america 2021.

My deep cynicism about this blog and about blogging in general will be placed on pause for the next 30 days as I attempt to document what must certainly be an especially unique moment in time, as if all moments in time aren't unique: in the middle of a global pandemic, the general dissolution of capitalist illusions, and the beginning of the climate change endgame, I'm irresponsibly taking a pollution-spewing commercial flight from one of the "hottest" Delta variant hotspots in Europe to one of the, get ready for this, "hottest" places in America. See that, hot/hot? It's like riding a bike. 

Anyway, please see Instagram for the aforementioned documentation. Here's a bit also. 

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It's not even noon yet but this morning's input has already generated a multitude of sputtering emotional outputs and my flight is still 3 hours away. The first of these outbursts occurred at 09:52, when I arrived at Station Sloterdijk underslept and on high alert only to discover that in the time it took me to leave the house and catch a bus for a 12 minute ride, my arch-nemesis the NS had cancelled most of the trains to the airport. The point of even going to Sloterdijk in the first place is its "ease of connectivity" to the airport.

Maybe I'll write again about the NS, but my loathing is a flavor of hatred so monotonous and unproductive that there's almost no point in indulging it. For now, we'll just say that I managed to catch the last train from Sloterdijk to Schiphol before things got really shitty. Then, cue all kinds of feelings about being at the airport, a familiar place, where almost nothing works the way it used to. I did feel gratitude at being an experienced traveller who is mostly sighted, mostly mobile, and mostly accustomed to the basic idiosyncrasies of European travel so that I could truly focus on being stressed out about pandemic-specific details. 

But, it all went kind of fine, some of it felt even quicker than usual, even though true efficiency continues to be made impossible by those people who seem surprised to find themselves at the airport, caught completely off guard by a request for their boarding documents or ID. Then: I saw right in front of me a mother looking at her teenage boy's face the way only a mother can, searching for clues, ready to accept any or all of the information they hinted at, and for a moment I understood what I was doing today. AWWWWWWWWW.

Then, you know, you see a couple fellow passengers not wearing masks properly; you engage in a few of those standard "in case I don't see you again, goodbye forever" conversations with loved ones; you feel all the feels about being sober at an airport for the first time in many years, ect ect ect. Is like bad carnival ride. 

Turns out not much has changed about the actually being on a plane part of flying. Boarding seemed faster due to a revolutionary new "five rows at a time instead of ten" technique. You could still only understand/hear half the announcements. It's still impossible to figure out how to get your futuristic Entertainment Screen out of your armrest. Cabin crew come by less frequently, and talk less because nobody can hear or understand anybody else. 

There is still no room to do anything at all except pray for a wormhole or some other non-lethal deus ex machina escape mechanism. I guess I'm going to have to turn to movies pretty soon. Only 6 out of 9 hours left on this flight. 

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