Monkeys Wearing Pants (4 page)

“Do you think it’s the steel plate in my
right testicle?” I asked. “Not everyone who served in Occupy Wall
Street came back in one piece, buddy.”

The TSA agent was not amused. “I’m going to
need you to go with these two agents, please,” he said, indicating
the Of Mice and Men pair who had joined the party. I was led into a
small room and given a brief explanation of how this was going to
go down. I noted immediately the complete and utter lack of
enthusiasm the pair seemed to have for the job at hand. The one who
seemed to be in charge explained the hilarity that was about to
ensue. “Sir,” he said in a flat voice, “because of the result of
your scan and the area in question, we are required by law to
conduct a search of your, um, well, that area. You will be able to
leave your pants on.” He clearly was not looking forward to this.
“Do you have any questions?”

“No. I get it. You’re going to feel me up. Go
trout fishing in America. Put your thumb on the scale. Say hello to
my little friends. Cast a wide net and haul in your limit of
genitailia. Yeah, I get it.” He had no response to this, but just
began his (surprisingly gentle) cupping. At this point, my goal was
to make him as uncomfortable as possible. So, while he cupped and
poked, as if he were trying to determine if a fresh loaf of bread
was done, I keep up a steady patter. “It’s funny, but my wife and I
met this way. You know, we would be legally married in 11 states by
now. Am I supposed to be feeling tingly all over? If you want me to
cough at any time, just let me know. Do I feel a little uneven to
you? I have been told I have a bit of a dangling participial on the
right. I don’t know if this is a full service pat down, but my
inner thigh is a little tight. This is weird, but I’m having a
senior prom flashback.” And then, thankfully, it was over, and I
was on my way. But not without two new, special friends and a pair
of underwear sure to evoke memories from that point forward.

The worst thing about early morning flights:
"Hey, isn't this the same (slightly damp) towel I used to dry off
four hours ago?”

I’m in the airport in Seattle waiting for my
flight to Anchorage. A few seconds ago a young couple sprinted by
at almost a full on run, awkwardly lugging their bags, pushing a
stroller and clutching their boarding passes like winning lottery
tickets. They were both sucking in air like the fat kid in P.E. and
the panicked look on their faces said it all, ‘We are about to miss
our flight.” In contrast, the little three-year -old in the
stroller was so happy, grinning ear-to-ear, waving her arms in the
air and practically screaming, “Go faster Mommy! Go faster!”
Sometimes life offers you a glimpse of beautiful contrast.

Apparently, the A/C in my hotel room only has
two settings: off and full-throttle, freezing, Arctic air, gale
force wind storm cold enough to freeze your snot and totally invert
your testicles. I'm having a hard time deciding which one to go
with.

Judging from the noise coming from the hotel
room above me, it seems to be occupied by Thumper, a Mexican
wrestler, a couple of Mandrake plants, Charlie Brown's teacher and
some guy who made one trip too many to the all-you-can-eat Vindaloo
chicken buffet.

While flying home today there was this guy in
the Seattle airport who totally looked like he should be an
international assassin. I was very tempted to go up to him and say,
“I thought Jason Bourne killed you.”

Note to self: not a good idea for anyone
involved to hang out the "do not disturb" sign when naked.

Driving back from Fresno yesterday, I got
into an ugly fight with my GPS. She said some things that were just
wrong. I said some things I later regretted. She is just so
stubborn and rigid and unyielding. I like to mix things up once in
a while. Anyway, I think we're OK now.

I have a new clock app on my Kindle. I got it
specifically so I could use my Kindle as a nightstand clock with an
alarm that was easier to use than the typical PhD-highly-suggested,
IQ of 197 plus required hotel clock radio. Last night, I set the
alarm and fell blissfully asleep while the neon green, analog
numbers softly bathed the room in a dim glow suitable for a scene
in a Ridley Scott Alien movie. I was in a deep sleep when the alarm
went off this morning: a loud, slumber-shattering, Pokémon
seizure-inducing, high-pitched beeping that is the electronic
equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. I shot straight up in bed with
one thought and one thought only: How do I turn this thing off? In
my cheery state of setting the alarm last night, I didn’t go so far
as to figure that out. Holding my Kindle, each jarring note of the
alarm hitting me like a hellish combination of a dentist’s drill
and a dozen mosquitos mating in my eardrum, I pushed and slid and
swiped everything I could see on the screen to no avail. The alarm
continued to warn of impending tsunamis and an imminent German air
raid. OH MY GOD, MUST MAKE IT STOP! I tried closing the app, but
that didn’t work. I opened it again and went into the menu, looking
for a way to end the madness, but there was nothing there. SWEET,
BLESSED JESUS AND ALL THAT IS HOLY, WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO? I fiddled
and fussed and then, as I imagined an angry mob of hotel guests
armed with pitchforks, clubs and torches (and maybe a Kindle of
their own! Gasp!), it hit me. YOU IDIOT, JUST TURN IT OFF! Pushing
down on the power button with enough pressure to stop blood from
spurting out of a major artery, and with the alarm from hell still
screeching at me like a cheated-on girlfriend, the Kindle greeted
me with this screen: “DO YOU WANT TO SHUT DOWN YOUR KINDLE?”
followed by two buttons reading “Shut Down” and “Cancel.” At that
moment, I had never wanted anything so badly in my life. I tapped,
tapped, tapped the “Shut Down” button like one of Poe’s ravens and
watched as the Kindle’s screen turned black and, FINALLY, off.
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! WAIT A MINUTE…THE ALARM IS STILL GOING! HOW IS
THIS POSSIBLE? Had I downloaded an app from the future? Was my
Kindle being run by some demonic creature from Hell? Am I being
punked? Did someone just really, really want to make sure I didn’t
oversleep? I jumped out of bed thinking that I might be able to
flush the Kindle down the toilet. That’s when I noticed my cell
phone on the floor, where I had apparently knocked it to in the
middle of the night. OH YEAH, I had set the alarm on my phone as a
back-up, just in case, and it was my phone, not my Kindle, that was
beeping like R2-D2 high on meth and a bad can of WD-40. I turned
off my phone, and the room was once again silence. Oops. My bad.
And my Kindle app? It never did turn on the alarm. I’m going back
to bed.

If little Jonny goes on a trip for 7 days and
needs one pair of socks and one pair of underwear for each, day how
many pairs total does he need of each? I don't know the answer,
apparently, because I have 8 pairs of socks and 6 pairs of
underwear. This new math is killing me!

Aside from the carpool lanes and the regular
lanes, we need a lane designated "really old men wearing hats with
the blinker still on."

Because I've been flying so much for work,
I've been elevated in the airlines’ caste system from a guy for
whom an upgrade was pretty much untouchable to a guy who maybe gets
a bump up to first class every three or four flights. That little
taste of seventh heaven has really soured me on the cattle car that
exists behind the magic curtain. It's not the snob appeal. It's not
the somewhat superior food or drink. It's not even the fact that I
can get out of the plane 10 seconds after they open the door. No,
it's really all about the first-class seat.

Back in coach, the section 8 airline housing
for the 98%, some sadist determined that three across seating on
either side of the plane with an aisle just wide enough for a
fashion model on meth to shimmy through would work out just fine.
It hasn't. The three-across seating method makes for a lose-lose
flying experience. Let's examine each seat so that I may prove my
point.

The window seat: There are some positive
things that come with the window seat. Not surprisingly, having a
window is one of them. But if you fly a lot, the magic of imagining
cumulus clouds as big puffs of cotton and little miniature
buildings and cars as, well, little miniature buildings and cars
soon wears off. Whenever there is actually something of note to
look at (cue your captain telling you to look out the right side of
the aircraft to see some mountain, a lake, or the lights of
Winnemucca, NV), the person in the middle seat is going to lean
over and crane their head to and fro so that they, too, can see
whatever wonderfulness is out there. If the exact, questionable
scenario were happening in a parked car and a cop went by, you
would get a quick burst of white light, a couple seconds of
flashing lights and sirens, and a deep voice coming over the PA
speaker telling you to 'move along'. The window seat also requires
that you have a bladder the size of an ostrich egg, because when
the window seat person needs to get up and go, aisle and
middle-seat folks need to dislodge and shuffle over and out like
guests on a late-night talk show. Finally, if a Canadian goose
makes a wrong turn and become mock foie gras after getting sucked
into an engine, you'll be among the first to know and will have a
front-row seat to impending disaster. I don't want to be the
messenger on that one.

The middle seat: Much like the Susan B.
Anthony dollar, the middle seat has virtually no redeeming
features. Unless you are a rail-thin contortionist and can fold
your shoulders like your expensive headphones, inward and flat
against your body, you are going to be uncomfortable. Murphy's Law
of the middle seat states that the probability is high you will
have a sumo wrestler on one side of you and a big 'ol hillbilly
(softly humming ”Dueling Banjos” under his breath) on the other.
There's nothing worse than spending three hours between the
proverbial rock and hard place, unable to exhale fully while your
arms are folded high and tight across your chest like an extremely
disappointed hall monitor.

The aisle seat: The aisle seat is still my
seat of choice despite its many shortcomings. The upside is that I
can stand up in the aisle without having to do the funky chicken
slide and scoot when coming from the window seat. The down side is
really all about that winning hypothesis which states two solid
objects can't occupy the same space. My shoulders are wider than
the actual seat, meaning there is always a part of me hanging out
there in the aisle that the airline has deemed as fair game. If I
had a quarter for every time my shoulder or elbow has been clipped
by the corner of the stainless steel beverage cart, I could afford
to buy my own upgrades for life. But the worst thing about the
aisle seat is when two people going in opposite directions decide
to pass each other in the aisle in your general vicinity. What is
almost physically impossible can only happen if each of those
people protrudes way in towards the seat. That is when you find
yourself with a face full of either someone's crotch or someone's
ass as those two people make enough physical contact to be
considered married in about 11 states.

I watched a flight attendant put a verbal
smack down on a kid today, and it was beautiful. As our flight was
getting ready to take off, a couple of minutes after the
announcement had been made to turn off all electronics, a
20-something-year-old guy in a seat across the aisle was still
playing around with his tablet when an older, very sweet-looking
flight attendant came our way. When she got to our row she looked
over at the young man and said very nicely, “Excuse me, sir, I’m
going to need you to turn that off now.” Without looking up, the
kid muttered, “In a minute” in a tone that any parent would
instantly recognize as young people speak for, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD,
CAN’T YOU SEE I’M BUSY DOING SOMETHING? PLEASE JUST LEAVE ME ALONE
FOR TWO MINUTES WHILE I FINISH THIS THING I’M DOING OF MONUMENTAL
IMPORTANCE THAT YOU DON’T EVEN UNDERSTAND, JEEZ, AND OMG, STOP
BUGGING ME! The flight attendant smiled and said, “Sir? Sir?” until
the kid finally looked up at her. “Turn…that…off…right…now,” she
said in a tone that would have made Dirty Harry pee his pants,
accentuating each word like she was speaking to a naughty
two-year-old or a shoe-chewing puppy. The pleasant smile was still
there, but the eyes were flinty blue steel like David Banner’s
before turning into the Hulk. It was subtle, but it was there. It
was awesome. The kid’s eyes got big, and his jaw literally dropped,
and he froze for a second. If he had been a deer he would have been
certain road kill. When he snapped back, he got the tablet turned
off in about three seconds. He looked at the flight attendant like
a guilty Catholic schoolboy about to get his knuckles smacked on by
an industrial-strength ruler. “Thank you,” the flight attendant
said simply and sweetly before moving on. I wanted to cheer. It was
a beautiful thing.

On my way to Las Vegas for three days of
meetings and seven minutes of fun. Going through security, I asked
the TSA guy if my fruit basket would be affected by the X-ray. "You
have a fruit basket in there?" he asked. "No. It was more of a
hypothetical question," I said. Hey...I just wanted to leave him
with food for thought.

Sitting next to three nuns in the Portland
Airport. One has an iPad, one has a laptop, and one has a new smart
phone. Is there a God? I guess there's an app for that!

The alarm clock in my hotel room didn’t work.
I called the front desk to see if I could get another one.

Front Desk: Can I help you?

Me: Hey, my alarm clock isn’t working. Can I
get another one?

Front Desk: Oh. What’s wrong with it?

Me: You can’t see the numbers.

Front Desk: What numbers?

Me: The numbers that you need to see to
actually determine the time. What a minute! Did I get a room for
clairvoyants?