You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The absurdity of the TSA.
They are burger flippers with badges, inept as the Mexican Navy, worthless like turkey stuffing the day after thanksgiving.
I have just wasted a good portion of my Saturday morning waiting in a line so that a TSA moron on a power trip can remind me that I am a citizen of the USA.
Now I am in the next phase of stupid. This is the space where you get herded into more lines and you are strip searched and xrayed and forced to remove your shoes and have your private parts examined.
This is the part of the TSA experience most people complain about.
I am lugging a lap top and a carry on bag. I am wading through a line that is hundred yards long winding back and forth like a flesh snake.
There must be a hundred people ahead of me.
It’s 7:45 am on a Saturday. Where are all these knuckle heads going?
What a menagerie of humanity. Fat and skinny and saggy and droopy. Clothes too tight and colors that a rainbow wouldn’t lay out as a sartorial ensemble.
And then there is the lady with the Mt Everest cleavage. Her shirt is tight like a trampoline. Her neck line is plunging like Donald Trump’s chances to be President.
Men are trying not to look at this traveler, but that’s a lot to ask. The line is moving slow and she is dressed like an exotic dancer.
The woman is a side of beef hanging in a deli run by starving wolves.
I get to the steel table with the bins.
Off with the shoes. Off with the belt. Off with the glasses, the watch the wallet. I lose the shoes and the keys.
I push the carry on bag into the x-ray machine. Then the bin. Then the lap top case, then the lap top in a bin for myself.
“Next,” the man in the blue uniform screeches.
I walk into the vertical tube and assume the position, heads over my head. It’s as if I am being robbed of my dignity and personal space.
The x-ray machine activates.
I feel like turning my head and coughing, but I remain still as the metallic bar passes around me.
I wonder if my junk is being displayed on a large screen somewhere. Will they tell me if they see something I should be concerned about.
“Come out the TSA man says.”
I get to the other side of the screening area and rendezvous with my bins and bags.
I put my wallet in my pocket, put my glasses on my head, put my keys in another pocket, and toss my belt into a loop.
I am winded as people begin to surround me to get their bags backing up in the machine.
What a mess. I grab my belonging like warm laundry coming out of the dryer and join the refugees of half-dressed citizens holding onto benches.
It feels like a TSA walk of shame as we all stand side by side putting on sandals, and sliding belts through loops and adjusting our under pants that have some how ridden high in this process.
I walk ten miles to my gate. C-19.
I’m lugging a carry on and a lap top. This stuff didn’t feel heavy when I started this process. Now I’m tired. It feels like i packed lead bricks.
I feel beads of sweat dancing on my forehead. Ah come on sweat. Get back in those pores. We don’t have time for perspiration right now.
I strain to wipe my face with the back of my hand. The sudden effort forces more sweat through my skin. It’s like a moisture jail break as the beads of perspiration dances angrily on my epidermal layer.
This is ridiculous, I think to myself.
Finally, I get to the gate. It seems like I was dropped off at the airport days ago. I am wet and exhausted.
I flop down in the high back leather seat with the South West Luv’s me logo.
I take a moment to survey my surroundings.
When it comes to travelers, I’m looking at every shade of grey.
Some people are normal. Sadly, not enough.
A woman moves to the seat beside me. She is clutching a screaming little boy, two carry bags, and somehow holding a cell phone.
Quiet she says with the calmness of a bull horn.
She takes her arms off the child to put down her bags.
The kid is Houdini.
Woosh.
Like that, the little boy is gone.
Like a greased pea on a marble floor, he scampers for the border. He is Steve McQueen in the Great Escape. He is going to make it to Switzerland and jump that motorcycle over that razor wire if it kills him.
The mother is horrified, as she drops everything on the ground, but her cell phone.
The boy is about 18 inches tall and he quickly disappears into a human forest of calves and over sized shopping bags on the floor.
I watch as she does her best OJ Simpson running around and over bags. She quickly catches him before he can run down the jet way. She grabs him firmly by the arm.
Yank.
The boy shrieks.
People stare. It is uncomfortable.
The woman walks him sternly back to the chair, keeping a firm grip on his tiny body. He is wailing like a debutante told she has to sleep with Vladimir Putin.
Quiet she says, not concerned about who is watching or what we hear.
She sits down. She is exasperated. I don’t blame her. I’d have let him go down the jet way.
Fix that you TSA bastards.
“Here play with this,” I hear her say.
I expect the child to have a shard of broken glass or a switch blade.
Instead, he is thumbing through an iphone.
He has gone silent.
Iphone. The new mother’s milk.
The child is transfixed, satiated by a constant stream of blather raining into his brain from the great internet beyond.
That’s when the man on the other side of me says; “my wife is sitting over there. She just texted me that you are the guy on the news.
I laugh. “That I am.”
“Really respect your work,” he says.
“Appreciate that,” I respond.
And so it goes.
We make small talk and I take in the incredible diversity of our country.
I see halter tops and plunging neck lines. I see Bald heads and guts bigger than a row boat. I see a man wearing orange pants and red shoes. He is brighter than a rodeo clown. I can only laugh. I watch two brothers fight. I see people so large they should be forced to buy 2 seats. I see people drinking big gulps wondering how many times they will have to go to the lavatory in a 4 hour flight. I see insideous clothing styles and outdated hairstyles and loud cell phone talkers.
The airport is a mixing bowl of everything and anything.
It’s so crazy, it is entertaining.
Suddenly passengers with A tickets are asked to stand in the corral.
I am number 32. I go to the section and wait to numerically sort myself.
A woman with a big 29 looks at my paperwork and steps in front of me. She smiles. I smile. It’s all so ridiculous. Like 3 positions will matter.
“Yeah you just take all that over head bin space lady.”
I am frustrated. I am tired of waiting and carrying bags. I just want to sit down inside this plane.
We move. We board. I toss my stuff in the over head bin. I find my seat by the window. I adjust my seat belt.
I exhale. Perhaps I can rest now.
Suddenly I see Jabba the Hut moving down the aisle toward me.
Oh no. Please don’t sit here.
Too late!
Life’s Crazy™