Saturday, October 13, 2007—Lost and Found and Lost
I rose early enough the next morning to find my way to the next phase of the conference. I’m not going to use a great deal of space here this time, as I’d rather leave the storyline predominantly for Jennifer to complete.
Solitary ‘Berry in SanAn
“I had decided before we left home that I wanted to see the San Antonio Botanical Garden. It’s not something Thomas would be very interested in, so it seemed like a good solo activity. All in all, it was fun, but like any travel adventure, it was not without its mishaps, nor its vacas (cows).
First, I had to figure out how to navigate the bus system. I had printed out some information before I left home, but being the skeptic that I am, I didn’t trust it, so I asked a friendly hotel employee at the front desk for some help. After a phone call to the bus company, he told me that the first step was to find the bus stop on Blanco Street, which was “right down there, at the stoplight.” So … of course, I walked a-a-a-l-l-ll the way around the block, drawing a blank on Blanco, before I finally spotted it. Unfortunately, I had missed the bus time I had written down. Rather than risk going off without proper information, I went a-a-a-l-l-ll the way back up to our little executive lounge and looked it up on the Internet, but of course that wouldn’t let me download PDFs of the bus routes. So I called the friendly customer service person at the bus company, got the rundown, set off back down to Blanco Street and caught my bus.
Luckily, the bus drivers were very tolerant of me when I told them I was a tourist and wanted to be sure of where to get off to make my transfer. They were glad to help me out, and I got to the Botanical Garden without further mishap.
There I was, the Botanical Berry, dancing among the trees and plants. I’ll not bore you with a detailed rundown of what I saw, but some of the highlights are worth noting. One was a Japanese garden, which had a nice little rock pond running through it, bamboo plants and shady trees. I also enjoyed the sensory garden, meant specifically to give the blind a full botanical experience. However, there was still plenty to see, touch and smell. I made my way up to the overlook, where I got a nice panoramic view of San Antonio, and wandered through the rose garden, which had plenty of beautiful colors and scents.
The main lowlight was the muchas vacitas, or ‘many little cows.’ There was a family with a herd of small calves ambling through the Japanese garden. It was a nice, tranquil place, and my peace was quickly destroyed by the shrill lowing from the young ones.
[ABOVE]: Having captured the alien pod during our trip to Biloxi in July 2004, [BELOW]: Jennifer finds another otherworldly flora in San Antonio in October 2007.
There was also some sort of Dora the Explorer maze through the formal garden, which was rendered all but unusable by me, the full-sized adult, who could not crawl through the little three-foot-high metal obstacles that had been placed in the walkways. I cursed the fact that a formal garden had been turned into a playground for kids, shrugged my shoulders and turned to get to my bus, which was due in just a few minutes.
I gazed at my bus schedule for the return trip and calculated that I would either just barely make my transfer bus, or have to wait twenty-eight of the thirty minutes between buses. Being a Thornberry, of course, I was betting on the longer wait. Once again, the friendly driver helped me get off at the right place. I settled myself in for half an hour on the hot, sunny bench, when what to my wondering eyes did appear but bus number two, minus the reindeer. I got back to the room a little early, a few minutes ahead of Thomas.
And now, back to Thomas’ narration to take you through the rest of the story!”
Riverwalk the Line
Jennifer and I once again stared doe-eyed at each other as we respectively told of our experiences above in bone-chilling, mind-expanding detail. Then came the decision of how to spend our last evening in San Antonio. Personally, I was prepared to just settle into the hotel and avail ourselves of its many amenities. We had sporadic access to email, so I didn’t feel quite so cut off from friends and family as in past trips (that’s you folks!), so we could have done much to communicate. Jennifer, however, wanted to venture out into the city and see the Paseo del Rio: the San Antonio Riverwalk. I was hesitant because we calculated that based on the bus ride and time to dine, we’d only really get thirty minutes of time at the Riverwalk before the last bus run that would bring us home.
I had to admit though, that my position in the discussion was causing me a touch of “existential guilt.” Basically, existential guilt is the sense of malaise one experiences when she or he is not living up to her or his full potential during a lifetime that goes ‘round only one time (unless you’re Hindu or Buddhist, I suppose). It is the sense of lost time and lost opportunity. En micro, I did sort of relate to Jennifer’s point that we had traveled more than a thousand miles to see the city, and it would be an opportunity lost if we hung around the room. So with her wanting to go and my wanting to stay, we compromised; we decided to go. ;)
As Jennifer’s account above indicated, she had previously scoped out the bus system, and she was confident we would be able to get out to the Riverwalk and back again without mishap. We hiked out to the right stop, climbed aboard the next bus and paid our $2 fee.
Right away, I was a bit unnerved. First of all, the trip was about forty minutes long. Second of all, I started to feel like we had crossed to the wrong side of the tracks somewhere along the way. There weren’t any bars on the windows of the homes we passed, and no one was using handguns with the identification numbers filed off, but the other passengers climbing onto the bus started taking on a considerably rougher, harsher, seedier look.
At one point, we had to vacate our seat because the driver had to flip it up to make that area wheelchair accessible for one of the boarding passengers. Bald and scruffy, the guy looked like he’d jumped onto a grenade to save his biker buddies in a militant gang rumble. The bouquet of roses he was selling made him seem…well, not one bit less intimidating. To the guy’s credit, he never said anything amiss or even talked to us at all. I think he made me nervous because he sat right in front of me and I was able to count the five wedge-like scars cut into the back of his shaved scalp. It looked like he’d gone a few rounds with a steel-beaked woodpecker…and lost.
Another group of passengers aboard included a very young Mexican-American couple. They looked to be around nineteen or twenty-something, and they had a child who appeared maybe two years old. And the girl was very pregnant and shaped like a potato with pencils shoved in the bottom of it for legs. Again, they never said anything to us, but I got the sense that if I had made eye contact, the young man might have taken offense and stabbed me. I cultivated a blank expression and stared past them out the bus window.
At last, the bus reached the right destination, and we stepped off of it to behold downtown San Antonio.
Eh.
Overall, it wasn’t that much different than downtown in other cities we’ve visited. It was characterized by a tangle of descending staircases that take pedestrians down to the famed Riverwalk. When we finally found our way down there, we say this little teeny stream, beside which many couples walked. The Rio Grande, the Paseo del Rio was not. A boat chugged by, stuffed with people and a tour guide. We've found someone else's video of the area at Youtube:
The place was peaceful in its own way, but this area was crawling with “steers” and there really wasn’t anywhere for Jennifer and I to stop and take in the view without having to crowd someone over the side of the concrete railings and into the water below. Tempting, but unwise. At one point, we ran into a cluster of well-dressed Texas “steers” all coordinating some kind of event—a marriage, funeral, save-the-whales karaoke, an Amish live birth—we really didn’t know or care. All we could determine was that they were in the way.
This is not to say it was an entirely unpleasant experience. No, there was nice foliage and flowers around the entire area, with birds flitting around, and the water did have a peaceful sound to it. We could see how it would be a nice hangout for young couples coming out for dating; it was a classy environment that did not take any great amount of money to appreciate. Our regret was that circumstances contrived to keep us from having the time necessary to find a spot and absorb some of it. We’d spent that time on the airport floor, alas.
Our search for food was a painful one. At one point, we found a nice, open doorway into what appeared to be a ritzy place. However, all the servers had disappeared. We waited for several minutes, but no one came back. I stepped further into the place and looked around, but saw no one who looked like an employee. Plenty of customers cramming their pie-holes, but no one to seat us. We gave up and moved on.
Eventually, we found a nice place called the “Iron Cactus.” They had a splendid Mesoamerican décor, a sedate atmosphere and a friendly hostess. We paid attention to none of those features. What we noted was that they could seat us outside and they could do it right now. Good enough for us! The details of the meal are relatively unimportant, save that we split a huge sampler platter of various Mexican dishes, and I generously doused it all with the hottest hot sauce they would give me. A thrill-seeker I am not, and a roller-coaster wimp I am. But among our family and friends, my taste for spice is rivaled by few. The facility served us up a couple of Mexican beers, which I used to wash down my food and the little bits of my tongue flaking away because of the hot sauce. It wuh wurt it!
If one can say “you are what you eat,” then Jennifer and I must have eaten a couple of stuffed Thornberries. Out we toddled, feeling heavy, but also freer and more confident. Not to be outdone, San Antonio then reached out and smacked our heads around backward, so we were looking down at our own butt cheeks (“Why didn’t somebody tell me my ass was this big!?”) That must be how we got lost, because neither of us could find any trace of the bus stop where we first exited to the downtown area. Every direction we went, we ended up further lost. Slowly but surely, our time ran out, and we realized that wherever that damn bus stop was, we had long missed the last run back to the hotel. So we found a safe haven on the stoop of an old friendly hotel chain, the Drury Inn. Settling in for a few minutes, Jennifer pulled out her Plan B: a taxi. Yes, she called a central number and requested a ride. Then we waited for the better part of an hour while every taxi but ours went down the road and picked up everyone but us. I was getting highly agitated by this point, figuring my existential guilt that had bent me down and kicked me onto this excursion might have been preferable to the salient anxiety of being trapped away from our only sanctum sanctorum in a very large and unfamiliar city. Adding to our burden, drunken people kept staggering by to stare at us or ask us in slurry words if we knew were various businesses where located. We didn’t, but I found it easiest just to point in the direction that was the opposite of us.
Finally, our cab arrived. Chunking and wheezing, the vehicle had a sickly green light emerging from inside it and wafts of luminous emerald smoke that puffed out of the cracked windshields. Inside, cloistered in the mysterious front seat was a “scabby cabby” who looked like a pile of dirty laundry with a thatch of gray hair awkwardly plopped on top of it. He spoke in a gravely smoker’s voice and flicked his lizard’s tongue while taking down our location. Then he set about finding the longest, most circuitous route by which to drag out the trip and gouge us for more money. While he meandered, he talked, asking us a few questions about ourselves and where we were from. Along the way, he had time to give us a long lecture about the history of Texas and how there are no public parks in the Lone Star State because the money-starved local government sold it all off to private interests. The Hilton bulking on the Texas skyline never looked so inviting by the time we rolled up to the front door. Scabby Cabby handed us a bill for about $22, or eleven times what we paid to go the same distance by bus. We disembarked from the cab and bolted inside, where we soothed over our jangled nerves with a beer from the hotel café.
The rest of the night was mercifully uneventful. But it had been a long day and we were ready for bed.
Sunday, October 14, 2007—Homeward Bound
The return trip wasn’t nearly as eventful as the story of our arrival. The only notable point was that our departure from the San Antonio airport was actually running early. Or rather, there was room on an earlier flight, and we jumped for the chance because our layover in Houston was only about an hour. We’d already missed one flight from that damnable place. We didn’t want another night with the zombies.
All in all, we got home in one piece. The greatest irony was that when we walked out of our arrival gate in our local airport, we saw that the departing flight from there was going to Newark, and it was—you guessed it—delayed! All Jennifer and I could do was shake our heads at those waiting passengers and think to ourselves: “Fellow travelers, you’re in for a lo-o-o-ong adventure.”
And as always, our darlings, thanks for your time and attention to our narrative!
Yes, Jennifer’s Spanish lessons can give voice to the day in a way my yet-crude Latin cannot.
San Antonio witnessed a plane giving birth to a couple of ripe Thornberries. Yes, other than a futile attempt to wash our faces using the restroom sinks and nearly empty soap dispensers, we weren’t able to do much about our hygiene. All of our supplies were in a cart or the belly of a plane somewhere. We could only hope it was the plane we had just exited.
Fortune finally stopped butt-plungering us at this point. We collected our luggage from the baggage claim without any major mishaps. We located phones to call the Hilton and they dispatched a transport bus. I knew it was going to be a painful trip when I sought to confirm with the driver that we were in the right place, and the little punk said, “I dunno. Are you?” [Sigh]. At this point, I really didn’t care what hotel he found for us, or if he went home afterward and shot himself in the head. All I wanted was a room and delicious sleep.
Our transport driver, demonstrating every bit of his human intelligence level.
Fortunately, I had recommended before we left our home airport that Jennifer call the Hilton and confirm our reservations so they didn’t cancel them. Our room was ready when we arrived and we got the room keys. But before we went up to them, I asked Jennifer for a little more patience while I sought out the ASCH conference people. I’m sure they’ve heard every sob story for why someone misses their scheduled time, so I thought if I presented my ragged, rank, stubbly self exactly as I had walked off the plane after a night in the airport, it might score me a few points. The ASCH assistant took one look at me and told me to go to bed. Happy to oblige.
The Hotel Hilton, Airport
Well, we may have paid 136% and then missed the first night, but somehow, I think we still got our money’s worth. They had placed us on what they called the “Executive Level.” Essentially, it was the top four floors of the hotel. It came with a complimentary access to a study, free breakfast, a computer for getting on the Internet and a team of attractive young, nubile, scantily clad people to perform “escort” services on…er, um…for us. Okay, perhaps not that last one, but they did give us the royal treatment, especially when our only point of reference on this trip was a hard floor plagued by zombies. We had to have our electronic room cards with us any time we got on the elevator because only those with “Executive Access” could get to those upper rooms. Wow. Call us the Throne-berries. Insofar as the room itself, they might have put it on a mountaintop next to a gibbering lama, but the accommodations themselves were comparable to most other hotels where we’ve stayed. Pay-per-view on television, desks, a few complimentary items like bottled water. No liquor cabinet like the J.W. Marriott in Atlanta and no refrigerator like the Drury Inn in St. Louis. Still, that vast king-sized bed was all I had the eyes to peruse. And then neither of us saw anything except our own eyelids….
His and Hers; Hypnosis and Huffing
Jennifer and I woke two hours later, mercifully freshened up and grabbed some food downstairs in the hotel’s café before the conference attendees belly-flopped themselves in front of us. We would later learn that in addition to ASCH, there were a couple of other professional organizations holding conferences. One was a group of well-dressed Pentecostals, singing the praises of the Lord and getting themselves baptized by the active Holy Spirit. The other was a group of naturalists. So the place was crowded, and we just barely squeaked our way in front of one group looking for loaves and fishes and the other for worms and twigs.
Afterward, we went our separate ways, me to finally get to the latter half of the conference, Jennifer to do…whatever it was she did. We’ll split the story off here and let you follow her thread.
Jennifer’s Experiences:
“I spent my afternoon doing what any self-respecting health nut does after spending a night crunched up on an airport floor … I went down to the hotel’s fitness center for a workout. It felt remarkably good to work the kinks out of my muscles. It felt so good, in fact, that I worked my body for almost two hours! That’s much longer than I stay at the gym at home. Not much else to say here, except to comment on how nice the hotel’s fitness facility was. It was equipped with two or three treadmills and stair climbers, a full set of dumbbells, a few benches, and a couple of ab balls. It also had a mat and large mirror, which were very nice for some vigorous yoga poses.
Feeling much better, I went back up to the room to get ready to go out to dinner with Thomas. Despite my swearing not to do so, I dozed off for a short nap, then roused myself and took a shower, got dressed and studied mi espanol until he returned.
Thomas will pick back up with the story of our evening together 'on the town:'”
The North Star Mall
The Hilton Hotel was across the highway from the pretty fairly sized North Star Mall. After Jennifer caught me up on the respective experiences detailed above, we had hopes of moseying over to investigate said mall and grabbing some grub. Originally, we thought we might just cross the highway and walk over, but after several hours in San Antonio, we realized that would be nigh impossible. The highway was multi-lane and heavy with traffic at all times. There was also construction going on, of course. We always seem to visit places that are being built or renovated. Neither of us was keen on the idea of playing a high-stakes game of Frogger where the loser ended up as pink squishy stuff beneath some Texas cowboy’s Good Year treads. That meant waiting for the hotel’s transport van. Fortunately, it arrived right on time and we got there with no difficulty. We had two hours to enjoy ourselves before the van came back for the return trip.
Of course you know there would have to be a stampede of humanity oozing its way around us, so Jennifer and I found ourselves prodding people out of the way or luring them off the main route of the mall with handfuls of fescue and oats. Only a brief exploration of this one-story palette of shopping splats, and Jennifer and I finally realized that it held few options for dining that weren’t in the open food court. We ended up returning to the place way back at the point we had entered, one known as Luby’s. It was basically a buffet place, where you pick up a tray and then tell the glassy-eyed, slack-jawed employees behind the counter which entrees and side dishes you want. I selected a pretty tasty ensemble that was a bit luke-warm, but otherwise palatable. It included ‘shrooms, which generally make any dish, including ice cream, better for me. Jennifer, on the other hand, suffered loud and long. Her dinner looked like someone in the kitchen has pulled the nozzle on it and let all of the air out of it. Flat, bland and roadkill-esque, she wasn’t even able to better it with butter and other condiments because each packet grabbed her plastic knife and forced her to duel it before it would submit to having its splattery viscera pasted on her culinary crap. At least it filled her stomach, even if that was all it did. The mall itself was a vast enterprise, a honeycomb of capitalism that would have Karl Marx rolling around in his 124-year old grave. Overall, it was so filled with shops, restaurants, kiosks, service providers and colorful lights that it would have required a dedicated shopper to spend five or six hours moving through it.
Eh.
Jennifer and I burned through it in about 45 minutes.
We’ve noted in previous narratives that we’re just not big shoppers. Sure, these malls tend to be huge. But once we weed out the chain stores that we have back at home, then go back and throw out the teeny-bopper places with their hot pink thongs and recycled boot-cut low-riders, then scratch off the frivolous places like “Leather ‘R’ Us,” and finally trim out the high-priced places that are affiliates of places we have at home, there really isn’t much left that captures our interest. Jennifer and I mainly just wanted a nice dinner (so much for that), and a coffee from Starbucks. We usually hold out hope for encountering something truly unique at these malls and I did briefly check out a game store. But I found it full of teenage “steers” (as opposed to the “cows” of home), and in general, my X-Box was just too old to run most of what they sold. There was a cheap, “old fogie” rack of games, but they were generally things that were so uninteresting that I remembered why I never bought them years ago.
Oh, there were interesting features in the mall itself. Various places in the court area had cans of food or boxes stacked in such ways that they made neat sculptures.
This "Great Pump'can" sculpture from Mall of America illustrates some the design concept the Travelin' Thornberries saw at the North Star Mall.
One I remember in particular was shaped like a giant stiletto shoe. But otherwise, it was stuff we had seen before, stuff covered with a wall of human Texas beef vast enough to even answer the question of that old woman who worked in Wendy’s commercials back in the mid-1980s.
Several minutes and handfuls of distributed fescue and oats later, we found our way back to the bench outside where we could wait peacefully for the return van to the hotel. Someone else from our hotel sat on the other side of the bench from us, but she was polite enough not to try to make conversation. Or maybe she was put off because I started reciting a never-ending plethora of classical Latin sentences, catching up from the missed time at the airport from the night before. remedium irae est mora! [The cure for anger is delay!]
Texas Beers
What more can we say? We caught the van back and swung by the hotel pub. There, we had a couple of local beers before retiring upstairs. All we did at that point was read a little, skim the television channels and go to bed.
Yes, it has only been a short time since we brought you a narrative summary. Because of circumstances shortly to be explained, Jennifer and I found ourselves crunched into two major trips within only two weeks of each other. If you’re still excited by our last presentation, please, please, do keep your enthusiasm-tacos well hot-sauced as we bring you this upcoming Travelin’ Thornberries adventure!
Forward!
Thursday, October 11, 2007—The Tepid Trip Scenario
Let it be said at the outset, Jennifer and I were neither one particularly excited about this trip. Unlike most of our laboriously planned excursions, this one caused us to feel that it was sort of foisted onto us…or rather, onto me. I had to renew my hypnosis certification this year and had every intention of doing so way back at the beginning of summer. Little did I realize, however, that the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis(ASCH) did not offer any training seminars during the summer because said seminars tend to be poorly attended during those months. So just my luck, I had to request an extension on my certification through October to get me to a point where we could make arrangements to travel to San Antonio for the ASCH workshop there.
A Screw Before We Flew
From the beginning, the trip was fraught with logistical snarls. Part of the situation was clearly my fault. Setting aside, for the moment, that I could have gotten this training last year if I had planned better, I also got horribly pressured by work-related time constraints in the weeks before this trip and waited too long to book our room at the Hilton Hotel. As a result, by the time I called and attempted to make reservations, the hotel attendant told me that the all of their rooms had been filled to capacity. I found it hard to believe that the entire Hilton Hotel was booked solid in the middle of freakin’ October, but there you go. And that meant we’d have to make a reservation at another hotel, where I’d have to try to find transportation over to the Hilton at 7 a.m. each day for the conference. Well, we managed to book a reservation at the considerably more humble Day’s Inn.
As we’ve stated in previous narratives, Jennifer and I do not necessarily feel entitled to opulence in hotel reservations. We just want safety and convenience. So it just often turns out that conferences and places of access to tourist attractions tend to be a little more ostentatious. They’re convenient, but hard on the budget. Staying in a more meager hotel wasn’t a problem for us, and in fact, we liked that it was about a third the price. But that issue of my trying to then get from this hotel to the conference at a different hotel just really cast a pall over our enthusiasm. It didn’t help that all of Jennifer’s attempts online to figure out where our hotel would be in relation to the Hilton kept belching up contradictory information. One Web site would say they were right next to each other; another would indicate they were twenty minutes apart.
Finally, Jennifer declared war on the aforementioned pall looming over this doomed trip, and she committed herself to find something about it to make us eagerly anticipate it. To our surprise, she found at the Hilton’s web site that they did, in fact, still have rooms available. It would have been nice if the hotel had bothered to explain to me that it was only the conference rate rooms that were all full. The hotel still had rooms at their ordinary, albeit much more expensive, rate. So we decided to just swallow the price and get a room in the hotel where the conference was taking place. Hell, we figured it just wouldn’t be worth the hassle for the extra money we might save at the Day’s Inn.
But then Fate said, “Let the screwing continue.” We hurled up the money for the new room, then I called the Day’s Inn to cancel our reservation…and learned that the money we’d already committed there was non-refundable. So the Thornberries prove again that if they get a room for 136% of what anyone else would pay, they might stand a chance of getting 50% of what everyone else would reap. *Snort*
The Usual Plethora of Airport Hassles
I had taken the day off and was largely ready to head out to the airport by the time Jennifer got home. I’m always antsy about getting there with enough time to spare for going through the security checkpoints and finding our gates. We had never missed a flight, so I don’t know why I was so worried. And ultimately, we needn’t have rushed. As soon as we got there and went to check in at Continental counter, we saw that our flight to our layover in Houston was delayed two hours. The registration attendant was kind enough to go ahead and rebook us on a later flight out to Houston so we didn’t miss the connection that would take us on to San Antonio.
With plenty of time to spare, we toddled off to the little airport restaurant called Creative Croissants, where we got a dinner of veggie burgers and fries, along with a couple of tasty beers. When we got back to our gate, we saw that the flight was delayed yet again. Apparently, there was a really bad storm in Newark, New Jersey, one that had grounded the plane we needed to board to get to Houston. Our harried attendant was busily trying to reschedule everyone who walked up to talk with him, explaining over and over again that such “acts of God” were not the fault of the airline and they couldn’t be held responsible.
Jennifer and I went back to the same restaurant and drank more beer.
What made the experience so hard to tolerate was that the gate we were supposed to fly out of was probably the homeliest, most technologically inferior one we had ever seen. Flight times had to be manually slid into and out of an old-fashioned board, one that wasn’t even digital. I think I saw someone deliver chalk or something at one point. So there was no running status report on when the hell our plane was going to take off from Newark and arrive outside our gate. At one point, I heard the attendant say, “Yeah, we all hate this gate.” So that gate was the only one of its type in the entire airport. Lucky us.
Ultimately, our plane would arrive to pick us up four hours later than our original scheduled takeoff time. During the interval, we had the opportunity to get to know a bit about our gate attendant. His name? Mr. Romans. Place of residence? Indianapolis. He commuted several hours to and from work every day. Species? Well, we know for certain that he is not a cow. How do we know this? He told us! Yes, we heard him talking on the phone to someone, making plans for dinner later that night. At one point, he said, “No, I don’t want alfalfa on it; I am not a cow!” Overall, we do have to say that Mr. Romans probably handled the crisis better than anyone else we’ve ever observed. Somehow, he stayed calm, cool and collected, dealing with irate passengers firmly but politely. In the end, though none of us were happy with the delay, he managed to see to it that most of our needs were handled to the furthest extent that was within his power. For us, he predicted that it was increasingly unlikely that we would make the back-up flight that the first attendant had booked us on, and so the next option was the first flight out of Houston on Friday morning. Sucking half the oxygen in the airport in a great heaving sigh, we told him to book us on it, which he cheerfully did.
Thanks a bundle, Mr. Romans!
Houston, We Have a Problem
At this point, we were still hoping against hope that some miracle would intervene and keep us from getting trapped at the airport, but we were growing pessimistic. This first branch of the flight was the longest, at about two hours. Basically, that amounted to about 800 miles, during which we managed to catch a few minutes of sleep. Jennifer showed great foresight by accepting the courtesy snack pack offered by the flight attendant, even though we had eaten a hearty meal and weren’t that hungry. It would end up being a blessing later on.
At last, the plane landed, and we were ready to jump off right away and see if we might still make it to our connector flight. Our hope began to wilt and rot as the plane then taxied leisurely around the runway for what seemed like 30 minutes, basically taking time for the passengers to study the rugged, pitted, worn tarmac. We were able to behold the lush beauty of the painted lines, the elegant symmetry of the orange cones and reflector lights, the glassy-eyed stares of the outside employees, and the impressive way the Texas moonlight reflected off the oily spots leading up to the gate. Oh, Captain, My Captain, may we please de-plane!? Jennifer and I left bloody handprint smears on the seats because we’d long-since chewed our fingernails down to the third knuckles on our hands.
Off the plane at last, we decided to give it the old “college try” and see if we could get to the gate of our connector flight before it took off. We huffed. We puffed. We rode escalators, conveyor belts, a putt-putt steam engine transport, a couple of irate burros and at one point, we crowd-surfed. Both of us were tired, but we were cultivating an attitude of weary acceptance combined with the last dregs of hopeful anticipation.
Wasted energy.
When we finally found our gate, it was empty. Dust devils blew around the seating area, and I stumbled over the bleached skull of a dead steer while trying to avoid an oncoming tumbleweed. Jennifer sat on a cactus. Nothing stirred with the breath of life.
We noticed that an adjacent gate was hustling quite loudly, with the attendants broadcasting the call for tickets in both English and Spanish. The destination of that flight was Caracas, Venezuela. Not knowing what else to do, we went up and asked them about our flight number. The young woman helping out the other passengers gave us the terse, unsympathetic answer, “It’s gone.”
O-ka-a-a-ay...
Since she wasn’t inclined to say anything else, I asked her what we were supposed to do as our next step. She hurriedly printed us up another couple of boarding passes for the next available flight to San Antonio…which was scheduled for take-off in a mere eight hours. [Groan!!] Just to really torture the both of us, I asked Ms. Overly Pencilled Eyebrows what time our original flight left, figuring that with our luck, it was five minutes before we arrived. But no, based on her answer, we calculated that it was probably leaving while our previous plane was touring the beautiful wild-lands of the Houston Airport’s tarmac. And aboard that absentee aircraft, toward the middle of the passenger compartment, were two lonely little seats that were conspicuously empty of buttcheeks belonging to two weary Thornberries. Damn the weather in Newark. }:/
To be fair to Little Ms. Dissertation at the Caracas terminal, and her lengthy explanations, she did give us a flyer outlining options for us to get a cheap motel room for the night. But frankly, we’d already paid for one hotel room we didn’t want, we sure as hell weren’t going to pay for another one. More, after missing one flight, Jennifer and I didn’t want to go to an unscheduled hotel stop via taxi and then risk missing our remaining option the next morning. So we were stuck at an airport that most decidedly was not designed for lengthy stays.
Thus began a surreal experience for the Travelin’ Thornberries.
We’d gone from hurrying frantically to being stuck for the next eight hours with little to do and nowhere special to be. The entire airport was closed down, all of the restaurants and shops folded up, the hallways dark, the spirits of the damned moaning from corridor to corridor.
One of the many haunted corridors at the Huston Airport.
The undead nighttime custodial workers were zombie-like, staggering around with jerky movements, parting their desiccated lips to croak out “brains” each time they spotted our succulent living flesh.
Undead nighttime custodial workers.
Fortunately, they moved very slowly, though annoyingly, and they always seemed to catch up to us wherever we went. Jennifer and I deliberately found a deserted food court that was as far from the undead creatures as we could, and that is where Jennifer brought forth her food bounty she’d stashed away in her cheeks while on the plane, as well as the little water cup from the same source (the plane, that is, not her cheeks). Otherwise, we’d have gone hungry all night.
Alas, the undead eventually caught up to us again, swarming in to try and crack open our skulls with their blackened teeth, so they could devour us from the inside out. Or maybe just to buff the floor. We really did feel like the nighttime crew was following us. At one point, we sat at some chairs in the hallway because there was a wall behind them where I could rest my head. Suddenly, one of the zombies came speeding down the corridor on a luggage cart, stopped abruptly right in front of us, stared at us with its wormy, empty eye sockets…then it turned around in the vehicle and went back the direction from whence it game. Huh? No logic among the living-impaired, I suppose. Jennifer chose a remote restroom in which to freshen up, only to have a couple of undead banshees immediately rope it off while she was in there, and then bang and clang all around her with their blood-freezing wails.
Time began to lose meaning, and my memories of the rest of the night are a jumbled and hazy hodgepodge.
One of the many kaleidoscopic visions running through the skulls of the Travelin' Thornberries, as they suffer through a night of hell.
We found our intended gate, but it was adjacent two loud television sets that were blaring CNN coverage of lemon rinds or something equally intriguing from distant shores. Rather than sit under there and let the commentary brow-beat us, we found a semi-private spot farther away, in a little corner behind a large, concrete pillar. There, we took off our shoes, battened down all of our valuable property and tried to catch a few winks. As I used my shoes for my pillow, I couldn’t help by gnash my teeth at the irony; we’d paid 136% for a room at the Hilton, and instead, we were sleeping on the hard floor of an airport. Arrghhh!!
And again, the zombies found us.
I slept fitfully at best, but two hours passed rather quickly, indicating at least some measure of an alpha-wave state of consciousness. I awoke suddenly to a loud crashing sound, which turned out to be some custodial idiot on a 10-foot ladder, jumping around with it like a pogo stick, trying to repair something in the only bit of ceiling in the entire freakin’ airport that was sure to disturb two barely-dozing Thornberries. Blearily, I realized he’d someday be coming to a pain clinic like my place of employment, where he would have to explain how he fell off of a ladder and busted his pelvis all over Texas because he was too lazy to climb down from it before moving it to another location.
A few more clatter-crash-groan-“brains” and Jennifer and I gave up trying to get any more sleep. Instead, we returned to our own gate. For awhile, we just sat there, counting the spiderwebbing of broken blood vessels in the whites of each other’s eyes and commenting on how terrible we looked. We couldn’t sleep, but we were too tired to concentrate on doing anything else. Latin and Spanish lessons lay fallow in our bag, and fiction books went undevoured. I think I might have made some notes for this narrative during that time, but damned if I remember for sure now. For a while, Jennifer tried to rest her eyes by lying across a row of chairs. I paced, taking periodic glances at the CNN coverage on the televisions. This same commercial kept coming on with a jingle that got stuck in my head…”Parking Cents! Ching Ching!” It had something to do with paying for a parking spot at the airport, but damned if I remember for sure now. Fortunately, my memory isn't necessary. You can view the company at least, here:
More hours slipped fitfully by. The zombies began to descend back into hell. The moaning spirits in the corridors dissipated like smoke, returning perhaps to the nether world between life and death. Store employees began to unlock the various business establishments. The digital gate sign sprang to life, showing our flight number. Mercifully, it was running on time! Jennifer and I stared with glazed expressions, our tongues lolling from our faces, as another hour passed. When they opened the gate, we giggled. When they called our ticket row, we cried. When the plane took off, we crossed our eyes and participated in an orgiastic fit that was midway between yodeling and barking. The sky never tasted so good.
Jennifer and I planned this trip to be the last one for 2006. For such a short excursion — only a weekend — it was intended to achieve no less than three separate goals. First, we hoped it would “overwrite” my first trip to Atlanta, when I attended a hypnosis conference way back in August 2003. That particular trip, which I undertook alone, was chaotic, lonely and included my getting shnookered by a panhandler. I left Atlanta back then with a metaphorical bad taste in my mouth that I was eager to metaphorically “swish” out. Second, this trip would act to carry on one of the themes of the Travelin’ Thornberries, that being the frequenting of art museums that are reasonably close to home. The High Art Museum in Atlanta seemed vast and exciting, and we thought it might help finish out the year on a more positive note than some of our experiences at the last art museum in Indianapolis. Finally, it would give us a chance to meet up with our great friend-turned-landlady, Gena, and her main squeezy-toy, Jim (aka Mr Boston or Mr “B”).
Ultimately, to our delight, this trip would meet all of those expectations and more.
Friday October 13, 2006—A Day for the Superstitious
Once again, we decided that the best way to relocate our corporeal manifestations from our cozy doorstep to the entrance of the High Museum would be to use an airplane. We reasoned that a direct flight of only about fifty minutes was a better option than slogging through abysmal traffic on unfamiliar roads for seven hours by car. So Jennifer and I took off work on Friday, spent the day finalizing our plans and then headed off to the airport. Alas, after our delightful discovery in May that we could carry on everything and save ourselves the headache of going through the baggage claim, another group of stupid idiots, this time in England, had to go and try to sabotage a plane in the recent past. Airline security was on high alert, therefore, and we had to check all of our hair gels, lotions and our delicious bottles of bourbon and red wine. But having done that, we had hoped for a relatively uneventful flight.
The Usual Plethora of Airport Hassles
But of course, you know that’s not the way it happened. We the Travelin’ Thornberries have gone to enough places by now that one would think we’d experienced and recorded everything there was to say about the headaches that come of getting from point A to point B. But apparently, the vicissitudes of the human condition are nigh infinite; we once again found ourselves confronted by novel annoyances that were bad for us, if imminently entertaining for you, our beloved Readers.
First of all, we learned in the ticket line that our flight was delayed by two hours. Since this was theoretically a short, direct flight, the delay essentially tripled our travel time and extended how late we would arrive in Atlanta. That sucked donkey loaf because we had plans to do some shopping in the Lenox Mall and the late arrival time threatened to squash those plans.
Second, as we went through security, I had the crap flakes scared out of me by a guard who saw fit to stop me and do for me what our lovely city government failed to do; let me know that my driver’s license was expired! Yes, I suppose it was my responsibility to look at the expiration date periodically, but who thinks to do that when their license is only one year, eight months and fifteen days old? Why the hell was it due already? I was to later learn when I went to renew that truncated license that apparently, any time you get a new one in between the four-year time period of your last, one, it gets designated “a replacement.” Such a license is only given a life span up until the next official time when the license would have expired. In my case, that was one year, eight months and fifteen days later. *Snort*
At any rate, the guard was not going to let me pass through the security gate. Not to be deterred, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, called on the Forceand waved my hand before his face, saying, “I am a psychologist. You will let me fly.” A blank look came over the guard’s face, his eyes glazed over and he said mechanically, “I will let you fly.” So in my stocking feet, I walked through the scanner, before he could realize I had used a Jedi “mind trick” on him.
Okay, actually… [BEGIN DISCLAIMER]
…Technically, I’m not a psychologist; I’m a psychological practitioner [END DISCLAIMER]. And the guard just asked if I had any other form of identification given to me by the state of Kentucky. I flashed my license to practice psychology, and he accepted it. But that’s so much less interesting, isn’t it…?
Back on track and feeling like we’d had a brief brush with the Gestapo, Jennifer and I set out to locate the gate designated for our flight number. Looking up at one of the omnipresent monitors, we noted that we were supposed to be at Gate…Zero? WTF? How does one find Gate Zero? Anyone? Show of hands? C’mon, don’t be shy! The only gate we did find had no one operating it, of course. So back and forth Jennifer and I moseyed, looking for information like alms for the poor. We weren’t the only ones; we stumbled onto a couple of other passengers who were just as lost at the idea of finding a non-existent gate. Eventually, we encountered an employee who acted like we were inconveniencing him by asking him to act like an employee, but he told us where we needed to be, if not where in a warm metaphysical realm mostly discussed in Abrahamic religions that he’d rather we go.
Once we found the spot, it was stuffed like a bag of marshmallows with the people scheduled for the flight preceding ours. People groaned like the damned, twisting atop each other, with myriad limbs sticking out in all directions. Blue faces. Wordless mouthings, like fish out of water. The suffering. Oh, the humanity. Not wanting to have to compete for oxygen in such a crammed area, we ended up going to the nearby café so I could have a beer (at 2:30 in the afternoon, but hey, it was vacation!) and Jennifer could galvanize herself with a cup of crack-caffeine.
Other than the waiting, we had no further problems boarding and getting out of the airport. It is worth noting, however, that we seem to have an uncanny knack for booking flight seats that sit on the damn engine! Yes, on both our departure and arrival flights for this trip, Jennifer and I were all the way in the very back, sitting with the plane’s vibrating engine up our buttcheeks. Meet the Travelin’ Thornberries: The last boarded and the last to de-plane. Perhaps we should get away from online booking and just let AAA handle it; on our honeymoon, they, at least, put us in the middle of the plane! *Grumble*
We touched down at the Atlanta airport about an hour after takeoff. Despite the headaches of the airport, it is quite nice to go more than 350 miles in only about 17 percent of the time it would take to go by car…and with less traffic hassle. Back during our previously mentioned honeymoon, Jennifer and I both had an abysmal experience with this particular airport, one that involved us basically running from one end of it to the other until we were so winded we vomited up pancreatic juice. This time, we walked nice and leisurely for awhile, more to stretch our legs than anything. Then we caught the transport and visited the Mighty Baggage Clam.
Yes, there it sat, a huge alabaster clamshell, probably ten feet across. It rested with its mouth facing outward, looking like Audrey II from the movie Little Shop of Horrors(1986). Every so often, it would spit out a large suitcase that would fall in a beautiful arc until it landed with a *whump* on top of its owner or innocent passersby. Crushed bodies lay strewn about beneath alligator skin tote sacks and broken backpacks. I don’t know if the Baggage Clam was just malicious in how it treated everyone, or if it simply had trouble seeing what it was doing; after all, it was missing an eye.
Okay, actually…
We collected our bags without any hassles, but as we were riding the transport, we noticed that the sign for “Baggage Claim” was missing the “I,” thus conveying the image of a “baggage cla m.” What’s life without a little creativity? ;)
Arrival in Atlanta—Initiate Systemic Overwrite
Jennifer and I boarded the Marta, the public transportation system in Atlanta that would take us from the airport to our hotel. Already, this trip felt better than my first one. Probably just having a detail-focused person like Jennifer along made it less harrowing for me.
As we sat in our crunched seats, I did as much people-watching as I could surreptitiously manage without getting stabbed by someone. Overall, people just sort of sit glassy-eyed and stare into space. But we did spot a couple of Mormon missionaries who looked distinctly out of place with their white shirts and black ties. Are subways in the Outer Darkness? Hm…
Some patterns of behavior had followed us to Atlanta from home…I’m referring here to the public cell phone users.
Indulge me in a rant.
As a technophobe, I tend to eschew “needless innovation,” which is what I call it when newer, more expensive and overly complicated technologies come along to fulfill needs or lifestyle situations that do not really change that much. One of my pet peeves is being forced to have to trouble myself with changing technologies because the world decides what I’m using isn’t good enough any more. And you can never just replace what you need. To use a mechanical example for comparison purposes, it would be like trying to buy a tire for your car and having someone tell you that they can no longer replace just a tire, because the rim also is outdated. And they can’t replace the rim because the frame is outdated, and so on, until it becomes obvious that you’ll have to buy a whole new car just to get four working tires!
Cell phones, represent “needless innovation,” especially the current ones with their 10,000 unnecessary functions, like Internet access, camera and text messaging (don’t even get me started on how TM butchers written language!) I’m willing to concede that cell phones can serve two relatively restricted functions: emergencies and logistics. Your loved one gets decapitated and in need of a skull transplant in the hospital, and immediate contact is necessary? Cell phone. You get caught in traffic and delayed for a preplanned rendezvous? By all means, cell phone. But for frivolous conversation in public places, where other people have to listen? NOT!! Such use is similar to people who smoke in public and then complain when their right to puff poison at others gets impugned.
Back to the story, Jennifer and I were forced by proximity to listen to two people jabber incessantly on their cell phones about topics that didn’t seem particularly time-sensitive or crisis-oriented. But they weren’t going to let go of their toys or put their desires on hold for any longer than necessary. I watched one gentleman calmly tell his phone that the train was coming up on a tunnel. He then hung up when he lost the signal, waited ten seconds until the train cleared said tunnel, then dialed right back up again to continue his conversation. This occurred two or three times. I mean, really, was his conversation so important it couldn’t wait until he at least got off of the train, where it would have been more convenient even for him? And did we have to listen to it? My opinion? If the discussion is important, wait until you get home so you can talk in private. If it isn’t, then it can wait. I’d rather not have loud, mundane business foisted on me. Alas, needless innovation moves at a far faster pace than social folkways and mores can compensate. And thus ends my rant. The J.W. Marriott Lenox Hotel We arrived at the J.W. Marriott, a pretty fancy hotel with an umbilicus connected to the four-story Lenox Mall. Standing there in our travel wear, Jennifer and I felt just a little intimidated by the bell hops, clerks and the concierge, all wearing their tuxedos and ties. But despite the opulence of the atmosphere, everyone was friendly and respectful to us. Check-in was smooth and hassle-free, and within minutes, Jennifer and I were blowing bloody mucus from our nostrils as the elevator shot us into the lower stratosphere. Dizzy and disoriented from the altitude sickness, we opened the door to our room on the 19th floor.
What a space!!
Yes, in terms of luxury, all that was missing in it were two naked foreign female massage experts to knead fancy oils into the skin of our backs with their shapely bare feet, while we underwent mud mask applications.
Jennifer and I typically aim for accommodations that are easy to reach from the airport (that is, without a car) and that are conveniently located near food and our ultimate destinations. We do not insist on royal treatment or a classy place to leave our bones while our nervous systems progress through the four stages of sleep. However, in this case, it seemed that those qualities were a windfall. Yes, the bed had a sweater-load of pillows arranged like a huge sculpture, the room was enormous, we had pay-per-view and to beat all, an actual liquor cabinet! We’d never actually seen the latter before in real life, but we were still savvy enough to expect that if we actually touched anything in there, we would probably wake up weak from the three pints of blood the hotel would have sucked out of us as compensation. Still, it gave us options, because (he said facetiously), it isn’t like the Travelin’ Thornberries have ever had any trouble finding a decent beer when they go somewhere new and exotic. [Snicker.]
While Jennifer freshened up, I decided to investigate just how badly the Mighty Baggage Clam had chewed up our checked bag back at the airport. I undid the zipper and beheld a swamp. Gelatinous goo and algae everywhere. And cookies. I simply cannot forget the cookies. Yes, one of Jennifer’s myriad lubricants, creams, lotions, sprays or chum had spilled inside the bag, giving everything a cream-based coagulated finish. Stuck in little tufts atop that gunky mess were the crumbs of the toffee nut cookies we had brought along to help snacking expenses. So much for plastic seal-able bowls. Yeech!
So we took the high road of responsibility and discipline…we blew off doing anything with that whole sludge pile for the time being and decided to head over to the Lenox Mall. Yes, we yearned for some dinner and perhaps a little shopping with the feeble time we had left before the place closed down. To our delight, the J.W. Marriott had an excellent elevator system, so that even as high up as we were, we never really had to wait for one, nor did we have to deal with the hiccuping frustration of waiting for it to stop on every floor. Pretty snazzy.
Even after our experiences at Union Station in St. Louis, the Lenox Mall was a vast, sprawling and nearly overwhelming experience for us. Four stories of hustling, bustling people threading themselves into innumerable shops. As impressive a place as it was, however, Jennifer and I would ultimately be struck by how little of it was really necessary. We could probably have gotten everything we needed from a quarter of the places they had available. I noted while we were there with how much we as a culture are oriented toward convenience, ease and satisfying as many of our desires as possible with as correspondingly little effort as we can get by with putting forth.
Barry Schwartz, in his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (2005), speaks of how our willingness to make decisions decreases as the number of choices we have increases, as does our satisfaction with the choices we do make. Watching all of those people desperately trying to find fulfillment by spending time and money in far too many stores, I could see Dr. Schwartz’s thesis being borne out. Bigger and more doesn’t always mean better. Life doesn’t get more exciting or fulfilling by trying to quench more and increasingly tangential material desires. Happiness lies in eliminating frivolous desires, prioritizing those that remain and limiting choices only to them.
Fortunately, Jennifer and I came to Lenox with a predetermined set of goals, ones that automatically trimmed out many of the unnecessary decisions about where to go and what to do. On this particular night, we mainly wanted to scope out the places that would meet said goals and also to baste something edible in our respective internal sacks of gastric juice.
The human experience of the place was part boredom and part anxiety. It seemed like half of the people were like hominid ice floes, bobbing along at nominal speeds, eyes glazed, aimlessly doing little besides circulating blood and letting the planet age under them. The other half were leaving dusty footprints on the buttcheeks of Jennifer’s and my pants; we felt like we were being run down.
These experiences aside, however, a bit more should be said of the employees and the general population of this part of Atlanta. Jennifer and I noted that these people were overwhelmingly in good physical condition. We saw far less obesity here than the lard-bonanza evident in so many of the public venues of home. More, everyone seemed to be dressed in trendy, new fashions that were largely unfamiliar to us (okay, unfamiliar to me, as it was Jennifer who first commented on them). Nearly everywhere we went, people were approachable and friendly. Before we left Atlanta altogether, we would note that it seemed like everyone in the businesses worked 24 hours per day…the people who served us during the day were often the ones we’d seen the night before. Go home, people! Get some sleep!
Back to our quest for food, Jennifer and I briefly thought about going to an open air (to the internal mall air, anyway) pizza joint, but decided we were too hungry to wait on a crowded Friday night. Instead, we went downstairs to the food court, where Jennifer snapped her tongue ten feet across the room like a frog to grab the little sampler meat morsels that some of the Cajun and Asian places were bandying about. Perhaps I did as well, but I’m telling the story here. ;) Samplers aside, though, we ultimately stuck with our lust for pizza by going to a by-the-slice facility and selecting a couple of specimens that didn’t look too mummified. Our loads in hand, we hotfooted our way back to the room, there to engage in shameless gluttony with our cheesy prey and five-dollar canned beers. While we masticated our fare, we watched some average cable television and then finished out the evening with the pay-per-view movie, X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) Then it was to bed.
Saturday October 14, 2006—The High Art Museum
Out of bed on time, we jaunted back over to the Lenox Mall for a snack of Starbucks coffee and muffins, then we boarded the Marta for destination: High Art Museum!
An Architectural Masterpiece
Our luck held out as sour as always, and the Marta dumped us where we’d be certain to walk in the opposite direction from the High Museum. But when we finally got on track and found our way there, what we found was an art museum that was a work of art unto itself. We entered the courtyard to the sound of accordion music being played live to an audience seated on chairs atop a grand red rug. In the background, performance artists acted as living sculptures; one example was a gentleman who affected the form of a stone statue of a Roman centurion.
Jennifer and Thomas pose before this "living statue" of a Roman centurion.
Later on, we would witness him standing stoically while tourists took pictures of him and one group of immature idiots touched his fingers and looked up his armored “kilt.” What lummoxes. They didn’t recognize that the man was a work of art and should be accorded the same respect as any other part of the museum’s exhibits.
Once we got inside and figured out which direction was which, we found our way to one of the High’s earliest and most impressive chambers. It was a huge multi-level atrium, with a window at the top that let in just the right amount of sunlight to illuminate a plethora of objects that made up the museum’s permanent collection. To ascend the different levels, patrons climbed up a series of graded ramps that zig-zagged up the sides of the atrium.
Security…Finally, Someone Gets It Right
This being our fifth art museum, Jennifer and I came prepared to be cautioned and directed along the way by the staff. Not to our surprise, it didn’t take them long to swoop in on us when they saw that I was carrying our camera. Jennifer and I do not normally mind if the staff look out for the artwork, for we’re loyal enough to the venues of human creativity that we want to see it preserved as much as the next patron. Camera flashes, for example, degrade the works of the great masters, so those works should be shielded from wanton and irresponsible forms of picture taking. But different museums have handled their cautioning role with varying degrees of tact and respect. One of our more recent museum experiences, for example, involved a human bat hanging down from the ceiling and screeching at us with her fanged mouth.
But the High Museum did it right, and they did it well. Someone came up to us discretely and asked us if we had received a “camera pass” yet. When we said we had not heard anything about that process, she calmly pointed us back to the main lobby and explained what we needed to do. We found the uniformed person responsible, and he had us read a list of disclaimers and “told ya so’s” in a book, before handing me a sticky badge to affix to my shirt. From that point forward, any time I took a picture, an employee would come toward me until they saw my badge. Then they left me alone. I learned to proudly thrust out my chest any time they were around, so they would see it well before I brandished the camera, and never have to waste any of our time by monitoring me.
A Rant on Unladylike Restroom Behavior
Throughout the history of the human race, philosophers, theologians and psychologists have lamented how much our species seems to be part angel and part ape. Humans are capable of great feats of technology and compassion, such as landing mobile rovers on Mars and establishing soup kitchens for the poor, yet woefully inadequate for the task of controlling petty emotions like jealousy or eliminating destructive patterns of behavior like violence and vandalism.
Here we were at an art museum, an institution dedicated to highlighting some of the greatest works of human inspiration, a place of creativity and beauty, and yet…well, I’ll let Jennifer explain where this little tidbit is going:
[TRANSITION TO JENNIFER’S VOICE]:
… And yet, the women’s restrooms brought the idea of beauty down a few notches. Now, to clarify and give credit where it is due, the problem did not come from lack of cleanliness or lackadaisical museum staff. They did a great job of keeping the restrooms clean. I even went into one restroom and found the staff person wiping off the sink, and I never had a problem with lack of toilet paper or soap, as is often the case in women’s public restrooms.
No, the problems I encountered were from the other women using the restrooms! They call us the fairer sex, but sometimes female bathroom behavior belies that moniker. Unfortunately, I have encountered less-than-pretty female bathroom behavior many times, and so I make a habit of looking at the seat before I sit down and wiping it off or covering it with toilet paper if necessary. I don’t share the common belief among women that if you sit on a public restroom seat, you’ll end up with an infection. So I don’t perform the move known as “the squat.” If I doubt the seat’s cleanliness, I simply cover it with toilet paper or a toilet seat cover if they are provided, plop down and do what I need to do. There’s no mess for the woman who will be using the stall after me.
On at least two occasions at the museum, I went into the stall and prepared to do my business, but when I looked at the seat before sitting down, I encountered splatters of you-know-what all over it. Eeewwww!! On one of these occasions, I even had to wait for the stall and encountered the woman who used the stall before me. Personally, I would be rather embarrassed to leave such a mess, then look at the next person going into the stall right after me. Please, ma’am, if you must do “the squat,” wipe the seat! Do you really think I want to sit in your bodily waste? Would you want to sit in mine? Sheesh! Have some courtesy for your fellow woman!
And now, Thomas will move on to a much prettier female part …
Buxom Beauties and Bouncing Men
While Jennifer and I were climbing up one of the ramps in the atrium section, we had opportunity to witness an entourage of performance artists dressed in period costumes. Here's an example:
You see, this particular weekend marked the beginning of the “Louvre-Atlanta” initiative, an arrangement that basically shipped classic pieces of artwork from the collections of Louis XIV, XV and XVI that are normally housed at theLouvre Museumin the country of France. These performance artists were arrayed in 18th century clothing, with the ladies wearing daring push-up bodices and the men wearing long curly hair locks and baggy bloomers. The whole team put on a neat drama with music, dialogue and pantomime, which, try as we might, Jennifer and I could not hear from our distant vantage way up on the third or fourth floor; what the atrium boasted in illumination and design, it lacked in acoustics.
Did I mention the daring push-up bodices?Check'em out!
Anyway, it also didn’t help that the employees kept ushering us off the ramps, so we repeatedly missed chunks of what was going on below during our disgruntled relocations. But they were obviously very entertaining to the patrons down there with them. One particularly talented performer did a juggling-esque routine in which he lobbed three to seven blocks in the air without losing any of them. We were impressed.
…Ah, the push-up bodices … makes me glad our trusty workhorse of a camera has at least a humble telephoto lens…
Highlights at the High, the High, the High, High, High
Alright, the above title referencing the High Art Museum is much more amusing if you sing it to the tune of the rock and roll hit “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors (1957).
This museum held a respectable collection of both European and American art pieces. Jennifer and I went through the different eras, styles and variations, greatly appreciating the talent it took to render them. Talent sorely lacking in the tips of our blunt, inarticulate hooves; we’ll never be able to render such beauty with brush, charcoal, clay or chisel. Still, we have an obligation to put our effort where it matters, that being in appreciation.
As always, we generally eschewed abstract, contemporary and landscape pieces, in favor of art that captured the human form. Sure, I always include the nudes, particularly the female ones, but there were plenty of other types of human figures in evidence as well. This museum had perhaps the best collection of sculpture of any we’ve visited. Unlike the Art Institute of Chicago, where it was arranged in a particular “hall,” however, the High tended to “pepper” their marble and bronze pieces all over the different floors, generally by period rather than medium.
Now that we have a breadth of experience with art museums, we’ve come to appreciate that many of them have duplicates of certain pieces, or variants by the same artists. Several of the statues, for example, were ones we had seen before, albeit often with subtle differences in the descriptor cards. Sometimes they gave more detailed information, other times, just different facts. One particular sculpture was the same naked female bronze form, but instead of being the bronze color, this museum had it rendered in green.
Frederick William MacMonnies's, Bacchante and Infant Faun (1893), as captured by the Travelin' Thornberries at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in March 2006 and again at the High Museum in Atlanta, October 2006.
Sometimes, it is nice to see a graded pattern of similarity, rather than a jagged kaleidoscope of diversity. In his book, The Secret Power of Beauty (2004), John Armstrong notes that beauty exists in our experience somewhere at the midpoint between boredom and exhaustion. Truer words were never experienced in Atlanta.
Randolph Rogers' Ruth Gleaning, 1867 is a replica of an 1858 carving. It's another piece the Travelin' Thornberries got to see at the Indianapolis Museum of Art five months earlier (Above). Fortunately, they got to see it again in Atlanta (Below), without the bitchy staff.
Having seen the Hall of Glass at the Indianapolis Museum of Art back in March 2006, Jennifer and I already had some experience with that medium as a form of expression. The High had their own glass pieces distributed in a similar manner to their sculpture, in a “lightly seasoned” dusting. Jennifer and I were both quite taken with the arrangements they offered, perhaps because the lighting in this museum was so much better that it lit up individual works of glass so that they captured, refracted and bent it into beautiful arrangements.
What surprised us the most, however, was our appreciation of the artistic furniture. To be sure, this wasn’t the first museum we had seen that demonstrated a fusion of aesthetic taste with pragmatic utility. But this time, we seemed more…ready for it. There were many couches, love seats and coffee tables that looked perfectly ordinary on the surface, but a more detailed eye would find delicate carvings or shapes of the natural and human worlds.
The Louvre-Atlanta Exhibit
Jennifer and I had taken literally pictures out the proverbial butt for a couple of hours. The time had come, however, to see the Louvre-Atlanta exhibit, mentioned briefly above. This was a special event that had actually cost us extra money to see and for which we actually rescheduled the trip by a week to make sure we caught it. We had kept an ear to the cell phone most of the day, trying to establish contact with Gena and Mr B, but alas, Gena’s cell phone was inoperative for part of the time and we later learned that their logistics had become more snarled than anticipated. But we didn’t worry overly much simply because we knew already that their scheduled time for this exhibit was exactly the same as ours and we could “hook up” with them then.
Returning to the downstairs lobby, we entered Bedlam. Yes, there were people wrapped in straitjackets, smacking their heads loudly against padded walls, while large orderlies used leeches to bleed out the “bad” blood from them. The occasional evil spirit had been released from a madman’s head by cracking said head open with a stone mallet. There was maniacal laughter, people picking at their own scabs and human waste on every wall. I think the Joker and other representatives of the “criminally insane” may have been waiting in line, somewhere…
Okay…
Maybe it was just that the entire lobby was crowded. As we noted, the exhibit was featuring art that was over four hundred years old. It felt like they allowed one patron in line per year. Jennifer and I did finally spot Gena and Mr B already in line and moving out, and we struggled to catch up. As his ear was tagged and he was prodded with a stun baton, Mr B even muttered that he had never seen an arrangement so chaotic. We chalked it up to this being the first weekend the exhibit was featured, so the High may not have gotten all of the “bugs” worked out in the coordination of it yet.
Processed by the museum like cattle, Gena and Mr B turn their tagged ears from the camera.
Jennifer and I were handed a little recording device with headphones to be used for listening to lectures on the various pieces, given a feed sack of oats around our heads and herded after our penned friends.
Once we all caught up to each other, our Charleston friends introduced us to Sean, a local Atlantan with whom they rendezvoused and caroused the previous night. We would find throughout the day and the upcoming evening that Sean and his wife, Cynthia, were both quite worldly, accomplished and educated individuals with a great deal of intelligent commentary on art, city life, fantasy literature and the meaning of existence in this seemingly empty and hostile universe. Like Mr B and Gena, they made us think. [Cut to Jennifer and I on our knees in Wayne’s World(1991) style, screaming “We’re not worthy, we’re not worthy!”]
So Jennifer and I, Mr B and Gena and Sean all entered the Louvre-Atlanta exhibit.
Eh. I won’t say we didn’t enjoy it, because there was a great deal of culture and history evident in it. Inside the first chamber were lots of big prominent busts…no, not those kinds of busts (get your mind out of the gutter!), I’m talking about a collection of sculptured busts, some going back thousands of years. Egyptian god-emperors, Roman orators, various dukes and marquis, the exhibit had them all. It was nominally interesting, though I have to say that after the first two to three rows, I kind of got saturated by them and didn’t really encode any more about them. Once we went upstairs to where the exhibit continued, there was even more crowded mayhem among the swarm of humanity. Up here, there was a large chamber filled with various and sundry sketches done by the great masters. I observed, for example, an image of an angel that was sketched by the hand of Raphael Sanzio, one of the contemporaries of Michelangelo (and incidentally, the one Mike tried to pawn the Sistine Ceiling job onto, until coerced into it by the pope).
But ultimately, it was Gena who pointed out that what we were seeing was essentially…well, scraps. Yes, these were preliminary drawings, test copies, essentially throwaways the masters used while they worked on the real pieces that are today still safely and securely stuffed into the Louvre itself. While we were thankful to be able to see these pieces of history, there was still a feel that that great French institution had only entrusted their most expendable peripherals for our viewing pleasure. I noted at the time that in some ways, it was like we were being given a tour of Michelangelo’s outhouse and expected to be awed by the contents, merely because they came from him. Sean would later say (to our agreement) that the exhibit could be improved if the finished paintings and such could have been brought along and displayed next to the sketches for comparison purposes. From blueprint to finished product, so to speak.
I do have to say that there was indeed at least one painting that stood out for me as quite impressive in detail and in history. This was the Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, completed by Raphael in 1515. One of the few tidbits of information I managed to beat out of the spotty technology of the headset recording was that this piece is often described as the “male Mona Lisa.” It was true that Baldassare’s soulful gaze reminds me of ol’ Mona. In fact, when that classic work by Leonardo da Vinci was stolen from the Louvre in 1913, Baldassare Castiglione was considered the only work with enough comparable elegance and mystique to sit in the empty spot. It would remain there until the Mona Lisa resurfaced two years later. If you look to the left, you can see what the painting actually looked like. Ultimately, I found a bookmark with the image on it, so persuasive of style was it for me.
A Night of Revelry and Disgusting Conversation
We finished up the exhibit and indeed, the rest of the High Art Museum in short order. After standing outside and watching the live entertainment for awhile, our guts got the best of us and we started talking about food. You can see us having the discussion in the video below, with Jennifer, Gena, Mr B and Sean presented in turn (with me making a cameo):
The finding of it, that is. With help from our local tour guide, Sean, we hotfooted our way to a nice little restaurant with outdoor sitting called The Prince of Wales. A story about us eating really wouldn’t be that exciting, and the only other notable event was that Gena tried to experiment by ordering a fizzy alcoholic apple cider that was so sweet it caused her lips to enter gravitational collapse. Yes, those lips shrank inward toward a mathematical point of smallness approaching infinity. The surrounding tables and chairs were starting to be drawn into the gravity well of her compressed lips until she was able to order a more suitable beer that caused those lips to spring back out with an audible reverberating “spopp” sound that caused glassware to shatter four tables away. Gena blushed.
During one interval when Gena was indisposed in the “powder room,” I took the opportunity to heckle Mr B for his diabolical plan of turning our landlady into “a buddy with curves.” After all, two years ago, she would never have consented to drinking a beer of any kind, and we’ve also heard secondhand accounts from her that she’s even started taking the risk of having hot wing sauce smeared from ear to ear by eating that delicious dead bird-delicacy in public. Mr. B gave that Cheshire cat smile of his, and said, “For a girl, she’s the best guy I’ve ever known.”
Our little group had to break up at this point, because Jennifer and I needed to get back to the Lenox Mall to do a little shopping before they closed. But once we did that, we re-rendezvoused with our little group in the hotel lobby and went for a few cocktails at a restaurant across the street called Houston’s. This time, Sean’s wife, Cynthia, who was like a walking social supernova, joined us. She was so extraverted that we liked her immediately and would find she worked incessantly to draw us into any conversation topic that fell out on the table between us. Like her hubby, she was swell.
Now it was Jennifer’s and my turn to experiment with an alcoholic beverage, also with disastrous results; we ordered a pale aleand beheld the experience of drinking Aqua Velva cologne. Carbonated. We clamped down on our vomit. Carbonated. Yes, the drink was quite wretched and we felt guilt toward our poor waitress, who was doing everything she could to please us, including only bringing us a sample of that swill to see if we would like it. She ended up finding something that we did enjoy and it was a great meal experience overall.
Other experiments fared better. Since Jennifer and I weren’t starved, we only ordered a simple appetizer upon which to masticate. Our decision was a platter of grilled artichokes. I plucked off my first fibrous, stringy leaf and chewed it like cud for forty-five minutes. By the time I swallowed it, every one of my teeth had been flossed. My jaws ached like I’d tried to take a bite out of a football. Cynthia saved the day on that one by modeling for us the proper way to eat an artichoke (which involved only biting into the tender part at the base of the leaves, not the leaves themselves).
To our delight, we discovered that Sean and Cynthia were almost as geeky as ourselves. Yes, they had read a fantasy book series passed on to them by Mr B, which had been passed on to him by the member of the Thornberries with a Y-chromosome. There was something refreshing about venting my entire repertoire of geekiness without having to hold any of it back for fear of bruising others with its oppressive barrage of silly-puddy pummeling. We talked at length about George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire(1996), a fantastic fantasy series that, characteristically, is running on too long with no end in sight. Gena and Jennifer slammed their skulls together in frustration, vowing to either read it themselves or put something in the food of the rest of us in a concerted assassination attempt if we kept our obsession with it.
As with so many good conversations, the amount of intellectualism varied inversely with the amount of booze consumed and the amount of debauchery and the bawdiness ratio varied directly. We ended the evening back in the hotel lobby, talking about potential love matches between the women present and famous female actresses, and discussing the perverse combinations of words some members of the group (who shall remain anonymous), could put together with those themed sets of refrigerator magnets. Apparently, if one uses the “love” set and the “cooking” set, she or he can get such statements as “Nude Love Weiner” and “Meat Banana Looms.” What demented minds we have among our adult friends….
The evening ended with fatigue all the way around and promises to share this narrative with Sean and Cynthia. It was a good day.
Sunday October 15, 2006—Another Plethora of Airport Hassles
Jennifer and I arose the next day, had a second meal over at Huston’s, followed by a delicious bitter-assed tea at Starbucks, then sped via Marta back to the airport. It was only after we got onto the train that Jennifer checked our travel updates to verify that the plane had apparently been delayed an hour from the time it was scheduled when we booked the flight six weeks previously. So all of our rushing to get checked out and back to the concourse was all for naught. Figures.
But it didn’t end there. The flight got delayed again. Then it got delayed some more. They also moved our gate a couple of times, which became increasingly difficult for Jennifer and I to accommodate, our flesh rotting off of our bones from the lengthy wait and all.
Finally, we climbed aboard the plane, where we met our flight attendant, a young woman named Debbie Jean. She was a cute down-homey type with that “girl next door” quality of innocence and perkiness that often finds its way into men’s fantasies. Much like the naughty nurse or the librarian who is a fierce tigress underneath the layer of bookish inhibition. I teased Jennifer by telling her Debbie Jean was one more real life fantasy I could now cross off of my list. Jennifer was so amused she was laughing in silence.
We touched down in our home airport, climbed into the car and drove to the parking lot gate where the mechanical hand zipped out, grabbed both of us and shook us upside down to gather our remaining loose money to cover the parking fee. Then it was home and the conclusion of another fine journey by the Travelin’ Thornberries. Thanks again for sharing it with us!
There I was, the Botanical Berry, dancing among the trees and plants. I’ll not bore you with a detailed rundown of what I saw, but some of the highlights are worth noting. One was a Japanese garden, which had a nice little rock pond running through it, bamboo plants and shady trees. I also enjoyed the sensory garden, meant specifically to give the blind a full botanical experience. However, there was still plenty to see, touch and smell. I made my way up to the overlook, where I got a nice panoramic view of San Antonio, and wandered through the rose garden, which had plenty of beautiful colors and scents.
[ABOVE]: Having captured the alien pod during our trip to Biloxi in July 2004, [BELOW]: Jennifer finds another otherworldly flora in San Antonio in October 2007.
Eventually, we found a nice place called the “Iron Cactus.” They had a splendid Mesoamerican décor, a sedate atmosphere and a friendly hostess. We paid attention to none of those features. What we noted was that they could seat us outside and they could do it right now. Good enough for us! The details of the meal are relatively unimportant, save that we split a huge sampler platter of various Mexican dishes, and I generously doused it all with the hottest hot sauce they would give me. A thrill-seeker I am not, and a roller-coaster wimp I am. But among our family and friends, my taste for spice is rivaled by few. The facility served us up a couple of Mexican beers, which I used to wash down my food and the little bits of my tongue flaking away because of the hot sauce. It wuh wurt it!
