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.