RIP, Richard Lewis, who died of a heart attack a few weeks ago. He was the comedian who coined (or, more likely, popularized) the saying "____ from Hell." I was never a big fan of his work, to be honest, until his regular appearances on Curb Your Enthusiasm. He was low-key brilliant as an exaggerated version of himself, often playing something of a straight-man to Larry David's over-the-top, petty megalomaniac. Here's a clip of him from a recent episode. He had Parkinson's disease, and you can see that it had really started to take its toll. Years of substance abuse and an eating disorder as a younger man surely didn't help matters either. Lewis' death provides yet another time-marches-on example, as I remember him being something of a heartthrob back in the day. It's just so weird to see hip, hot celebrities from your youth wither away and die.
On the flip-side, however, Larry David, who was born only a few days after Lewis (at the same hospital), seems to be as healthy and spry as ever, so he's a good counterpoint. He has that thing going on, where you start looking old when you're actually still young, and then when you actually are old, you look pretty good for your age. My father-in-law is like this a bit too. He's in decent shape for a soon-to-be 82-year-old, but in pictures from his wedding day, he looks like a middle-age man, and he was only in his early thirties. I guess, there are late bloomers, and then there are late bloomers.
Anyway, I just got back from a work trip to Palm Springs early Saturday morning -- so early that it was more like Friday night. I like Palm Springs -- it's a beautiful city and a cool place to visit -- but it's one of the more annoying places in the continental US to get to from DC. There are no direct flights, which is extremely irritating, especially so when your work is paying the airfare. Also, I never seem to be able to find that Goldilocks hour-and-fifteen layover--they are all either 45 minutes or four and a half hours. This time I was able to get an hour layover both there and back, which is decent, but only by departing from and arriving at different DC airports. This meant I couldn't drive, which, again, is especially irritating when your work will pay for parking.
I also made a mistake by buying an "economy basic" ticket, which meant I couldn't bring a carry-on unless it fit under my seat. I do not remember selecting this option, and I didn't even know that there was a type of ticket below economy,* but apparently select it I did. It turned out to be fine. I actually prefer to not have a big carry-on, as it's a pain to lug it through the airport, and it's nice to not have to worry about overhead space. But I will usually bring one, in lieu of checked luggage, for short trips (especially with layovers), because if a flight gets cancelled, or you miss a layover, or something like that (which has happened to me several times before), it's way way more convenient and way way less stressful to have everything with you.
*S books all the family flights, because she's some sort of premier United flyer and frequently pays for our tickets using her miles. This is a huge perk of her traveling all the time for work.
On the way there, everything went smoothly. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the return trip. The trouble started Tuesday evening when I got an alert from United telling me they were expecting snowstorms in Denver on Friday afternoon, which would affect my layover, so I should book a new flight through a different city. It seemed a bit hasty to me to make this call three days in advance, but better safe than sorry, I figured, so I arranged a new flight through Houston. It got into DC much later than my original flight (10:30 pm versus 3:00 pm), but it also left at noon, instead of the ungodly 5:30 am, so I didn't mind the later arrival too much. Also, it allowed me to eat a delicious breakfast (something called migas) Friday morning with some colleagues at a quaint, trendy little joint in Palm Springs called Farm. So, that was cool.
When I got to the airport Friday afternoon, I noticed there was a flight leaving to Denver, so apparently they didn't get hit too hard, but, whatever, I had already changed my ticket. It didn't matter much to me one way or the other. That is, until we were about to land in Houston, and the pilot made an announcement that we would be circling for a little while because they were having thunderstorms in Houston and landing would pose a safety risk. What? You gotta be kidding me. Rain on your wedding day is not ironic. Rain at the airport at which you specifically rescheduled a layover, lest your travel be disrupted by inclement weather, is ironic. Immediately I got worried about missing my layover before thinking: Hey, dum-dum, your layover is going to be delayed too. You should be worried about getting out of Houston!
Indeed that proved to be the appropriate worry. Upon landing, I get a *ding* your flight is delayed one hour, and when one ding comes, you know there are more. Those things are like mosquito bites. The issue isn't so much that you got bitten once, it's that you know you're going to feel about a dozen more bites in a few minutes. Sure enough... *Ding* your flight is further delayed by a half hour. *Ding* your flight is delayed 40 more minutes. *Ding*... *ding*... *ding*...
It gets up to a three-hour delay for a flight that is already getting to DC late in the evening. But we finally board, and then the toilet breaks. It starts leaking that weird blue sanitary fluid, so they have to bring out a mechanic to try to fix it. They allow us to deplane in the meantime, which is extremely deflating, but I actually appreciate it because I wanted to get some water and a snack. (I was really counting on getting some pretzel mix and that quinoa chocolate thing with some seltzer water soon.) Nothing is open except for one of those tech-dystopian cashier-less kiosks, so I ring myself up a bottle of water and a small bag of almonds for $15.67.
We reboard and finally take-off, arriving in DC around 2:15 am. I book it through the airport, grab my bag from the carousel, reserve an Uber, and get home at 3:15 am. It's a pretty impressive time, to be honest -- one hour from a cabin door at a gate in Terminal C in Dulles to my front door -- but it's only because the airport and roads were virtually empty. The thing about airport delays, however, is that once they are done, they are done. You don't have to think about them anymore. You can rip up your boarding passes (or delete them from your phone as the case may be), throw away your luggage stickers, and wash your hands of the whole situation. It's kinda nice, in a weird way, to have a problem in your life that is completely solved.
Also, the advent of the iPad makes travel delays much more palatable than they used to be. In all my flights combined, I crossed off five movies from my massive "to watch" list -- American Fiction,* Dune, The Holdovers, 1917, and Born on Third Base (a Gary Gulman comedy special). They were mostly all excellent. I couldn't really get into Dune, though. I wanted to see it so that I could be all caught up to watch Dune: Part II in the theater, but now I'm not super excited about that proposition. I don't know what is was exactly, but the movie just didn't grab me. I think it was too Game of Thrones-y -- too many characters and tribes and magic, not enough explanation for anything. I'm just not a fantasy guy. Although, I did enjoy the 1984 version of Dune, starring Kyle MacLachlan and Sting. I mean, I never actually saw that film, but for many years my family owned a copy of the book -- not the Frank Herbert novel, but a pictorial book based on the movie -- that was autographed by MacLachlan, and I really liked looking through it as a kid. I wonder what happened to that book. It's possible it's still somewhere in my parents' house.
*Technically, I watched this one before I left.
The best of the five movies was probably American Fiction. The performances in it were so good, especially that of Sterling K. Brown. His Oscar nomination was well-deserved. I also quite enjoyed The Holdovers. It made me nostalgic, not for the early '70s when it was set -- I wasn't alive then -- but for the time in my life when people would actually go see something like the The Holdovers in the theater, and it seemed like a mainstream movie, not a little arthouse film. This was right around the time Richard Lewis was at his peak.
And now that I've brought it full circle... until next time...
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