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air conditioning barricade
Saturday, August 26 2017
location: Bunk 2, Cabin 12, Camp Hollywoodland, Griffith Park, Los Angeles, California
Today was the day I'd be flying back to Upstate New York, and one of my possible rides to the airport would be leaving at 6:00am. I was awake before then but fell back asleep and by the time I was woke up, it was 6:24am. I grabed all my stuff (and all of the bedding I'd been using) and went down to the main hall, where Em and Brent (the VP of Corporate Outreach whose snoring has been the main feature of Cabin 12) were up early yacking about something. I got a cup of coffee and found my leftover Mohawk Bend pizza (Angry Vegan) in the fridge and devoured it outside next to a set of large water valves. I eventually I talked with Em and Brent about the topics everyone wants to talk to me about: my urinal system and my brownhouse. But then we moved on to the state of "the new IT," as it is widely known in The Organization. And I was perhaps a bit too candid about David, my erstwhile boss, and how his failure to listen and communicate had been huge problems. (Brent had asked me what lessons I'd learned from the shakeup, and I'd stressed the need to listen to underlings.)
There was breakfast, though the only part of it that really excited me were the cubes of tofu. While we were eating that and talking about the interview questions for hires in Administration and Corporate Outreach, Sara appeared and said she was hailing an Uber for the airport. Soon me, Sara, and Mikæl were loaded up and being driven down Canyon Drive. On the way, we saw a very healthy coyote strolling along a suburban sidewalk. Sara said she thought he looked lost, but he looked like he knew what he was doing to me.
Ever since I'd been in the office yesterday, the WiFi on my laptop (Hyrax) hadn't been working. It was as if someone had physically switched it off, though the switch showed that it should've been on. I tried getting it working this morning at LAX, but nothing I did seemed to work. If the WiFi was dead on that thing, maybe it was time to get myself something newer (and hopefully less clunky). I usually try to keep my main laptop in service for about two years before replacing it with another five year old one costing less than $200 on eBay.
I had a window seat on the first leg of my flight, which was to O'Hare airport in Chicago. I'd drained my bladder enough not to need to get up at all during the three and a half hour flight, though by the end I was a little uncomfortable. The flight would've been a lot more pleasant had the young Asian gentleman in the seat in front of me not had such a terrible case of halitosis. Great stinking clouds of it would come my way whenever he'd turn to look out the window. And this guy somehow had a girlfriend. I eventually figured out how to direct the stream of the air conditioning vent so that it fired like a laser into the middle of where those halitosis clouds were coming from, acting like an imperfect wall and diluting what little came through. I should mention that of course it was initially logical to assume the halitosis belonged to the elderly woman sitting in the middle seat to my right, since old people (in addition to not knowing how to get good seats in an airplane) tend to have worse breath than young people. But no, her breath was fine.
As we landed at O'Hare, I watched the process in real time on Google Maps, having a bird's eye view of the airport. This took away all the mystery of taxing and what fucking gate we were going to. I'd looked all that up and knew and could see us taking the quickest route to get there. Gretchen had warned me that O'Hare is a huge airport and that if I only had an hour to make my connection, it might not be enough time. But I knew exactly where to go and had plenty of time to spare. As often happens, the provided 120 volt outlets at the gate were all dead, but I managed to find one that worked behind a trashcan (which I scooted out of my way).
On the plane to Albany, I was actually sitting in the wrong window seat in my aisle, but the woman who should've been there was perfectly happy to take the other one, since by then I was trapped behind a very large man who was both tall and fat. He also stunk slightly, in the way that overweight people do. It was just enough of a smell to be distracting, though I set up another air conditioning barricade, and it effectively isolated my atmosphere, at least most of the time. This second flight was only an hour and a half, and I tracked most of it (including the landing in Albany) on my phone in real time. Now that I have that window on the process, it's likely I will do it from now on.
I drank two beers on the drive back from Albany; they'd been waiting for me on the floor in front of the passenger seat the whole time I'd been in Los Angeles. The weather was cool (in the low 60s) so the beers weren't even at a terrible temperature.
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