Dear American Airlines 2

As the book progresses, the reader is given some insight as to why the main character/narrator/author is so cynical. The time he has spent in the airport gets upwards of 8 hours, and he starts to share his family life with Delta Airlines. He an illegitimate child with a woman he didn't really love and it began to dominate his life. During the pregnancy, he describes his feelings by saying, "Often I was aimlessly angry and sometimes I was thrilled but mostly I was terrified," (33). Though the idea of having a child is often romanticized, the anger and terror he felt is completely justified. He is an aspiring poet who is being robbed of some of the best years of his life just because of a stupid accident. Although it was pretty much all his fault, the reader can still sympathize with him. The situation later becomes even worse when his relationship with his girlfriend falls to pieces. Unable to stand his drunkenness, Stella flips out, taking away the baby, and telling him to move out. The whole ordeal is pretty much summed up when she yells, "Look at her. She's screaming. Do you see what you're doing to her? Get away from us Bennie. Get away. I swear to Christ I'll kill you--"(48). After being forced to accept a child he didn't want, it becomes even worse when, after learning to love the child, his girlfriend takes the child and kicks him out. He feels betrayed by anybody, and now has no own to look after him. Being deserted by the world can certainly leave one feeling cynical.

Later in the reading, some light is shed on all the problems that drinking has caused for the main character. Despite being sober for 5 years, he still yearns for a drink, and he describes his love of alcohol when he says, "The worst part of sobriety is the silence. The lonesome, pressurized silence. Like the way sound falls away when you're choking. Even when I drank alone, the vodka provided me with a kind of soundtrack--a rhythm, channeled voices, a brain crowded with noise and streaming color, the rackety blurred clutter of my decrepitude."(53). Alcohol was his crutch, so much so that without it he feels a silence. A silence is pretty much an emptiness, and an emptiness signifies something extremely important missing in someone's life. His drinking caused so much trouble that even years later, his old girlfriend whom he impregnated still wont talk to him. When he called during his rehab to apologize she simply said, "Thanks, but no thanks."(52). Damn...thats cold. Even the person who used to love him more than anybody won't accept his apology. Perhaps that is why the main character is so cynical to this day. Blah blah concluding sentence blah.