Travel…notes from the front.
These are texts I sent my wife while waiting in an airport. When I mention her asking me why she enjoys my suffering it was literally a text from her that said “why do I like laughing at your suffering so much.” I tried to answer her question to the best of my ability.
Sitting here at Gate 2 waiting for the inevitably unbearable flight to commence.
In this entire terminal there is 1 bathroom. In this singular bathroom there are 5 toilets, 8 urinals and 4 sinks. There was a line coming out of it as I approached and I figured, hey I’m early, I’m gonna keep going past my gate and find a less busy place to take a shit… No such luck, no such luck at all. It seems the airport imagine that the dregs that fly on southwest will cop-a-squat and relieve themselves amongst the filth that they must be used to by now. I traversed the entire terminal in hopes of finding something clean, in hopes of finding something slightly less over run by the mob, in hopes of finding something even just two decibels quieter, a place where my bowel could relax and breathe out this brewing mess. I was not successful.
I am in a slightly more secure Greyhound bus station. Secure from physical threats and bombs hidden in shoes. However there is a chaos and psychosis here that seems terribly dangerous.
I am in a Disney alley where people have saved for the year in hopes of blowing their nest eggs on a Mickey hat and churros.
I am stuck in a bad acid flashback but I cannot for the life of me remember taking acid and this horror is linked to no false joy that comes to mind.
The woman at security gave me a hard time about my hat and glasses, that I don’t have hair in the picture on my drivers license and finally that I had two tickets. When I explained that I’m a big guy and don’t fit in one seat she said, jokingly I thought, “you’re not that big.” This went back and forth until I realized she wasn’t kidding, it wasn’t a compliment, a nice way of saying “well for a lardass you look ok pal!”, but rather she wanted a different reason, an explanation for the extra seat. I finally told her I didn’t like to touch people I didn’t know. To this she rolled her eyes but gave me back my tickets and allowed me to pass.
Sartre describes in his play No Exit, Hell as other people - and I must say I suspect that he was on to something.
My wife asks me why she so enjoys laughing at my pain?
It’s human nature I think. Mostly there is the joy felt in witnessing the suffering of another because we can then gauge the non-suffering of ourselves or the reverse - we can relate to it and thus have a comrade in suffering. It’s an exchange of sorts. I suffer and you either realize that you are not suffering as bad and are relieved or you see that you are not alone in your sufferance and are also relieved. I get to vent, thus relieving my own pain and misery and hope that you as well are suffering or that you realize how bad I really have it. It’s an exchange. Reciprocity.
Delayed and delayed and delayed and Gate 2 becomes the nightmare, where before there was only potential. The stewardess that would normally take your ticket without looking at you and allow you to pass from place to plane has begun “song trivia” so as to subdue the forming mob, the crowd, the dregs, the masses…. I am trapped and my extra ticket doesn’t buy me an extra seat in the terminal. It will buy me a foot and a half of relief for two hours of hell and headaches and stiff backs.
The Australian boy has moved, changed seats 6 or seven times. I find him staring at me from a new area of the room every 5 or so minutes. There are no open seats anywhere and yet he seems to be constantly in a new one. I signed his “diary” right under the title “day 1.”. Perhaps he decided to give the diary a go after spotting me, it is noteworthy after all. Other good times to begin documenting your life, graduating from high school, getting married, first experience with pregnancy and hell if you haven’t started, meeting that fat guy from that one show that you vaguely recall, PERFECT DAY TO START A JOURNAL! He pleasantly moved on only to play musical chairs or perhaps it was all just in hopes of finding a better angle to view me.
A smallish Asian woman approached me asking if I was “Ethan?” She seemed meek and all things standard with smallish Asian women. However, upon my admittance of identity she became almost clown like in the way people from the Mid-West can sometimes seem. “I’m Nadeeens friend!!!!!” The American Mid-West smile and gesture is cartoonish in its expressiveness. She explained that she and her husband were on their way to Orlando, their stop in Albuquerque is just that, a stop, for a Disney cruise with her father, its his 70th birthday after all!!! “SO HE GOT TO PICK!!!!” And they would be doing this with her sister and her sister’s kids. There was some disdain for children expressed. The husband did all of his “talking” to me while looking at his wife. I must say that as they announced, for the first time, that the flight was delayed I felt gratitude because these two demons decided to return to the bar for a sweet flight anesthetic.
My bowel is in a state. I fear standing.
Some time passes and the inevitable takes place.
Have you used a public restroom and felt like you needed to take a shower and scrub your entire body? Has it been worse than that? You feel like your clothes need to be washed and your shoes probably thrown away? It was worse even than that. Not only do I need to throw away my shoes, wash my clothes in ammonia and bleach and scrub and scrub and scrub the first 3 to 4 layers of skin right off my body, not only that, I am probably in dire need of antibiotics at this point. I would say with 93% honesty that I was wading through the muck and mire of physically and mentally diseased people. It was as though people had dropped trow and wantonly sprayed the bathroom down with fecal matter in an attempt at recreating a Jasper Johns. When satisfied with the shit visual they went to work on the floor. The standard “wet floor” sign that seems to be an airport men’s room must was only misleading because it had gone so far beyond the point of merely being “wet.” I mean would you call the Pacific Ocean “wet?” A yellow hazard sign with the word “swamp” in red would have been vastly more to the point.
And so here I sit contemplating staph and the clap and also any mental defects, for if it was present in there, I’m sure I got it…
You should try the self cleaning public toilets in San Francisco sometime…
That’s alot to take in at whilst waiting at the gate. I myself am not noteworthy or famous(I think), so I don’t have to deal with the autograph thing. After passing through security I usually pop an ativan, dial in some Incubus on the iPod, and go into auto-pilot(no pun intended) until I reach the luggage carousel at my destination, or the rental car counter, as I have become less and less interested in checking a bag.
Last fall I had to transit Heathrow Airport’s brand-new Terminal 5 en route from California to Eastern Europe. I had already been on the road twelve hours (OC to Chicago to London) when I reached Terminal 5, which is basically a shopping mall masquerading as a airport terminal.
There are so many large luxury stores (Harrod’s, Prada, Gucci, etc.) that the corridors are narrow—a pair of people can’t always walk two abreast because there isn’t enough room for the people coming from the opposite direction to pass you if they walk two abreast as well. Single file works better.
Restrooms were not clearly marked and inevitably had a line of waiting people trailing out the door. Each bathroom had no more than six toilet stalls and eight urinals. If this was a 45 year-old terminal being used beyond its expected life, I could understand, but the Queen had cut the ribbon to open Terminal 5 less than six months earlier.
I have to transit Paris’ Charles de Gaulle in October for another journey to Eastern Europe and I hear it’s tied with Heathrow for the worst airport in Europe: filthy restrooms, homeless persons swarming all over. And $42 of your ticket is a “facility use fee” for de Gaulle Airport.
Next time I’ll try to go via Frankfurt or another cleaner airport.
very intresting piece of informtion
It’s not the bombs in a Greyhound bus station that you need to watch out for . . . .
Air travel… I served in the Air Force and during that time took considerable flights. One of the most memorable was when the General took us too Luke AFB in Phoenix for the weekend. We had a barely memorable drunken weekend and the time was short. We were back in Base ops the first thing Monday Morning and waiting for the T-28 (DC-3) we used to shuffle large quantities of green tuxedos from place to place. You say “DC-3? What is that? It;s the airframe that flew over the hump and supplied the Chinese during WWII. What was it doing in the Air Force inventory 40 years later? I couldn’t answer those questions but I can tell you I feel a lot safer in a 747/737 airframe than I ever felt in that old crate we were flying in that day. We loaded up and got on the tarmac rolled into take off position and then put the power to the engines. I was sitting in the back watching out on of the windows as the motors spun up to speed and the brakes let go. As we were rolling down the runway to take-off speed I noticed oil coming out of the starboard engine and made a comment to one of the others in the plane. The flight engineer overheard me and looked out and noticed what I was talking about and immediately called the pilot to let him know what was going on. We were already off the runway at this time and the only choice was for the pilot to make a full circle back to where he could bring the plane back down to the runway. In that short time between take-off and the eventual landing the engine seems to flush it’s oil out in increasing measure as I started to wonder if we would make it back around. to landing? Smoke became the new worry as we came around to approach and that means every piece of fire equipment rolls out to the runway for the expected fire and wreckage. We came back to the runway in a cloud of smoke and we rolled to a stop the crash trucks foamed us good. Since that time I have never been able to completely relax on a flight but I manage to get to where I’m going..
Oh Ethan , you are such a cutie!!!