Dan Rhatigan, your resident megalomaniacal self-publisher, wrote, lived, and photographed this shocking tale of disaster and wonderment.
Accommodations provided by Northwest Airlines and the sinister Dr. Lau.
This was my first time
Wow.
I mean it — wow. Wow. Wow! Freakin’ WOW!
I just returned from my first trip out West — a brief week in Los Angeles
to visit my oldest pal Eddie and see what the whole West Coast thing was
like. It would be a criminal understatement to say that I got my money’s
worth from my discount airfare tickets. I got adventure, trash, sorrow,
glamour, nostalgia, chicken and waffles, and natural disaster. Bad omens,
however, started pouring in as I left Boston. I left work early so I could get a head start to the airport for a six-thirtyish flight. I optimistically (foolishly, whichever) ignored the warnings of snow, fiercely determined to escape to the land of seventy-six-and-sunny come hell or high water. The plane left a little late, but I wasn’t too worried, since I had a direct flight, needing only to switch to a different plane with the same flight number in Minneapolis. (You can see this coming, right?)
I packed my warmer layers into my tote bag and checked it once I reached the airport. I patiently waited at the airport, eavesdropping on a conversation between a jappy girl and a trashy family as they compared notes on their respective trips to Portugal. This girl was sitting around reading, and soon the thirteenish daughter from the family recognized her and started interrogating her about her vacation. Soon, the whole bunch got into the act, bombarding the slightly horrified young lady with ardent small talk. At one point, she was struck dumb when the young son of the family started asking her about her romantic life, and if she knew “Joe Escobar,” apparently a friend of the family’s in Portugal. I left before I started to suffer brain rot.
The plane ride itself was uneventful as those things go. The selection of music was catastrophically poor — the blandest possible assortment of inoffensive pop hits and country-western ditties. This was not the best assortment for someone who prefers music that’s a little more challenging. The in-flight news and travel show, a shameless promotional vid by the airline, was a paltry attempt to distract the passengers from the fact that we were getting no movie. Again, it was meant to be singularly inoffensive. Their little travel info pieces on different cities like San Francisco and New Orleans would suggest that every city in the country is a pleasant racial mix, straight, and affluent. A lifelong city-dweller, I was skeptical. The news was little more than entertainment dreck profiling Michael Bolton and some retail magnate. Admittedly, though, I have never been one to enjoy lowest-common-denominator entertainment. Craving distraction from that cultural vacuum, I scarfed down free snacks (those honey-roasted peanuts aren’t as bad as standup comedians would have us believe, don’t you think?) and Cokes (they’ll give you a full can of Coke as opposed to a thimbleful of anything else) and struck up conversation with the guy sitting next to me, a music scene guy from Minneapolis who was visiting his sister in Beantown. We talked about the state of rock clubs in Boston and junk like that, and I thought it was really wacky that you can have a long conversation with someone while traveling without exchanging names, since they’re largely unimportant. I started getting nervous when the airline began to make announcements about which connecting flights had already left Minneapolis, since they made no mention about the fate of the flight I was on. I’m a pretty unseasoned traveler, so I had no idea how these direct (as opposed to non-stop) flights operated.