• Today was a lousy day to fly. Got up around 06:15 in Grafton, WI and had to make it down to General Mitchell Airport for my 07:55 departure to Pittsburgh.
• I got up to the counter and Dale, the friendly guy who always exchanges my Orbitz itineraries for tickets at the USAir ticket counter in MKE, is talking to the woman in front of me. It's 07:25. He says to her, "You've got a 10am departure out of here, but I suggest you get in the security line now or you'll never make it on your plane."
• I sighed.
• When I got up to the line, I asked him as nicely as possible, "So I'm pretty much fucked, aren't I?"
• "Are you on my 7:55?"
• I nodded, and he sighed.
• "Yeah, you're way past my cutoff time for that one and we're completely booked up this morning, so I'll have to put you on standby."
• As it turned out, I didn't have to go on standby since he found me a good combination out through Philadelphia. I had avoided that flight on purpose, but somehow I was just fated to be on those planes.
• So I wind up flying all the way from MKE to PHI for over an hour and a half on a cramped Canadair Regional Jet, then the 27 minutes in the air from PHI to BWI in a spacious Boeing 737.
• How is it that I can get through BWI security into the most popular concourse on a Friday evening with absolutely no line in 2 minutes? That was enough time to take off my (already untied) boots, load everything through the machine and get waved on with a smile after I pass through the metal detector without so much as a blip.
• After all that travel, I get to Grafton, open my bag and discover a spent 9mm shell casing. Don't get me wrong, I'm not picking on them by any means for not finding it. As far as I'm concerned, they shouldn't care about that. I'm just glad I didn't have to wash the smell of latex glove off of my sphincter for the next week and a half.
• But Monday morning from little MKE? No shell casing, just forty-five minutes in line and 5 minutes with a guy with a big black paddle asking if he has permission to grab my ankles.
• The line on the way home was wrapped entirely around the concourse just for Terminal D. Now, General Mitchell isn't a huge place, but when you have a line that intersects itself and the security guards are acting as human traffic signals, something is wrong.
• The lines for all the other MKE terminals? None. Apparently everyone leaving Milwaukee flies USAir.
• Transportation planning at its finest.
• Philadelphia to Baltimore. Start out from Philadelphia, an airport that I've come to hate for the sheer hideous sprawling monstronsity of its layout, and a strange sort of folk waiting in the gate area with me who feel like it's their business to comment on mine. Boarding for my (now) 14:00 connecting flight to Baltimore begins at 13:30. Everyone boards the plane and sits. Come 14:00, we're all ready to take off, when we find that there are n people aboard the plane, and n - 1 tickets accounted for at the counter.
• Hilarity ensues.
• Actually, I'm lying. About 6 dozen surly passengers are just getting really hot and really annoyed because some guy at the gate can't count and keep all his ticket stubs in an organized deck.
• I have a feeling that person was me, since I gave the guy at the counter a flight coupon and boarding pass and he might have given me back the wrong stub. I would have said something from my seat, but the first rule of being a good sheep is to bury your face in your book and not call attention to yourself.
• Baaaaaa.
• I expected that. Leaving from Pittsburgh to Milwaukee on Friday some Einstein decided to check his luggage, then not get on the plane. So we have to wait another 20 minutes to open the cargo bay, find and remove a piece of luggage with no idea what it looks like.
• Can someone please fund the "Scissors and Knives welcome" airline? Just arm the pilots and several well-trained passengers with small caliber hollow point rounds. Then let everyone carry whatever the hell they want onto the plane. I'd fly it all the time. Nobody would sleep, but everybody would get to keep a modicum of self-respect.
• If United States were truly the land of the free, we'd have two standing towers and twenty-some terrorists riddled with dozens of large caliber entry wounds.
• Speaking of which, I saw something terrifying today: a National Guardsman carrying a nightstick.
• This is bad, folks.
• There are two main types of order enforcers in our society as it is. Police and soldiers.
• Police are public servants, hired on a relatively local level to govern and enforce local order. They are authorized to use reasonable force at all times to enforce the law, and deadly force when absolutely necessary to defend individual citizens and their own lives.
• Soldiers are given the authority of deadly force under order to defend the country from harm under the leadership of the government officials on behalf of the people. Under these sort of orders, they are not directly accountable to the citizens, only the leaders they serve, who in turn can only make broad changes in the operation of the military through established procedures.
• Seeing military men armed with instruments of non-leathal force such as nightsticks makes me assume that they've been authorized at some level to use reasonable force against citizens of this country to enforce the law.
• If they are fighting terrorists, they should be using only deadly force to mitigate an immediate wartime threat.
• The only people using reasonable force to enforce individual order should be police officers, accountable to the people.
• I know the National Guard is delegated on a state level, but the accountability concerns remain the same no matter what sort of military unit is being used for domestic law enforcement.
• Luckily my search for National Guard today revealed a glimmer of hope. It appears that Police officers will replace National Guard troops at airports according to the Lando Times.
• Maybe this country is finally getting realistic again.
• It's about damn time.
• Yeah, it's annoying that I've got no choice besides my own four wheels, but it's worth it to save the time and be able to spend more of a lovely weekend with my wonderful girlfriend.
• Thanks to her I'm offically a real photographer again. She needled me mercelessly until we stopped at Target on the way to Deeply Rooted to get a new 128 MB SanDisk CompactFlash card.
• Some of you may recall I lost the last one on the way to Milwaukee last month. Not that I mention that fact on a regular basis or anything.
• Which is really strange since I can't fathom how it fell out of my carry-on bag except maybe at the BWI checkpoint. It's probably in my office somewhere, or else some kind soul will find it, see the vees.net URL in black permanent marker, come to my site and read about how sad I am to be without my very first memory card and adapter, and mail it to me.
• Or maybe not, which is why I got the new one.
• Took a pretty neat batch of photos of work getting done, but no fire spinning over the weekend. That's okay, I had everyone enthralled with admonishing stories of Assateague Island and other experiences.
• Well, they seemed enthralled. Maybe they were just making "interested" faces and nodding in all the right spots. I would have been too damn worn out to notice.
• We turned into bed at 19:30. Even considering the jet lag, that's pretty amazing for me. But I suppose that's life when you work hard all morning long, have a delicious hearty dinner and have no power grid electricity.
• I want to try it more often.
• I would have taken more pictures, but then I would have felt so lazy next to Suz, Bobby G and Wade who were doing so much work out there. Especially Bobby G. From what I saw, that boy could conceivably decimate the stone ruins of entire ancient civilization and turn it into the stone foundation of a Disney World parking lot in about a week.
• Good thing he's focusing his effort on bettering a pagan commune in "up north" Wisconsin.
• Mr. Yard Cleaner from March 24, 2002 came to the door this evening again, carrying his usual rake, broom and _my_ orange work gloves that he took from the porch last week. He asked if there was any yard work he could do and I told him I wasn't going to pay him for anything. As he was leaving, I said "I'm _sure_ you're leaving my work gloves with me, right?" He handed them back to me and said "Yeah, here, oh yeah, I found them for you." Yeah, right. So all is well; he seems harmless. Just keep your eyes open.

March 30, 2002 - April 2, 2002

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