My First Goth Y’All

It is a mistake to write this essay. My neck has gotten an origami treatment from an airport terminal chair that is designed to look comfortable to anyone bereft of information about the design of chairs. I have been awake for twenty-five hours, with twelve more on deck. I’m being treated to an endless loop of someone slicing a steak over and over, with no food available this time of night but vending machines that only accept debit and credit cards. I am trying to picture the circumstances that would compel me to push my debit card into a vending machine in an airport. It’s an especially piquant proposition because nothing in the commerce boxes has a price on it. One of the vending machines even has unpriced Lego sets in it instead of Cokes. I’ll play Russian roulette, sir, but not with four bullets in the gun.

It’s inevitable that I’d write something that makes Kafka sound like Suess. I should avoid the subject. Talk about the surprise of great, green swards of Dallas spread at my Airbus feet as we cruised over the city. Dallas is as green as Kent. Who knew?

But the interior is just a terrazzo rash. I have encountered terrazzo beforetimes. I have appreciated terrazzo under different circumstances, trod on it willingly, and even admired it. But terrrazzo, morning, noon, and night, terrazzo for breakfast, brunch, lunch, and dinner, with no intermezzo, it’s too much. And as much of a shock as it might come to you, architect-dude, terrazzo has, in the past, been laid in other than indistinct, blobby patterns.

But a lack of style is the style these days. And where am I? I should know better. They call it a terminal, and they’re determined to live up to the name. It is not possible to be comfortable in a place like this. It’s a sciatic purgatory, a desolate desert of color, and texture, and sound, and vision, and succor of any kind.

A kind of devolution happens overnight in an airport. We walked past the saddest room outside of Dante. It was set aside for people who had missed their flights because their connections were late. Their expressions ranged from rage to extreme rage…

Hold on. Look out. Good God. I am currently being exhorted to get on the good foot by none other than James Brown, via a television bleeding out of a closed convenience store like an audio gunshot wound. It is currently 4:13 AM, and I regret to inform the Godfather of Soul that I’m  not currently in possession of a good foot to get on. And my bum hurts. There are no other takers for his offer of good-footedness, either, because the only other people within earshot are a man watching off-color videos on his phone in Spanish, and an incredible, douche-tastic, tattooed love boy brosephus who has been talking loudly to the second-least interesting person in the world for six straight hours. This has interrupted my attempts to perform amateur chiropractery on myself while trying to sleep.

But we found the last eatery in the concourse that served food before the terminal flatlined many hours ago. It was a shrine to the Cowboys. Tom Landry stood guard by the door…

Whoah. Wait a minute. I ask you: Who’s the one who won’t cop out, when there’s danger all about? It’s 4:28 AM Shaft! Can you dig it? You can? Right on…

Listen, before the Jimmy Castor Bunch shows up, let me get back to the concourse dinner. The Cowboys shrine had foodstuffs! We sounded slightly more than quizzical. More like dazed. Can we get something to eat? Here? Now? Really? We’ve been turned away from more places than Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and a Jehovah’s Witness.

The young lady behind the counter was failing at failing, which is hard to do. Her skin was marked up like a men’s room wall in a punk club, and she had enough fishing tackle in her face for a striper tournament. It was a form of voluntary failure, but she couldn’t pull it off. She said, “Of course, darling, what can I get y’all?” and the clouds parted and her true self was revealed.

“Hamburgers and fries, times two, please.”

“The fryer’s broken, sorry. Are Cool Ranch Doritos OK?”

So I’m outside a generous portion of Cool Ranch Doritos, and the last Guinness in the place, because it was the only Guinness in the place. But I am sanguine, because I got my first Goth Y’all.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to stop typing now, and Let It Whip.