Mercy, Already

Wotta bloody grinding horror show. I dont even know where to start, sitting here dazed as I just drove home from the airport in Syracuse.

You had to catch the scene this afternoon at the security checkpoint for gates 23-34 at Reagan National. There they were: Mom, Dad, the kid barely toddlerable and laying in the stroller; Mom frozen mid-move at un-strollerizing the toddlerable and looking up at the TSA screener, who's holding the sippy-cup with the apple-juice in it; Dad, with one shoe off and hanging in one of the two hands dead-limp at his sides, waiting for a clue: the screener looks to his right, at the sitting X-ray woman, who looks back at him like she can hardly even believe that he's looking at her: the screener-guy fumbles a bag toward the X-ray maw while he's looking at the dangerous sippy-cup; he's stalling for time, trying to figure out his next move. He steps to his left to get a sight-line angle and flags the woman standing beyond the scrutinizer gateway, waves the sippy-cup and says, "Apple-juice and water..." She shrugs with heartfelt instinct, and then looks somewhat concerned and interested, but with no hope of adding value to the matter. The screener-guy looks at Mom & Dad with a one-forefinger 'waitaminnit' and breaks for a supervisor. The thing's in full committee, now, and everything is stopped. Like; more than it already was. None of 'em are able to press on at getting anything done; the X-ray lady isn't moving the belt (she's looking off to her right where the reinforcements will come from), Mom's not going anywhere -- although she is unstrollerizing the toddlerable. Dad's getting another shoe off. People are piling up behind me. There's a bit of groaning. Me? I'm just taking all the time in the world at getting out of my jacket after I stash all kinds of bits in it, because I've got nothing but time. Watching this... astounding nonsense ...in the heart of the various huddles: the 'Rents, the 'Bots, and the Mumbling Herd behind me..

Word comes down: ditch the apple-juice already.

...which is eminently possible, still, because the shit didn't just blow right the fuck up while everybody was shakin' and wavin' it around back there.

Dad pours the contents of the sippy-cup in the nearest plastic-lined refusal, and the world starts turning again.

Maybe it's not there anymore. Maybe it was some hellish corrosive designed to burn through the floor of the jet, down through baggage, and out the bottom, spilling belted passengers in their chairs all over the damned place from on high, but since it got poured into the plastic-lined refuse can, it's since eaten its way down through baggage-claim at Reagan National and it's even now draining into the Potomac. Everybody watch the news.

[shrug]

That's just one episode. The main joy of my whole thing was that my bag got tossed into space somewhere between Syracuse and Detroit. You know; a little roll-aboard carry-on. You know; like what I've been bouncing all over the place with for years, but now I checked it because of the bleedin' toothpaste. >poof< Right outta here. Did all day yesterday with just what I was wearing, then the show, then got back to the hotel to hear that my bag had been prairie-schoonered to the Detroit airport: it was past midnight, I'm fallin' down, so I told 'em to hold it and I'd snag it on my way back through in the morning. Got there, mentioned to the nice lady that, if I did my job like some people, I'd be selling pencils on the street-corner by the end of the month. Copped the bag, and figured that I had just enough time to make it back over to ticketing and check it to fly.

She looked at me: "You're going to check it again?"

>sigh< "You know...This is about a brand-new tube of toothpaste," (see; this is just me "whining" -- like some people put it, sometimes -- about keeping up with small bits of civilization, which I do in my own way, like when I brush my teeth three or five times a day, on average, and I really like Arm & Hammer's Dental Care toothpaste, and I really like that the market brings me something like that because it's all about me, you see, and the things that I prefer to exploit in my own peaceful, if kooky, way, in order to make my life better, and -- rotten as they are, these days -- nobody brings them to me better than Americans, you see, when they're not stopping the world over a spoonful of goddamned apple-juice) "...and I'll be damned if I'm going to throw it away because of those TSA idiots."

"There. I said it, right out loud."

There was nobody else around, but she didn't want to laugh. She had to try real hard.

There's a couple of highlights. There were all kinds of jangles, creeps, and crawls along the way. The only thing good was the show and the people I work with. Every single time the thing veered in the direction of getting there and back, it just went to hell and never stopped, to the point where it really, honest-to-god, did feel like Kafka. The whole thing really is very neatly engineered for excruciating bore-holing every last nerve of an American boy.