my sunday was to begin at 3:50am. i can count the days that i have begun at 3:50am on one finger of one hand. i was ready for this particular day though because it was to mark the beginning of a twelve hour trek that would return me to my people.
the day started with the alarm of my iphone ringing one hour early due to daylight savings time which means the day that already had a gruesome start time now had an even more gruesome start time. sadly i didn't realize this miscue until i had taken a shower and went to wake bookguy. for one hundred reasons i was afraid to go back to sleep so groggily waited the hour out in preparation of the two hour car ride to calgary that would officially set our journey in motion.
instead of boring you with the litany of missteps that occurred throughout the day, i'll just add how it all ended because if you sprinkled ten more equally fated dots on the page, you'd have a fine picture of this travel experience. the day concluded, after a three hour delay at o'hare (an airport i was not originally supposed to pass through at all and a full six hours after i was supposed to have been home based on my original itinerary), with the pilot saying over the garbled intercom that there would be a brief delay because the plane was over-fueled and we had to wait for the suck-extra-fuel-back-out-of-the-plane truck to come and suck-extra-fuel-back-out-of-the-plane (as you can imagine, airports, even ones the size of o'hare, aren't exactly teeming with such specialized equipment). the word "brief" in o'hare-speak turns out to be thirty-five minutes and these were just a few more drops in the bucket that culminated in my crossing my home's threshold at 12:40am (mon) instead of 4:30pm (sun) as i was originally scheduled to, or if you prefer twenty-two hours instead of fourteen.
i try to not gripe about such pedestrian matters in this space and i know i run the risk of sounding like one of the douche-bags so
expertly dissected by louis ck but i'm taking this moment to rededicate myself to some long-held convictions:
- avoid u.s. customs (post 9-11)
- avoid connecting flights
- avoid checking bags
- avoid flying (post 9-11)
and don't get me wrong. i love flying. i love traveling. and i love the ease in which both of those things are possible via today's knowledge and technology. but the love of those things is irrefutably trumped by my complete lack of patience for
thoughtless reactionary, partially-cooked processes which are mindlessly implemented and heartlessly administered. it's tragically sad and we're capable of
so much more.
