Sometimes it's the exact same dream, the same scene playing out over and over again. But other times there's new details, or whole new parts of the dream inserted. Sometimes it's a bathroom that shocks the conscience and the soul. Sometimes it's that one well-meaning but ultimately frustrating TSA agent. Sometimes it's an actual jerk. But it's ALWAYS the other shit. Walking from F (that's F for "Fuck You Regional Flyers") concourse to A (that's "Aren't you glad your gate is A26?) concourse. The fucking unnecessarily long C concourse with its many kitchsy, over-priced, bullshit stores faced in natural wood, flavored with just enough pretentious Native American cultural iconography, that it necessitates a fucking train to not be bothered by it. Minneapolis Airport is an edifice to consumerism in a way that just pisses me off, not least because it's an inconvenience. It has more bathrooms than most airports IMO, and yet you've got a 60% chance of something being a) filthy b) totally fucking ruined by someone and yet to be cleaned up or c) broken in some way. You might ask why I don't sleep during any of this like most people do to escape the horrors of air travel. The answer is I tend to wake up from naps with a mild to an actual headache, stay groggy quite a while and feel pretty terrible after constantly dozing off and waking up again. I prefer the fever-edge of sleep deprivation to that. I drink coffee, listen to
stuff like this and read arm-thick 40k novels. That's how I deal with it, but it tends to have side effects.
I wasn't going to go into it, but fuck it, I have my n
2th wind so let me give you a taste of my mental state when I visit my nightmare that is Minneapolis Intl.
My day starts briskly at 5:00 am because my other boss, the auction guy, tries to save money where he can on airfare, and we put up with it because we're damn near family at this point and we don't want him to wreck his pocket book flying everyone across the country. (I can't really speak bad of him, I was well-compensated this trip and they got me loaded to boot.) But still, I expect to start most trips running on 3 to 5 hours of sleep. I am a consument night owl.
Lincoln TSA holds me up because of my replacement license. Not a huge inconvenience but it presages more.
There's almost a fist fight as we disembark to Minneapolis. Some guy tries to shove past another guy along the aisle, things start to get heated in a very short period of time and a real fight is averted when he manages to slip past the other dude. Minneapolis, the dark of heart of RAGE speaks to a lot of people.
Cue an hour layover in a mind fog of sleep dep and guzzled coffee, and the usual bullshit.
The auction itself is decent by normal standards. But it's still two ~10 hour days sweating your OR freezing your ass off, and going from total-video-game-esqe focus to mind-numbing boredom and anxiousness and discomfort waiting for your turn, all to the thought-obliterating tune of the auctioneers' cant. And that's a good auction with no technical problems. I sleep poorly most nights (compared to my normal sleep) despite generally decent hotel rooms and being exhausted. Even going to sleep early isn't a huge guarantee of being well-rested for me.
The trip home has a 50% chance of also being at the crack of fucking dawn as well. This time? We were up at 3:45. A new record. Coulda slept another 30 minutes I suppose and still been good, but who wants to run the risk of being trapped in SomewheresTrucksville. This trip wasn't far from Indianapolis, but I end up in the boonies more often than not. And because we celebrated last night, I was still half drunk from the beer and the Apple Pie Hooch. If it's going to suck, I might as well get my fun out of it first.
So, brain-dead and with zero energy, still kinda tipsy, I plow back into the nightmare that is Minneapolis. Long straight aways where you walk and walk and feel like you're getting nowhere. A toilet that just won't stop flushing. Sullen vendors. Fucking idiots standing out in thoroughfares blocking the flow. People crowding up to their flight for no goddamn reason. People who cut. 90% of the places you'd look become eye-contact. (My rational brain tells me that if I'm there that early, so is everyone else and no one is probably in a good mood. But rationality is the real dream in this nightmare.)
The long, long walk to Concourse G, to the one place I like in Minneapolis Intl. The smoking area just outside the employee bus pick up point. It's my oasis. I have to walk for 10 goddamn minutes to get there, with the train, but the security gate is primarily for pilots and staff coming in and out, so it's almost always empty.
The smoking area itself is blissfully quiet and tranquil after the bustle of a hundred souls a minute passing by. There's a nice big planter with trees and bushes at the end of this cul-de-sac. There's few people and those who are there generally do their best to avoid each other, unconsciously obscuring sight lines for a brief fucking second of privacy. Cigarette butts and trash litter the mulch (because people are fucking stupid and disgraceful) but I try to ignore it and enjoy my moment of peace.
But it's just the eye of the RAGE STORM NIGHTMARE, and then I head back inside.
And Minneapolis Intl., it can't help but fuck with me again as the gate security harasses me over my replacement license. He's well-meaning and just wants to do his job, so I don't blame him. But at this point in the nightmare, I see the fell hand of Minneapolis Intl. in everything, toying with its every slave and filling my cup of rage bit by bit until it floweth over. At least this time, TSA regulations were on my side for once.
The gate steward drops a Class A line.
"There's no first-class seats but we're full on first-class fliers." Then he proceeds to board the plane and fucking bomb with not one, but two vaguely in-context puns on the PA. Shoulda quit while you were ahead fella.
And just because it can, Minneapolis leaves me with one more present: this woman I'm pretty sure was this chick in highschool who I never got along with. She gets to sit right across from me. And I guess she's still kinda a bitch, because the the door to the plane hadn't even been opened a minute before she was going "Cmon, hurry up already" loud enough everyone gets to hear it, practically walking face first into the dude in front of her in her rush. Yeah, we fucking
know but the rest of us are exercising a fraction of fucking patience. Jesus christ, if I'm
this hopped up and manage to wait with a little dignity, do you think you can kindly shut the fuck up with the rest of us?