Monday, March 12, 2007

L.A. Trip: Coffee is for Closers

I went to Los Angeles on Friday and stayed overnight until Saturday evening, catching the last plane back to Salt Lake, possibly because I’d done something wrong and was worthy of punishment. I’m sure there are many people who enjoy that city, but I can’t count myself among them. Which is too bad, because if you like early onset melanoma and drinking the air you breathe instead of merely inhaling it, I understand it can be quite nice.

OK, I shouldn’t harp on the place that much. The weather is fabulously tempting, especially because I came back and though it had been a nice day on Saturday, I still nearly froze my fanny off walking from the long term parking bus stop to my slightly misplaced car. But the traffic and sheer holy-crap-there-are-a-lot-of-people-here-and-they-are-all-in-my-lane of it all really turns me off to the place.

Taken from my camera phone as I drove west on Washington Blvd. in Culver City.

Anyway, I wrote this next little ditty while on the plane. By hand. In pen. On a hand made spiral bound notebook. Since I no longer had any access to technology and the three Mac Book Pros I delivered and set up while there, among all my other duties of being scared on the freeway, getting lost on the freeway and yelling a lot while on the freeway were no longer in my possession. I only had my cell phone and an iPod to show for all my tech geek-iness. I know, I know, it’s quaint, my using a pen and paper.

LAX, near the rental car return streets. I swear I thought this plane was going to squat down on top of me.

OK here we go (remember… all hand written, so any hyperlinks you see here are just me thinking them out loud):

PART I: A Confession and a Critque

LAX. Boeing 737-700 on the tarmac (which is a funny word and if I were writing this on a computer, I’d probably take a moment and look that term up in Wikipedia or something. Where’d it come from, anyway?) I’m on the exit row of seats again for this flight, just like yesterday morning’s flight. Leg room in the SouthWest airline sky bus we are encased within is a very nice thing. Though, if there is some kind of incident on the plane I’m sort of in charge of opening the door, which means we are all hosed. Wasn’t paying a lick of attention during the here-are-the-safety-features lecture. Sorry fellow aluminum and titanium tube travelers. It’s just going to be every soul for themselves when our doom hits. But I’m glad of the leg room right now.

We had the comedian flight attendant again. You know the one, he says, “in case of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, once you stop screaming go ahead and grab one of those masks that comes down and try to begin to breath normally.” That sort of thing. Clever. But his delivery leaves a lot to be desired. You are either funny, clever and mocking the possibly life saving yada-yada-yada you have to say or you should play it straight and just read the info off the damn card. He sprinted through all the punch lines is what I’m saying.

PART II: In which I rebel and listen to my iPod during take off in direct violation of FAA rules and we fail to explode in a fiery mass of miles of wire, people, the iMac G5 I’ve got stashed in my checked baggage, the failed stand up comic flight attendant guy and a few tons of plastic and metal over Inglewood and Santa Monica

OK, I guess that’s really all there is to this part. You probably got the gist of it from the section title.

Except to say this: Yeah, I had my iPod on during take off. Suck it, FAA. We are all worried about electromagnetic interference, right? Cell phones and stuff like that which might interfere with the navigational equipment. Well, I’m here to tell you that my little black 30 GB iPod emits about as much radiation as I do after eating a microwaved burrito, which is to say, “almost none at all.” In the words of Aaron Sorkin via Toby Ziegler from the pilot of “The West Wing,” (I’m paraphrasing here pretty badly of course, since I don’t have access to imdb.com at 32,000 feet, but if I did, there’d be a link-y thing-y for sure), “You mean something I bought at Best Buy can flummox this shiny Boeing?” Really?

SWA had Nabisco bake little teeny, tiny Boeing 737 shaped crackers for them. Über-cute. Perhaps I know a small boy or girl who will enjoy them. But they have hydrogenated cottonseed oil in them so perhaps not. I.E., the devil in trans-fat clothing. Reha’s been after us to give up all trans-fats and I just finished an article which said the exact same thing she’s been saying for a while. That stuff will kill us all. Also, as you can see below, the el-cheap-o internet special non refundable, you’re gonna get on that plane or lose your money extra special fare we purchased bought me the world’s smallest package of peanuts.

Photo also taken with my cell phone camera, two rules broken! Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta!

In writing this all out by hand like I’m doing now, and as is my wont to do while I’m writing in general, I tend to take little breaks and stare off into space and think about what pithy thing I’m going to say next; these are the times when I have trained my body to hit Cmd + S (Save). I just wanted you all to know that I just hit Cmd + S on the left side of this notebook. There is no keyboard here. What the...? Body + Mind == weird ol’ muscle memory, I guess.

PART III: More confessions

I stole many pens from the L.A. office. I don’t know why.

I also stole a pillow from the Best Western on Sepulveda in Culver City. Sorry. I needed padding for the iMac G5 in my suitcase and I had neither the time, inclination or directions to go to a local Staples and buy bubble wrap.

Yes, guy next to me, I farted. Yes, I know I looked over at you and gave you a look that said, “it wasn’t me, I think it was the old guy in front of us.” It was me. I had the world’s worst Mexican food for dinner and it wouldn’t surprise me if it happened again before we land. Usually I can control that sort of thing, but this was powerfully bad Mexican food and it might prove too much for me. Again, I’m sorry about that, my “random exit row we have all the leg room we’ll ever need, but we’ll die if something happens to the plane, because I wasn’t paying attention during the lecture” friend. And I’m sorry for spilling on you when I reached over to grab my beverage from the comedian flight attendant guy. I should have been more careful.

PART IV: Random Thoughts

iPod love. I surely do love my iPod. Not more than Reha or the kids, of course. But way more than is strictly speaking, normal. It’s like I live in “iTuneia.” And it’s night now. So we have “iTunesia.” Like the jazz standard by Dizzy Gillespie, “A Night in Tunisia” Get it? iTunesia! Fine. Never mind.

My seat row neighbor (I’m sorry again about the flatulence. It won’t happen again, even though I *know* I fooled you into thinking it was the old guy up there) has a 17” Mac Book Pro and I think I’m in love with it. Although, now that I see him working on it, I’m think I’m less enthralled. It’s too large. He’s all hunched over and it gets bumped by people walking down the aisle because it juts out so far it might as well be a part of the wing. Or maybe a better analogy is that it’s an aircraft carrier. That’s quite a bit more like it. It’s huge and big and flat.

I still want one, though.

Home. Finally. I violated the rules again and watched an episode of “Heros” during the landing.

And. After driving that goofy Hyundai all over L.A. this weekend, I forgot that my Jetta is a manual transmission and I tried to jam the thing into reverse without using the clutch.

I have terrible penmanship. That was mostly exactly what I wrote. The only parts I edited or embellished were the parts I couldn’t read. Bless the tap tap tap of keyboards. 

1. Why oh why would SWA call their airfares “BYTE” sized? I cannot stop thinking about this.

   Posted by Radioactive Jam  on  03/12/07  at  09:48 AM

2. Ah… Look closer at the photo, grasshopper.

   It’s a tie in to southwest.com

   Took me a while to figure out as well. :-]

   Posted by Jon  on  03/12/07  at  09:51 AM

3. Wait, there are people left in LA?  I thought they had all moved up here to Puget-Tropolis.  We really need to setup some machinegun nests at the border to keep the rest of those folks out.

   Posted by michael  on  03/12/07  at  11:26 AM

4. Trust me, Michael. There are still PLENTY of people in L.A. And they are all on the 405 going in both directions.

   Posted by jon  on  03/12/07  at  11:29 AM

5. Judging by the sprawl and traffic on I-15, last time I was in SLC, you folks might want to build a few machinegun nests too.

   Posted by michael  on  03/12/07  at  10:47 PM

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