Airports

Holiday mornings at the airport and other terrible things

As if waking up at 6am to go to the airport 30 minutes early so a semi-close friend could catch the flight that he didn’t even wake up for causing you to shake him awake almost violently wasn’t bad enough, I trumbled  (it’s a new word and it means to tug yourself on your feet through an airport departure lounge at or before 8:15AM on a holiday weekend) along the scuffed linoleum floors of the bathroom staring incoherently at my boarding pass.

 

36B. There are two things wrong with what I was reading. One being the digit occupying the tens place of the identifying row and the other being the consonant that also happens to be a homophone with a buzzing stinging insect that exists only to cause harm but mostly just fear - is there really any difference.

 

The realization that I had lost the lottery, that I was a middle seater for the next 4.5 hours unleashed a host of mild-mannered concerns into my sleep-deprived, alcoholically muted mind. Quick rationalization was required to alleviate the mental unknowns that my near future held. Worst-case scenario �" the person to the left of me smells bad. On planes and generally when thinking I look towards the left. If the individual placed in 36C is a foul smelling POS I’m finished. Almost as bad, but not quite worst-case scenario: the person sitting to my right is cloaked in a similarly foul odor. I can imagine it seeping out of his enlarged nostrils, filled with mucus and long curling crusted hairs lurching onto his cheeks.

 

I finished pissing into a urinal too tall for me to avoid splattering my leg with a thin layer of my own waste. I was too tired to care. I usually avoid pissing any closer than 3.4 feet away from public urinals, but the bathroom was full and it was better to accept the psychological discomfort of piss on your jeans than to endure the physical discomfort of strangers watching you critically in a public bathroom. I wanted to back away quickly from the urinal as I began to piss, as the stream got stronger and longer and more optimistic in its wasteful violence and then abruptly shuffle just as pathetically back towards the enemy strung up on the wall as it devolved parabolically, reaching it’s La Grangian limitations of horizontally, gravity-defying, straight-line velocity required to reach the intended recipient.

 

I believe that airport bathrooms are some of the most uncomfortable places you will find in ordinary life and I was satisfied to exit with my psyche intact. I found Bradford asleep on the chair I left him on three minutes before. His mouth was open in some gaping, unconcerned, fashion. The kind of unconscious arrangement that could provoke a passing stranger rushing to his gate to wonder for a split second if Bradford might require medical attention or at the very least some consideration to be woken up to ensure he doesn’t miss his flight that may be taking him somewhere very important in which case it would warrant reason to awaken him, or alternatively Bradford could be very poor and he might not be able to afford another flight home. That also might merit some heroic action of the passerby to shake Bradford lightly at first and then possibly ask him if he is ok and when he doesn’t respond shake his shoulder twice but this time harder and then as onlookers begin their insatiable onslaught of visually critical consumption the passerby would most likely give up (or more accurately give in) and leave without successfully awakening Bradford who probably had a friend to watch out for him anyway.