress for meetings. Suits, polished shoes.

I wear black clothing that will not easily reveal sweat.

I spill my coffee constantly.

Once I met a woman at an airport and then, later that night—at a hotel—met her again.

I asked the TSA security guard, do I need to take off my jacket? No, she said, but I’d like to see you do it.

I have seen a stranger and thought: this person is going to change your life.

The most interesting airport in the world is in Singapore. Connected to the airport is the “Jewel Changi Complex,” a multi-use development that includes the world’s tallest indoor waterfall—the “Rain Vortex”—and a lush indoor forest. I had a conversation with a man right next to the waterfall. I said, this is the most beautiful airport I’ve ever seen. He said, you need to look harder. At what? I said. At what this waterfall is attempting to cover up, he said.

I met a stranger at the airport tiki bar—an older Irish man. He told me a story about himself that was too painful to repeat here. A story about regret. A story about a dead child. The story ended with the following image. The man stood alone in front of a mirror crying, saying: I’m me, I’m me, I’m me, and I will never be anyone else.

In one airport, I fell asleep with my legs crossed waiting, which cut off the blood circulation to my legs. When I woke up, my legs were completely numb.

 I have briefly known the feeling of having no legs.

There is a sense of being nowhere in particular.

I do not remember to whom I have said what, so I often tell the same stories over and over.

One thing I know for sure about myself is that I do not enjoy small talk.

Sometimes when I have conversations made entirely of small talk, I have the thought that I’d like to kill myself.

“But suicidal thoughts are a symptom of my medication, don’t worry.”

I walked into the seating area and saw someone—a woman—who waved me over and asked me to sit down. I sat down. She called me Dale. Dale, she said, how have you been? Who the hell is Dale is what I wanted to say, but I played along. Great, I said. I’ve been great. She talked for what felt like 15 or 20 minutes to Dale (me). She told me about all the people we knew: Izzy, Michelle, and someone named Wellington. She asked me how I found living in Texas (I have never lived in Texas), and I said fine, fine, fine. When the conversation ended, I got my coffee and said goodbye.

I get nervous around too many people. I also get nervous when I am completely alone.

As a child, I had sleep paralysis. I used to wake up and see a soldier standing at the foot of my bed. He wore a soldier’s uniform. He carried a rifle.

When I told my mother about the soldier, she said: that was your grandfather.

When I was diagnosed with epilepsy, I was relieved. I had always believed there was something wrong with my brain and no longer had to wonder what it was.

I am remembering a grocery store checkout belt.

Items are moving toward me.

Yes, I was relieved.

I was also embarrassed.

No one talks about how embarrassing it is to be sick.

It became harder to “be a man.” I was constantly asking for help. I was crying all the time—especially when music began unexpectedly to play.

My grandfather died before I was born, but I have been told I look like him. I have his cheekbones.

When he enlisted to fight in the Vietnam War, my grandfather’s ethnicity was listed as “ruddy.”

I often have thoughts that I would not associate with “myself” or claim as “mine.”

I carry baby aspirin around with me everywhere I go.

I have hallucinated bats.

I have hallucinated a boat on the desert horizon.

I have seizures almost every day. For several seconds I am aware of myself but cannot speak. 

I have described the experience as: feeling the presence of an angel who is there to comfort me but refuses to intervene.

I have been told that these are called partial seizures.

I find my scientist friends don’t realize how often they use metaphors.

I am partially there.

During an aura, strangers appear to me as narratively significant.

Someone experiencing a seizure in public is often mistaken for intoxicated. Emergency responders are trained to protect the head.

The postictal state—the recovery period immediately following a seizure—for me, resembles the feeling of arriving in an unfamiliar country.

Or, I would say, my language is intact but the context for it is missing.

The most beautiful feeling in the world is accepting that “you are going to be okay.”

A bird nesting in baggage claim.

A child waving at a security camera.

A man told me he would rather watch planes take off and land than watch a Hollywood blockbuster. It soothes me, he said. It eases my mind. It prepares me for sleep.

Once I met a business owner who claimed that his Facebook account had been hacked by someone who had posted anti-Israeli messages. He believed the Israelis had themselves done this to him. They have good reason to do it, he said. Then he said, I’m finished, I’m done, I’ll never work again.

I do not enjoy speaking but enjoy having spoken.

There’s a medieval icon that depicts epilepsy as a winged demon dragging a saint off a ladder to heaven and pulling him down toward hell.

I saw a man stop his baby from crying by putting whipped cream in her mouth.

I saw a woman reheat the same cup of coffee three times and never drink it.

I saw a woman practice smiling at her reflection in a dark window.

The first airport metal detector was introduced in 1968.

For better or worse, illness enlarges symbolism. A painter watching a seizure sees light. 

In one airport, I approached a stranger reading art history who had just learned that Vermeer used powdered lapis lazuli more expensive than gold to paint a strip of blue no wider than a finger.

I used to gather crickets, cut their heads off, fry them in butter and salt, and eat them with chocolate.

When I see religious representatives in airports, I immediately approach them. They are almost always eager to debate—

It is an ordinary human impulse to pray, that is, to project into the universe one’s innermost anxieties, discontentment, fears, and thankfulness, said a Catholic priest.

Secular institutions are no less violent, zealous, hypocritical, or politically dubious than religious institutions, said another Catholic priest.

Uncertainty is what one needs to start living a good life, said a Buddhist monk.

Because we cannot know the future, we cannot understand what we need, said an Islamic leader.

I don’t really believe in the church, but the stories are good, said a Mormon bishop. And it’s good for the children.

The rise of numerology, witchcraft, astrology, and tarot cards is the result of rampant individualism. 

In airports, I tip baristas a higher percentage of the bill than I would elsewhere.

The neurologist John Hughlings Jackson believed that the nervous system was hierarchical, with higher brain centers normally inhibiting lower, more primitive ones, and that a seizure represented a temporary “loss of hierarchical control.”

The lower levels of the brain revolting.

In Wilder Penfield’s electrical stimulation experiments, patients reported hearing music and seeing colors. They also reported having visions of their childhood streets.

Sometimes I run through airports pretending to be late for a flight but in truth I just want some exercise.

A film student on the plane told me that technology has an inner unintentional drive which exists independently of human agency—he said that technology, in other words, has its own “self-driving momentum,” an “almost mindless Schopenhauerian will,” which humans cannot “completely understand.”

When I was a child, my mother was a flight attendant. She’d be gone for two or three days and would return with outrageous stories. Sometimes they included sexual harassment and physical violence.

I’m more afraid that I have nothing left to give than I am of anything else.

I met a man who said he was the poet laureate of JFK. He wanted to write me a poem. I said, go for it, bud. I don’t remember the poem, but I remember that it was about the apocalypse. At the end of the poem, the world was torn in half. I told him he shouldn’t be writing apocalyptic poems in an airport. Then he said: God does not speak but through his prophets.

When he walked away, I briefly considered skipping my flight.

Airports sell books about transcendence next to pain medication.

The patron saint of epileptics is Saint Valentine.

Also, the patron saint of lovers.

Also, beekeepers.

Once a man explained to me the “island rule,” which describes how, in isolated environments, large animals tend to get smaller and small animals tend to get larger.

Some of my onlookers wept.

I met a man who claimed to have a book buying addiction. I told him that my father had the same addiction (which is true). But for this man it was different. This man, at the airport, claimed not to know how to read. He buys books, but he does not read them.

I met a man who claimed to live with something called “compulsive decluttering disorder”—he can’t live with material objects longer than a few weeks before needing to throw them away.

I carry a card explaining my diagnosis in case I cannot speak.

Before I leave the house, I write down on a sheet of paper where I am going.

You’re going to the grocery store on Madison Rd.

If you get lost, ask someone for directions.

Do not talk to the police.

The Greek term for epilepsy translates directly as “attack.”

I have learned that most strangers assume intoxication before illness.

At the airport I overheard:

“Don’t romanticize your illness!”

“But it’s my illness!”

After all these years, I decided to keep a list of things people have said to me at airports—direct quotes—so I won’t forget them. Here are some:

No one wants to touch what I’ve got.

There are many names for what it is if it is something you understand.

The time is now for you to be happy.

What it was was what exactly?

There is nothing the modern sensibility abhors more than Paradise.

If the government gave you a gun, would you shoot me?

Buddy, I read that book even before you wrote it.

Every test says I’m fine, but I’m given instructions anyway.

Thinking about the future is rarely a good idea.

There comes a point where you must stop.

Be other people.

Don’t get down, get excited.