28 December 2002: Treasonous Babykiller

This is the terminal entry for the year. 

Used properly, the word terminal is an adjective.  One should not, then, when arranging to meet someone at an airport, propose to meet them at the terminal, any more than one would propose to "climb the highest," or "attend the New Year's."  A destination should be a noun.  Always meet your friends at the terminus.

While I'm bitching along these lines, when did it become acceptable for supposedly erudite social commentators, writing in supposedly respectable publications, to say that "the popular media claims" this or that?  Media is the plural form.  A medium claims; the media claim.  Barbarians.

Today it is raining and I am at home taking my final downtime of the year, trying to shake a persistent cold that would love to be something worse if I'd give it a chance - which I won't; I aim to spend the evening drowning it in ginger tea, while doing laundry and reading yet another massive Tim Powers novel.

Flew out Tuesday morning to join Dragon Lady in Dallas.  I love travelling alone.  Perhaps I'll do a lot more of it someday, far down the road.  Right now, a simple life at home suits me well.  New verb:  At this time in my life, I am hobbiting.  Perhaps, like Bilbo, I will suddenly find myself going on long journeys at the age of fifty.  And I certainly plan to retire to Rivendell to finish my memoirs, when I am eleventy-one.

Stopover at the Denver airport, where a recorded voice on the PA system announced every five minutes, "Do not leave luggage unattended.  Unattended luggage will be immediately confiscated and may be destroyed."  No one laughed but me.  As Vonnegut said, there's nothing funny about National Security.  Unless, like me and Baron Munchausen, you're prone to simply ignoring the boring lies and petty balderdash of "consensus reality," and thus instinctively create more interesting contexts in which to interpret such surreal messages.  My first mental image upon hearing the announcement was not of a heroic bomb squad disposing of a ticking parcel abandoned in the midst of a crowd of baby carriages by a sinister man in a turban (I get the impression, from what accidental glimpses I get of the popular media, that this is the sort of scenario we're supposed to imagine, and that it is supposed to be a convincing and stirring enough fantasy to induce us to beg the Conspiracy to take away still more of our civil liberties, please, just repeal the whole Bill of Rights, anything to save those darling babies).  Instead, treasonous babykiller that I am, I imagined that the airport's management was attempting to warn us that they had ill-advisedly pressed a small army of gremlins into service as airport security shock troops, and that these gremlins, equipped with human disguises, airport security uniforms, guns, and unaccustomed authority, were now running amok, snatching any piece of luggage (or small child) that wasn't held tightly, and dragging all their spoils to some central lobby area to be gleefully stomped on, hurled against walls, hacked up with axes, and tossed onto an ever-growing confiscated-luggage bonfire.

Dragon Lady's parents rock.  They are good people, really genuinely good, like my own parents or Geminica's, and they welcomed me into their home and family even though I'm a treasonous babykiller who laughs at National Security.  I didn't feel any need to be anything other than myself; I felt like I was visiting good family, rather than (as I've always felt in similar situations with the families of past lovers) performing a tiresome diplomatic mission.  I relaxed and acted like me, and so, apparently, did they (that is, they acted like them, not like me), and we got along famously.  Wow.  My family approves, and her family approves, and this just keeps on getting better.

Got back last night.  The Khan picked us up at the airport, and told us that Zebra was holed up in her apartment resting her newly-transfigured genitalia, so we dropped in and visited her and she showed us the set of variously-sized lucite dildos the doctor had given her for purposes that she described to us in glorious detail but modestly refrained from demonstrating.

Time for another cup of tea.