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without any warnings or complaints
Tuesday, June 13 2017
rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
[REDACTED]
Corpses found this morning included a dead 12 inch ring-neck snake directly outside the front door and a tiny (inch-long) vole near the northwest corner of the house.
For me, today would be the start of a multi-day Converge conference in Columbia, South Carolina with other members of The Organization's IT team. Andrea had decided to give Gretchen at least a day of alone time during my absence by going down to the City and spending the night at the residence of a son of a friend. Perhaps if she hit it off with this son, she might be able to spend additional days. Gretchen said her goodbyes to both of us before making a brief errand out to the Hurley library, but she returned before we'd left and then it felt weird to leave when it came time for us to because now Gretchen was in the middle of what I refer to as one of her "endless phonecalls," in this case about a dog in need of a foster home. But Andrea had a bus to catch and that first set of goodbyes was going to have to suffice.
I dropped Andrea off at the Kingston bus station and then got on the Thruway and drove up to the Albany airport. The check engine light never came on in that 50 mile drive, suggesting perhaps I had successfully hacked the oxygen sensor. Somewhere in the drive, I saw someone with a NY vanity license plate reading "XJGALO." (In NY State, it's harder to get Faygo than it is to get crystal meth.) I parked in the economy lot and immediately caught a shuttle bus to the airport, which was on the other side of the north-south runway. As always, security was an easy gauntlet, despite the fact that I was a shaggy-haired gentleman traveling alone with a bag full of wires and unlabeled containers containing liquids. I don't know where I'd be right now without white privilege.
Because I'm neurotic about not being late for things, I'd over-budgeted time for getting through security, so I had some time to kill in the airport. I mixed some gin into an overpriced bottle of orange juice and sipped that while plinking around on the web using the free WiFi.
Once in the airplane, we were informed that we were being delayed for departure to Charlotte due to thunderstorms at the airport there, which was causing a bit of a landing-airplane backlog. Once we got going, though, the flight was mostly without incident. There were some powerful drafts as we descended into Charlotte that caused the plane to twist somewhat frighteningly in the wind, though that was a bit more disconcerting to the Latina sitting next to me than it was to me. She didn't talk to me, though I overheard her brief conversation with the woman to her left in which she said this was her first time in an airplane since the age of nine.
Once in Charlotte, the tarmac delay caused me to run through the airport past all the lumbering landwhales from C7 to E2. But I arrived there with plenty of time, even though I could no longer access my boarding pass with my phone and had to have a ticket agent at the gate print it out for me. (I'm sure I'm not the only one who doesn't know how to do a screen grab with my phone, which American Airlines recommends.)
The flight from Charlotte, North Carolina to Columbia, South Carolina is a short one (on the order of 20 minutes) if one manages to get into the air. But getting into the air isn't always easy at this time of year in the humid American southeast. An ongoing thunderstorm shut down the runways and taxiways soon after we'd board the plane. Understandably, the ground crew doesn't want to work when there is a danger of being struck by lightning, particular when they're surrounded by things like fuel trucks and fully-fueled airplanes. So there we sat, eventually burning off nearly two hours for what was supposed to be an 18 minute flight. Most of the people near me on the plane were green army recruits heading off to basic training at Fort Jackson. The young woman sitting next to me, for example, was 18 years old and maybe six feet tall. She'd hit it off with some of the other recruits, and they talked for most of our time waiting in the gate-bound plane. As with any subculture, conscript army talk has its own obsessions, and this one focused disproportionately on the subject of doing pushups as penance. There were also discussions of such things as what to bring to boot camp, the protocol for using cellphones, and differences between Army and Marine rules. There was surprisingly little talk of families and lovers left behind, perhaps due to the excitement of launching into this new world.
There were also a few discussions of cultural items. The longest of these focused on the movie Get Out (the one where a white girl introduces her black boyfriend to her creepy family in the country). All of the people discussing the Get Out were white, so it was a little surprising there was no overt racism in what they said. There was a moment of implicit racism when someone who had not seen the movie asked, "so is anyone normal in the movie," and the guy who watched it said "no." The correct answer would've been "the [black] protagonist Chris Washington and his friend in the TSA, Rod Williams [also black]." Amusingly, there was no concern whatsoever about spoiling the movie, and all of its secrets were casually divulged without any warnings or complaints. Maybe that too was a kind of implicit racism.
Once I arrived at the airport, I called my boss Da, who had already checked into the hotel room we would share (he'd also gone to a Mellow Mushroom franchise and bought four vegan pizzas for me and the others in the conference). As he drove from the hotel to pick me up, I sat outside in the humid evening, relieved to finally get away from the relentless air conditioning in which I'd been immersed since climbing into my Subaru (a duct on one of the airplanes had made my ankle numb; the one shoes I'd brought had been flip flops). Cool air is nice in this muggy, summery weather, but it has an artificial, processed quality and is almost always colder than it needs to be. Amusingly, the only seating outside the airport was in a designated smoking area, as though the only people who would ever venture outside for natural air would be doing so entirely because of a craven addiction. The South is like the 1980s; it's as if it was engineered specifically to clash with things that make me happy and comfortable. (Imagine me growing up in the South in the 1980s, and what an æsthetic relief going to Oberlin College must've been.)
Seating, but only for smokers, outside the Columbia airport.
Before long, Da showed up, and we stood around waiting for the flight from Los Angeles via Dallas, which would be bringing Ca and Allison. Meanwhile, Ni had landed in Charleston (on the coast) and the rental car company wouldn't rent a car to her because she only had a debit card, not a credit card. This forced her to take an Uber, which cost about a $100 for the 114 mile ride. This waiting took well over an hour, exposing me to more southern-fried æsthetic horror. For example, some sort of multi-screen video advertisement for a brand of assault rifle was running on repeat above the stairs down to the baggage claim area. And then, across the main atrium of the airport, wave upon wave of new recruits were being mustered from their various flights. They were made to stand rank-and-file in front of the USO office while a skinny drill sergeant made ordered them to do various things. He was mostly soft-spoken, though occasionally he'd bark orders too. The recruits were so untrained and flustered by the sudden change from their video-games-teevee-and-fast-food lifestyle that their movements were painful to watch. They'd hurry to gobble down food they'd just bought and then run to join the others. Then they'd turn the wrong way when ordered to face this way or that. Hopefully they won't all be killed in a land invasion of North Korea, but who can know when a toddler who doesn't know chess is using them as chess pieces.
Eventually I saw Ca and Allison coming our way. I'd been in meatspace with Ca, but not Allison. She is unrealistically thin and taller than I expected (about as tall as me). Amusingly, she said she'd expected me to be taller than I turned out to be. "That's funny," I said, "because Tessa [a former co-worker] had expected me to be shorter than I turned out to be."
Da had driven to Columbia from his home in Marietta, Georgia, and his having a car (Ca's comment: "I thought it would be more metal") meant he could drive us back to the hotel, the Hyatt in downtown Columbia. I was so famished that the moment I was left alone with it (in the room the three of us men would be sharing), I wolfed down a piece of the Mellow Mushroom pizza. It had been taking too long for us to get around to eating it.
Down in the lobby, there was a indifferently-staffed bar, and we were all drinking by the time Ni showed up from her long Uber ride. Ni doesn't drink, and Allison doesn't drink alcohol unless it is at least as concentrated as it is in wine. Eventually Da went back to the room and fetched the pizza. I ended up eating three or four enormous pieces, which was probably more than anyone else. Allison didn't have anything other than a glass of white wine.
It was late, but Ca and Allison were still on California time, so all of us went to a bar Da (who knows Columbia) suggested called the Art Bar. It's a decorated dive, with an appalling bathrooms, unnecessary aluminum dryer ducts (the kind used to make robot arms) under the ceiling, and dozens of homemade robot sculptures, many of which doubled as phone charging stations. There were only a few people and one bartender there when we arrived. Unusually (we would discover), the waiter was a friendly guy who told us about the owner, his fondness for tinkering, and the various robots. Allison was loving that the top-shelf whiskey was only $7/shot and asked if the bartender would allow her to braid his beard (which reached nearly to his waist). He said no, perhaps only because that was the right answer. We kept drinking until the Art Bar's 2:00am closing time and then walked back to our hotel. [REDACTED]
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