Skip to main content

I Don't Feel Secure Traveling - Part 1

I travel a lot - I have 1.7 MILLION frequent flyer miles on American Airlines alone! So I bitch and moan about travel hassles to everyone who will listen and frankly people in my life are tired of hearing about it so I'll blog about it and hopefully get it out of my system.

At the San Jose airport one time I was inline behind a very elderly couple. She was in a wheel chair and he was pushing her at a very slow shuffle using the chair as much as a walker as a mode of transportation for his wife. When they got to the front of the line about to go through the metal detector the TSA person said, "Mam you'll have to walk through." The woman raised herself out of the wheel chair with great difficulty and was holding on to the counter when the agent added, "Those shoes will need to go through X-ray." She had on little pink slippers - the sole was maybe an eighth of an inch thick and was cotten! The little old man had to get down on his hands and knees while she sat back down so he could slip her slippers off for the damn X-ray!

While this "security" process was underway, cargo was being loaded into the plane I would later fly in to Austin - most of that cargo is not searched, x-rayed, or inspected. How in hell did making that little old lady put her slippers through an x-ray machine make my flight safer???

More later...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Fabian Fan Club

            I was in the fourth grade when I had my first identifiable sexual feelings.  I didn't call them sexual feelings then.  Actually, when I begged God's forgiveness that night (because I was certain that anything that felt good was bad) I remember describing it as "a tingling in the bottom of my stomach, like the time I broke into the elementary school - bad and wonderful at the same time."  I wasn't a juvenile delinquent or anything just a kid who was easily influenced by my peers.  Four of us broke into the elementary school and our vandalism was to write (in easily erasable chalk) "Zorro was here!" on several classroom chalk boards. Fear, tingling, sexual - whatever I was feeling I liked it.              It was 1962.  My sister and her friends were giggling about a packet that had come in the mail from the Fabian Fan Club. They were getting ready for my Moth...

We Got "Married" NOT "GAY Married"

On September 24, 2013 in San Jose, California, a Deputy County Commissioner for Santa Clara County named Loune Philavane said, "By the authority vested in me by the State of California, I now pronounce you legally married spouses."  We stood on the opposite side of a Plexiglas divider with a circular arrangement of holes at head level to allow us to hear MS Philavane when she spoke the vows we repeated.  People were all over the place in the Courthouse at windows just like ours getting copies of their birth certificates, or copies of some family member's death certificates or like us, getting married.  How did we get here and why such a pedestrian setting for what is typically reserved for much pomp and circumstance, and why were we alone with no friends or family to witness our nuptials? We're Gay, that's why.  We live in Texas.   Texas citizens decided several years ago (80% to 20%) that our relationship has "no standing" and that the State and non...

Birthday Dinner Discussion

I'll start this entry by saying that I don't know exactly where I am going with it - it hasn't been thought through like my other entries but by the time I finish I hope that I understand a reaction I had a couple of weeks ago and maybe both of us can learn from it? It was my birthday and to celebrate my partner invited four of our friends to dinner at Sampaio - my favorite Brazilian restaurant in Austin. We all know each other, some better than others, so I was looking forward to a nice, relaxing, fun conversation. We are all gay, fairly liberal politically, literate, educated, well-read and skilled conversationalists - what could go wrong? Religion. Maybe that's the biggest source of difference for us and in hindsight perhaps something we should have avoided. It started innocently enough; we were talking about relationships - the six of us constituted two single guys and two couples. One of the single guys, let's call him Jay, said that he made a pact with a singl...