It’s true. I fucking hate traveling. It’s not that I dislike seeing new places and meeting new people. It’s the process of getting there that I hate.
First, take traveling by car. In order to get anywhere meaningful, you have to spend hours or even days riding in one position in a confined space. You’ll often spend more time on the road that you do at your destination. Even with the dubious advantages of portable electronics, it’s damned boring. Thanks to those pesky open container laws, you can’t even play drinking games to pass the time. And don’t even get me started on traffic. In the state of Tennessee, we only have two kinds of roads: inadequate and under construction. I had a hard enough time riding as far as Atlanta for AWA.
But all of this pales compared to the frustration of air travel. If I wasn’t already an alcoholic homicidal maniac, it would be enough to drive me to drinking and killing people. Killing people with blunt objects, that is, instead of my usual methods.
Take my situation, for example. After Christmas with my family, I planned to fly to Duluth to spend New Year’s with my fiancee. My flight was scheduled to leave Knoxville for Detroit at 7:30 in the morning. December 26th is, at least for the holiday season, a fairly sane time to travel (proportionally speaking – traveling any distance during December requires a certain level of batshit crazy daring). The ticket was cheaper than usual, even – since Northwest is the only airline that goes from Knoxville to Duluth with only one layover instead of twenty thousand, they normally gouge unfortunates like myself for all they can.
Not having an exact idea how long it’d take to get through security, I figured on arriving at the airport in plenty of time. Sounds like a good plan, doesn’t it? Too bad that good plans never work, or at least never survive contact with the enemy (in this case, the enemy was the weather over Detroit). Since it takes an hour to drive to the airport, I figured getting up about 4:30 would leave plenty of time to shower, shave, and drive up there.
Problem number one: when we arrived at the airport, the flight was delayed by an hour until 8:30 because of required crew rest time. That wasn’t such a big deal, since I definitely prefer a pilot who’s awake instead of asleep, since it minimizes my chances of dying a fiery death in a plane crash (As Worf would say, today is not a good day to die.). Besides, my layover in Detroit was supposed to be two hours, so I would have had plenty of time to make my connection.
That is, if said connection had occurred. A heavy blanket of fog had settled in, covering Detroit and probably most of Michigan. Maybe they should’ve lit all that crap floating in Lake Erie on fire to try to evaporate the fog.
Because of the fog, the airport was clogged up tighter than my ass after a triple dose of Immodium. The plane I was riding from Knoxville was the first to land all morning (and it arrived about 11). Initially, the flight from Detroit to Duluth was merely pushed back from 12-ish to 12:30. Then it was canceled entirely.
I called the NWA rebook hotline to get my flight changed. The lady I spoke with – I wish I’d gotten her name – was friendly and helpful. It wasn’t her fault that the only way I could escape Fordopolis was a flight to Minneapolis at 7 p.m., then another hop across the state to Duluth, arriving sometime about midnight Eastern time (11 o’clock in that fake Central time that doesn’t really exist).
I’ve experienced my share of errors from Northwest, with them losing luggage, gouging on their prices, and generally having seats too small for my ass. My ass isn’t that big, either. However, I want to say that the people they have manning their panic lines are helpful and courteous and will generally do just about anything to help get you on a flight as soon as possible. If you’re reading this, Ms. Nameless Rebook Line Operator, here’s to you.
Anyway, the net result of all this is that I got up at 4:30 in the morning to wait seven hours, eat bad sushi, and drink overpriced Asahi in the Motor City, which is on my list of Places I Have No Intention Of Ever Visiting, Even If Kidnapped By Teamsters. Instead of having a nice lunch and spending the day with my fiancee, I got to spend that time in the Detroit airport, all due to fog. Thanks a lot, God. Way to inconvenience everyone.
And to top it off, my luggage disappeared somewhere between Detroit and Minneapolis, meaning I am now in Duluth without so much as a change of underwear, much less the Christmas presents I was bringing. Yes, there’re worse holiday travel fuck-ups, and I fully expect the trip back to be filled with them, with my luck. That, or if I’m really lucky, the plane to back will crash and burn. At this point, it’s probably a fifty-fifty chance, depending on how tired God is of my complaining and how badly He wants to put an end to it. Generally, He just gives me a little more rope to hang myself by, in hopes that I’ll say something unforgivably blasphemous and He’ll have a reason to lock me in a room with Pauly Shore for all eternity.
Before you accuse me of being a cranky old man, let me point out that according to some, I was born an old man. This is America I have a right to be cranky and hate everything except Matlock and to make people listen to me bitch about it. That, and being stranded in Detroit for seven hours is as bad as being stranded in anyplace else for a week. Anyplace short of New Jersey, that is. If I owned both Hell and New Jersey, I’d sell New Jersey and live in Hell.
Sooner or later, someone’s going to suggest that I take a bus or train instead of flying. My reply is this: “No fucking way.” If I’m unwilling to spend ten hours in a car with my own family to get somewhere, there’s no fucking way I’m going to spend fifteen hours getting to the same place in a cramped bus seat with El Stinko Bandito who hasn’t showered in a year sitting next to me. Thanks for the offer, Splayhound, but I’d rather sit in a pool of my own vomit. (And for the record, I don’t mean to imply that Greyhound busses are populated solely by smelly Mexicans. I’m sure that most of their passengers are smelly Caucasians.)
And as for taking a train, riding the rails sounds marginally more tolerable than eating broken glass. While it has a certain Old World mystique, rail travel has all of the pain of both airlines and buses, with the added disadvantage of not going anyplace a sane human being wants to go (which is why Amtrak’s busiest routes are around Washington D.C.). Granted, no sane human being wants to go to Duluth, either, which is why Northwest has a virtual monopoly on travel into and out of the city.
When scientists finally perfect teleportation, I might consider traveling again. Of course, if it was Northwest Airlines running the transporter, my molecules would probably end up scattered somewhere over Kansas. At least this way, I only have to worry about them losing my luggage.
It’s times like this that I’m tempted to paraphrase my idol, the late, great Lewis Grizzard. If I ever get back to Tennessee, I’m going to nail my feet to the ground.
The Chef was born 856 years ago on a small planet orbiting a star in the Argolis cluster. It was prophesied that the arrival of a child with a birthmark shaped like a tentacle would herald the planet's destruction. When the future Chef was born with just such a birthmark, panic ensued (this would not be the last time the Chef inspired such emotion). The child, tentacle and all, was loaded into a rocket-powered garbage scow and launched into space. Unfortunately, the rocket's exhaust ignited one of the spectators' flatulence, resulting in a massive explosion that detonated the planet's core, destroying the world and killing everyone on it.
When the would-be Chef awoke from his torpor, he looked around at the new world he found himself on. His first words were, “Hey, this place sucks." Disguising himself as one of the planet's dominant species of semi-domesticated ape, the being who would become known as the Chef wandered the Earth until he ended up in its most disreputable slum - Paris, France.
Taking a job as a can-can dancer, the young Chef made a living that way until one day one of the cooks at a local bistro fell ill with food poisoning (oh, bitter irony). In a desperate move, the bistro's owner rushed into one of the local dance halls, searching for a replacement. He grabbed the ugliest can-can dancer he could find, and found himself instead with an enterprising (if strange) young man who now decided, based on this random encounter, to only answer to the name “Chef".
His success as a French chef was immediate (but considering that this is a country where frogs and snails are considered delicacies, this may or may not be a significant achievement). Not only was the Chef's food delicious, it also kept down the local homeless population. He rose to the heights of stardom in French cuisine, and started a holy war against the United Kingdom to end the reign of terror British food had inflicted on its citizens.
When the Crimean War broke out around France, the Chef assisted Nikola Tesla and Galileo in perfecting the scanning electron microscope, which was crucial in driving back the oncoming Communist hordes. It would later be said that without the Chef, the war would have been lost. He was personally awarded a Purple Heart by the King of France.
After that, the Chef traveled to America, home of such dubious culinary delights as McDonald's Quarter Pounder With Cheese. He immediately adopted the Third World nation as his new home, seeing it as his job to protect and enlighten it. When the Vietnam War began, he immediately volunteered and served in the Army of the Potomac under Robert E. Lee and General Patton. During the war, the Chef killed dozens of Nazis, most of them with his bare hands.
Marching home from war across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, stark-naked and freezing, the Chef wound up on the shores of Mexico. He spent several years there, drinking tequila with Pancho Villa and James Dean. He put his culinary skills to the test when he invented the 5,000-calorie Breakfast Chili Burrito With Orange Sauce (which is today still a favorite in some parts of Sonora).
Eventually, the Chef returned to his adopted home of America, where he met a slimy, well-coiffed weasel who was starting up a new kind of buffet - one dedicated to providing the highest-quality unmentionable appetizers to the online community. The Chef dedicated himself to spreading the word of his famous Lard Sandwich (two large patties of fried lard, in between two slices of toasted buttered lard, with bacon and cheese), as well as occasionally writing about his opinions on less-important topics than food.
Every word of this is true, if only in the sense that every word of this exists in the English language.
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