Day Tripper.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of flying to Cleveland for the day. That means I get up at 3:45am, and catch the 6 o'clock flight, and then catch the 7pm flight home. It makes for a long-assed day, I can tell you that. I knew it was gonna be another fun one when the geezer checking my boarding pass burped into his mouth and then blew it in my face. If you've ever wondered what dead animals floating in a pool of old coffee and cigarette butts smells like, I can tell you. It smells bad.

Really bad.

The next thing that happened is that I get stuck in line behind a 400lb black kid. Like 6'4". HUGE. Probably somewhere between 18 and 20 years old. The metal detector keeps going off. He takes off his bling. It still goes off. He loses the belt. It goes off again. Finally they shunt him to the side and start wanding him. It appears that he must have a plate in his head. No...not his head. The problem is head-related, however. More specifically, the problem is in his MOUTH. He has a full set of gold teeth. I was witnessing a highly entertaining episode of "Grills Gone Bad." Eventually, they let him go.

When I got home, I did a little research on airport metal detectors and found this little tidbit:

The Metor 300 also incorporates an advanced Random Alarm function, which enables discreet search of non-alarming passengers.

So who knows. Maybe it wasn't his grill after all.

Other than that, I did get to witness someone almost knocking themselves unconscious on the overhead bin. That was fun. Besides the numbnut behind me who kept slamming something down on his tray table and waking me up, and the caffeine-addled, non-stop talking machine with the armor-piercing laugh in the seat across the aisle, the rest of the flight wasn't bad.

When I got on the train to go downtown, at the first stop a black kid in a hoodie sits down in the seat across from me and starts making a noise like, "ARRRRRGHHHH!" and pounding on the seat in front of him every 20 seconds.

He's talking to himself about something that is clearly making him very angry, since between the seat-banging and yelling, every other word in his monologue is the F-word, used in more variations than I thought possible. Finally, he slouched down, pulled his hoodie over his eyes, muttered something about hanging a motherfucking Grand Theft Auto poster in his room, and went to sleep.

Or died. I'm not sure -- I didn't check. Man. How much would it suck if your last words were "motherfucking Grand Theft Auto?"

At the second stop, a older white woman sits behind me and all is well until about 30 seconds after we leave the stop, and she lets loose with a chest-rattling phlegm-filled cough. It wouldn't have been so bad, except that she didn't even make a half-hearted attempt at covering her mouth with her hand. She just let loose. After the 2nd time it happened, I turned to her and said, "Could you stop coughing directly on me?" After that, she covered her mouth -- but only when I was watching her. When she thought I wasn't, she just sprayed the back of my head again. Ignorant people. I really need a driver when I go places.

If I thought the train ride in was bad, the flight home (delayed, of course) was worse. My seat was the second to the last one in the plane, and the whole area smelled like a dirty litterbox. It was pretty brutal. I had a screaming baby across from me, and I was surrounded by people with some sort of affliction. All signs pointed to Tuberculosis. I had my recorder on me, so enjoy.

This is just a 5-second snippet of a one hour flight.

It didn't stop the entire time.

I love day trips. All of the shittiness and none of the fun. How can you beat that?