It’s fair to say that I actually feel that way all of the time – my husband can testify that I worry very much about doom, about something awful happening, about dying some horrible painful gruesome death. This is why I’m so much “fun” to be around.
Sometimes I wonder if the reason I become more and more full of dread with every year that passes is because I’ve led such a charmed and relatively easy life so far and there’s no way it’ll last. It’s not fair, and the universe sorts these things out, right?
So I have yet another transatlantic journey coming up (in two and a half weeks holy shit), this time with a sweet adopted dog who has extreme anxiety issues centered around noise and separation and who will have to ride in the cargo hold for first a 1-hour flight and then after a 3-hour layover, an 11-hour flight that is landing in one of the hottest places in Christendom in late July, so more than ever before, it’s vitally important that nothing go wrong, that there are no delays or mistakes made by airline agents or even any extra cruising around the 1,000-degree tarmac waiting for the pilot to be told which gate to go to. The last time I landed at DFW airport, we literally rolled around that goddamn tarmac for a solid 45 minutes, and then pulled up to a gate and sat there for another 30 before they attached the gangway thingy or whatever it’s called.
Yes, I’ve been reassured by two different Lufthansa agents on the phone, and in writing on their website, that the animal-containing area of the cargo hold is air-conditioned. They swear to all that is holy on earth that it is safe for my dog to be down there, even at DFW airport in July, even if we sit on the tarmac for 2 hours.
The problem is that I have almost no faith in humanity anymore, and I don’t believe anything people are paid to tell me about something they personally care nothing about.
That’s cynical and probably irrational, yet here we are.
It doesn’t help that in the last few weeks, I’ve seen three or four different news stories about planes around the world (a couple of them in the U.S.) stuck on tarmacs for hours, with 100 or 200 people inside going nuts because the air conditioning was shut off. So don’t try to argue that it never happens. If they shut off the A/C for passengers up in the cabin, you can bet your ass an animal in the cargo hold is finished. I used to think about how much this situation would suck for passengers; now all I can think is if this happens on my flight, my dog will literally die in a truly awful way, after spending 15 hours purely terrified.
Some people talk about the power of positive thinking. Those people have magical unicorn sparkles in their brains.
But I have been trying to do some of that sparkly thinking, if only so that I can sleep at night because I’ve woken up at 4 a.m. with nightmares about this a lot lately and it’s not helping anybody. And I was making progress, reading all the emails and comments on my other post about this, feeling reassured and comforting myself with statistics and probabilities…and then I read what Victor Davis Hanson wrote the other day and it made me cry for an hour. I love Mr. VDH. He is one of my heroes. But damn, man, I wish I hadn’t read about how fucked up American commercial aviation is this summer. It has nothing to do with dogs in the cargo hold, just with the epidemic incompetence and general bullshit of the whole system.
As the Fourth of July nears, be careful of flying.
I have wondered lately whether a weekend in Guantanamo Bay would be all that much worse than flying in the United States. Imagine if we were to treat Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the manner we accord everyday passengers: put him in a tiny chair, with arms crammed together and tucked between the rests — with another inmate on each side. And then we bolt him down there for eight hours. He has to share his toilet with 100 others. The ceiling is about 5 feet high, the seat continually moving while he urinates. We feed him airline food, make him watch airline shorts on the video, and have him go through a TSA security routine twice a day, all the while telling him that he is scheduled to walk down the hall for his exercise at noon, while we cancel, delay, and reschedule his long anticipated walk.
I have flown a lot in the Third World — Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece in the 1970s, and lots to and fro from places like Egypt, Libya, and Mexico. But I am not sure anymore whether American air travel is much better. I flew three round trips the last month — California to Wisconsin, California to southern Europe, and California to Washington, D.C. Almost everything that could go wrong, of course, did.
The first trip from California to Wisconsin took 18 hours and five cancelled flights…
Oh for the love of all the things.
I’ve flown a lot. In only the last few years, five round-trip transatlantic journeys and dozens of domestic trips around Europe and the U.S., and had a cancelled flight once – which I did not care about much because I wasn’t trying to get to a business meeting or a funeral, but mostly because I didn’t have a live animal out there somewhere GOD KNOWS WHERE, on what plane?, in what luggage-handling area?, being moved around in his crate by shit knows who?
Arriving into Newark from Lisbon for a transfer through customs to a final flight to San Francisco was a veritable descent into Dante’s Inferno. The plane dumped some 200 passengers into “customs.” But all customs turned out to be were two clerks in booths. The other ten windows remained empty. One poor officer clearly had no clue about what he was doing. For ten minutes, he struggled to get his computer working. I won’t repeat the commentary in the lengthening line.
“No problem” is my motto: after all, I had three hours between flights. I emerged out of security back to another terminal and back into security for the connection to California. But chaos awaited. The line of about 100 people snaked back and forth. Sweaty, hot passengers were livid. Forty percent of the TSA security lines were idle. Only five women were checking tickets; about five more were idling. A “supervisor” went back and forth: she talked, she laughed, she yelled, she stared down the irate passengers. She did everything … but open up a new security corridor. Meanwhile, the line still lengthened.
This has happened to me, too, when I didn’t care because I wasn’t in a hurry. Now I’m shitting my pants. Customs at DFW has never taken me more than 10 minutes (except the time I forgot about the banana in my bag and their sniffing beagle sniffed me out and I had to unload all my luggage to prove I wasn’t a drug-runner) but it could get stupid and take 3 hours like it did almost every time Rupert-not-his-real-name and I ever flew into Heathrow, and I think I would actually vomit worrying about Primo waiting somewhere, still in his crate after 15 hours.
Rupert says I “overthink” things. Hahaha.
I just got back from a third flight from D.C. The early morning TSA security line in Fresno almost went out the door of the terminal. One of the two machines was broken at 5:30 a.m. Half the TSA staff stood idle among the irate passengers, until someone ordered them to manually start opening bags. Many missed their flights.
Apparently no one knew how to fix the machines or had notified anyone that they had become inoperable a few hours earlier the prior night…
After watching the TSA in five airports the past month, I would suggest the stereotypes are mostly correct: unmotivated, even with a certain class edge, as if the perhaps better-off passengers should be made to suffer a bit of comeuppance by workers who have the ability, if only for a brief moment, to make life miserable for anyone they chose. I have been flying a lot since 9/11, and I have never yet heard one “I’m sorry” from any TSA employee for thousands of lapses and gratuitous rudeness.
Just want to pause here and say a hearty Nice Work There, Assholes! to the TSA.
A few years ago, my anarcho-libertarian brother told me I was crazy to submit to the ministrations of the corrupt and incompetent TSA on my way in and out of the U.S. I got mad at him for that but he had a point, a really good goddamn point.
Passengers dress like homeless people these days — sweat suits, pajama-like leisure clothes, gym attire. Don’t open your computer while others are opening the overhead doors: their luggage often becomes projectiles that fall out and shatter anything below. Some zoom down the aisle, slamming anyone foolish to use the armrests…
Do not even get me started on any of that.
Last week in a piece at Breitbart, Ace used a phrase that has stuck in my head ever since: “our increasingly hideous society”.
I don’t know if he meant only American society but it certainly applies to Europe too because all of those behaviors, the selfishness and stupid entitled-ness, are just as evident over here, no more and no less, simply with different manifestations. But I haven’t had to really care about that shit over here, because I’m a foreigner and this is not “my” society. I realize now that’s been a certain kind of luxury and that when I move back to America, I’m going to have to start feeling responsibility about it again, a sort of guilt and despair and even rage that this is my society, and it is, as Ace said, increasingly hideous.
Sorry about the depressing tangent. I’m just worried about Primo and I have an overwhelming dread that my good luck with flying so far is going to come to an end on July 20. I’ve never had a truly bad experience in all the tens of thousands of miles I’ve flown – as mentioned, I had a cancelled flight once, but only once. No more than 5% of all my flights have been delayed, and one time my bag was routed on the wrong plane but nothing was ever lost. I’ve never even had a really unpleasant seat-neighbor, and the worst turbulence I’ve experienced didn’t even make the flight attendants blink (though it made me have an out-of-body experience of profound and unrelenting existential horror).
You’re so glad you clicked over to my blog today. All this sunshine is just what the world needs and you’re welcome! Glad I could help.
Feel free to share your own stories of doom, or, alternatively, to laugh at my genuinely ridiculous first-world problems. I’m good either way because I have bourbon.
