Jus' lahk them there Bahbull tahms.

As I sat in Bangor International Airport yesterday "morning" at 4 AM waiting to board my flight back to the corn, irritable and bleary-eyed, I looked at my ticket for any suspicious markings that would lead a "cheerful" TSA officer to believe that I was desperate to detonate some incendiary device on our thirty person propeller-driven mosquito-sized aircraft. When I went to pass through security, a young woman whom I went to high school with (five on my Random Encounter-Meter) took my boarding pass and waved it under a red scanny-thing. It beeped twice.

Beep one: Allahu.

Beep two: Akbar.

So yet again I was taken aside for "special treatment." My rapist- oh, I mean, officer- was a man who clearly did not want to be wanding people at a time when most humans would be slumbering. To say he was brisk with his patdown would be like saying there's a lot of them there Chinese people. I mean, it was like a prison movie without the dropped soap. I hobbled away with my bags and a few shreds of my dignity; his musk lingered on me for hours. Honestly, drunk and unshowered at 4 AM? Of course, I was also drunk and unshowered, so naturally he felt his "move" was appropriate.

This time, the plane took off. At the precise astral moment when I thought I could fall asleep, the flight attendant brine hag came over the PA to say that we'd be landing soon. Put on my brown hide shoes and I boarded the plane/ Touched down, me all full of booze in the middle of the pouring rain. Cincinnati. My sworn enemy. With what I thought would be about a half-hour of layover time, I relieved myself and made way for the gate. Indianapolis. Delayed. I was beginning to think that I'd somehow incurred the wrath of the airplane imps; I hastened to the Auntie Annie's pretzel counter, purchased a pretzel-wrapped hotdog and ceremonially cut its throat. Just when I thought that one more moment in that, the undercarriage of Ohio, would make me do the unspeakable - buy a Cosmo magazine - my flight began to board. By this time, in the amount of time that I waited for my flight I could have driven to Indianapolis and back. I wanted to die, and I wanted to die so hard. Mostly, though, I wanted to sleep. On the twenty minute flight to Indianapolis, the flight attendant threw six ounce bottles of Dasani water at us from her vile nest near the cockpit; she was too busy molding the ground-up carcass of a ten-year-old into fine pottery to really care about our needs for the tasteless cookies they now serve on planes.

So. Back in the corn. First day back at work. I'd missed it here a lot. I have, as of yet, to unpack, but hey, you're pretty much useless when you're on the stem. I got a call from my friend Nicole, who invited me to dinner and to fetch my mail (I lived in Nicole's apartment this summer, and apparently not all of my "people" have my correct address yet). While dining upon a delightful pasta dish, I opened one envelope to reveal a small orangish slip and a folded piece of hard paper. The slip explained that the State of North Carolina had deemed that I was grossly overcharged for my car insurance and I was to be refunded (with interest!) the money I'd overpaid.

The hard paper was a check. A check for $531.

I imagined, for the briefest of moments, what watching manna falling from the sky would be like.
That'll keep me in Velveeta Shells n' Cheese for, like, a year.

It's good to be back, Bloomington.

Dom