I'm in San Francisco on what I can honestly tell the I.R.S. is (mostly) business. At Security at LAX, I was subjected to a pat-down and wanding so thorough, I got to wondering if maybe I was a terrorist and had merely forgotten what I was up to.
Once they'd decided I was safe to board, I got in the little line at Gate 1 where Southwest wants you to line up in numerical order according to your boarding passes. Mine was A-24 and when I asked a fellow traveller what his number was, I got the following response — and to capture his delivery, you have to imagine Jesse Ventura delivering these lines. He said, "I don't know from this stupid system they have here. All I know is I was the ninth person to line up here and I'm gonna be the ninth person to get on that friggin' plane and nobody'd better try and stop me if they know what's good for 'em!"
Nobody tried to stop him and he was, indeed, the ninth one on the plane. That system works, too.
It was a short flight. I only got as far as the outdoor speakers shaped like tiki gods in the SkyMall catalog. A friend of mine used to have this theory that airlines in this country were secretly releasing a special gas into their cabins that made you a bit more docile and acted as a kind of tranquilizer. His main piece of evidence was how you almost decide to order something from the SkyMall catalog. You flip through it, page after page, thinking to yourself, "How could anybody want this crap?" And then you come upon the one item — and it's different for everyone — that could make your life so much better. It's crap to everyone else who leafs through the ads but to you, it's the greatest scientific breakthrough since the Magic Bullet. "At last," you cry out. "Someone has finally made a trowel that can teach a man to speak Hebrew!"
You jot down the ordering information or you tear out the page…or maybe to make sure, you take the whole damn catalog. And you fully intend to order at least a dozen of whatever it is until you get off the plane and step out into the terminal. There, you breathe non-spiked air and you go "Naaah" and toss the ordering info away. Every time.
That's my friend's theory. I used to argue with him that the narcotic was not in the air but was instead in the coating on the honey-roasted peanuts. He almost agreed but then the airlines switched over to pretzels or crackers and we were still almost ordering styrofoam barbells from the SkyMall catalog so maybe I was wrong. All I know is that the air on the plane did smell a bit odd and the edible bedroom slippers looked awfully tasty.