...Drink, and be merry.

So I got this bottle of la Grande Dame Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin at the duty-free shop in Heathrow Airport around 1994 or 1995. It cost me, at the going exchange rate, about $60 and I thought to myself these bitches really know how to rape a guy when he’s at the most vulnerable.

You see it’s always been my theory that at any duty-free store you always pay more than what it would cost at the store on the local High St including the taxes. But I was at the point where I figured I could spend my pounds sterling there or wait until I got back to the States and go to the James Cook, Sam Cook, Harry Cook or whatever the name of the exchange bureau was called then and convert the money into dollars at a rate that would even make a loan shark or a fence blush with shame.

Not being a real champagne drinker, although if I had a choice the cheaper yellow label version of Cliquot has always been my favorite, I always thought that I would save my French import via London for a special occasion. I didn’t know what that occasion would be, but it would have to be a small one because there are only so many people you can share one bottle with. 

But somehow that occasion has never really happened or at least never thought of until it was well after and done with. I mean sure, there has been the birth of this relative or that. There have been the times that I got together with this person or thanked God that I didn’t, but I never thought to reach under the bed, my storage cellar, to celebrate the event. And now that I find on the internet that the going price for an ’89 Grand Dame is around $360 I realize, sad thing,  I’m not sure if I ever will crack the bottle open.

I’ve been having the weirdest dreams recently, all of which have been apocalyptic in nature with me ending up running from something. I may have to change my movie watching to romantic comedies or something instead of the teenage Armageddon types that I like to go for. So with that kind of foreboding and the long dead Mayans telling us that the end of the world will be on Friday, I’m sort of thinking about my bottle now. 

I know I won’t open the Grande Dame on Thursday because that would be just silly, nothing’s happening. But if on Friday there are earthquakes or erupting volcanoes or an invasion from Mars I somehow don’t see myself saying, “Time for the bubbly,” either. But since like TS Elliot I see my world ending, "not with a bang but a whimper," that's probably not worth thinking about.

I wish I had spent that $60 on something else; I would have more than used, lost or broken it by now. All I actually do know is that by next week, I'll still be staring at the bottle and still wondering when.

Too Much Stress

It's time for the annual gripe and even though I’ve been doing it since I was eleven, I don’t really like flying. There is too much stress involved.

I had just arrived in Nashville TN an hour late doing that airport hopping thing that people do when they’re trying to get from one city to another but have to change planes at behind “God’s Back” county 30 miles east of nowhere. The airport at Nashville seemed to fit the bill. It looked dark and dingy and dismal and I thought, “If I’ve missed the last connecting flight to Philly, there’s no fucking way I’m staying overnight in this place.” I swear a lot when I’m talking to myself; somehow it seems more poetic and insightful. Call me crazy.

While I was leaving the plane from Florida, trying to figure out which gate I should go to and where the flight information board was, I noticed that I was a behind a man in a wheelchair who was tipping the person who had helped him off the plane that I had just left. In fact there was a whole bunch of people sitting there in their wheelchairs waiting for another flight or for someone to take them somewhere and I realized why the flight attendant on the plane had asked passengers in wheelchairs to be patient since there was only one person who would be able to help them disembark.

I passed the group, carry-on luggage in hand and I was hit by the stench of what can only described as the smell of raw sewage and baby shit. “Oh God, this must be some sort of decrepit persons wheelchair convention,” and then I wondered how long it would be before I joined them. But I heard over the loud speakers, “Last call for flight blah, blah, blah to Philadelphia at Gate 25 please come immediately to the gate.” “Freedom!” I thought and made a quick dash to the right only to stop and do a u-turn after 20 yards when I realized I was heading in the wrong direction.

Anyway after arriving at gate 25 panting and wheezing feeling the sweat start to trickle down my back, I really do need to quit smoking, they took my boarding pass and closed the door of the airplane 20 seconds after I had boarded. Last on board as usual. This seems to be becoming a habit.

I don’t think I really like flying, there’s just too much stress involved.

An Inexpensive Form of Airport Security

Alright people, nothing going on here. Move along please, move along.

Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire

I’ve been told that all I ever think about is sex; I always make a reference to sex either verbally or literally, and that is so untrue. I’ve never spoken about sex when writing about catastrophes like earthquakes or when planes fall from the sky. Speaking of which just let me get this straight, the Christmas Day Bomber 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was carrying an explosive device in his underwear when it went off and instead of it exploding, it just burst into flame. Like Jerry Lee Lewis used to sing, “Goodness gracious great balls of fire.”

Now I think that if there was a cause that I believed in strongly enough, there wouldn’t be anything that I wouldn’t do to fight for that cause. But I would have to think long and hard to find a good enough reason to roast my own chestnuts and even then I’m not sure that I would come up with anything. I mean the boy was 23 so he must have thought that what he was carrying wouldn’t have been that big enough to completely obliterate him. But then I’ve never really understood that kind of behavior, here of there, now or before.

Speaking of nuts, I’ve heard that because of what happened on Christmas, many airports in the US and around the world intend on getting those whole body image machines that can take pictures of the body exposing anything or everything that maybe concealed below a passenger’s clothing. I know now that I will never get a Prince Albert even though I had been thinking about it. It will be bad enough that strangers will be able to see my Little Dorrit without me having a say so in the matter, but they would also be able to judge me and come to whatever conclusion they will have about me simply by staring at my choice of jewelry. And God forbid that I should ever become famous, that picture would be emailed over the net and TMZ before I would have even found my seat on the aircraft.

I remember back when I was child, we had to be well dressed to get on a plane. I had to wear a suit and a tie when I was 10 and travelling with my mother so that I wouldn’t shame her. Nowadays all of that has changed. We will be forced into a state virtual nudity by people making $3 over minimum wage who will map every mole and blemish on our bodies only to discover we will still get onto planes that fall from the sky for no apparent reason.