Airport Crowd

A screed followed by an actual ANALysis by yours truly

I am notoriously known in my family as a hobbit. Every time I am in the security line at the airport I declare a need for teleportation, or, at the least, a chance at private aviation, if not abandoning travel altogether. I’ve been given the privilege of flying private some twenty times and can concede there is nothing like it. Funny how I do not complain with shrimp cocktail and a pretty stewardess—I am a spoiled little shit, I know.

Recently I had to break my streak of avoiding airports and, alongside my dad, ventured to one of those liminal slices of Sodom.

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Due to us having to be up at an hour wherein even the rooster is still slouched in its nest, I decide to stay up the entire night.

On the way there, I try to circumvent the toils of airport nonsense and make small-talk with my equally distressed dad about our plans when we arrived. I show him the clip of John Cena butt naked with a paper nudged near his genitalia, and say that is how I feel at airports. I already feel preemptively greased up and in agony.

It is all dandy enough when you’re right outside, at the drop-off zone. If you’re lucky you can check in suitcases there. If not, you have to go inside and GET IN LINE. I find airports take on the same architecture of a modern museum and it is quite tasteless but it must be uglyified to deter the commonplace low IQ instinct of disrespecting clean, beautiful designs. AHem.

Already, I am judging everyone I can see. First thought? Obesity.

My dad has his enormous baseball cap on to fit his massive cranium and we are punished with an upcharge for our luggage. Would you like to dispose of some items to lower its weight? YES! I would LOVE to crack open my decently packed suitcase in front of bored to shit tardos who stare as if constipated and dispose of excess items that I packed FOR A REASON! No, sigh; just charge us. A woman behind us has a serious puss-on. Me too but without the bug eyes and the bob. My dad tries putting his license back into his wallet and his cards spill everywhere—SPECTACLE! One would need a cuticle pusher to get those things off the ground. This woman in her athleisure jumpsuit is still looking.

At which point I am going to die. I am sweating bullets and yawning impulsively to stave off an attack and I walk quickly past old-heads with my dad. He’s my anchor, thank God. There’s shells on the tiles—this is a Florida airport but one of the better ones BELIEVE ME. There are men built like sasquaches and women with lymphedema out of an H.P Lovecraft novel. Typically women are known for hating their equivalents but here, anytime I see a well-kempt teenage girl wandering about in a cute outfit, I like her and she doesn’t know it but we’re friends. I’m mewing as we make our way to the security line because I’m part-androgenic—the guy, not the manly state—and I see lots of recessed jaws that make me insecure about mine. I think people are looking at my beak. I am the cooing rooster.

It is LONG. I start getting tunnel vision, but am able to pull it back with a forceful tug of my tote bag and an intense need to, rather than panic inward and ruin the morning, ruminate closely on the clientele alongside my dad. At our flank there are two YNs. Surprisingly I like them because they’re quiet and completely soaked in their identity. Alright We Wuzzes. They didn’t seem too crazy about anything.

In front of me is an insufferable hispanic woman (I shouldn’t get into this!!) with a black-eyed baby and thirty thousand suitcases to which she has no idea what to do with. There’s also ten more of these. Whatever. Just be a ‘decent fucking human being’ and geez cool the racism it’s 4 o’clock in the morning HOE.

Elton John’s ‘I think I’m gonna kill myself,’ leaves my lips in manic whispers like SpongeBob’s rocking back and forth bipolar period. The minorities are honestly more or less uninteresting to look at. Pre-occupied. What really irks me is a cluster of white people in the line adjacent to mine. One is this tall and probably European guy who keeps messing with the guardrails like some googenheimy white knight. We know you’re not supposed to cross the line, and we know you’re going to get promptly hounded by the TSA. It’s unclear whether he was trying to help the TSA or the incoming people, but it really doesn’t matter—the best you can do is render yourself entirely obeisant.

Another—and you just KNOW the type—is a cluster of well to do buffalo chicken dip people. The man. Or, the husband. Goodness gracious, it is like one took a male and put it through a meat grinder. Soft, sun-freckled arms with pointy elbows and sausage fingers. HORRIBLE, absolutely ATROCIOUS facial hair to accompany what absence of jaw he thought the near PCOS type beard would cover. An anglo mystery, lost in the aether. I see the non-slope, I see the big nothing there. I assume his toe and leg hair is wispy and thin. He is not terribly obese but he has an overall softness despite not yet at the age where that’s permitted. His belly slopes over his mesh red shorts and his ball-cap is of some sports team. Yes, yes—millions of these. His wife is tall, well-kept, and thin. I don’t know. He’s subservient, probably. I point to him with zero secrecy and look at my dad like this:

My dad grins. I am standing with a SIGMA.

“Low T.”

“You don’t say.”

“Fromage,” rolling his r’s, “Frrrrromageeeyyy.”

I nudge him. “You should feel better about yourself.”

“Yeah. Well.”

“I will either be Napoleon or marry a Napoleon.”

“Alright. Ok. Relax.”

Engaging, briefly and ironically, in a blackcent, “Where my mannnn atttt, the fuckkk.”

I trail these people until we reach the beginning of the monster pit. Average TSA experience:

Before we enter the salami-line we are required to slip our ID into a Venus fly-trap thing and, while it is processing, we stand in front of an elementary school tablet and it takes a photo of us. I see my inverted self in the blurry mirror along with the YNs behind me. I look like butt but at least I weighed less when I stepped on the scale an hour prior. I smile like a dumb bitch at the TSA worker and receive no response. Beside me, there’s a transgender one with a cast on his arm. This is a relatively conservative City in Florida, and Florida is conservative. So what are we doing here blud.

The Hispanic woman in front of me takes literal decades—wherein I feel wrinkles forcing emphasis on my naso-labial folds—to get everything sorted out. Naturally her baby is crying and naturally she is ignoring it. In less than two seconds my dad and I place our laptops neatly on the disgustingly dull-grey plastic containers and send them henceforth into the x-ray machine. I am constantly frightened that I will receive a simultaneously randomized yet mandatory bag search. I feign apathy and pass a resignedly content look at everyone around me. The starchy ceiling tiles allude to a certain mental asylum and the beige walls remind me of a taint, also I muse that it smells like one—I make myself laugh in these subtle ways, and thus enjoy myself. I watch my powerful dad be humiliated by the arms-up legs spread stance of the large scanner machine, like a mini tornado at one of those goyfest arcades but instead of a whirlwind you’re getting pulsed with radioactive particles. When it is my turn I, for no reason, turn and smile at the YN, IDK why, then casually and absurdly step in there and get it done quickly and nicely. After which all feeling of agitation ceases and I can return to my cognitive vitriol.

Upon receiving my DAMAGED, radioactive goods, I see a belt in my container. Why. And then no one came to get it—a homeless, stupid belt. I will speak more on this later.

“IF ANYONE IS MISSING A BELT ITS SITTING IN SECURITY PLEASE PICK IT UP.”

“THE LOCAL TIME IS 4:45 AM.”

“FLIGHT ENROUTE TO ——”

And then it repeats all that in Espanol because yaknow. There are people consuming a dish I equate to Satan’s diarrhea—Chili, at this early morning hour. (I am a Chili DESPISER. No one can tell me Kidney beans in some weird meatloafy sauce half marinara half mexican spice is good. It doesn’t know what it wants to be. Bisexual meal. IDK if that’s how it’s actually made I just hate it).

As we pass the tchotchke stores and other fast-food restaurants, alongside places you can pick up a little BITE TO EAT, a LITTLE BITE, a SANDO (executing everyone who says ‘sando’ JKJK), I do a glorious spin and tell my dad how grateful I am to be past security. He tells me the gate number and juts to the bathroom. Doody calls.

The one upside to airports is that it allows me to be phone-free. At the gate I am subject to so many unfashionable and invigoratingly gauche individuals that it allows me to think very ably and clearly about certain things. However, because I am without my glasses, I have to squint pertinently, and then switch to wide eyes, to even vaguely make the outline of these lackeys configurations. When they see my glare they must see this:

Anyway, to act like I’m NOT actually looking I whip out Aristotles’ Politics and squint intermittently at that before switching back, as if I am absorbing his screed about the idea of natural-born slaves then reverting back to the public to identify who would be NOT and who would be SO. Because I’m a shit-stain and need to think these things through or else I get miserable.

My dad comes back. We always find an outlet seat. He plugs in his phone and dives into some bottomless-instagram-pit. Five minutes of sated observation causes me to note some extra people, this time those set to attend my flight.

1. An old man with a guitar case. Caught me looking at him like the fledgling black boy and smiled. Respectable, in jeans. An amiable, balding man. Lovely.

2. A blonde woman, obese and I mean it. Not simply plump, or fupa-esque, and for some odd reason upon witnessing her I’d gotten deja-vu. She wore a black tank-top and I thought of those fried turkey legs at state-fairs as I watched her arms move to retrieve her Michael Kors DUPE purse. Her nails and hair were beautifully maintained. Hm.

3. Another blonde, middle-aged, eating a bagel. I could tell she was attracted to my dad. She flipped her hair and her eyes were quick and resistant to look instead at her bagel like a civilized person. She smeared it in a plastic container of cream-cheese, broke off another piece, wiped crap off her lip.

4. A peak millennial couple. Gangly, mid 30s, bored, controlled, cucked, obliterated with a hydroflask. Nothing more to say.

And then, unfortunately, although able to seem completely gobsmacked by Politics, I burst out laughing when right across from my dad and I sit this awful family. I say awful entirely predicated on appearance and depth-perception, in which case I mean that literally. Easy to know exactly what these people get up to on a baseless Sunday. First it was either a Gen X or Millenial guy, very springy and Mickey Mouse goofalicious with a fedora, and the fedora had a red feather, as well as a burnt chest luridly exposed to me in a quarter buttoned button-up, and with it he wore shorts. I could see all the way up to his groin. I did not look. He also had a ginger goatee and Sperry’s, which I think can look good sometimes but not HERE. Alongside him was his wife, overweight with a horror t-shirt you buy at ROSS DRESS FOR LESS with a Terrifier franchise bag, hair in a bun already slept in, dirty, with outdated shoes. After a tense minute of trying not to look their kids come over—water bottles out the wazoo. I feel as if I’m the only one that doesn’t carry some abominably large and LOUD metal CLANKING water bottle that I have to go FILL and drink like sucking on nip every TWO SECONDS. Everything about this family is SOFT and linkin park coded and they haven’t evolved yet they guzzle this water like it’s HELPING.

I turn back to my book and giggle.

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I appear like an incredibly judgmental person; I am, and I am not excluded from these judgements. However, when I see these people submerged in one place I tend to react hyperbolically and even animatedly because, insofar as I can gauge their exact life, which is generally done easily, it feels good. It feels good to insist upon the destitution of the exterior in avoidance of those inner qualms, and for all my hypotheses of my own behavior, these ones can be easily and pleasurably proved in one microcosmic instant and in one lacking, sorry place. But I don’t look abominably on the populace for pleasure that posits me as superior—I do it because it posits me as a thinker, it stimulates me to a more enlightened pace so I can later come to the page and scribble this down. Hoping, in some way, to make a case for reform. From here I will attempt a more analytical lens.

I am eighteen. I haven’t yet had feelings that come in later ages. I am aware that there are achievable feats of happiness still attainable in this world and I am, as sensibly as I can, trying to achieve them. Despite this I am often overcome with a feeling of identity fraud. Not as if I am fastening myself to a life undignified and unfit for me—I have made careful and oftentimes compromising halts to avoid that—but like it is disgraceful to turn my inherently prescriptive eye away from what is clearly a degenerated world occurring from my conception and beyond. Granted I am young, I don’t know if I am right, but I seem to have been plagued—and blessed—with this prescriptive aptitude. It’s downside is that I am emotionally distant at what is closest to me, and what is in my simpleton power to do, but emotionally roused by these worldly disparities that seem to undermine anything I’d attempt to do in conquest of the former. So, I am not attune with what I am objectively meant to do.

When I retrieved my bag and its electronics and saw the belt, I stared at it questionably. I had watched my hardened container get rolled onto the pipeline, belt-less, and yet now it was accompanied by an unfamiliar and Tommy Bahama-adjacent object. It seemed to have appeared there. C’est la vie. Perhaps it was Schrodinger’s belt, pre-existing my tote bag, destined to be placed there in the invisible hive of the X-Ray, concurrently there and not there depending on it’s position in the X-Ray. And then, when it was announced that someone had indeed lost their belt, I turned and looked at the crowd behind me, waiting for a start and sudden remembrance from one of my peers, wherein they’d go and get it. That did not happen. It startled things but also deliberately seemed to reserve space as is while remaining stagnant, unpossessed, to be taken and thrown through a hostile, administrative ringer.

I gallivant and use theatrics to convey these hostilities to friends and family. But then it is reduced and forgotten about. The belt itself was dirty. There was a soot stain on it’s side, like wiped charcoal or pencil, that wiped against my bag and soiled it, very faintly, but enough for me to, upon noticing it, try to wash it off. It was one of those insufferably permanent stains.

In those TSA lines, they only have a vague idea of who’s items are whose, and if something were to be scanned as unfit to pass the line, only then do they go back and find the person possessing it, in pursuit of reprimanding. So you lump your most important items into a duplicate of a duplicate of a grey concaving box, and you hope that in the indiscernible and intimidatingly corpulent scanner they will not be misplaced. In the event that they are, you must stand and wait with the rest of the apathetic, duplicate phenotypes to retrieve what has been, if it hasn’t been robbed, flung inconsiderately into someone else’s pile. You are distractedly coerced into entering an arch where, while your material goodness is stripped and indistinguishable, you are undergoing the same treatment. Worse case you are declared as threatening and must be molested under the breast and groin because you have mis-ticked. If not it is still dehumanizing because you have metabolized into an exacting caricature of yourself and must be subject to judgements based mostly on your associative markers, and in recent years and for certain specific types these have been criminally inverted. As this is happening, you watch glossy-eyed and belated agents intermingle, with the help of technology, through your things, unclear as to what they are seeing. Presumably nothing, but it is precisely that anticipation that burgeons a destructive feeling in the gut, that you have become a kind of omniscient, person-less point to be briefly recognized, calibrated, and obtusely sacked for the next patron. Your environment is delegitimized with nods to patriotism beside the sleeping agent clicking through nonsense, and behind which flag sits corpsely wrinkled comes a filing cabinet wall, smudged and dampened in fluid movement, transitional compartments unacknowledged by any sentimental designer or careful, present instructor, and you are remaining there prostrate with sprinkled nerves and a head of contempt, looking at those walls, at their thoughtlessness. Everything brisk with a sensation of destruction; I wait for my possessions, at the very least, and they’ll come back all mine.

The box of doom is shot out the other end, rumbling—hopeful, you see what was once yours and saunter toward it, dismissing the indolent space and the slow, inebriatedly dim people who come just a caliber before you, their formation like helpless, infantile ducks lost in a pond.

But there’s a belt. A belt has emerged from nowhere and left it’s incredibly dirtying, like all else in the room, spot on your novel belongings. You ignore how soiled you’ve become by the time relative to the space in which you’ve occupied this squalor and glare at this instead. A technological blockade in which both you and your belongings were subject to then emerge some foreign object. You, and your special things, house a territory unlike yours, and you set your eyes disconcertedly on this puzzling thing howsoever forgetting that you have, first, placed your lodgings in these plastic, stinking, unclean containers, and second, you have walked step-to-odious-step through a electrical tyrant wherein your body is stripped bare and skeletal for prying, seedy eyes to deride, and third, you have watched in horror as various so-unlike-you figures have done the same, and finally, you have been out-putted to reconcile with what you sling confidently to your shoulder as if to say this is mine, and it too has been through similarly dismantling treatment, and only now do you see such a belligerent, wrong thing imbuing on your sacred items. This is an essential step in making it to any tarmac.

C’est la vie you poor nomad. Look closer. This is the thing itself.