7-SEX-7

August 22, 2011 jeffrey hannan Leave a comment

I’m no great fan of airlines. Yet I’m amazed by them and I marvel at the complex logistics involved in moving millions of passengers a year without inciting riots. Occasionally I fantasize about them (namely, flying business or first in an a-380). Mostly I suffer them like those without private jets do: as a necessary evil. My principal gripes are with their perverse economics as well as their usually indifferent, frequently rude, and on occasion outright falsified approach to shuttling said multi-million homo galactics from gateway to ground each day.

Grace was on our side this morning, however: everyone has been lovely so far. It helped that the only staff we encountered post-taxista were the security guard (gladdeningly indifferent and efficient), a thoroughly delightful woman at the front desk of the admirals’ club, and a pleasant young woman in the newstand who asked if I found everything I was looking for. It helps also that when you fly first class you can board the plane whenever the hell you feel like it; you have your own express entry to the gangplank (what on earth is that long corridor called?) and they greet you as “Mister –.”

legroom

I write these dangerous words with a bit of trepidation. Having spoken pleasantly of the morning’s flying experience – up through and including the satisfactory breakfast service on board the plane – I worry a little bit that I overpaid on my good fortune somewhere between home and here and that karma is going to ask for a refund once we land in new york.

In any event.

Dare I say it: the 767 is a lovely plane. Sexy. Like a private lounge for 36 blessed travelers. I don’t know what it looks like in the behind, but up front it’s quite delicious. Almost better than–. (Well. No. No need to get carried away.) There’s almost an excess of space up here in the front. Arvin confirmed as much as we settled in, he shifting around his bag and our water bottles and the full-size pillow and comforter that come with the seat (yes, comforter, no wispy acrylic thing with other people’s hair stuck to it). He leaned over and whispered as he tested the array of buttons that control the seat: “There’s so much room I don’t know what to do.”

I then knelt down to get the hand sanitizer from his bag, which was tucked fully beneath the seat ahead of him. Remembering the near-impossibility of extracting anything from beneath the seat in front of you when in coach, I silently chastised myself for even contemplating the notion that first class accommodations are a profligate use of aerospace.

(And if by any chance you’re in the back of the plane while reading this, rest assured that I don’t approve of this sort of airborne extravagance. One of my persistent pet peeves is the disparity between upper classes of service and the chiropractic crisis otherwise known as Economy, and I firmly believe that there must be an alternative to forcing people to fly cheaply in what is the homo sapien equivalent of a veal cage. As the stewards bring around champagne and orange juice in tiny stemmed plastic glassware set upon trays, I’m reminded that there IS an alternative. It’s called the bus.)

Travel

On y Va

August 22, 2011 jeffrey hannan Leave a comment

The first in a (theoretical?) series of postings from abroad.

8/22/11 – mon
AA #24 sfo – jfk
A mostly easy weekend of preparation in advance of our holiday – the first bona fide vacation in 5 years that involved just the two of us, away from home, in a new land, with absolutely no work. It helped to wrap up work by friday evening. That took until 8pm and then we had pizza and caught up on last season’s Dexter. On Saturday: a walk to cole street for minutiae – travel containers for lotions and potions – and a fresh bottle of my ubiquitous saline nasal spray with xylitol. (The xylitol, I’m told, fosters the growth of beneficial bacteria in the back of the nose.) Lunch ensued at the squat and gobble with our standard fare: salmon fusilli pasta for arvin and a mexican chicken salad for me (never stray!). In good holiday spirits my salad was accompanied by a very summerlike french rose. Perfect for a frigid summer.

Sunday was yoga in the morning for me, which was mostly good – I moved through the poses with focus and agility; and it was interesting – charu, my cosmic earth goddess instructor, indicated that we are transitioning from an era of homo sapiens to an era of homo galactins (an awareness given name by the inter-species communication class she’s just begun taking); and it was also kind of bad – I came out of meditation feeling like a failure: shirley maclaine figured into my assessment somehow – she of following truth, opening up to the mystic, me having accomplished very little in my 47 years as compared to her films and past life confessions. It left me with a sour taste in my brain and my heart, which was filled with openness, sweat and light, struggled to compensate. By nightall I was mostly ready for the trip, having rounded out my various ‘get me the hell out of here’ little tasks, my mood elevated by a list of things all crossed out.

The 4.15am alarm arrived on monday with me dreaming that it was 3.15am and I was already in the shower, noting almost proudly that I’d awakened early and hadn’t had any ‘airplane’ dreams – the kind where you dream you’re dreaming that you’re already awake.

Arvin’s alarm rang and we got out of bed, showered, had a sip of leftover coffee. Dumped the last bits of trash and rotting veggies down the chute.

Ordinarily I don’t mind christening the on-board restroom on airplanes but for some reason I didn’t feel like traveling with a bloated bowel today, so I went into the restroom and forced the issue, with moderate success. Just then my cell phone rang. “Taxi,” arvin called from the living room as I flushed. The taxi had arrived in front of our building as timely as a train in switzerland.

A taxi is not a hired car, however, and one worries that a taxista might not wait too long for you, or that someone will creep out into the darkened morning and abscond with your taxi if you dally gathering your things. For that reason, there’s always a pang of hurry and worry the moment a taxi arrives. A rapid brushing of the teeth is followed by a final glance around the place and an acknowledgment that whatever’s been forgotten is now officially left behind. Then there follows the mandatory check of the zippered compartment of the bag to make sure, again, that the passports haven’t jumped out of their own volition. (Because you know it’s possible. As a homo-galactic, I recognize that paper is made from trees and trees are living creatures and therefore the paper on which our passports are printed, and the sand and chemicals upon which their RFID tracking chips are based, possess vibrations. So it’s quite possible that the passports vibrated their way out of the pocket while I was ‘making a deposit’. Possible. But highly unlikely.)

I rushed out of the bathroom, slipped into my shoes and did the cursory last checks. Arvin stood by the door in his slacks, sports coat and modern pointy shoes: “On y va?”

traveling light

In the past few years since the advent of online check-in, doing so for international flights wasn’t an option. At least it wasn’t a perk accessible to this mostly domestically voyaging iconoclast. It was with delight, then, that arvin and I arrived at SFO with our boarding passes, passports and carry-on baggage an hour and a half prior to departure without having to queue up for anything other than the obligatory security checkpoint. After clearing that uneventful hurdle, we spent an easy hour in the admirals’ club in brand new terminal 2 – luxury amid newness. If you haven’t been to an airport lounge, I can assure you these clubs offer a far more comfortable setting for sipping airport coffee than do the rows upon rows of black cattle chairs surrounding the departure gates. And the bathrooms, if today’s was any indication, are lovely: like those in a Sofitel. But they’re not for everyone. Oh no. They’re pleasant but they’re nothing to strive for in life. Save your money and spare yourself the anxiety. Better to struggle to put your children through college than to aspire to annual membership in one of these iffy country clubs. Trust me.

Mind you, we don’t fly this way all the time. The only reason we had access to the lounge is because in February of this year I cashed in all of my mileage on american airlines and booked us two round-trips between san francisco and western europe. I had just enough miles to get us first class passage between sfo and jfk, with business-class accommodations across the pond. We’d been wanting to visit greece and rome ever since we met, and I since I was in college. Given that world economics are in shit for the unforseeable future and America’s 2012 political posturing more closely resembles a Fellini film than it does a democratic process in what is (used to be?) the world’s finest nation, we said ‘why the hell not’ of our decision to spend a coupling weeks paying 1.4 dollars to the euro.

Arvin in Admirals Club

Random Firings

civil rights, my ass

August 11, 2011 jeffrey hannan Leave a comment

Market + Noe. 3pm.

Came out of Peet’s after grabbing a coffee to get me through the afternoon when I passed by a young woman pulling what is best described as a small freakish creature on a leash. The latter of the two – the elfen one – was skittering around in the dirt beneath one of the trees along the sidewalk.

It was a mostly hairless dog in a busy checkered sweater with tufts of fur sticking out around its head and paws. It looked like a miniature runt freak that must have been left in the litter cage, lost among the shredded newspaper and towels, after the rest of the puppies – the better looking ones – had been adopted. It squatted down to take a dump by the tree, which was right in front of the natural foods store. Its mommy, a young blonde haired woman who is probably fairly fun to have around at parties (hide the good tequila, though), cheered him on: “Do your business, baby :-) ”

I took a glance at the little runt, who’d squatted down low on his haunches and straightened his right leg all the way out parallel with the sidewalk, in what I swear was a nearly perfect yoga shoulder press known as Bhujapidasana.

Awed by the little rat’s blend of yogic flexibility and strength, the scene made me want to do a photo expose – a series of diptychs in which the left side is a photo of a dog or some other animal in a beautiful, asymmetrical asana, and on the right side is a photo of a yogi in a similar pose. It’s probably been done before, but regardless it struck me as an entertaining concept. Though I admitted to myself that it might be difficult to capture random shots of dogs in yogic positions. One could hang out in Duboce Park with a telephoto lens, or -.

Certainly there were better ways to spend one’s time.

Interestingly, all of this contemplation took place in an instant. In that instant I was confronted by the choice of whether I should lift my cell phone and quickly and adroitly open the camera app and snap a shot of this four-legged marvel in trailer plaid, or whether I should play the unperverted passerby and let the dog do its business in peace.

As I pondered whether to snap a shot, I was led to the question: would I be violating the dog’s civil rights in doing so? Furthermore: do dogs even have civil rights? The answer, of course, is no, they do not. They have doggie rights that bestow upon their owners certain obligations, but dogs are not citizens in the socratic sense, therefore they have no civil rights. Then, in due course of inquiry I had to ask myself: what about the owner? Would I be violating her civil rights by taking a picture of her dog taking a crap? Again, of course not. She chooses to parade her hairless little squirrel along a busy urban sidewalk and therefore has relinquished her animal’s ‘rights’ to unmolested toiletry.

Now, then, she herself could squat down by a tree and take a dump and she’d be legitimate picture fodder. That’s public domain, I say: she’d relinquish her rights to personal privacy the moment she began to defecate in public. Naturally, I doubt that the gentle folk eating their sprout sandwiches on the rustic wooden benches in front of the store would have been thrilled to see that particular scenario play out in front of them.

In any event, in that moment of decision, I decided not to to take a picture. It’s all well and good to verbalize certain odd proclivities, but once a camera becomes involved you’ve crossed a line.

Irrevocably.