Walking up to the ticket counter nearly twenty minutes my past gate-time at the busiest airport in the world, I knew already that I was looking at stand-by on the next flight out, at best. I was over it. Everybody else was settled in their seats, rolling out, and cracking a book or doing that airplane-breakneck-nap thing. They’d all be in their rooms by the time I came trailing in behind them and calling Ollie’s cell number to get where I was going, or maybe he’d leave me a packet at the ticket counter. When I blew things up like this in the past, he was pretty good about that.

I wasn’t really worried — just irritated as hell – and yanked out of that “I travel the world - I don’t know how” mode that Jidman and I have seeped into in the past three years. We get flight times in e-mail or on the phone. Somebody else puts it all together, meets us at the airport with the essentials, and off we go.

About eighty feet away at the counter, there was this baggage cart stacked about six feet high with not-suitcase stuff. I’m looking at this as I’m walking up to it, and I see these armored corners on what looks like Anvil cases, and I realize that it’s rock gear. And there’s a large guitar case lying flat on top of the pile, and I’m thinking “Well, that’s the only way to do it,” and I see the color of that case and it’s Dee’s case. That’s D-Bass’ bass guitar on that baggage cart. At nearly twenty minutes after gate time.

And that’s Jid’s RF (”radio frequency”) rack, the heaviest item we fly with. And the SPX box. That’s our gear.

“What the hell?…” I’m thinking. Stopped dead.

And Regina jumps up over there at that flat narrow end of that long, long room that is the ticketing concourse at the world’s busiest airport, and she hollers at me, “It’s all you fault.”

“*What* is going on?”

“We were all waiting for *you* to get here and check in, and they scrubbed all our tickets!”

By now, The Amazing Sleeping Man is starting to shake with the giggles there on the baggage scale at the empty counter, and I’m getting some kind of picture of this thing.

“Nonsense. Look: I’ve been listening to nothing but bullshit all week long, and I won’t have it.”

Halfway through the turn of the on-ramp to Interstate 85 and nearly fifty miles away I realized I was only an hour and twenty mintues from gate time. It was moderately alarming, but I’d seen worse, and at the right time of day it would go. This wasn’t the right time of day, but the operating principle here is, “Never give up.” Take every second you can shave, all the way along, because I’ve seen it play down to seconds: stashing carry-on and looking back at seconds anywhere along the way where the wrong play would have made the difference between making the seat with the team or dragging catch-up behind them all day long.

The first fifteen minutes southbound were as good as they could be, making eighty-five on average with room to stay safe out there with all those nutters. They seemed to be behaving themselves, and I was able to blow along all the way down to midtown in that time, which was hopeful. The south half was going to be a drag, but every second up front was going in the bank… which promptly went broke at the I-75 split. The six-lane parking lot, from there down past the stadium. Jesus, god.

Tick-tock. Nice 454SS pickup putting by in the HOV lane, and then the guys with the hip-hop blasting rust powder off their heap with the kick-drum beats. Riding in the afternoon sunshine, home on a Friday afternoon. I’m glad everybody’s having such a good time out here, but I wish they would all just get out of my way. Why can’t they plan their lives around mine? I wonder how hard could that possibly be.

The damned thing finally began sliding along at about gate minus-thirty. Gassing it on for the next ten minutes or so in broken traffic, I was thinking I still had a shot. The last of that silly flame winked out when the west economy parking lot was closed — which fact they never indicate out-front where one can make a sound strategic navigation move when seconds count — and I went another round the mulberry bush to get to parking nearest the ticket counter. Hell, though; I was rounding-round, at least five minutes past gate-time, and just went for the damned Park & Ride lot.

Forget it. It’s just that I hate to run like that and not make it.

Geena and September were having a fine laugh over it while Ollie was burning down a cell phone. D-Bass was laid-out on the baggage scale doing the Amazing Sleeping Man thing; out, if he wanted to be, but hearing everything. The way it was explained to me, I was was thinking somebody really needed to get fired behind this. Somehow, for the first time I ever saw in an operation like this, we had everybody standing around without tickets to the gig. Something weird had happened in the food chain far above our heads, or even Ollie’s, apparently. It wasn’t worth tracking down at the moment, to us. Someone either in the travel office or artist management. Didn’t matter, right away, because somebody was trying to hook up stand-by’s on the next flight, in two and half hours.

Jid came strolling up, with carry-on’s. “What the hell?…” I’m thinking. “Where did he come from?” Last anybody knew, he was in Oklahoma City, and I figured he’d just turn up at Sacramento.

“What are *you* doing here?” Geena and September were laughing all over again because they’d heard him call Ollie from baggage claim and knew he was on his way up to our end. “Jesus… you daughter was telling me last night that she knew where you were but had no idea when you’d be home. I thought you’d just fly out to OKC. Why the hell did you come home?”

He was groaning that all-day drag, and he finally let on how his bags were on the next flight in from Dallas or someplace. “Well, that’s cool,” I said. “We’ve got over two hours until our stand-by to the coast, so we can go play if Dad says it’s okay.”

Ollie didn’t need us to hang right away for ticketing and claim-checks on the gear. He was able to nod-out that much with the cell-phone wedged on his cheek and scribbling on his PDA. Carnell wanted to hang with the gear and the girls were talking real-estate, so Jid-man, Mark and I made our escape to the bar.

That’s where Jid told me the story about how he didn’t burn twenty-five thousand miles and seventy-five dollars to change his ticket out of OKC. *That* flight got goofed by the guy who booked him on that gig, so he was making up his mind about blowing straight home with the fastest thing he could grab or coasting on the ticket he had. That thing was a bounce to Chicago or something, and he’d been delayed already. He said, “To hell with it. I’ll just coast in, catch the next stand-by back out to the coast and catch up with you guys there.”

By the second tap on The Pretty Bottle, he was laughing at my freeway breakneck and figuring he’d made the right call.

“Well, yeah,” I said, “but what time did you guys get going this morning?”

Mark laughed, “Six o’clock. We could be in Europe by now.” Jid pretty much just rolled his eyes.

We walked back down to the flat end of the ticketing concourse of the busiest airport in the world, and I couldn’t believe it.

“That man has *two* cell phones going.” Ollie rolled his eyes with a phone wedged against his cheek and the other one in the hand that wasn’t thumbing the PDA. The Amazing Sleeping Man drawled out that “whatthefucknext?” look on his always-ready-for-anything face. I’ve never seen anyone more adept with the uncomfortabilities of airports, the world over, and he was having high comedy already. Geena and September were daintily lounged, best they could be, and tearing off bits of harmony now & then between the hang.

Carnell had been buzzing the ticketing agents, and between him and Ollie, the last laugh finally dropped when he said he was going home.

D-Bass couldn’t fall down laughing, because he was already down on the baggage scale. Everybody did the huddle on Ollie and noted the new times: the best move was just to go home and come back for the 8:10am. Jid-man was getting *very* happy that he didn’t burn those miles, when Derek came strolling up. He and Keetcho had been up at the gate concourse, soaking up a barley-sandwich, no doubt, and were just getting the word. Even Ollie was laughing now.

So, Mark, Jid, and I mounted our bags and headed off to Jid’s car, and I looked at the afternoon air. It was soft and windless, and just perfect for one of those early spring flights in a small airplane, of the sort that I’d been wishing I’d been able to squeeze in before I left on this trip. It didn’t quite open up before today, but the evening was perfect…

… and by the time I drove my ass all the back up north, it would be just getting too dark to take off. And that’s how it went. Jid dropped me at the Park & Ride bus; I got a toss out to my car; started driving the nutter-course up through town, with the setting sun just mocking me out the left window all the way home.

Yes, folx; it’s a glamorous profession.

I love my work, I really do.

It’s just too bad how I sometimes hate my job.

The miserable business of “counseling troubled youth” will naturally continue to thrive under Conservative Communism, even if certain of the poor dears’ criers come and go now and then. Taking each case on its own demands an eye on details always properly set in the big picture, like naming the winner in a close race to hell or congratulating someone acquitted of a murder charge. There is a lot more afoot than meets most people’s eyes.

It is always far more categorically important in these matters to not “take each case on its own," because of the nature of “these matters." I certainly do not suppose everyone in the world intelligent enough to abide my own nearly Victorian world-view in the matter of dealing with children — to say nothing of them as criminals — but I can righteously demand that they one & all keep their bloody hands out of my pockets while they’re at their own way about it. And I always do. The categorical imperative here is, as always: private property. Do not rob me in order to pay for your goods.

Conservative Communism, however, is about the continuing business of setting various gangs and herds against each other at the lip of the village soup pot. War-fighting doctrine now calls for establishing Faith Bases out where the enemy of poverty controls the night. Naturally, strategic hamlet chieftains must be carefully chosen for the role they will play in deploying such critical resources.

Looking out the chinks at the darkness all day long and glancing over one’s embattled shoulder at comrades toiling the brats in any given hamlet qualifies them to gauge a “good job” at that sort of thing, if anything does. Thus the wailing reaches us over the walls at one of the little forts because a good comrade has been cast out.

The New York Times Magazine brings the sad tale of Alicia Pedreira, whose good works at the Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children of Louisville, Kentucky, have come to naught because she is a lesbian. The works are alleged to be “good” by the brats themselves, various peasants living about the hamlet, as well as Alicia, and that’s good enough for the chink-outlook. I’ll take it.

She really cared. The brats loved her. She had a “sterling reputation” behind the walls, and she is educated, with “a degree in expressive therapy." She was solicited to work at the Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children and she even told them that she was a lesbian during a job interview. Nonetheless, she took her place among the comrades and brats and things went swimmingly until somebody went and won a state fair photography contest with – guess what — a picture of Alicia with her arm around her girlfriend at some AIDS walk around the hamlet.

Well, that was that for the Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children, who decided that they could take the seventy-five percent of their budget that they get from the state government and discriminate against Alicia by firing her because they can’t use queers or dopers. Actually… to be fair here, the Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children didn’t really say that Alicia was a doper, but they said they couldn’t use dopers, anyway.

Anyway, Alicia’s fired, various of her comrades have thrown themselves over the hamlet walls in her name, and the brats are in tears.

So, now, a man can stand at Cincinnati, cock an ear downriver, and hear the lawyers thrashing toward Louisville.

Alicia and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed a federal lawsuit in United States District Court at Louisville, because the Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children have a religious problem with a queer on the staff. Conservative Communism is said to be alarmed at some implications of the case, coming as it does in time with the new war-fighting doctrine of Faith Bases. Homosexual legaleers are scouting the most important case since some people recently told others to get away from their private campfires. Adventurers scaling the range of the 1964 Civil Rights Act are marking territory from which to lay fire on “Charitable Choice” strongholds, and Conservative Communist benders make the viddie rounds pleading for a special discrimination (”only on the basis of religion” – Stephen Goldsmith) hoping nobody notices such craven weenietalk.

The central issue in this case is the probity of a right to be dumb with other people’s money. If the Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children were truly and centrally concerned with their brats’ welfare, then they would also have concerned themselves with the instant facts of Alicia’s daily drill around the hamlet, which is said to have been quite soldier-like. “She really cared,” etc., and she apparently wasn’t the sort to start laying tongue-holds on the poor kiddies, or even walk around glaring about how “gay” she is. Nobody knows what actually concerned them in this case, because they weren’t concerned with it before some amateur took a picture of her. None of the ink they’ve sprayed at the matter seems to clear the air of it, but it really doesn’t even matter now, except for the hollering, and maybe a million or two in punitive damages years down the road.

To people living in and around these matters, it is the most rational possible thing to go to war over how they’re going to spend each others’ money. Every sort of creep with a jag on over “sky muffins” will be on hand to scream about how their money shouldn’t pay for “imposing religious beliefs." (They’re absolutely right about that, but nevermind.) The Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children have said that they would rather “stop contracting with government” (as if receiving stolen funds can represent a contractual arrangement) than to change their ways, and I’ll try not to laugh while I’m waiting. The governor of Kentucky has expressed concern at such a dire turn of affairs, and while the case only involves money stolen by the state, legal fangers hold out great hope of federal constitutional high-life.

The Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children and all the Faith Bases deserve the battle, of course. It’s only natural when there’s a war on.