Christopher Street

Chicago

I took a trip to Chicago earlier in the year for a convention. A furniture convention. Yeah, yeah--the excitement of my life knows no bounds.

In any case, it's been a crazy summer, and I never got around to posting the journal entry that I wrote on the plane home. It was all written and everything--just never posted it. I know, lame.

I should write more about my weird summer--between the conventions and the consumption and the weird, hideous, disfuguring skin virus, well, it has not been *un* eventful.

But that will have to wait. Today, it's all about Chicago.

It痴 worth noting at this point that I don稚 like airplanes.

I知 writing this on an airplane. Not doing something fancy like typing on my blackberry or anything曜ust typing into a word document for the super-high-tech cut and paste later, if I remember. Or, if it turns out that I have anything even partially interesting to say.

It痴 worth noting at this point that I don稚 like airplanes. As much as I don稚 like airplanes, I like flying even less. I try to avoid flying, if I can. I don稚 fly capriciously. But sometimes it痴 necessary and years of therapy do get me on the damn things. There is, however, not enough therapy in the world to make me like them.

It痴 not that I think that planes are inherently particularly dangerous. It痴 really that I think that life, in and of itself, is a particularly mortal exercise, with huge buckets of danger at every turn. In 典he World According to Garp�, John Irving coined the phrase 砥nder-toad�, to refer to the general anxiety that plagues us all, the danger that greets us at every turn, in the form of planes and trains, speeding motorcycles, plugged-in curling irons, unstable tree limbs, falling pianos, medicinal overdoses, aneurisms (which I just had a bitch of a time spelling, by the way. ANEURISM. A-N-E-U-R-Y-S-I. Wait. A-N-E-U-R-I-S-Y. Hmph. A-N-E-U-R-R-I-S. Shit. Like that.)

But, I digress. Undertoad.

The story was this. Garp had a son, Duncan, and one day, as Duncan was swimming in the ocean, his father called to him to beware of the undertow. The boy heard his father say, 釘eware of the Under Toad�, and imagined some huge toad-monster waiting to snatch small children from under their parents noses. The Under Toad. Garp returns to this metaphor over and over in the book, to refer to great feelings of dread. Feeling that the Toad is gonna getcha.

The Under Toad is never stronger for me than before I have to fly somewhere. It痴 interesting悠 am not an hysterical flyer. I don稚 need to be medicated, I don稚 cry, I don稚 get all histrionic. I don稚 even drink in flight, except for that one time I got upgraded to first flass and then it was just for the experience of getting, you know, free liquor. Once I am on the plane, I am a vision of calm, much like the folks that you see being lead to the gas chamber. I have made my peace. This is going to go down as it is going to go down, and as therapist number three once told me, it is pure ego to think that I can keep the plane up with worrying. So, I go, I sit, I buckle, I fly. It痴 cool.

The two or three days before the flight are another story. I can稚 sleep, I have nightmares. Awake, my mind races悠 can稚 help it. I start to think about what will happen to my family when the plane crashes, when I am gone. It痴 crazy, but I never claimed to be sane. I get on every single flight, not necessarily believing that I will die, but really painfully aware that I could. Every flight, it痴 just me and good old Mister Toad.

This flight has gone OK, so far. We池e flying at night, which always makes me more nervous揺ow does the pilot see?傭ut we池e 12 minutes from home, they tell me, and , well, we just hit a major amount of turbulance. Shit. We appear to be flying through a thunder storm, if the flashes of lightening are any indication. Cabin lights flickering, the whole shebang. Not pleased with this turn of events.

We weren稚 supposed to fly at night. Because it makes me more nervous to do so耀ee above re: how do they see at night悠 never schedule night flights. However, tonight there was some sort of ground freeze on flights leaving for the east coast, due to some weather, and we wound up sitting on the tarmac for almost three hours. Wedged in like sardines, no AC and me in LINED crepe pants. We ended up not leaving Chicago till almost 8:30 local time, which puts us in Baltimore around 10:45. Again, local time.

How was my trip to Chicago, you ask? Well, aside from the flying, it was good. I now know many things about Chicago that I didn稚 know before, not the least of which is that the entire freaking city apparently has an aversion to air conditioning. I mean, I get that it痴 on a lake, and supposedly it痴 all *breezy*, but bitch, please. You can稚 put, like, 9,000 people in an Italian restaurant in June and not condition the air. That way lies madness. And, please, please Chicago taxi drivers揺ear me! There is a reason that cars are air conditioned擁t痴 because no one likes driving with the windows down. We don稚. We also don稚 like driving 40 feet at a time at the speed of sound and then slamming on out brakes, but that痴 another story.

(And here, the plane landed. There was, I am sure, intended to be more to the story, but life interfered. And, I could add more to the story now, but I am not going to. )