Beltane Garlic Moon
Started back up on the exercise. Gently. I always need to ease myself back into the routine after, this time, almost two weeks off.
My mind and body have both returned to Minnesota, the fuzziness now a memory.
The truism is that we cannot remember pain and I find that true of solely physical pain. I remember, for example, that my leg hurt like a son of a bitch after my achilles tendon repair, but I don’t recall the pain itself. Only the event.
A different sort of pain, however, sticks with me. That is, the hassle and discomfort of days like last Friday. The accumulation of those, that flight back from Istanbul that also vectored through Schipol, the smaller insults that begin with booking and paying the add-on fees, that escalate with the TSA check, then the crowded planes and the uncertain take off and landing times.
You may say, this is not real pain. And maybe it’s not. Let’s call it aversive conditioning. What ever it is, it makes long plane rides, even shorts ones, something I will go through a great deal to avoid. Give me a car. A train. A ship. If I can make any of those work for a particular trip, I’ll take them.
Big air may have financial problems, I can’t tell the obscurantism from the truth with them, but I do know that they have consistently up priced their product while down sizing their service. This reality of airline travel then has nested inside the airport reality of security checks and in the case of international flights, passport and custom controls. The sum of these is an experience, at least for us coach class customers, that has little difference from self-induced and expensive torture.
What would it take to fix it? World peace. Wider seats. An attention to customer needs as opposed to airline needs.
Whatever the ultimate solution, air travel, once something I cherished, has become a sinkhole of time wasting and money covered over with active irritations.
