On the road again

Taylor and I are once again driving across the country because the convenience of a 4.5-hour plane ride sometimes overwhelms Taylor. Actually, I think it has more to do with how he often says, “If you break down in a car, you break down. If you break down in the air…” he never finishes this sentence, but I get the point. So here we are, gliding past Ohio with a carsick puppy, $40 lost to tolls so far, and 200 miles to go until we reach our first stop in Chicago.

It is worth mentioning that we are gliding along in what Taylor has affectionately termed “the grocery getter” and what my sister and I have less affectionately termed “the grandpa mobile”. It’s a two-decade old Buick Lesabre that Taylor bought for a sweet $750. Once he convinced me that a summer road trip across North America was just what we needed in our lives, I assumed we’d be taking the recently manufactured Subaru Legacy on which I am still making payments. I assumed this because when we went about purchasing a car in Delaware, we chose something with a high enough price tag that we could safely rely on its ability to make a cross-country trip if necessary. Cleary I assumed wrong as I am now enduring the occasional outburstvof “Lesabre life, baby!” from the driver’s seat, or if he’s really feeling excited, a lecture on how I’d never get this kind of smooth suspension in an airplane. I will give it to him that I was able to nap earlier today almost completely horizontal thanks to the space in this boat on wheels. That was pretty comfortable until I woke up to “uh oh” … this was Taylor’s response to the engine light coming on. I guess I looked alarmed because he offered to cover it with tape since that worked well for the ABS brake warning light issue he’d been having earlier in the month. Livin’ the dream, people. We’re livin’ the dream.

I would also like to state that traveling with a puppy is hazardous for your mental health. This is especially true if you hate most people with white-hot intensity are an introvert. I was minding my own business on one of our stops, just letting the puppy stretch his legs, when I was alerted to the presence of another human being by a loud shriek issued somewhere to my left. Five minutes of puppy adoration ensued, followed by 15 minutes of listening to this complete stranger’s entire history of shih tzu ownership. This was interrupted only when I tried to follow the wandering puppy and was told to “let it be, sometimes they need to poop but they have to work it out first”.  At one point I saw Taylor heading my way but then saw him dart into the gas station once he saw my predicament. He hates the babbling of strangers as much as I do and sometimes it’s just every man for his self, no hard feelings. Except that I gave him a good punch to the arm when I finally made it back to the car.

As I was considering the pitfalls of road tripping around in an automotive relic with perilous tolls, sick puppies, and loud strangers, I came across some writing I had done during a plane trip home for Christmas. Reading it made me appreciate almost everything about this road trip because I forgot how much more exposed you are to the masses when traveling by air. On that particular trip I must have been paying a debt to karma or Jesus or whoever is running this show because I could not have hand picked worse people to sit directly behind me. And I’d like to point out that that’s saying something because I think everyone is the worst. Especially when travelling.

It began almost immediately and ended almost never. I sat down and heard some conversation behind me that became difficult to tune out at some point, mostly because I had forgotten my headphones. Somehow these two strangers (henceforth referred to as Bro #1 and Bro #2) had met on this flight and started right off with some deep shit about the philosophical meaning of life, plus what it’s like to shadow dentists in dentist school. It was only after this odd combination that they introduced themselves and shook hands like they had just found themselves at a fricking business meeting.

Here are a couple tidbits that I actually typed as they were being uttered (because how else was I going to survive) with a little commentary from yours truly:

“Oh my God dude, it’s so funny you would mention that, my name used to be so unique that I also knew when someone was talking about or to me!! Now though I sit next to a guy at work with my name – Noah – and he’s like so outgoing and talkative so now people are usually talking about a Noah other than me.”

FASCINATING.

“I firmly believe that only idiots enter the public sphere.”

Well, depending on your definition of public sphere, you could be very wrong or very right. For example, if occupying an airplane full of other people counts as a public sphere, you’re kinda right.

Then, for a minute, there was sweet, sweet silence. But alas, after 30 minutes of blissful quiet, they could stand it no more. Bro #1 sparked up the conversation again with, “Know what’s interesting? We have been conditioned for THOUSANDS of years to angle our heads toward the screen like this” (meaning the TV screen on the back of his seat).

Dude, screens have not even been around for THOUSANDS of years. Stop trying to science. You’re embarrassing.

The next item of business involved a diatribe on the various extractions Bro #1 had experienced in his lifetime. Wisdom teeth…tonsils…you name it and he’s had it extracted. He was also “basically raised in a cult”, used to have severe sleep apnea, studied abroad and took a lot of pictures with the bride and groom of weddings he stumbled across in whatever foreign country he was in (what?) and experienced constant winter nosebleeds as a child (his words exactly: “HUGE streams of blood coming from both nasal passages”) which was eventually corrected with rhinoplasty. Fortunately, his friendly seat mate (also known as Bro #2) was in dental school, which I guess qualified him to administer an on-demand lecture detailing the anatomy of the nose and throat and what the exact culprit of these nosebleeds was likely to be. His final advice: “You gotta let your body do its own thing”. Yeah, I think I’ve read that on an emergency room wall somewhere….the good doctor’s mantra.

More facts about Bro #1: He’s preeeeeety good at his job…like, his boss loves him. He went to three different high schools. He has a commercial driver’s license. He has Netflix and Hulu but he’s thinking about phasing out Hulu. He recently started listening to electronic music. He was flying westward from the east coast because the “girl situation” was getting serious, but not serious enough that he would ever move there permanently (he’s “too free for that”).  He almost got in an argument with his friend recently about file sharing. He “has a moral system that supersedes the laws set by the government”  and thus has a server in the Netherlands that he uses to illegally download movies. He has an “audio file” friend who is part of a subculture that doesn’t believe in music streaming. I don’t know what half  of that even means but here’s my overall assessment of Bro #2: he can talk for almost 4.5 hours straight and I think he’s lying about having any kind of “girl situation”.

As if the bro squad wasn’t enough for one trip, there was the woman in front of me loudly requesting “rocks” for her whiskey as the flight attendant was trying to pour drinks for the passengers 4 seats past her. He does not appear to understand the term “rocks” and she does not appear to be capable of using the lower-class version of the word – i.e. “ice” – so on goes the awkward exchange of “ROCKS, WE JUST NEED SOME ROCKS UP HERE” followed by “I’m sorry, wha…what did you say? What was that? So sorry…” And then, when asked if she would like a receipt for her whiskey, her response: “WHAT? OH, no. We don’t need one of those”. Upon consumption of their four drink orders, Miss rocks and her man promptly proceeded to make out in a dramatic fashion, breaking their lip lock once to discuss New Year’s Eve plans and then again when she passed out on his shoulder. Her male counterpart must have found himself quite bored after this because he then began occupying the time by blatantly digging out the contents of his nose and discarding his findings by absently brushing his fingers over her sleeping head.

So yeah, I’ll take the Lesabre life, carsick puppy and all.