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Jabbas the Hut in bullet time
Saturday, October 1 2016
location: Cabin 11, Camp Hollywoodland, Los Angeles, California
I slept fitfully through the night and awoke before there was much morning light and immediately began consolidating my scattered things in preparation for my homeward journey. Da and I were the only people left in our barracks, and he was also up and getting ready, so we could just turn on the lights. By this point, we'd decided to take the same Uber to the Los Angeles airport, even though Da's plane would be leaving several hours after mine. In terms of places to wait for a plane, a seat at the gate of LAX had much to recommend it over the austere conditions at an increasingly-depopulated Camp Hollywoodland. When Da and I hiked down to the mess hall, we found people languishing around in an uncertain state between sleeping, resting, and waiting. One of the guys was still sleeping on the floor between the tables; it was unclear why he'd abandoned the barracks. At the time I was carrying a teeshirt that had been entrusted to me by the woman representing China. The shirt was unusual in that it had Chinese characters on it beneath the familiar logo. A number of people had said the wanted it when I showed it to people last night, and it was so unusual that someone had even taken a picture of it. The Chinese representative had told me that I could keep the shirt if I couldn't find the India representative, but then he came walking down from his barracks fully and cheerfully awake (who knows what time it was in his native timezone!), so I turned it over.
I was finally able to call up my boarding passes on my smartphone, though initially it wasn't obvious that the PDF had been broken into two pages, so for a few terrifying minutes I wondered if I hadn't been booked for a flight from Philadelphia to Newburgh. Meanwhile Da nattered on with whoever was around about whatever was in his mind, much of it things I'd already heard in earlier tellings. He's not a big fan of silence. At the time, most of the people nearby spoke English only as a second language, and I had a feeling they were missing a lot of what he was saying. He tends to talk rapidly in a foggy syllable-skipping north-Georgia (that is, somewhat Appalachian) accent, and it was too early in the morning for anyone to insist on clarification.
On the long Uber ride to the airport, Da owned up to the fact that he likes to talk, though it turns out that he doesn't often get a chance to do so. He lives by himself, works remotely, observes unusual hours, and has few friends.
Da and I went our separate ways in the airport when the woman at security told me it was easier to get to my gate from two terminals away. As I went through security, I was pulled out of the line so my laptop could be swabbed for explosive residues. At first I thought this might be because my laptop is a chunky older model HP Elitebook 2740p, which would make for a more effective laptop bomb than a svelte MacBook Air. But then it seemed that everyone else with a laptop was also getting their devices swabbed. I wondered if perhaps the TSA had recently thwarted a plan to get a laptop bomb onto an airplane. That seems like the most obvious place to put one at this point.
I was hungry and had a fair amount of time to kill, so near my gate, I got excited by a burger place called the Habit, which had a big sign advertising its veggie burger. So I waited in line and then went to place my order. At that point, I was told that the veggie burger was not available because the Habit was still on its breakfast menu. The fact that perfectly-good restaurants turn into other, deeply imperfect restaurants in the pre-noon hours has always been one of the structural things about American society that reminds me that it was not built with me in mind. I've never liked egg-rich foods, and yet that is mostly what Americans want to eat after their morning defecation. Oddly, though, the Habit hadn't replaced their french fries with hash browns (or some other less-ideal morning form of potato), so french fries and coffee was what I ended up with. I then went to the place where one can plug into 120 volt power and get free WiFi and opened my laptop for the first time since landing in Los Angeles. It was great to have a keyboard again.
The shoes I'd been wearing for this entire trip had been my Keen sandals, which I'd often been wearing without socks. The problem with those is that they seem to be unusually good at incubating fragrance-producing bacteria, and my feet seem to be abnormally rich in those to begin with. For much of my time at the retreat, I went around barefoot (I was the only person doing this, I should add). I also washed my Keens with soap and water on two occasions. But despite all this, by this point in the trip, my Keens were becoming a real environmental hazard. I first realized how toxic they were when I had to take them off as I went through security. But then later, as I sat next to a nice older Australian couple in my window seat on the plane, I realized fumes from my feet were slowly wafting up from below. Interestingly, these fumes seemed to hug the wall of the plane as they rose, concentrating in the void next to the window, which was where my nose spent most of its time in the nearly five-hour flight. Embarrassed by this situation, I tried to move my feet as little as possible so as to limit the amount of stirring happening inside my Keens. This time I'd remembered to retrieve my inflatable neck pillow from my bag, and it allowed me to sleep so well that I didn't need either alcohol or ambien.
I made the calculation as we descended towards the Philadelphia airport that I could wait until we landed before taking a piss. But then the landing seemed to take forever, as we turned southward over Malvern and flew nearly to the Delaware border before turning west, then apparently north, then east again, flying almost entirely within a opaque bank of clouds. Thankfully, the taxiing went unusually quickly, and there were no unusual delays while deplaning. But when I got out of that plane, I had to hustle past all the Jabbas the Hut in bullet time to get myself to a bathroom, where I exploded into a urinal.
After taking a shuttle to the puddle jumper terminal, I looked around to see what the food options were. When I saw there was a Chipotle, I didn't have to look any further. The burrito I got there seemed a little bigger than usual, though I don't think it tasted quite as good. At my gate, I went to a distant corner and changed my socks while listening to the unseen talking heads on CNN. Usually the sound is off when CNN is playing at an airport, but not here. I marveled at the poor writing and limited vocabulary of the scripts that were being read. It sounded, as I wrote in a post on Facebook, like a fourth grader's report about bugs and spiders. By now I was getting a flood of friend requests from other employees in The Organization, and it made me think that perhaps I had not embarrassed myself at the retreat quite as much as I'd feared.
The flight to Newburgh (referred to only as "Stewart Field" on departure manifests) only took an hour. I sat beside a plump young woman and, though my feet didn't smell as bad as they had, they were still far from perfect. But I wasn't the only one stinking up the joint; someone (perhaps the young woman) vented a silent (but deadly) fart twenty minutes before landing. We deplaned in Newburgh within sight of my Subaru in "long term" parking, which is only a couple hundred feet from the front door of the airport.
Back home in Hurley, Ramona the Dog and Gretchen the Human gave me very enthusiastic welcomes, both of them doubling up on my face for a joyful minute or so. Neville the Dog, on the other hand, didn't seem to notice that I'd been absent at all. He didn't have any particular reaction whatsoever.
I told Gretchen all the gory details of the retreat, culminating with the glorious account of my discourse on my laboratory's urinal. "It killed," I assured Gretchen.
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