Danger Silver Dot Com

The Terminal-ator

For those of you who follow my Twitter feed - which is now linked with my book’s Facebook page, which means that the inevitable, “WHO THE FUCK IS THAT POSTING ON YOUR WALL?!” from legions of my dedicated fannery of both sexes is coming, which means that I will one day be hobbled in a back woods cabin by some psychopath or buried in a hole by a nut in a summer dress and heels trading lotion application on my fair skin for back issues of Auto Trader – know that I recently spent two and a half days in Terminal B of Rochester “International” Airport trying to fly back to SF from a what was supposed to be four days with my dad. And, for those of you who have never heard of the ol’ ROC, that is a small airport that seems to think that flying twenty minutes to Canada qualifies an airport for “International” status.

If you don’t follow said Twitter feed, here’s the breakdown of what happened:

      • I boarded a plane on day one for Chicago O’Hare.
      • Spent the obligatory three hours on the tarmac.
      • Returned to the gate with a “timed out” co-pilot.
      • Took a cab back to Dad’s.
      • Showed up next morning at airport early for noon flight to O’Hare again.
      • Cancelled because of weather.
      • Put on later flight.
      • That was then cancelled.
      • Was put on a flight that connected in Minneapolis despite my vocalized skepticism that the cataclysm of storms in the Midwest would be isolated to the greater Chicago area.
      • Called Expedia.
      • During that phone call, the flight was delayed to a point that I’d miss my connection to SF again.
      • Spent an hour on the phone to be re-routed without my knowledge to O’Hare despite saying that I DID not want that reroute.
      • That flight was cancelled, so it didn’t matter.
      • Dad picked me up that night.
      • Made plans to buy my dad’s Mustang and drive across the US in a car with 140,000 miles on it.
      • Was woken up by dad at 0500 to try to make a 0630 flight to O’Hare.
      • That was delayed.
      • Made it to O’Hare on a flight that landed at around noon, Chicago time.
      • Made a connection to SF a few hours later.
      • Landed late that night.
      • This time a stewardess just spilled a cup of ice on my laptop, as opposed to a full Sprite on the last United trip I took.
      • By the way, my keys are still all sticky.
      • Took a cab home.
      • Attempted to explain to my dog why I was so late.
      • She ignored me for a day until I bribed her with carrots and pig ears.

Now, what’s worth mention, is that while I struggled with United, I saw other flights from different airlines leaving the airport, so I’m not sure why ONLY United was so screwed. But, once again, I have made the decision never to fly United again… until I have no other options, which will probably mean that the next trip I take will be on United because I am a not a multi-millionaire who is incredibly patient with infrequent connection possibilities. Also, nowhere really flies to Rochester, because, frankly, there’s no reason to go there if you don’t live there or have family there. Nice town, but not exactly a tourist destination.

The point of this saga, is that I kinda had a window into what it must have been like to be Tom Hanks’ character in the movie The Terminal, which is a very nice tale about a foreign citizen who winds up in limbo for a few months trapped in La Guardia or JFK – I forget. And, that said, I probably would have wound up in jail for destroying a gate, not building a nice mosaic and nailing Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Now, despite all this travel drama, I did have a lovely time hanging with my dad. He’s 65 now, and we still managed to play catch and go shag fly balls out in the sandlot together. We also went to Cooperstown, NY, where we went to the Baseball Hall of Fame and saw an old-timers game on Father’s Day with six Hall of Fame players and a bunch of retired major  league players. I met Bill “Spaceman” Lee, saw my dad get all star-struck, had him autograph the ball dad and I were playing catch with, and bought him and his wife drinks. It was a pretty fantastic moment.

I know my dad isn’t going to live forever, so every moment that we have together – and it usually is a once  a year visit as he is on the other side of the country – I cherish. The time with him made the trip worth the effort coming and going. That, and my pappy showed me a whole bunch of his treasured baseball memorabilia that I will one day inherit – provided I don’t get written out of the will because he meets a Playboy Centerfold who likes retired screenwriters that live in the Rust Belt. I’m probably pretty safe there. So, eventually, and I hope it is a long time away - though my dad isn’t exactly what you would call a health nut - I will have an entire apartment filled with NY Yankees stuff and will probably hold the record of the biggest Yankees collection owned by a Giants fan. There are far worse things to be known for, I suppose. It could be the Cubs.

The weekend also had some low moments that weren’t United related: namely that I’m still on life’s disabled list due to the various malfunctioning disks in my lumbar/sacral spine. Watching men in their fifties and sixties run around the bases all the while knowing that I could not do the same was a tough pill to swallow. I hope I hid my physical discomfort from my dad well, as I didn’t want to dissuade him from playing ball with me and going to the batting cage, but such activities took their toll.

I made the internal decision to try to enroll myself in every intramural league of every sport that I can once I’m healthy again. I want to be the white San Francisco amateur version of Bo Jackson if you will, one with far smaller stature, and certainly less athletic ability, but some sort of comparable facsimile on a very liberal level. I’m not sure when I’ll get to the end of this injury, but boy-howdy am I looking forward to it. I just bought a cane on the internet last night. Yep, a goddamn cane. So being thirty-two years of age and walking around with a cane, people will either think I’m a colossal dweeb, wannabe pimp or a highly-functional blind man. I suppose there’s a good amount of humor to be had there. And screw you right in your butthole for laughing at me in advance. Also, and on a thematically unrelated note, I bought two knives. One is a gift. This is the problem with getting the Cold Steel catalogue and being male. Soon you wind up with all sorts of random bludgeoning and stabbing tools, justifying such purchases to females who don’t see the logic with, “They are just in case the shit goes down, man.” This explanation tends to only make sense to those of us with testicles. And that is literally all the explaining needed.

With this injury, Netflix has been a godsend. I’ve caught up on comedy in a way that I haven’t been in years.  I just watched Bill Hicks’ last taped performance before his untimely death of pancreatic cancer at age 32, my age not to put too fine a point on it. The sheer level of awesome that he was really struck me when I saw that. I remember Bill Hicks from being a compulsive standup  comedy viewer when I was a tween, but I never fully grasped his level of brilliance before now. Nor did I so fully relate to his brand of angst until this age. And I learned something about myself through the viewing: pissed off comics are way funnier than happy ones. So, that said, I suppose this injury is a blessing in that regard. I’m really pissed off most of the time these days. And I have been doing a great job of cracking myself up with my own observations on the absurdity of modern life. I think my dad is still very pissed off too, which is why I find him to be so funny. I come from good comedy genes.

If nothing else, at least people like my father and I entertain each other.  And I would be much worse off without that. I guess I’ll book another flight on United. Laptop health be damned.

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