Travel

Flew to North Carolina early in the morning. My flight left at six in the morning, and, having had a few close calls with checked baggage recently, I got up about three-thirty to be sure I made it to the terminal with plenty of time to spare. In typical LA fashion, there was a long line formed outside the security checkpoint. I looked at the list of tiers of people who could go into a shorter line, and, much to my delight, saw that I was eligible. Sally’s been doing a lot of business flying, and gave me Premier Associate status, which allows me to fly in Economy Plus (an additional miniscule amount of legroom, but extra, anyway), and bypass long lines at security, apparently.

So that was nice. On the first portion of the trip (Los Angeles to Chicago), I might’ve had an empty seat next to me, only a girl from the row behind mine commandeered it, after the woman in her row’s aisle seat had put her broken leg up on the rest of the seats. I fell asleep pretty quickly.

The second portion of the trip had me in an aisle seat in the front row of the Economy section, right behind the bulwark separating the forward & main cabins. My companions were a girl from Georgia & a man who’d lived there for a time. We talked about the South, and about Chick-Fil-A, and about Coke v. Pepsi. The man said that diet Mountain Dew was probably the best possible libation to accompany pizza. They both ordered Diet Cokes, and the girl drank about a sip of hers before falling asleep with her mouth open. The man whispered to me that he had a fridge in his bathroom for Diet Coke.

I landed at the Raleigh / Durham aeroport just before four in the afternoon. Eastbound travel makes the long day seem shorter. Kiehl picked me up and took me to his house, where we met up with rest of Id Vicious. I’d missed out on Bo Jangles, and a moment of hilarity. While they’d been dining, they’d seen signs that read “Please allow us to clean your tables.” Our troupe being a polite one, they’d have been happy to bus their own tables, but they weren’t about to disregard a written placard. As they were posing for a picture by the Bo Jangles storefront logo, a woman came along with her child, and said loudly that they would lead by example. She then unleashed a diatribe on those about to be photographed, yellining something about the restaurant workers being shortstaffed and working a double shift apiece, before saying to them, “Y’all ain’t broke,” resulting in hilarious awkward looks in the picture. That became the catch-phrase of our trip.