Perspective in Chicago
Sh*t happens…as they say. And it does. A lot. I, like you, want a life full of 95-mile-an-hour fastballs, right down the middle of the plate and as predictable as a Swiss watch, but life throws wobbly knuckleballs, and if the past is any indication of the future, the universe appears to be governed by a Times Square Rolex. To make matters worse, we occasionally take one on the noggin and don’t get a free pass to first base. We have to stay at the plate, shake it off, and be grateful we didn’t take one to the old bean bag.
The truth is, it can all be boiled down to one thing: perspective. That’s it. The complexities of life disappear when the aperture through which you view them is narrowed down to perspective.
For example: As I write this, I’m sitting in row 38 on a 737 at O’Hare going zero miles per hour. Row 38 is the very last one with seats that don’t recline because you share a wall with the lavatory – a thin wall, I might add. I thought the fuselage exploded when the first person flushed the commode. I’m not kidding, I about had a damn heart attack. Luckily though, I got a window seat, hence the photo – but don’t let the good weather fool you – it rained for five minutes and somehow managed to screw up all air traffic east of the Mississippi. We’re twelfth in line to take off, it’s hotter than hell, and the guy next to me is wearing a tank top. As if air travel isn’t terrible enough, there are still humans who do this. Don’t you have to wonder just what in the hell was going through this guy’s mind when he dressed himself (assuming he did)?
“I’m going to be the middle sardine on a flight that’ll inevitably be delayed, so maybe I’ll wear…oh, I don’t know…a tank top…yeah, a tank top! BRILLIANT! It’ll show off my arms, and who knows, maybe Selana Gomez will be sitting next to me, and that’s when the big money comes in. Chicks can’t resist these guns, so I gotta put my best foot forward. You know, this is probably my best idea of the day. At first, I thought my other idea was the best one – that I’d wear white socks with my flip-flops, but this one is much better. Selana best be ready cause when the biceps arrive, ladies’ knees be buckling!” Unfortunately for Rico Suave, he sat between me, who couldn’t have possibly been less impressed, and a grandma in a fluorescent track suit. All that thinking for nothing.
Perspective - it’s ALL about perspective. So here goes:
All told, I’ll have been in a cab, train, airport, or a coach seat for 15 hours today. Why, you ask? Why would anyone voluntarily subject themselves to this brutality? Well, I thought saving money by not flying first class would be a good idea – it wasn’t. I had a ninety-minute lunch meeting in Chicago that I foolishly thought I’d be in and out of, so why spend the extra dough? I am notoriously too optimistic when it comes to potential hiccups with travel.
This is how I saw my day unfolding:
Cab to LaGuardia (30 min)
Flight to O’Hare (120 min)
Train to Chicago (45 min)
Lunch at The Chicago Club (90 min)
Visit the Art Institute of Chicago (60 min) Didn’t Happen
Train back to O’Hare (45 min)
Flight to LaGuardia (120 min)
Cab to Manhattan (30 min)
What could possibly go wrong?
Oh, I don’t know. Maybe a drop of rain falls and disrupts the second busiest airport on the planet. I don’t take these things into consideration. Never have and probably never will. My expectations are simple: 95-mile-an-hour fastballs, right over the plate. Is that too much to ask for?
According to my calculations, for every ten minutes at lunch, I spent an hour and a half traveling. I believe the nerds would call that a factor of 1:9. Or maybe 9:1. I don’t have a Fields Medal – I’m spitballing here.
Anyway, back to this damned perspective thing. According to my phone, it would take 13 days of walking to get from Chicago to New York. And I can’t walk 24 hours a day. Off the top of my head, my days would look more like this:
Wake up around 7am – so seven hours are gone right there.
Coffee, WSJ, breakfast at a local Waffle House – that’ll take an hour.
Morning cigar – that’ll knock out thirty minutes because I’ve switched to a smaller gauge stick.
Steam, Sauna, Shower – that’ll be sixty minutes.
I diddle-daddle around for a good thirty minutes, so I’m not on the road until 10:00am. And yes, it has occurred to me that the route I’m taking is full of Waffle Houses and private clubs with cigar rooms.
I guess I’d walk until noon because I’d need another stop at Waffle House for a patty melt and double order of hashbrowns, covered with a dozen shakes of Tabasco. You’d have to take into account that I’d sit around shooting the bull with the staff, so I wouldn’t be back to walking until 1:30pm.
And no one expects me not to have a cigar after such a big lunch. That’s what we call “digestive health,” and as you can see, I’m big into my health. So, let’s say I’m back on track at two o’clock.
I’m good for a long stretch with a full belly, so let’s say I put in three hours of walking – quitting time is 5:00pm. Then I’m off for another shower, supper, cigar, and a movie.
So, I got five hours in, and I don’t work weekends. And if the Braves are playing, I’m sitting in front of the television.
Maybe I’m walking 20 hours a week total. At that pace, getting from Chicago to New York on foot would take almost four months, which sounds like the seventh ring of hell, even if it’s lined with Waffle Houses.
That said, if I have to sit on this damn tarmac with a hundred strangers, all of whom are pushing the bounds of the length of time their deodorant works, I’ll find solace in knowing I have the privilege of zipping back and forth between New York and Chicago in a day. Even a robber barron in his velvet-upholstered Pullman had a one-way trip of twenty hours and he didn’t have air conditioning.
I suppose it’s a foregone conclusion that I would’ve made a detestable settler. Covered wagons, terrible food, and Indians…no thank you. I read Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and it’s terrifying. I’ve been joking around thus far, but that book vividly describes violence that is borderline demonic. It ain’t the “cowboys and Indians” that we played in our backyards as little boys. There’s a reason why Harold Bloom included it in his Western Canon. All that to say, you can live the rest of your life in a permanent state of gratitude for the folks who braved the westward expansion of our country.
Now, there are two sides to every story, and this isn’t an appeasement to political correctness: I believe the Indians had every right to defend against the aforementioned expansion. Hell, one of our country’s mottos was, “Don’t Tread on Me.” I get it. I really do. If someone slips into a parking spot I’m waiting on, they’re liable to get an earful of four-letter words. No one wants anything taken from them. But, and this is a big “BUT” --- the savagery in Blood Meridian is atrocious. You would’ve been lucky to have only gotten scalped...while your heart was still beating.
ANYWAY … how I went from being stuck on a tarmac in Chicago to a dimwitted commentary on one of the greatest books of the twentieth century is a mystery to me too. That said, I’ll take this overcrowded airplane over a covered wagon any day of the week. Besides, I always died of dysentery when I played Oregon Trail in grammar school.
