June19, 2006 Forgive me for starting at the end (of my West Coast excursion), but it's the most amusing part. So, they load us on United 302 (Chicago to Albany) and we push back from the jetway, and about ten minutes later I notice that we are taxiing past the "C" Concourse again, that is, we've circled around the whole airport. Okay, well, O'Hare is a weird operation.
So I sink back into the newsprint fog of the fifth newspaper I've read that day and after another ten minutes I notice we're rolling past the "C" Concourse yet again. It's also real hot in the plane because it's 90 degrees outside and the AC isn't running too well. The other passengers are getting grousy.
So, we finally stop driving around the fucking airport and apparently get on line for takeoff. Only it looks like a staggeringly long line, going forward and around the corner and up the tarmac, forever. "Kcccchhhhhhh," static over the PA as the pilot gets on the microphone. "Uh, folks...." (Whenever they start with that patronizing salutation, you know you're in for the business.) "Uh, folks, it seems to be rush hour out here. They've got us at about, oh, twenty-five or thirty for takeoff..." Groans up and down the aisle. "...and we'll give you an update as soon as we have more information, Kccchhhhhhhhh."
Okay, we're already a half an hour late for takeoff, and everybody's roasting in the cabin. I'm thinking, the pilot said, "It's rush hour out here." Wait a minute. I don't get it. Rush hour? Like a whole bunch of planes just showed up at O'Hare unscheduled? Coming and going? Nobody was informed about it ahead of time? They're all...surprised? Like there's some kind of airplane freeway ramp out there feeding onto O'Hare, and for some reason a whole lot of planes just appeared? And now the runways are clogged with planes that nobody expected or knew about...? I mention this because this is the kind of mendacious bullshit that Americans are subjected to constantly. No wonder we can't think about public affairs anymore.
Okay, so I spent nine days on the West Coast, starting in Los Angeles, Pasadena, actually. Let's just say that part of the United States is absolutely hopeless. It consists largely of a roadway hierarchy and whatever's left is apportioned to valet parking. It has no future. The poor oblivious denizens of the place don't question their predicament. The whole sordid scene is, well, tragic, and I'm sorry, but let's pass over it for now.
So, eventually I got up to Seattle, which is trying to be a city, like a real twentieth century city -- did I say twentieth? Well, there's the problem, right there. They're lining the avenues with condo skyscrapers. Big mistake. Skyscrapers are not going to be cool in the twenty-first century as we run into problems with the electricity supply. Oh, well. The other problem with Seattle is this: the topography is really demoralizing. The hills are so steep that I got shin splints from walking around the place for one day. Now, if the people who lived there and run place had any sense, they would have cable cars or some damn thing traversing the hills every ten blocks. Then, you could walk the contours comfortably and get up the elevations okay.
But they don't do that. They probably had them ninety years ago (and, in fact, I saw framed photos of Seattle's cable cars in the Town Hall auditorium lobby where I gave a blab, so I know for a fact they did). But apparently they forgot how to do that. So now, obviously, everybody brings their car downtown because it's impossible to walk around comfortably, even if you're in shape, and Seattle has become one of the worst traffic clusterfucks in the nation.
Eventually I got up to Vancouver on Amtrak -- a very comfortable ride along the shore of Puget Sound past flocks of eagles and all kinds of natural beauty -- and when I went through customs at the Vancouver central station, I was pulled aside and directed into a grim little room with a female interogation officer. I had a New York DWAI traffic conviction dating from 1997, and did I know that this made me undesirable for entry into that fortress of rectitude, Canada? Well, gosh, no....
Then the lady officer said -- I swear she did -- that she could prevent me from entering if she had been in a bad mood. But instead, she gave me printed instructions for how to apply to the Canadian consulate back home for a document proving I had been rehabilitated (from a misdemeanor). It was interesting to note that Canadian border policy depends on the particular mood of individual customs officers.
Vancouver is a very appealing site for a city, but it is in the process of being utterly pranged (as they like to say) by massive hyper-mega-overdevelopment. And anyway, circumstances had me more-or-less house-sitting an old college friend's home way up in the hills of suburban West Vancouver, where it required fifty dollars in cab fares to get something to eat. Enough said. I took a spectacular ferry ride, on an extravagantly comfortable (and cheap: $8.50Ca) vessel over to little Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, on the big island out in the Pacific. Victoria, too, was on its way toward a good self-pranging, but there is a visible residue of the pre-pranged city that is scaled comfortably and possesses great natural beauty. I met a lot of nice people there, and they didn't seem disturbed that nine years ago I had incurred a misdemeanor conviction for DWAI.
The rest was that torturous return journey home via O'Hare, which I already told you about. One final note, however, to the hotel chains of North America: please lose those fucking twenty-pound duvets you're putting on all the beds. They're too heavy. They're too hot, even with the AC on. I hardly slept the whole time I was away. No wonder I'm cranky.
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