JFK JetBlue Terminal 5 Gate 10 at 6:20 PM
Shitty Phil Collins plays out of the speakers. The same shake of the tambourine loops. It’s either that or the red shaker thing you used to play with in 4th grade music class. This is the closest thing on earth to purgatory. A Jay Cutler lookalike walks by. I’m in slight pain, fighting one of those sinus infections that goes away after about a day or two, but absolutely sucks until it’s packed up and gone home. It’s ok: I’ll get home, take a hot shower, load up on Sudafed, and break the record for most Vaporub used at once, (a record currently held by Freddie Prinze Jr. after a wild night at The Viper Room back in ‘96). After that I’ll be fine. Is that Elvis playing? The JFK DJ clearly didn’t watch Priscilla. Airports are bizarre. Anarchistic in nature. You drink vodka cranberries at 7 AM, and get interrogated about your choice of shampoo by a TSA Agent that really wants to be a cop. You eat bad onion rings, or bad sandwiches, and puke all over the nice Swiss flight attendant (I’m sorry Helga). You don’t really laugh, and you might cry. Airports are a perverse stasis, the holy in-between. Time moves slower. Or faster. There are no rules. No lingua franca. You’ve just got to eat your ham and cheese sandwich with too much mustard, and accept it. Give yourself over to the chaos.
As a kid, I used to hate airports. Well, I hated travel in general. My reasons were simple: I really liked my bed, my room, and my kitchen. How was I supposed to make my Special Cereal™ at a Best Western? They don’t have Smart Starts, they don’t have dried cranberries, and they certainly don’t have under-ripe bananas. Also, I really liked (and still like) LA. These factors, plus profound motion sickness (there was a disastrous flight into Denver at about the turn of the decade), meant that I wasn’t exactly the happiest camper every time the suitcases came out.
Did shit change? Yeah, I mean I guess it did. I think I was about ten years old when it clicked for me how lucky I was to see the world. The tears on the drive to LAX stopped (or at least decreased). The periods spent hiding out in the bathroom got shorter. I learned to appreciate where I was, rather than fight where I wasn’t. However, even though I’ve become far more intrepid, some things stay the same: the best part of travel is coming home.
There’s nothing like seeing the lights of the sprawl of Los Angeles twinkle from above. The city just goes. There’s recognizable monuments from the air, like SOFI, but the vast majority of the view is what makes up LA: single-family homes, freeways, and mini-malls. The freeway’s slash and switchback through the city, half-red and half-white, creating a sort of Portland Trail Blazers logo. The oil fields of Culver City tell you one of the reasons why people first lived here, and the baseball fields below on the flightpath are filled with people doing everything they can to keep living here. The concrete behemoths of El Segundo to the south welcome you to American Selunda Secundis, and the glimmering lights of the Hollywood Hills to the north tell you that if anyone is going to make it here, it’s going to be you. It’s not gaudy like New York, not jaw-dropping like Paris. But it’s home, and just happens to be the most beautiful view on earth.
By Eli Pearl
11/21/23
