∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞ bad goody goody! ∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
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For The Birds
by Cripsy Duck 12-19-00
(printed in C-VILLE Vol.12, No.52)

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AAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

On the very same day that George W. Bush's future presidency was assured by the swift gavel-slamming of the nation's highest court, I was attempting to make my way from Virginia to Arkansas where my obese and diabetic father lay in an intensive care unit with a surfeit of indescribable tubing poking out of his every orifice, pumping him full of an equally indescribable series of gurpy fluids and medicines.

As if the task wasn't grim enough, I had to fly. Bad move.

Don't fly. Flying is no longer cool. Flying is now officially stupid... as of Wednesday. It hurts your ears, you can't smoke, and they don't feed you anymore. (Pretzels and one free drink, my ass. Bastards.)

I was slated to leave Washington's Reagan National Airport (so many crummy things begin with Ronald Reagan, don't they?) for Memphis, Tennessee, where I was supposedly going to catch a flight to Fort Smith, Arkansas. Estimated flight time: 2.5 hours.

But there was weather. Good old weather. At the Northwest Airlines teminal in D.C. I was informed that Memphis wasn't allowing any landings due to freezing ice and general inclimate shittiness. Bummer. They advised me that, given the relative state of emergency I was facing with my fast fading father, it would be best to go instead to Dallas as quickly as possible to beat any mean storms. Once in Dallas, my Fort Smith options would be increased considerably due to the cities' relative proximity. Unfortunately-- they mercifully informed me-- Northwest doesn't actually fly from Dallas to Fort Smith, but they would gladly hook me up with a carrier who does: American Airlines. And since they had cancelled my flight, they'd also pick up the difference in fares.

It all seemed reasonable enough, except that now I was being rerouted to Detroit, where I would catch another flight to Dallas and from there... you know... on to Fort Smith. Details were getting cloudy and my transit time had swelled to over double its previous length, but I resolved to put my fate in the hands of the gods and ride the literal winds as soon as possible. So I was off to Detroit.

A brown film holds down the sky over Detroit, an untidy-bowl-type reminder of the permanent damage they've done to both themselves and the entire world with their infamously festering industrious automobile fetishism. I navigated the airport without hitches, getting myself to the proper departure gate, but alas... my flight had been delayed. The plane that was supposed to leave Detroit at 3:00 with my ass on it was still on the runway in Montreal and wasn't scheduled to depart from there until 3:00. Ouch! This would certainly blow my connection in Dallas so I immediately set to booking a new flight out of there. For 10:35. That night. At least I'd have plenty of time to make my connection.

Well... all is rarely as it seems and usually a fair bit meaner when you get right down to it. I sat staring that bitch of a truth directly in the fangs as I swilled shockingly pricey double Bloody Marys and huge beers in the Detroit airport bar. The fun was just beginning.

My flight out of Detroit-- delayed but now scheduled to depart at 4:47, sat on the runway in a snowstorm (with us in it) waiting for a good wing de-icing until 6:30, when at last the ridiculous bird took flight. I slapped some Cocteau Twins into my Walkman and passed out.

We made good time, putting down in Dallas around 8:30, two full hours before my departure. No problem, right? Wrong. This wasn't just any old airport-- this was TEXAS, by God. (Don't mess with it.)

Dallas' DFW airport is a place I wouldn't wish upon Osama Bin Laden. What an amazing piece of unnavigatable bullcrackers. There is no simple way to understand DFW. It's the size of small city-- so sprawled out and poorly marked that when you arrive there, you literally have no idea where you are and no idea how to get out. The maps make no sense and no one can explain them, either. It seems like many miles from one end of the scarily empty science-fiction facility to the other-- or a fifteen minute ride on a bus that comes with the regularity of a lottery win. This is not a place you want to be trying to make close flight connections in. You will definitely lose. Luckily, I had two hours, right?

In Detroit I'd been told to go directly to the American Airlines terminal in Dallas and they would issue me a new ticket. So I wandered around with an irritated "what the...?" look on my face until I found the proper bus stop to take me from terminal E to terminal A. I waited. It came about a half hour later. I rode the barely crawling behemoth the fifteen minutes and nearly-as-many-mile voyage to terminal A where I disembarked and approached an American Airlines ticket counter, but the flustered employee couldn't issue my ticket. That'd be way too easy and this was no time for easy. No, I needed to go back to Northwest and get the ticket from them, and only then could American issue me a boarding pass for their flight.

"You're kidding, right?" I thought. "I don't have time to hire a Sherpa guide and pack llamas for the trek just now..."

Thinking fast, I caught a cab back to terminal E, retrieved the ticket from Northwest and then, well... it all fell apart. I foolishly decided to wait for the bus. (Dumbass!) When the thing finally pulled up almost forty minutes later, the driver coyly announced that he was going off duty. (SHIT!) My flight was leaving in twenty minutes. I caught a different bus that only went as far as terminal B (before it ran out of supplies or something and had to turn back) and ran in to get my ticket verified, but it was too late: there was no way in hell I could catch the flight. I was still miles from my gate in terminal A. Literally. I begrudgingly booked a new flight for the following morning and trudged the endless miles to my departure gate in abject defeat.

I camped out at the terminal. (Not gonna screw that up again.) At least they had cots. Not a single restauraunt or bar was open to assuage my sorry almost-dead-fathered and left on the runway ass. And the thing that really burned me was that if I had just rented a car and driven, I'd have been there already. Hell, I could have hitch-hiked with fewer hassles.

No wonder George W. wanted out of Texas.

In loving memory of Bug Darling-- a fat, scotch-slurping king of an ex-Navy pilot smart alleck. And a pretty good pop, too.

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