This Is Indeed a Miserable Continent

When I left Boston at 7:40 this morning, it was wet and very cold – icy, in other words. The taxi to the airport took about twice as long as it should have, given the light traffic. The terminal itself was cold and anxious, more so than normal; lots of old travelers overwhelmed by the mechanics of security, lots of people saying goodbye for a long time. In Chicago the weather was, if anything, worse – the region had clearly gotten a lot of rain with a front over the past 24 hours, and that rain had iced up into dirty, robust icicles that you could tell just by looking at them knew they were going to be there for a while. The sky was chalky and unpleasant, and did little to improve my mood.

I had decided en route from Boston to cancel the tentative plans I had set out for myself upon arriving in LA – instead of heading to In ‘N’ Out Burger and Mann’s Chinese I would while away my time in the international terminal, perhaps purchasing Duty-Free cosmetics. I changed my mind, though, seeing Chicago as miserable as it was – there was no reason to leave the country for as long as I will soon be leaving it with that dismal meteorology fresh in my mouth and chest.

But then LA turned out to be having one of its supposedly rare nasty days, 60 and light, chilling rain. The aggrieved tone the pilot, head of an LA based flight crew, he had told us earlier, related the bad news about the weather spoke to just how shocked he was that the sun wasn’t shining full blast to welcome he and his crew back home. He was like a chief of internal medicine who’d lost a patient during a routine appendectomy. Evidently in layover planning, as in surgery, there is no such thing as routine.

Just the run from the American terminal to the International convinced me hopping a bus into town wasn’t worth it. To make things worse, the Duty Free cosmetics I so longed to purchase are barred from me until I get a boarding pass from the Air Pacific desk, and Air Pacific isn’t scheduled to open it’s desk up for another four hours. I get the feeling that could be a very loose four hours, too, sort of how “manana,” which literally translates to “tomorrow,” more accurately means “not today.”

I am very much looking forward to this trip, am in fact obnoxiously enthusiastic about the prospect of it. That said, days like this serve to both confirm and cast doubt on your motive for leaving in the first place. On the one hand, Milford Sound, Cascade Saddle and the wily jungle birds of Rakiura only seem more and more attractive as I sit in this overdesigned food court, looking at the tailfin designs of foreign airlines as they try their best to outgay each other – Fiji Air wins by a wide, colorful margin, incidentally – in spite of the colorless and leaking sky. On the other, what kind of stupid asshole leaves a country that has been good to him and a girlfriend the likes of whom small island nations have gone to war over for four months – four months! – for the pleasures of 14 hour plane rides and eating at the LAX McDonald’s. That is, I would eat at the LAX McDonald’s if I could afford it – instead I am eating peanut butter off of a plastic knife I cadged from a faux-Oriental food stall.

A Hare Krishna just complimented my hair. He made some noise about being envious of said hair, gesturing at his own almost bald head. First off, my hair is sublimely greasy. Second off, you shaved your head intentionally, so don’t go looking for sympathy in these parts, dude. I’m looking at a book he gave me, about spiritual reinvigoration and the like, complete with full page color photos of the chain of being. At the moment, despite my best defenses, I’m somewhat receptive to the Hare Krishna’s message. The flattery, not the religion.