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not a terrrible 14 hour flight
Sunday, July 13 2025
location: southeast of Dubai over northern Oman in an Airbus jumbo jet flown by Air Emirates
Under the effects of only a single plastic cup of red wine (it had been a generous pour), I'd managed to sleep for more than two thirds of the flight from Colombo to Dubai. I'd had my head against a pillow I'd placed on the window, and this made things just comfortable enough for me to get that sleep.
After waking up, I marveled at what I could see of the nighttime desert landscapape below. It was criss-crossed with highways, all of them regularly lit with little ovals of light cast by street lamps, even far from urban areas. Not even in the United States is electricity used so profligately.
After landing in Dubai and getting off the airplane, Gretchen and I did what we could to kill the three hours before our connecting flight to New York. We were concerned that perhaps we'd be placed in a "fishbowl" prior to boarding (that is, a large glass-walled room for the people who had been cleared to fly, a room that, at least in Sri Lanka, had lacked any stores or even bathrooms), and we definitely wanted to minimize our time in such a place. (We could see such fishbowls along the sides of the terminal as we headed towards our gate.) The Dubai airport has a particularly large duty-free section, and this gave us the opportunity to gawk at its many absurdities. We looked bedraggled from having been packed into economy on the last flight, but we nevertheless wandered into a couple stores selling overpriced handbags just so Gretchen could see how overpriced they actually were. One bag she handled in a Gucci store had a pricetag in Emiratee dirhams that Gretchen looked up and found to be equivalent to $4000. We wondered what sort of person would consider that a savvy purchase. Then it occurred to Gretchen that we actually could afford it, but that one of the reasons we could was that we would never spend such money on a purse.
In a bookstore, we found multiple books (in both Arabic and English translations) by a single keffiyeh-wearing gentleman who, it seemed, must be the current leader of Dubai, as his books were being showcased the way a despot's relics typically are within the context of an authoritarian regime. Amusingly, the only other book in that section was a biography of an older Irish gentleman who, the cover said, had revolutionized the duty-free industry. Only the owner of a duty-free shop would care enough about that subject to consider it the least bit interesting. We had trouble imagining even a single duty-free shopper being so impressed by their surroundings to want to find out more.
Other trinkets that could be bought included Burj Khalifa-themed keychains. In a store selling kids things, there was a Lego-like manufacturer that sold various Arab-themed assembly kits, including a scale mode of the Kaaba, a cubic block that wouldn't be all that much fun to snap together.
Eventually we'd burned up most of our three-hour layover and decided it was time to enter the fishbowl for our New York flight. After passing through a disturbing gauntlet of video-only animated flight attendants who electronically read our passports, we went down an escalator to a lower level, and there we went through another security procedure. This one dispensed with x-ray machines and instead we were separated by gender and a staffer considered whether or not to go through our luggage, used a special wand to look for explosive residue on our hands, and (in my case) felt through my clothes for hidden weapons that had somehow escaped notice in the other security gauntlets we'd passed through. Fortunately in this glassbowl, both potable water and bathrooms were provided.
It took awhile for our jumbo jet to load, and we thought we were among the last to board. Finding someone in one of our seats, we were initially horrified to think we'd have a person in our seating cluster for the 14 hour flight back to JFK. But that guy had just prematurely decided to spread out into what he thought were unoccupied seats. After that, a few bursts of additional passengers arrived, but despite all that, we retained that empty seat between us for our upcoming flight, which also featured that extra space for my legs due to a missing seat in front of me.
I immediately started watching various movies on the screen of the empty seat next to me (since my seat had a fold-out screen that had to be stashed for takeoff). One of the moviews I watched was one about a crypto scam called Cold Wallet. After we were off the ground, had gotten our meal (which was pretty good) and I'd gotten my wine, I ate a xanax and soon fell fast asleep.
By the time I awoke, our plane was heading west into the North Atlantic not far from Norway. At that point I got another plastic cup of red wine and ate an ambien, which put me asleep until the plane had nearly reached North America southwest of Greenland. This ended up being one of the easiest flights I've ever been on because I managed to sleep for about 80% of it.
I was expecting a harrowing experience trying to get back into the United States with the newly Trumpified immigration staff. But there were apparently few Americans on our plane, because the American national line was empty when we arrived at it (having, of course, run past as many people leaving our plane as we could, though we'd been near the back of the plane and could only get around so many of them). There was no staff to stamp our passport; all we did was look into a camera and a cold robotic decisionmaker let us through; perhaps this new system is the result of massive DOGE layoffs. I'm not a fan of DOGE, but if the result is getting through immigration in a matter of seconds, it's hard to complain about it.
On our way out to the street, Gretchen and I got oat milk cappuccinos at the in-terminal Dunkin Donuts. Then we waited about fifteen minutes for the guy from our car parking service to come driving up in our car. He drove us out to that same desolate warehouse entrance where we'd first encountered the service, and from there Gretchen began our drive back to Hurley. It was about 10:00am at the time, and this proved to be a perfect time for driving through Queens. We made it out out to the Palisades in less than a half hour.
Gretchen drove us to an Electrify America charging station a little ways up the Palisades, and we changed for only about twenty minutes, just enough to get the electricity necessary to drive back to Hurley. From there, I did the driving, and I stopped at Little Loaf in New Paltz to pick up some treats Gretchen had ordered, which included a TLT sandwich for me.
Back at the house, our housesitter Christine was waiting for her boyfriend to pick her up. When he showed up, he was a fat heavily-tattooed white guy who'd arrived with his similarly-tattooed bandmates in a shady-looking black van. They were apparently a pop punk band that was ending their tour tonight with a performance in Kingston. I think if I'd seen them instead of Christine, I would've worried a bit more about to whom I had entrusted my house. But they seemed like nice guys, and they all seemed to love Neville the dog.
After they were gone, I took a nice hot bath and immediately fell asleep. I managed to pull myself out of the tub a little before our neighbor A (the actress) and her daughter came over for a short visit. But all I could do was sit in a chair and not do a whole lot of talking.
Later I lay down in the laboratory beanbag and ended up sleeping for hours. I'd thought I'd gotten a lot of sleep on the planes, but perhaps that sleep hadn't been sufficiently restful.
At around 9:00pm, I woke up again and drank scotch until I felt like setting the alarm and sleeping the rest of the night away.
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