Going out to the smoking area in Miami, having lost my lighter to a cult of security in Trinidad and Tobago (who probably have a shrine of lighters that they have found), I bummed a light from an American Airlines employee named Geovanni. So we start talking - something the healthier and less social non-smokers wouldn't understand. We talked about all sorts of things; he on his break and myself awaiting a connecting flight while drinking coffee and trying to singlehandedly decrease the percentage of damage that bovine flatulence does to the climate of the planet.

We talked about Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba (where he was from), Panama, Nicaragua, Colombia, and many other things. We talked about how people can never simply get along. We laughed about life, smoked our cigarettes and blew smoke at the universe. We spoke of places we'd been, people we've met - be they Palestinians in Greece or Jews in Miami or Barack Obama or Fidel Castro. We agreed that the world made less sense than people generally thought it did because when you peek under the soft lace that the media dresses many things in... it's naked. And naked, despite what testerone powered adolescents may think, is not always good. But to see the world naked is a passion for some of us, and by pure chance and addiction to nicotine, we sat there and talked for about an hour. An hour passed idly between strangers at an airport discussing the world, the people of the world, and so forth.

He was a teenager when he left Cuba; he tells me the first 10 years in the United States were hard but that his dream was being fulfilled: by working with American Airlines and the nature of his work, he traveled the world. He and I are alike in that we don't stay on the beaten paths - we want to see how people live, how they think, what they think and why they think it. The world is an open ended question.

He tells me of Amsterdam, of visiting a museum dedicated to Anne Frank - and finding out afterward the voice narrating was her father's voice. He talks about what he remembers of Cuba, of being a farmer there as a teenager and being happy - but now he's looking all over to find the very same thing that he left with a few modifiers - particularly, a place where lies don't run rampant. We talk about the United States and Barack Obama, and I make the point that many people in the Caribbean seem convinced that Barack Obama is their savior - but he's really a man who took a job to protect the interests of the United States. The interests of the United States do not necessarily coincide with the rest of the world.

We talk about Caribbean leaders talking about removal of the trade barrier with Cuba even while Cubans can't use the Internet in their own country and 24 journalists are still in prison. We talk about Obama's closing remarks at the Summit of Americas, of how he spoke of Cuba's penetration of the region with doctors.

Geovanni tells me most of them are veterinarians.

I mention that I need to go see Europe. Geovanni tells me, uncannily understanding why I'm even in an airport, and tells me to save some money and go within 2 years. To forget work, to forget everything and to simply go and see - advice from a kindred spirit, telling me what my own spirit knows. I need to go see. And over the last 10 years, all I've done is continuously get wrapped around the axle on other things that, in reality, mean so little to me.

With that, we shook hands and walked our separate ways. And while I was smiling and shaking my head, I glanced back - to see him doing the same thing.

The world is an interesting place.