hurling invective dot com

I spent the better part of my day and night getting to, waiting around and drinking in, and trying desperately to get out of Chicago.

It was a simple enough proposition: catch a late morning flight in, hang out in the hotel for a few hours, throw a party for a group of physicians, and catch the red-eye home. And everything went fine until the red-eye bit, although admittedly, my eyes were red.

Everyone told me: don’t fly out of O’Hare. How bad could it be? It’s Chicago to Cleveland – could that flight really be all that late?

I sat there with my thumb up my ass for five agonizing, sweat-soaked, hazy hours. Let me tell you… if you ever get really drunk and need to sober up for that drive home, fight with the wife, galactic civil war… just go spend a few minutes in “flight limbo” at O’Hare. That’ll kill your buzz right quick.

Anyway, at the airport, I kept having these waking dreams. You know the ones I’m talking about. These particular waking dreams are about severe, cartoon-like violence. I’m talking Itchy & Scratchy shit here. Sometimes they are so vivid they frighten me. They’re that breaking point in my mind’s eye where a near-boiling ire turns into a beautiful fantasy of apoplectic rage.

For instance, I saw this kid walking through the airport, maybe seven or eight years old. He was several feet in front of his family, which consisted of another younger brother and a clearly bedraggled and bleary-eyed mother and father. Every ten seconds or so he would look back and shout – shout, mind you – one of several phrases in rotation. They were:

“C’mon, you guys!”

“C’mon, everyone!”

“Let’s go!”

“Hurry!”

“Hurry! C’mon!”

What this child was on about, I’ll never know. Perhaps he knew they were going to be late for their flight. Perhaps he was tired and wanted to arrive at the gate so he could rest his weary little feet. Perhaps his parents should have drowned him in a pail of warm water immediately upon his birth.

I walked up behind the parents and scalped the mother with a Bowie knife while my finger turned into a shiny sword and stabbed into dad’s eye ala liquid metal guy in Terminator 2. I then pummeled the caterwauling child on the top of his head with my fists until his skull collapsed and then proceeded to punt his lifeless body down the terminal while singing a medley of show tunes.

C’mon. You know it’s happened to you. I should point out the following disclaimer: I just had about five rounds of Glenfiddich and was out of my mind with fatigue. And I was at fucking O’Hare, people. Ergo: I feel somewhat justified. I had plenty of other, um, “moments” like this during the remainder of my exile, but I won’t go into them here. You get the drift.

My most frequent waking dream occurs during seemingly endless moments of extreme boredom, usually during business meetings that I’m forced to attend for no good reason. During those, I usually picture myself jumping up from my chair, grabbing it and throwing it through the window and following it out and down to the ground.

Anyway, what was my point here, you ask? Like I fucking know? Don’t eat yellow snow. Don’t do drugs. Keep your hands to yourself. Don’t grow up to be like me.