It was anything but a straight shot.
A foggy, pre-dawn cab ride gouging ice ruts up the 205.
The frantic luggage dump at PDX, followed by a bloated four-coffee, three-Cinnabon flight delay.
A forty-four minute, 33,000-foot roller coaster assault on Seattle, nutsack plastered to the belt buckle at touchdown. A quick bathroom break, then a mad dash for Sea-Tac's lounge: three venti vanilla lattes, two chocolate eclairs, three Blue Moons with extra orange slices for vitamin C, all Jenga-ed onto a bacon, sausage, and Belgian waffle tower slathered in maple syrup.
Back up in the air, the cabin goes dark. REM comas for the lucky few, while us insomniacs stare holes through our alternative realities of choice: Plotless movies. Unintelligible subtitles. Mindnumbing video games. A veritable documentary wasteland, circa 2011: The making of the Bugatti Veyron. Airbrakes and 17k dollar tires. A tour through Rome's catacombs. A desembodied British voice squeaks like Sir David Attenborough sucking helium while being donkey-punched in the pills. Breathless reporters spew hyper news about societal collapse in North Korea. Crowds of villagers prostrate themselves in apoplectic fits. No time for context. Only sheer madness.
My face and palms are lubed in sweat. I'm dressed Green River serial killer chic for the grim realities of Portland's December, swaddled in long underwear top and bottom, flannel shirt, jeans, three layers of argyle socks, light windbreaker inside heavy bomber jacket, camo boonie hat. The petite lass on my left stuffs in her earbuds, avoiding eye contact.
Dinner is served. Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, green beans, and lime jello jigsawed into a glorified egg carton. Afterwards, I rip open a family fun-sized bag of sour gummy worms from carry-on, washing it down with econo-bottles of Drambuie lifted from the bar cart. "Want some, ma'am?"
The faceplate recoils. Pure horror.
Another beeline to the lavatory, squeezing past the anorexic guy's legs splayed on his girlfriend's lap as she reads a Cleo Hathaway romance novel. Submerged Desires. Sounds like a steamy classic, I'm sure, but Ichabod's been dead to the world since take-off. Lucky Turd.
The washroom degrades with each visit. Flight nerves? Bowel anxiety? There is no medical catch-all term for what trumpet blasts out a middle-aged colon six miles up at eight-tenth Mach for eleven hours . . . and we're out of toilet paper? My God. A deep breath of the befouled gummy worm and Belgium waffle tar pit dipped in Drambuie coffee grounds churning below me.
How did it come to this?