Don't Die In Florida Pt 1

Travel. It is supposed to be one of the most glorious things about living life in the modern era. Of course, the person who said that failed to account for 9/11

I hate to be the sort of guy who blames the world's problems on 9/11, but this one is legitmate. I even accept that the TSA guys were and are just doing their jobs, but I always use at least three of those little trays every time I go through the security checkpoints: one for my shoes and the contents of my pockets, one for my laptop, and one for my messengerbag proper. Sometimes they make me put my jacket in one too. There is no dignified way to collect all of your belongings after such a diaspora of personal goods.

It seems that with travel, air travel especially, that something always goes wrong, which is maybe a factor of how many things CAN go wrong, between tickets, luggage, security thinking your candy bar is a loaded magazine for a .45, shuttles taking you to the wrong terminal, screaming kids, engine failure, fat women whose fat envelops the arm rest, angry bitches who accuse you of taking their seats, old men who smell of rotting wood, "Fool's Gold" being the in-flight movie, condescending foreigners speaking condescendingly about you in languages they think you don't understand, talktive middle aged family-men who want to tell you about their vacation, talkative middle aged family-men who want to talk to you about YOUR vacation, etc.

None of this keeps me from travelling, it just causes me to occasionally go on a veteran tirade: "My buddies died face down in the sand/swamp/snow/etc...". It's our right to be both resistant to change that inconveniences us, as well as to call the changers out on it taken as a personal affront to our patriotism. To think, a small investment of 12 years of my life gave me all of this. I'm speaking deliberately in the future tense. I will have invested. I am investing. Whatever, I'm doing more than you are.