California Here I Come…eventually

Assuming the world doesn’t end this week (check Vegas for current odds) in a couple days I’m getting on an airplane to fly to California and be with my mother for her 96th birthday.

And having seen my flight itinerary, I think it’s safe to say the airline industry would be slightly more efficient if you didn’t start a trip from Kansas City, Missouri to Sacramento, California by flying directly South to Dallas, Texas.

If the airline industry had planned their trip, Lewis & Clark would have explored the American West by leaving St. Louis and heading straight South to New Orleans, Louisiana, which if you think about it, probably would have been a lot more entertaining and if they could get Sacagawea to loosen up and flash her “funbags” (it’s what my friend from Texas calls them) they could have collected a wagonload of beads, headed back to Washington, D.C. and reported the Louisiana Purchase was a bargain, as long as you visited your new territory during Mardi Gras.   

Semi-related Lewis & Clark story alert

According to Undaunted Courage – the Stephen Ambrose book about Lewis & Clark – they had to watch out for American Indians who wanted to steal their guns because the various tribes or gangs or rap groups (not sure how they were organized at that point) were at war with each other and if one of the tribes or gangs or rap groups had guns, they could kick everybody’s ass and be King of the Plains.

So if that’s accurate – and I wasn’t there – then the image of the American Indians living peaceful lives in harmony with nature and their fellow man until the White Man showed up is pretty much bullshit. Apparently American Indians were acting just like everybody else; fighting over stuff.

Now here’s a quote from the Scientific American website:

“Native Americans definitely waged war long before Europeans showed up. The evidence is especially strong in the American Southwest, where archaeologists have found numerous skeletons with projectile points embedded in them and other marks of violence; war seems to have surged during periods of drought.”

On the other hand, that comes from the “Scientific American” which (as current vaccination rates show) means it’s definitely a minority point of view, so if you think over 600,000 of your fellow citizens are playing dead as part of a world-wide hoax organized by Bill Gates, the Illuminati and Don Corleone, feel free to ignore  any information with the label “scientific” attached to it.

Second Lewis & Clark story:

Once they got out West they were warned to watch out for “bears” and L&C said they knew all about bears because they had them back East, but they were thinking of the smaller bears that made up half the brokers on Wall Street and the first time they saw a grizzly bear they said:

“What the fuck is that?”

(And I think you’ve got to be appalled at their language, even though I just made that quote up. On the other hand, I’m probably not that far off.)

Humans run about 28 MPH and grizzly bears run 35 MPH, so maybe you want to climb a tree, but they can climb trees, so maybe you want to jump in the river, but they can also swim, so generally speaking (and I think Leonardo DiCaprio can back me up on this) your best option is not fucking around with bears.

Which reminds me of another story…bear with me

When you visit Yosemite National Park they warn you not to keep food in your car because bears can smell it and use their claws to peel the door right off your vehicle which I wouldn’t mind seeing as long as it was your vehicle. And if you’re camping out and brought along a Christmas ham to eat around the campfire, you probably don’t want to use it as a pillow at night because a bear won’t think twice about peeling off your head to get to his midnight snack.

So while visiting Yosemite we were driving down the road and some moron and his slightly-less intelligent female companion had stopped his T-top Corvette so she could sit on the top of the roof frame and feed a bear Cheetos. Never being one to let a good line go to waste, as we passed, I said:

“I hope you got a lot of Cheetos.”

The female looked startled like it hadn’t occurred to her that an entire bag of Cheetos was pretty much a bear appetizer and after finishing that off he might decide to go for a four-course meal, which – if you do the math – would include both her arms and legs.

(I also think it’s fair to assume the female was less intelligent because when the bear decided to eat her arm, her male companion could hit the gas and get the Fuck Out of Dodge and make up some story about how his girlfriend got lost and maybe the park rangers could go look for leftovers.)

And now back to our previously scheduled tirade

Like a lot of people, I don’t especially like to fly.

It’s not exactly “fear of flying” it’s more, “vague concern about flying, based on pilots who finished last in flight school, but still got a job flying my airplane.”

Face it: somebody had to be the worst pilot in flight school and maybe he or she is currently in your airplane’s cockpit asking what all those little lights mean.

Anyway…

This is admittedly an emotional response to flying because the evidence indicates I should be much more concerned about the drive to the airport.

For example: According to the Washington Post and the kind of people whose lives are so boring they keep track of this stuff; between the year 2000 and 2009, deaths per 1 billion passenger miles when traveling by car were 7.28, while deaths when traveling by plane were 0.07.

So logically, “fear of driving” would make a lot more sense than “fear of flying” but as you might have already noticed, human beings aren’t always logical and that goes a long way in explaining the 2016 presidential election.

BTW: Deaths per 1 billion passenger miles when traveling by motorcycle is 212.57 so if your wife buys you a Harley Davidson for your 50th birthday, call the cops…she’s definitely trying to kill you.

Bottom line: traveling by airplane is one of the safest ways to travel even though it doesn’t feel like it and it probably doesn’t feel like it because when things go wrong with an airplane you can’t pull over to the side of the road and call Triple A. When things go wrong on an airplane, they go Lead-Story-On-CNN wrong.

You might not want to sit next to me

The airline I’m flying does that thing where you board by groups and then have Greco-Roman wrestling matches to pick your specific seat.

I once screwed up when I got on a plane and there was an empty seat in the front row and even though it was a middle seat I wanted it for the leg room. Turned out the woman on my right and the man on my left were married, having a fight and not speaking to each other, so all the way from Kansas City to New York I had to relay information because she would say, “You can tell him for me that I don’t want a drink” and I’d relay that to the husband and then he would say, “You can tell her for me, fine…be that way.”

But things worked out OK, when we landed in New York we all got a divorce.

That was a traveling situation that sucked, but might seem like a dream come true if things go bad on this trip.

As regular readers already know, I had some minor surgery and if you’re not a regular reader maybe you need more fiber in your diet. (A childish and sophomoric joke, which nonetheless, met my standards for humor and if you keep reading seems to have met yours.)

While my stitches heal I’m taking antibiotics and one of the side effects of the medication can be explosive diarrhea so maybe you don’t want to sit next to me on airplane. Now that I think about it, maybe I can use that in my favor:

“Yeah, you probably don’t want to sit here because somewhere over Oklahoma City there’s a 50-50 chance I’m going to shit myself.”

Also, I still have a 3-inch row of stitches in my neck so I can let people get a good look at that or cover them up with a bandage, but either way somebody is going to ask what happened and I think I’m going with:

“Had a gang tattoo removed…prison is rough.”

Assuming we don’t make any unscheduled stops in an Iowa cornfield (and with the airline industry’s sense of direction that seems entirely possible) I’ll write something after I make it to California, but it might take a few days because me and some friends are immediately leaving for a beach house on the Northern California coast which sounds entirely awesome if not for one fact:

It’s in bear country.