Our Dumb Blog

So I’m back in Chicago. And, you’ve got it, not for long. I’ll be leaving in the morning to get back to a more stationary life in Oklahoma. At least for a little bit.

It seems that I left off somewhere around LAX. I’d paid for a “ShuperShuttle” reservation the night before. I’d never really used them before, so I wasn’t sure how it worked. I eventually found their agent on the “traffic island” and told her I had a reservation. After about half an hour, she told me to get into one of the many vans that drove by. I gave the driver the address, and he looked it up in a Mapsco. And then we drove around the airport for another half hour collecting other people. That done, we departed on a grand tour of the greater LA area. He dropped everyone else off before driving up the mountain. I suspected that finding the body shop with the Miata was going to be difficult, but he managed with no difficulties.

The place was closed for lunch. I put my backpack down and sat on it. Eventually a clean, rather modified, early 80’s Porsche 911 drove up with two mechanics. They said that they didn’t have the key to the office, but that I might want to go next door for lunch at the malt shop. So I did.

I had a very good burger as well as a milkshake and headed back to the body shop. They turned over the car with a minimum of fuss. I stopped at Carol Ann’s to pick up what few things I could fit in the Miata and started driving east.

When I started getting tired, I called Joanna and asked if she could find me a cheap place to stay for the night. She got me reservations at a Motel 6 in Tempe, AZ. Having a navigator on the other end of a telephone line is useful, though not as good as having one right there with you.

The Motel 6 couldn’t find my reservation. There was one woman working there, and she didn’t know what to do. After pleading that surely there was someone she could call, she called someone. Who told her to check me in and worry about matching the room to my reservation later.

I slept soundly and got up about the same time as the sun and kept driving east.

It seemed to be a nearly endless drive. The desert goes on and only changes form every so slightly over many hundreds of miles. It’s beautiful, but I had no one to share it with. Of all places, I desperately wanted to be in Norman, OK. I drove on and on listening to NPR where I could get it, recorded episodes of This American Life where I could not. There were lots of public radio stations on the drive, but most of them seemed perpetually out of reach. I wanted to stop at an In-N-Out. I was sure that I would find one in Arizona for lunch, but it didn’t happen.

It rained off and on. At some point Joanna called and asked where I was. I thought it was New Mexico, but it might have been Texas. The question seemed terribly unimportant as though all that mattered was that there was desert. And not much else.

It’s nice to have a home and to come home to it.

After enjoying the rest of the weekend with Joanna and fixing the car, I set off for Nashville on Tuesday morning.

While driving through Oklahoma City, I got stuck in an exit-only lane that’s not well marked. It says “Left Exit” but doesn’t say “Left Exit Only”. There was a line of trucks and it looked like I was going to be forced off. But, just at the last minute, I noticed a space in front of the trucks, which I could just make. I accelerated and changed lanes just as my lane exited. Not two seconds after changing into my new lane, a woman on the right side of the trucks changed lanes. Into my lane. My being in the lane didn’t seem to faze her.

Because the car doesn’t have ABS, I locked up the tires braking while simultaneously leaving her as much room as possible. Because the lane I’d just changed from had disappeared, I’d left myself with no options. So she hit the front right corner of the car knocking it a little sideways.

I slid for awhile, managed to straighten the car, get it under control and bring it to a stop on the grass.

The woman who hit me got out of her car apologizing profusely, which probably would have helped my case had I decided to fight about it. While the accident was definitely her fault, I was certainly a contributing factor. I’m not sure how police/insurance would finally decide about it. Her car had a scrape and some paint damage. The Miata had a not-insignificant dent on the front right fender, baseball sized. Since I have no accidents on my record and really, really don’t want any, even if one that might not be my fault, I asked her if it was okay if we didn’t call the police. Even in the best case scenario, we were both going to be facing an insurance premium hike, which seemed stupid. So we shook hands, and on we went.

This wouldn’t be a big deal at all if it were my car, which is already dinged, and well, mine. Dad had already sold the car to a friend of his. Furthermore, the car had just come out of the body shop because someone had hit it in a parking lot.

I went ahead and drove to Nashville, and the car was in the body shop when I left.

The folks who’d purchased the car were actually on their way to Chicago from Georgia and were passing through Nashville. They picked me up in their RV-thing, and took me to Chicago. They were planning on picking up the Miata on their way back from Chicago, but I have no idea if the body shop had finished by then or not. I managed to sleep a little bit in the night but certainly not well.

They dropped me off at a suburban Metra train station, which took me right to the loop. It was an early morning commuter train, everyone going to work but me.

I arrived at the Loop in something of a daze, not really sure where I was. When I figured it out, I tried to buy a fare card so I could get to Sydney’s. Only all I had was a $20 bill and $1.65 in change. It’s a $1.75 fare, and the machine doesn’t make change– it merely gives you a fare card for whatever money you put in it. I bummed a dime from a helpful CTA employee, reflecting that I probably could have gotten on the train for a dime once upon a time.

When I got to Sydney’s, we got in the car and drove. 960 miles to the western edge of North Dakota. This is definitely one of the weirder things I’ve done. And I’ll have to write about it some other time.

Now I have to decide if I should take the State bus to meet Sydney at work or the Red line. And tomorrow I’m driving home. And plan to stay there awhile.

Well, I did go to bed early Thursday night. Before I had fallen asleep, Berck called. He and Sydney were stuck in traffic because of a wreck up ahead, and Berck had to pee. So he didn’t talk to me very long before throwing shame to the wind and stepping out of the car and into the bushes to do what the whole line of cars watching him knew he would be doing. (Perhaps with a little envy).

An hour later or so, I was sound asleep when my phone rang again. It was Sydney this time, asking if I could give them some directions. The wreck had actually been a guy locked in his car with a gun, threatening to commit suicide. A wreck could have been moved out of the way, but this was blocking traffic for hours. So everyone headed off the interstate and onto county roads.

The problem with county roads is that they often don’t show up on road atlases. Berck’s laptop had given up the ghost earlier in the day. So Berck contacted his navigator, who happened to be at home asleep in bed. My computer was turned off, too, and I can only use the mouse on his. While I was booting up, they lost signal, which gave me a little time to wake up and try to figure out where they were (a certain interstate exit in eastern North Dakota; do you know how difficult it is to figure out exit numbers in Mapquest?)

After getting connected and disconnected a couple of times, we finally determined that they were heading the right direction and would get back to the interstate soon. Berck took the phone then and thanked me.

“Uh huh.”

“Are you mad at me?”

“No, I’m just sleepy.”

But then, of course, I couldn’t go back to sleep.

Today he called again. Sydney’s friend’s friend wanted to go to Wal-Mart to buy some ammo for his Glock. Berck drove him into town so he could call me. It sounds like they’re having a fun time.

But it’s really cold. It’s supposed to snow tomorrow.

The weather here is beautiful. It gets down into the forties at night, then the sun shines all day and it warms up to shirt sleeve weather.

Berck left a message on my phone around 11 a.m. this morning telling me to call him.

I don’t check my messages until I get off work at 3:30, so I gave him a call then but got his voice mail. He called me back about the time I got home.

“Well,” he said, “I’m in Minneapolis.”

The first thought that crossed my mind was that the motorhome took a wrong turn. And a pretty big one at that.

“What are you doing in Minneapolis?”

“I’m driving to Montana.”

Apparently, as soon as Berck arrived in Chicago early this morning, his sister Sydney told him they were going to Seattle to visit someone. When Berck explained that it would take three days to drive there and a good four hundred dollars in gas, she and her friend agreed to meet halfway somewhere in Montana. Berck is just going along for the ride, because he can’t very well return to OKC while Sydney is borrowing her car back for the weekend. That and he told me, “I had someone to drive around the country with when I was nineteen, and it seems like Sydney should too.”

So the new ETA for my honey is Tuesday night.

But I’ll believe that when I see it.

He sounded pretty groggy on the phone, having gotten next to no sleep in the motorhome. I’m hoping he’ll keep his part of the driving to an advisory role.

I’m not nearly as sleepy as my honey, but all I want to do right now is go to bed. And it’s only six-thirty, and the sun hasn’t set, but hey, I bet I can sleep for eleven hours…

So I’m back in Norman. But not for long.

Originally, I’d planned to drive to Chicago and visit Sydney, Mom and Noell. After leaving Chicago, the vague plan was for me to drive to Nashville where Dad is these days, and he and I would go out to California to pick up his Miata and some of his stuff.

On Wednesday, I was outside the Smart Museum in Chicago, which is the University of Chicago’s little art museum with free admission and a pretty nifty little collection when Dad called.

I’m going to spare you the logistical details. They’re simply not very interesting, extremely complicated, and I don’t understand them or the resulting decisions myself. The basics are that Dad needed me to get his Miata from California to Nasvhille because he sold it.

What eventually happened is that Dad sent me money, and I bought a plane ticket on Thursday night for a flight leaving at 6:50am the next morning from Chicago-Midway for Los Angeles.

After buying the plane ticket on Thursday night, I left Noell’s apartment on the loop and called Sydney. It was now 5:00pm, and I told her I’d meet her at 5pm at her workplace so we could go to her friend’s apartment for dinner. I wasn’t sure how long it was going to take me, but I guess about half an hour. I told her I was going to be late, and I could just meet her at the final destination. She said, “I didn’t expect you to actually get here at 5pm. And we’re still busy. So just come here. Take the State bus from Noell’s apartment to 13th Street, which is right by my office.”

“It’s rush hour, are you sure I should take the State bus? I could just take the red line southbound…”

“I take the State bus all the time. It goes right where you need to go.”

“Okay.”

I waited for 20 minutes for the State bus, number 29. Every other bus in the world seemed to come by a dozen times. This was ridiculous. It takes me three minutes by bus and fifteen minutes to walk to the nearest L station. I called Sydney and asked if she was sure that the state bus was actually running, and if she was sure I should take it. She said yes.

Finally, at about 5:30pm bus 29 pulled up. I got on and we rather slowly made our way down Illinois and then south on State. Very slowly, as the traffic was pretty bad, it being rush hour. At this point I’m feeling pretty stupid for listening to Sydney.

In Chicago, especially at rush hour, there are traffic cops everywhere. They stand in the intersections and generally just wave at traffic to do the things that the traffic lights tell them to do. I’m not really sure what their purpose is, but my experience with police officers indicate that traffic lights do a much better job than they do anyway. But surely there was something better for them to do than simply translate a traffic light into arm waving.

And then I saw one that told a line of cars to stop at a green light. I think that she’ll think twice about doing that next time, since the car she told to stop didn’t realize it until she was very close to the intersection. The driver locked up her brakes and slid withing a few inches of the traffic cop. The car behind did the same thing. Meanwhile, I thought I was going to be on the 29 bus forever. And ever.

I finally got to 13th at about 6:10pm. Sydney and her friend Meagan were just finishing up things anyway, so it didn’t seem to matter than I was so late. Sydney’s transit card had expired, so we had to go get a new one. For whatever wonderful reason, you can only buy transit passes at Jewel Grocery stores and currency exchange places. They cannot be purchased at a CTA stop where you’d buy a fare card. This seems very strange to me, but no one else is bothered.

Sydney admitted to having given me bad advice.

And we road the train to Meagan’s house, where her roomate Racheal had prepared a most interesting pizza. Toppings I could identify: pears, arugula, goat cheese, some sort of nuts… It was quite Italian in spirit and Rachel’s crust was better than mine. It turns out Rachael is vegetarian. She decided that there wasn’t enough arugula on her piece, so she piled mounds of it on top.

Dinner was good, and it was nice to meet people who could carry on conversation I found remotely interesting, which seems to be rare these days. An enjoyable evening.

Unfortunately, we stayed for dinner until nearly 10pm, and then I had to go get stuff out of the Solara which was parked at Sydney’s apartment, and then go back to Noell’s where I’d been staying. I wasn’t staying at Sydney’s because Noell’s in a better location, has a shower that works, and Mom was staying with Sydney. I didn’t get back to Noell’s until about Midnight. It took me another hour to finish doing some laundry and pack. And then I couldn’t sleep. I think I fell asleep around 2am. And my alarm was set for 4am. Noell works at Starbucks and had to be there at about 5:15am. I walked with my backpack and everything else all the way to the red line station. The loop is eery at about 4:45am. It’s completely quiet, and there’s almost no one around, just a few joggers. I got to the airport at about 6am. I figured it would be early enough. How many people could be flying out of midway at 7am on a Friday? A lot.

I printed out my boarding pass from an electronic ticketing machine just inside the terminal, and walked to security. My boarding pass had SSSS on it, like I knew it would. I’m not sure exactly what the origins of the code are, but it means you’re a “selectee”. A sure-fire way to be a selectee is purchase your ticket less than 24 hours in advance. Clearly, terrorism is a spur-of-the-moment activity, and no terrorist would buy tickets more than 24 hours in advance.

While in most places, SSSS generally means you’re going to spend a lot more time in security, it seems that this isn’t the case at Midway. I was routed down a special line with a magnetometer and a host of TSA suits. The advantage was that it looked like the lines for the normal-people magnetometers were very long.

There were only three people in front of me a the SSSS magnetometer. So it only took them 15 minutes to get to me.

The Department of Homeland Security is probably the worst government organization on the face of the planet. Since I was a selectee, I knew I’d have to take my shoes off and be wanded regardless of the outcome of the magnetometer beeping or not. I would really like someone to explain the point in having me walk through a magnetometer which, of course, did not beep. They went through my bags, felt me up, messed with my laptop, and generally did their best to annoy me. The thing I hate most about the whole ordeal? The TSA agents who have the audacity to pretend that they’re doing this for my own good. The folks who say, “I’m sorry, I’m just doing my job,” I can understand. What I can’t understand is the people so stupid to think that they’re accomplishing anything. Just go through airport security and tell me that the “Evil-Dooers” haven’t already won.

I got to the gate just as they started boarding, so it was pretty good timing. I’d selected a bulkhead aisle seat, or so I thought. When I got there, I realized that it was instead an aisle seat with a bulkhead behind it, meaning that the seat wouldn’t recline. Fortunately, I managed to swap seats.

ATA had the audacity to try to sell me “breakfast” consisting of a $5 Cinnamon bun and a fruit cup. And then they tried to sell me headsets with which I could listen to the audio portion of some old television.

At least the flight attendants were courteous and efficient. Even if ATA has Pepsi products, but no Dr. Pepper. Or Root beer. I drank off-brand cran-apple juice and did my best to sleep. I hate flying.

To be continued…