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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Monday, September 2 2024

location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY

Today Gretchen and I would be driving to JFK Airport and flying to Copenhagen for a two week European adventure. (I hesitate to use the word "vacation" given that my whole life seems to be one at this point.) Most of our time will be spent on a boat on the Elbe River in Germany, but initially we'd be in Denmark. I preparation for our departure, I had a few chores to do, including doing the laundry, remaking the upstairs bed for the housesitters, cleaning some nasty deposits off the shelves of the refrigerator, and, of course, packing my backpack with the things I would need, particularly my electronics, cables, computer, drugs, alcohol, four ghost peppers (to spice up the bland German food we'd be eating) and clothes. For the first time evee, I actually remembered to pack European wall outlet adapters.
At a certain point in the afternoon, I took the dogs for a walk, crossing the Farm Road and then hiking south atop the escarpment west of the Farm Road and then down to the Farm Road when I saw that Georges' Tesla was parked at his place, since I didn't want to disturb him by hiking through his property while he was there. (Evidently he was taking advantage of the long Labor Day weekend to have an additional day Upstate.)
At a little before 4:00pm, Billy, one half of the gay couple who'd be dog/house sitting for us, arrived. I was a little hopped up on kratom tea and tried to make smalltalk with him, but he wasn't very chatty. One thing he said he wouldn't be doing was eating any of my ghost peppers, as he said spicy food does not agree with him. Gretchen returned from an abbreviated shift at the bookstore a little while later, and then off we went, this time in the Subaru Forester (so as not to have the added stress of worrying about charging the EV). On the way down, Gretchen had me take the New Paltz exit to gas up the car, at which point she realized, to her horror, that she'd forgotten to bring any of her credit cards. She'd thought she was packing smart by downsizing her wallet to just the essentials needed in Europe, but then she'd forgotten to put those essentials in her luggage. This meant that I was the only one with any credit cards or non-passport IDs. This wasn't much of a crisis, though, since all it meant was that we'd be paying a nuisance fee on every transaction made with the one credit card I had. (For foreign travel, Gretchen prefers to use "the brown card," which has no such fees.) I suggested that Gretchen maybe try to set up Google Pay on her phone, so she tried. But because she didn't have her driver's license, she couldn't pass the "upload ID photo" part of the identification confirmation. There were a few other things she tried, including setting up Google Pay on my phone with my ID (since I'd brought my driver's license) but there was always one thing that would get in the way. Eventually she had to give up, accepting that we'd be paying that nuisance fee. But, using that same credit card, we'd be getting 1.5% cash back, so the nuisance fee of 3% was only really 1.5%.
We got stuck in congestion in multiple places on our route, which was a bit circuitous to begin with. Google had suggested taking I-84 to I-684, which was far to the east of most routes to JFK. But supposedly it was the fastest way, even though it was over 20 miles longer. Still, we arrived early at the car parking place, and we had plenty of time to kill in the airport. (We went through security unusually quickly, and nobody gave me any shit for the four ghost peppers I was smuggling.)
To kill time, we sat down at the bar of a Buffalo Wild Wings near our gate. I ordered a Hazy Little Thing (it was like $16) and Gretchen ordered a $10 Miller Lite. Gretchen had been raving about the BDubs cauliflower wings, so we had a small order of those and a large order of fries, which we ate while playing Spelling Bee on our respective devices. (Periodically we'd also glance up at the college football game playing on the television screens, but, as Gretchen pointed out, that was incredibly boring, with a couple seconds of play followed inevitably by several minutes of yawn-inducing setup.) The food was slow to come out, and when it did, I bit into a cauliflower "wing" and found it was cold in the middle. I would say that qualifies as a fail. The fries were pretty good, though, and, as it happens a Hazy Little Thing is much better drunk from a glass than from a can (the way I normally drink it).
Our plane ended up being something like an hour and a half delayed because of some problem with getting it to the gate. The gate changed twice, and in the end a plane that had originally been bound for Shannon, Ireland was repurposed to fly to Copenhagen. This involved moving all the checked-in luggage, but apparently changing the special meals had been too complicated to attempt. This only affected people like us, though, who had ordered vegan food instead of the usual swill. Gretchen went up to the gate and asked if we could be given vouchers to buy food in the airport given that otherwise we'd have to spend our own money or go hungry, and one of the Delta employees said sure. So that was how we came to be buying bags of nuts and Chex Mix in a Hudson News. The vouchers were made considerably more difficult to use because there was no way to scan their QR codes, so Gretchen had to key in their 15 or 18 digit numbers, and she had to do this for four separate $12 vouchers.
Boarding went surprisingly quickly, perhaps because it was done biometrically. We each glanced at a camera as we boarded, and somewhere a robot calculated who we were, and then we joined the line of people entering the aircraft. It was a big plane, the kind with two aisles, and our travel agents (Gretchen had been forced to use one) had given us aisle seats in the middle three-seat cluster. Luckily, even after everyone had boarded, the seat between us was still empty, meaning it was all ours.
By this point I was about half way done with a twelve ounce orange juice into which I'd poured about three ounces of 40 proof gin. I began watching the Korean film Parasite on the plane's entertainment system, and ended up watching the whole thing and very much enjoying it. (I think a movie with subtitles is actually easier to follow on a plane, since the audio can often be hard to follow over the airplane noise.)
About an hour into our flight, a flight attendant offered us each vegan meals, apparently because people on the flight to Ireland had ordered them. They turned out to be pretty good coconut curries served with sides of rice and quinoa.
When the drink cart came through, I ordered a red wine and immediately took an ambien. Normally that knocks me out within a half hour or so, but I was somehow able to stay up at least an hour, watching all of Parasite. The twist where it turned out that the rich person's house had an underground bunker was perfectly suited to the magical realist mental state ambien takes me to if it doesn't immediately knock me out.
Meanwhile, Gretchen was watching the Fall Guy as a xanax kicked in. She was able to lie across the three seats as if it were a bed, and when I felt asleep, I rested my head on the side of her hips, which worked fine so long as she wasn't farting, which she mostly was.


There was a sleepy grey cat in an office chair just outside the office of the car parking place we used near JFK. Click to enlarge.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?240902

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