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volcanic debris in Arizona
Sunday, April 24 2016
location: West Hollywood, California
Today would be the day I flew back to New York, and I woke up early to get my shit together and wash a sheet and pillow case from my bed (which is part of the protocol at the intern dorm). Eventually Da woke up and started getting his shit together too. Since his plane would be leaving at about the same time as mine, we shared an Uber to the airport. For much of the ride, I marveled at how chatty Da was being with our driver about things he probably had no interest in. For his part, our driver spent most of his time extolling the virtues of Lyft, an Uber competitor for which he also drives. His job before working in the sharing economy was at a nonprofit dealing with issues related to HIV and AIDS.
Because Gretchen normally handles the details of buying airplane tickets and checking in, I don't know much about how it is done. For this reason, by the time I checked in (late last night), the only seats remaining on my jumbo jet back to Philadelphia were in the very middle of the plane, with a seat (not an aisle) on either side. But even when I'd thought I'd checked in, evidently I hadn't, because this morning when I was trying to figure out how to show a proper digital code without access to a printer, I learned my flight from Philadelphia to Newburgh had been canceled. (Later I would learn that the flight hadn't actually been canceled, but that I'd tried to check in after all the seats had been allocated.) So my first task in LAX was to get that problem solved.
The woman at check-in had the stern, presumptively-cold demeanor of someone who has dealt with a lot of assholes and frantic travelers. I was more in the latter category, though I felt like I was doing more to calm her down than she was doing to calm me down. It took her awhile, and she had to make a phonecall too, but, once I'd said flying into Albany was acceptable, she found me a set of flights that would get me there at 12:14am tomorrow morning. That was good enough for me. Best of all, on the second (and final) leg from Charlotte to Albany, I'd be flying first class.
But my good flying mojo began soon after boarding, I was seated at the window and the seat beside me ended up being unoccupied, something the woman at the aisle had said she was hoping for but which I'd deemed "unlikely." I started drinking a mix of orange juice and vodka early in the flight, and by the time I thought about taking Ambien, there were only three hours left. So I didn't take any.
I saw some amazing things from the window of my airplane as I crossed the United States. First there were the unlikely splotches and splashes on the face of Arizona. Though the Grand Canyon looked fairly modest from 31,000 feet, the were some dramatically alien-looking volcanos, one with a very well-defined lava field (35.582677N, 111.631752W). (I would later look it up on Google Maps and Wikipedia and learn that it had been named after a hypothetical toilet disaster.)
Hundreds of miles east of there, beyond the odd ghost town and track of a dead river, I saw the first circular disks of green where irrigated agriculture began. The greenery built gradually from there until it was in full riot somewhere in Eastern Oklahoma. But then suddenly, in a hundred-mile-wide swath along eastern Missouri and Arkansas, the green was replaced by a large geometric pattern of brown. It looked almost as arid as things I'd seen in New Mexico, but then I realized it was all just the freshly-tilled fields of springtime. Evidently no land is left fallow in the Mississippi Valley.
Soon thereafter, I got my smartphone out of airplane mode and discovered it was possible to geolocate using GPS from a jet plane moving over 500 miles per hour. (I'd previously read that GPS isn't supposed to work over 60 mph so as to thwart the makers of homemade cruise missiles. But it seems I'm wrong.) This was how I figured out that the brown fields I'd seen had been southeastern Missouri and northeastern Arkansas, and that the broad brown river with the Mississippi.
Somewhere over Tennessee, I marveled at the long, persistent ridges that doggedly maintained their low presence over the utterly flat plane on either side of them. I was particularly struck by a fencelike ridge bent around Rocky Top, TN before heading northeastward. Not far from there was the Great Smoky Mountains and then the jumble of landforms in Wester North Carolina. As the plane descended towards Charlotte, I was dismayed to look down upon an agricultural landscape studded with factory pig barns, each a little concentration camp with unique horrors all its own. There's no reason to put these in the country save for the cheap real estate and stench-absorbing landscape. The reasl estate around these barns is almost certainly devalued, and this accounts for why I saw so many pig barns and trailer parks in close proximity. I don't know if I saw this one from the air, but a particularly-egregious example can be seen at 35.659446N, 81.380793W.
I had several hours to kill in Charlotte, and I hoped to be doing it in some first class lounge. But that's not how things work on American Airlines. Their Admirals Club is only open to First Class fliers with long overseas flights. My two hour flight from Charlotte to Albany was not going to cut it. I still had some of my own booze left, so I drank that, and then I considered getting something at a bar near my gate. But the bars were both terrible ("Bad Daddy's") or crowded (Tequileria). I should take the time to flesh out my feelings on North Carolina's weird bathroom hangup. My web haunts have filled with mockery of the North Carolignian panic about the possibility of men dressing up as ladies and molesting eleven year old girls just trying to take a dump. But it goes deeper than that. It might just be a southern thing, but I'm still weirded out by the bathroom attendants in the Charlotte Airport. You go in there needing desperately to shit, piss, or shoot heroin, and there's somebody asking you how you are. They can't possibly want to know. The best strategy is to avoid them entirely, but doing so can be a little like Nemo dodging a bullet in the Matrix. Sometimes the best dodge available is purely mental. I have a feeling there is a relationship between the fear of scruffy dress-wearing dudes in the women's rooms and the presence of minority gentlemen collecting tips in exchange for civilized nicities in places that would otherwise be dedicated to the polite ignoring of animal moans.
I tried not to act too much like a rock star as I waited for my plane to board, but after the woman in a wheelchair boarded and any military in uniform (there were none), when first class was called, I marched right up like I'd done it a million times and got into my big wide seat at the front of the plane. I snapped a few selfies to prove to my friends on Facebook that it was actually happening, and then tried to look like an indifferent oligarch as the hoi polloi filed past on their miserable march to steerage (a march I myself had done only seven or eight hours before). Though I think I'd flown first class exactly once before, I had no familiarity with its rituals. Soon after I took my seat, a stewardess offered to fetch me a drink, so I requested red wine. It came in a plastic cup, which I thought was a little ghetto. But as the stewardess scrambled to recover the cups before takeoff, I realized that was a perk that was never extended to people in coach. I was against a window in first class, and there was a gentleman to my right between me and the aisle. When, later, the stewardess had more drinks than room to put them, my neighbor, saying, "I fly a lot!" popped out a hidden extension on the console between us, the only evident place to put drinks. Oddly, there was more intimacy and comingling between our glasses here in first class than there ever would've been in coach. Though my presence there was fluke, perhaps there's an expectation amongst its denizens that first class is curated enough to prevent the spread of contagion. I spent most of the flight trying to catch up on the second season of Halt & Catch Fire, though everything I saw was recognizable because I'd watched it earlier while stoned and lost count of what episode I'd seen.
Me in first class this evening.
After landing, I called Gretchen, who acted like she was still down around Coxsackie, 25 miles away. But there was a fullness to the audio, and I was seconds away from discovering why: Gretchen was right there, coming up behind me. That's one of many ways little pranks come effortlessly to her. She'd brought all three dogs (Eleanor still has it!), so I climbed into the backseat so as to be with Neville and Ramona. The latter was so overwhelmed with joy to have me back in her life that she nibbled on my ear, and I just let her. Neville was happy too, but he and I have less history. Still, he climbed into my lap and slept there for the entire ride home.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160424 feedback
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