One last California Trip Story

Plus airline travel, dreams and making up tall tales for the benefit of your fellow passengers…

I don’t know about you (frankly, I’m not altogether sure about me), but when I travel I always sleep poorly the night before.

Maybe that’s because I like to fly early in the morning and the reason I like doing that is I’m under the impression that if you fly early you have a better chance of your flights being on time because as the day goes along flights can get delayed for a variety of reasons and those delays build up throughout the day and because some plane pushed off late from the gate in Bumfuck, Iowa at 6:25 AM your flight to Horse’s Breath, Wyoming, which was scheduled to depart at 9:45 PM, gets delayed to the Twelfth of Never.

(If that’s not how it works, please don’t tell me because I don’t want to know. I’ve decided to believe this so I don’t need any highly inconvenient information about flight delays or the possibility that Santa Claus doesn’t exist or who was on the Grassy Knoll when JFK got shot. I don’t want actual facts spoiling my opinions, which would be a great campaign slogan for Donald Trump’s next presidential campaign and would also look nifty on a T-shirt. )

Anyway…

I slept badly because I was staying at my best friend’s house the night before departing and he has a room at the back of his house which I consider my home-away-from-home, but they remodeled it and took out the bed without consulting me. (The inconsiderate behavior of the people I sponge off at least once a year is appalling.)

But my friend told me not to worry; he bought an inflatable bed just for me, which sounds incredibly thoughtful…

Until I slept on it.

Turned out the bed was OK as long as you laid exactly in the middle and didn’t move anywhere near an edge because then the edge would collapse and throw you on the floor and my bladder insists I get up from one-to-three times a night depending on how many high-quality Manhattans my inconsiderate buddy serves me, so it was like trying to get a good night’s sleep in bouncy house while a birthday party full of kids tried to work off a sugar rush before early-onset diabetes set in. (And if that’s not how that actually works, I think you already know my position on “facts.”)

So now I’m thinking maybe my friend bought the bed “just for me” to send a message which was something like:

“Oh sure, you can stay with us and sleep on this trampoline while Simone Biles practices her floor routine.”

Anyway…

I planned to get up at 5 AM and leave my home-away-from home at 6 AM, but woke up at 4:48 AM to check the time and I was pretty sure I couldn’t get back to sleep and pick up an extra 12 minutes of quality sleep, plus I was having a weird dream which adequately describes all my dreams and now it’s time for a digression about that.

Dreams in Literature

I think my main problem with bad writing is it’s not realistic or honest and bad writers spew out a bunch of clichés and have lovers say things like, “Oh my darling!” which only sounds like something somebody would say in Real Life if they were singing and the next word was, “Clementine!”

And bad writers often use dreams to make some point they think is subtle and sophisticated and the last one I remember reading was in a New York Times Bestseller (which tends to be a sign that the book was mediocre enough to make the same people who didn’t get vaccinated like it) and the dream featured a father underwater trying to get to his daughter who was trapped in some seaweed and he wakes up and realizes she needs help because his dream revealed it and that only sounds realistic if his daughter was named Ariel.

(Man, that was a lot of work for a Little Mermaid joke.)

Dreams in real life

(What follows is an actual dream I had that was so screwy I woke up and wrote it down because I knew someday I’d use it to pad out a story just like the one you’re reading.)

So I’m at a baseball stadium in a wheelchair, but I’m not handicapped and don’t really need the wheelchair, but some unidentified woman sees me and thinks I’m handicapped so to keep her from thinking I’m some kind of asshole who’s making fun of the handicapped I have to keep that lie going and pretend to be handicapped and get on an elevator while still in the wheelchair and somehow the elevator turns into a Bar-B-Que restaurant where I order too much food, which so far is the only thing within shouting distance of reality.

Next I’m driving home from the restaurant with the BBQ leftovers and go by my high school girlfriend’s house and her mother is out in the yard doing (big surprise) yardwork so I stop to say hi and offer to help which means this really is a dream because in real life I won’t do my yardwork, much less anybody else’s.

But I’m also kinda in a hurry because I’m pretty worried about getting those leftover ribs back home and into my refrigerator .

Then my high school girlfriend’s older sister comes out and she looks exactly like she did when I first met her, which is pretty remarkable because she’s now about 70 years old, but in the dream still looks like she’s 17.

And now she’s going to the store and wants me to go along so we can keep talking, but now I’m really worried about those ribs, but she keeps on talking anyway and says she went through a bad marriage (at 17?) which taught her a lot and now she’s telling me I didn’t marry her sister because I was afraid to commit and I have to decide if I want to keep having a conversation that could change my life or get those damn ribs home and eat them and at this point in my dream the ribs have the upper hand.

To complicate matters even further, I’m now somehow in charge of a baseball team and my girlfriend’s sister’s family now includes some previously non-existing brothers and sisters who are helping with the yard work, but look suspiciously like illegal aliens they picked up outside Home Depot…and then I wake up.

WTF?

Now that’s what a real dream is like.

(Also, I’ve suddenly developed a craving for ribs.)

Back to reality

So I’m in the Sacramento airport waiting for my connecting flight to Denver and my Denver flight was originally scheduled to leave Denver at 2 PM and arrive in Kansas City at 4:35 PM. (You lose an hour traveling East, so keep that in mind as we do what’s going to become some bewildering arithmetic.)

But then I get a text from Southwest Airlines that my Denver flight is now leaving at 4:39 PM which, if the one hour and 35 minute flight time stayed the same, would get me into KC at 7:14 PM and I get that text at 10:59 AM.

16 minutes later I get another text saying my Denver flight is now leaving at 5:39 PM which would get me into KC at 8:14 PM.

19 minutes later I get a text saying my Denver flight is now leaving at 3:07 PM, so divide the 3 and add an hour of airport detention, multiply by pie r squared and I have no idea what time I’m making it to Kansas City and don’t blame me because I warned you this would get complicated.

The only explanation I can think of for all the texts and time changes is somewhere in some Southwest Airlines control room two people are fighting or having sex and keep rolling over a keyboard that is sending out random departure times and confusing the shit out of Southwest passengers.

Two seating policies; Southwest’s and my own

If you’ve flown Southwest Airlines you know they have an open seating policy based on a WWF Steel Cage Death Match format in which the first people on the plane get the best seats and the people too cheap to give them extra money to get a head start on the Oklahoma Land Rush have to settle for what’s left.

If the middle bulkhead seat is open (the first row of seats on an airplane) I’ll take it for the leg room because I’m a bird-in-the-hand kind of guy (which now that I think about it, sounds like a great way to end up with a hand full of bird shit), but I don’t pass up what’s a better-than-average middle seat because I’m under the illusion there’s an open Barcalounger with my name on it somewhere back there in Row Z.

When I get on my Sacramento-to-Denver flight, imagine my relief when I spot an aisle seat in the bulkhead row and the middle seat is occupied by a young woman of normal size who has her left foot in a plastic cast that looked to be designed by Tony Stark (that’s an Ironman joke for those of you who don’t keep up with the Marvel Universe) and on her injured foot is a slipper with the words “Maid of Honor” embroidered on the toe.

Normally I disapprove of people who want to talk on airplanes, but somewhere over Utah I can’t take it anymore, gesture at her foot and ask:

“So you got a good story that goes with that?”

She says no, she just had foot surgery and wore the slippers from her sister’s wedding because they were comfortable and I tell her I’m disappointed because I’m a complete stranger and she could have told me absolutely anything and I would have believed her and urge her to tell the next person that asks about her foot that her sister’s wedding turned into a brawl and she suffered an injury while performing a Muay Thai maneuver on the Best Man who tried to cop a feel at the reception.

A story like that would keep her engaged in making shit up and keep her traveling companions enthralled and asking, “Then what happened?” and reminds me of the time I was in Hawaii with Jason Kendall and two extremely-inebriated women thought I was a movie actor.

I’ll keep this short because I’m pretty sure I’ve told this one before

So it’s New Year’s Eve and were sitting by an open-pit fire and these two drunk women say they’ve seen me in movies and I say it’s unlikely, but Jason says I’m just shy and they probably saw me in Alien.

He said I was also in Saving Private Ryan, but got killed off early (apparently I’m a character actor and can’t carry a film on my own) and I kept saying none of this was true and Jason was pissed because I didn’t go along with him and make stuff up, but I said, dude, they got iPhones. They’ll look me up and realize this is all BS, but Jason was right – as usual – because when they Googled me they found my picture and even though it said “Run-of-the-mill political cartoonist” right underneath my picture I guess the women were too drunk to read and insisted I take selfies with them and their husbands so somewhere there are two women who sobered up on New Year’s Day, looked at their phones and asked each other:

“Just who the hell is that guy?”

Please return to your seats, were on our final approach

So I get to Denver and the board says my connecting flight to KC is leaving at 3:12 PM.

The next time I look it says my flight is leaving 3:16 PM, so apparently that same couple is fighting and/or having sex on a Southwest Airlines keyboard and I think we have to hand it to them for endurance.

I forget the exact time because I didn’t write it down, but at some point the departure time changed yet again and I had an hour-and-a-half before boarding even started so I went to a deserted part of the airport to read a book and figured I’d check one more time before I sat down which I thought was a little obsessive/compulsive because I’d just checked a few minutes earlier and this time it said my flight was “BOARDING.”

For the second time in one article I have to ask, WTF?

So I grab all my shit and race to the other end of the airport and make it on time and take the first middle seat available with two moderately-sized people on either side and pull out my book to keep me occupied on the trip to KC and reach for my reading glasses which are usually hanging from the neck of my shirt and they aren’t there because I was in such a hurry to make the flight, I left them at the Denver airport and now reading my book is like trying to read the bottom line of the eye chart at my ophthalmologist’s office.

After a few minutes I give up reading and turn to the elderly woman sitting on my right and say:

“Tell me a story.”

(OK, I didn’t actually say that, but I was definitely thinking that and if she didn’t have a story of her own I was fully prepared to tell her about my brief role in Saving Private Ryan.)

So next time you travel, think ahead and make up a story about Muay Thai fighting or being a character actor or CIA assassin and your fellow travelers will thank you for it.