Deep in the abyss...
Here I am, in the famous St. Louis Lambert airport. Charles Lindbergh's plane is here, or something like that, and I'm sure it has some other irrelevant historical value. However, all I know about the airport is that the moment I step in the door is the moment I start thinking about an escape plan.
Is it just me or does it seem like every airport in the Midwest is some kind of biggest redneck in the universe contest? I want to start by stating that I don't only mean 'most redneck' (although that would probably be a significant factor in a real contest) but the physically 'largest.' I suppose the airport is full of fat people because if they had they chosen to walk a few thousand miles across the country, they probably would have cut some inches. But these look the kind of people that don't walk much farther than the fridge on the daily basis, unless Randy Jr. ate the last of the McGreasies leftover from last Thursday. I wonder how one can possess such a luxurious lifestyle and still maintain the moral and spiritual loftiness required to have a 3 foot tall Jesus sculpture on your lawn. Some are just gifted in their faith.
The American airport is indeed a fantastic spot for sitings of the elusive (at least in civilized cultures) 'Don't Mess With Texas' and 'John Deere' apparel. Trucker hats possibly less common, still seem to be in excess.
It's -almost- redeeming to see people reading in the airport, although the people who do are still but a fraction of the ones with their eyes plugged into their laptops (guilty) or their iPhones. However, on closer inspection you'll find out no one is actually reading at all, but simply having their brains absorb a heaping spoonful of sugary bullshit force-fed into the dark, gurgling pit of their mouths by Patricia Cornwall, Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer, or someone else that Mark Twain would've probably liked to beat with a hammer. I don't believe in book burning, but I am beginning to feel open-minded.
I still don't know if I want to call it airport limbo because it seems like I'm surrounded by the living dead, or if being surrounded by these other zombies kills me a little more inside each time. First of all, I'm sick of the couples. It's a four-stage process of development in people, and it almost always turns out the same way unless something truly disastrous happens (although at the end of this, you might call it a disaster too). It begins with the lovey-dovey newly wed types, all gushy and holding hands and just shouting to the world: "LOOK, SOMEONE -WILL- ACTUALLY SLEEP WITH ME! FUCK YOU CLASS OF '94!" They soon turn into the preggers type, where there might already be one screaming abomination already out of the womb and another one in, and both of the parents already starting to get the itch of fear that something out there in the big bad world of evilness (see: smokers, minorities, anyone else that the perfect family cannot bear the thought of interacting with their child) will do harm to their wittle preshush. I think it's pretty clear by now that I don't want kids, and yet this still fascinates me so. The third kind is the rich conservative type. These types will fly often, as most likely they will be trying to drown the misery in their life by consumption of possessions and vacations to cookie-cutter resorts where it's like the good old days, where they used to have servants. Usually it's a family vacation, with either a few bratty porkers or the blonde, blue-eyed type with names like 'Trevor,' 'Keith,' 'Anastasia,' or 'Kimberly.' And in the final form of this evolutionary process, they metamorphose into the bizarre bug-eyed old woman creature with an absurd amount of mascara and a Louis Vutton purse, just like the one staring at me right now. And now, just like Christians in Texas, evolution is starting to make me feel a little uncomfortable. The husband probably got caught in one of the myriad number of golf stores, which I always found to be a mystery as to why it would be in an airport until now. Then, the answer hit me like a nine iron to the forehead: golf is the coping mechanism of old rich men, an escape from their empty, meaningless, superficial excuse for existence; it's essentially the society man's substitute for alcohol or heroin. We're all the same, deep down.
But get this - What's hilarious is that I'm posting this on Blogger, while Blogger's 'Next Blog' feature serves as a perfect confirmation of theory. Don't believe me? Well bookmark this page, hit the 'Next Blog' button, return, and post a comment when you realize how true it is. Most of the time you will get stuck in one of the loops documenting some exceptionally boring family's life; complete with a catalog of depressingly ugly people in the form of wedding shots, 200,000 pictures of the same stupid looking baby with ice cream all over its face, or super duper fun in the sun family vacation shots. That is, unless you get stuck in one of the other little niches about knitting or biking or some other shit no one cares about. What the fuck is the point of a blog, anyway?
When it boils down to it, I just think airports have a lens that make people look uglier and stupider. However, I think this is a side effect of the fact that everyone is generally pissed off to be there. I know that I am, and that distorts my perception of others into having seriously noticeable genetic abnormalities, whether in the form of the 'You can tell I have low brain activity' stare or the 'I'm a superficial bitch' overbite. It's a deadly cycle, the more annoyed you get, the worse people seem, the more annoyed you get, and so on and so forth. I know there's probably a psychotropic drug I can take to cure the Airport Social Syndrome (ASS), but let's just say I'm not one to miss out on the details. I want to soak in all of that juicy bullshit completely unfiltered, through nothing but the lens of my bloodshot eyes.
- SL
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