bahston
This visit only strengthened what I’ve always thought of Boston: lovely city to visit, but I don’t think I could live there again. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy I went to college there, because Boston is (with all due respect) a great training-wheels city. It’s small and accessible enough to get around and have variety, but I feel like I’ve been going out in the same four areas, to the same five to ten bars and eating at the same five to ten restaurants since I first got there in 1997. It’s fairly cheap in that you can find cheap eats (see: Anna’s) and cheap beers (Beacon Hill Pub is always a great, cheap bar), but it’s expensive enough to give you a dose of reality (i.e. rents are kind of expensive, $6 or $7 pints of Guinness abound). And finally, it’s got lots of culture and entertainment options, but 80% of these options are related to “What the fahk is wrong with Pahpelbohn?” and “Tawm Fahking Brady is gonna throw at least 60 touchdown this yeah.” So as long as I get a long weekend in Boston every two to three months, I’m perfectly content.
(Not to mention, have you ever tried to hail a cab in Faneuil Hall or Boylston or the North End at 2am in January? Not awesome. Not awesome at all.)
The occasion for the Boston visit was my buddy John’s marriage to his lovely bride Caroline (which was an awesome time), but otherwise I did what I always do in Boston: drinking, eating, carousing with old friends, etc. Without getting into the details of the wedding or the daily walkabouts/activities in Boston, some notes on traveling:
Virgin America…meh and kinda wow at the same time. At about 1am PST Thursday night/Friday morning, as the plane was somewhere over the Midwest, I was drinking an absinthe cocktail, watching “Fight Club” on Fuse, and dicking around the internet. This would not have been possible even two years ago, yet here we are. What a crazy world.
Other props to Virgin on its ordering system: instead of waiting for the flight attendants to come by with the beverage cart to order a drink, you simply click on your TV screen, add a beer and whatever else to your cart, “check-out,” swipe your credit card, and the order arrives about a minute later. That was pretty sweet (and likely the reason I got off the plane more than slightly drunk).
One fairly major knock on Virgin, however, is that the seats are significantly smaller than other coach class seats (at least, they felt that way). Maybe I’ve gotten spoiled on Delta because they always bump me up (or maybe I’ve gained a ton of weight and/or height), but I felt very cramped in the flights, both ways.
Overall, I probably would fly them again if I had to, based on the Wifi, absinthe, quick ordering, and the fact that the flight was under $300. But otherwise, I’m loyal to my friends at Delta. That’s just how I roll, son.
I’m probably getting a vasectomy. Look, I love kids. Really. They’re adorable, they’re funny, I just want to grab their chubby hamhock thighs and pinch them. But my god, I learned a lot about myself and my feelings for children on this trip.
(“I learned a lot about…my feelings for children on this trip.” That sounds pretty terrible. And no, I did not go to Thailand.)
The only reason that I want a child is to have some sort of legacy, so that when I die, it’s not totally over for me. This doesn’t mean that I would haunt the child (not necessarily, at least, although that could be a lot of fun), but just that when people who knew me when I was alive got drunk, they would tell my child stories about me, mostly starting with “My god, your father…what a strange, strange man…” and “Boy, he had a scrotum that looked exactly like a great, big chewed-up ball of Juicy Fruit.” In this way, you’re “alive” for at least a little while longer.
Actually, there’s also another reason: I’d like to have a kid to correct all the mistakes I’ve made in my life and/or create the perfect person (i.e. get them started on the piano at age two, learning Russian and Latin at age three, trying out for football at age four, hitting the weight room full time at age five, SAT prepping at age six, etc). When you have a child, you get to play God, to a certain extent. That sounds kinda cool.
But after this trip, I may forget about the whole legacy and playing God thing.
For one, it’s fairly obvious that when you have a child, you’re saying, “You know what? I’ve done all I can do in terms of me. I’ve peaked. Time to try to make someone who can hopefully do better.” Say goodbye to a social life, nice dinners out, spontaneous long weekends, getting bombed at a random Tuesday happy hour, having sex anywhere in the house you want, taking a Xanax or Valium and sleeping for eleven hours, spending whatever you want on whatever you want, smoking a bowl on the couch and watching “Wildboyz” for four hours, leaving loading guns around the home, etc. These are all things that you can’t do when you have a kid. Well, I guess you technically can do them, but you probably shouldn’t, unless you want your kids to grow up to be criminals or, for that matter, exactly like me.
I’m not hating on kids or those who have them. If anything, these feelings stem from my own incredible sense of selfishness and ego, so kudos to parents for, you know, not being incredibly selfish and self-involved assholes like me. And I do truly love kids; I’m the third oldest of around thirty cousins, so I’ve been around them all my life – and just when my aunts and uncles stopped having them, the oldest cousins started popping them out. And kids have always loved me – I’m like a younger, slightly more surly and much more apathetic Santa, but I’m right there with him with the jolly when I want to be.
I’m just amazed that when you have a kid, boy, that’s it for you, so I hope you had a good run. And I just can’t see myself ever wanting to trade the joy of hitting a happy hour for six beers, reading in the shower for two hours or banging out sick and heading to Vegas for a long weekend for being responsible for a child who’s around all the time and, by the way, for the rest of your life. Doesn’t seem like a hard decision to make to me.
[And what was really supposed to be the main point, before I went off on the above tangent, was that traveling with kids is either impossible for the parent or makes your fellow travelers absolutely miserable. It's summer, which is amateur hour for traveling, so there were a bunch of families on both flights, many of whom had never been in nor had possibly even seen a plane before. The parents feel into two groups: those that were completely frazzled and tried the entire flights to get the kids to sit still, keep their voices down, etc, in the hopes of not disturbing the other passengers, and those parents who basically said "Fuck it," ordered a glass of wine and a movie, and let their kids run roughshod all of the plane. Naturally, I'd fall into the latter category, but I'm telling you, if the woman I'm married to/living with/dating/met in the Target parking lot and specifically told me she was on the pill (twice) ever tells me that she's pregnant (and is going to keep it and expects me to help raise it), I'm going to smile, hug her, give her $5000 and then take a nine-month leave of absence from work and travel the world. Because there's no way I'm bringing a kid on a plane until it's at least 19 years old. Fuck that.]
I will never check a bag again. I was planning on going to the wedding solo, but then Selena surprised me with Bonfire, the five-cd box set of Bon Scott-era AC/DC, for my 30th birthday. That’s enough to get you a free ride to Boston in my book, so I made a few calls, changed a few things, and off to Boston we went.
(See? As I said above, it doesn’t take much to make me happy.)
(By the way, I’ve completely gone off the rails with my AC/DC obsession. This is the fourth such musical obsession of my post-adolescent life: first it was the Beatles, then Jimi Hendrix, then Elvis Costello, now, over fifteen years later, AC/DC. And this box set is truly, completely, 100% fucking awesome. There is a version of live “Problem Child” that, when I listen to it, I can actually feel my balls getting bigger. Likewise, once during the live “High Voltage,” I went to open my fridge and I ripped the door off and two planes dropped from the sky. I’m still working my way through it, but it’s only a matter of days before something like this happens. Honestly, I’m surprised this box set is even legal. It’s just flat-out dangerous.)
I travel a lot and have a very specific routine. First and foremost, I never, ever check a bag. Even though I just spent almost two weeks on the east coast, I only had a carry on and shipped the rest of my clothes to my office in NYC. Especially now with checked bag fees, this makes a lot of sense, since it’s a wash, cost-wise. And it also allows me to get off the plane, almost literally run to and be the first one in line at the cab stand, and be at my destination in the minimum amount of time as possible. I have packing and this routine down to a science at this point, and, to be honest, I’m terrific at them.
But when you have a situation in which a woman is going to a wedding, she’s going to need to check a bag. I figured that if Selena was going to check a bag, I might as well, too. When we landed in Boston, it was after taking a redeye on which I slept not even ten minutes. The very turbulent descent and landing was prefaced by the captain, who came over the PA and said, “Sorry for the early wake up call, folks, but I gotta be honest – it’s gonna be a really nasty ride the rest of the way.” When we landed, we saw that there was a torrential downpour going on. When we got to the baggage claim, Selena’s bag was the second to come down the chute. Guess who’s was the very last? Yep. That would be mine.
Because my bag was the last one, and because it was pouring, and because it was 6am on a Friday morning, we had to wait forever for a cab. Throw in a rapidly-wearing-off buzz and no sleep, and Uncle Jason was not a happy person.
And – fast-forwarding here – wouldn’t you know that it, a few days later after a longer flight back to the west coast on a plane that was more of a day care center than a mode of transportation, guess whose bag came off (literally) first? And whose came off (literally) last? Yeah. Selena is the first answer, I’m the second. Totally sweet.
Maybe this is God’s way of telling me never to fly with a woman again. Or maybe I should just not check a bag anymore. Whatever – same difference, really.
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Lastly, two quick book recommendations for you:
- Blue Boy by Rakesh Satyal. I’ve pimped this before on Facebook and Twitter (which I’ve stopped using, seeing that Jesus Christ Himself would make me want to punch Him in the face if He posted hourly updates like “RT @StPeterRock just had eggos – sooo good! #awesomebreakfasts” – get over yourselves, people, no one gives a shit), but it’s worth mentioning again. Here’s my one sentence summary: “An endearing and hilarious coming-of-age tale of a precocious Indian-American child growing up in 1980′s Cincinnati who, because of his interests in make-up, ballet and Whitney Houston, believes that he is the latest incarnation of the Indian deity Krishnaji.” This isn’t a really good description (it’s actually pretty hard to describe in one sentence) and I read this book in the spring when it first came out, but I pimp it out here now because I recommended it to a bunch of my Boston friends and just this weekend, three that had read the book told me how much they enjoyed it. So there. Go on and get it.
- The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts by Tom Farley, Jr. and Tanner Colby. Um, this one should be pretty self-explanatory. No major nuggets discovered or bombs dropped here – the guy was hilarious, he partied hard (like, real hard), he died – but a good, quick read nonetheless. I was surprised at how religious Farley was and to read about his decline was quite sad, but I walked away from it feeling like book didn’t serve him feel: he was an easily-influenced, kinda slow-witted guy with a very addictive personality who would do anything for a laugh and to please his father, who sounded like a case study in denial. Good read, but I wanted a little more; I just have to believe that there was more to Farley than how he was portrayed in the book. Whether or not that’s because he didn’t allow anyone too close to him, I don’t know. But I wanted a little more.
[Have a good weekend]
