The Bends

This is horribly out of character and awfully Gewillian of me, but I am double-posting today. Well, it doesn't feel like double-posting to me because I really posted at just past midnight last night (while I was not-sleeping before my 4:45 AM wake up call for my 6:25 AM flight). Thing is, I'm in Portland Oregon, they have free Wi-Fi (that's right FREE...so suck it Logan!) and I'm incredibly bored. This is what it must be like to have a desk job, blogging out of boredom...or contempt for THE MAN.

The first leg of my flight was mostly uneventful, I couldn't sleep, I never can. I had my bad-ass Panda neck pillow instead of the slightly-less-bad-ass pink pig neck pillow. The Panda pillow looks way, way better with my Big Black compression socks.



God, I wish I could track down a Big Black shirt. They used to be so readily available at Newbury Comics back in the late eighties.

We did hit a bunch of turbulence and I am not a good flier. I had an incident many years ago that I have never been able to shake. Sometimes I'm OK, sometimes I'm not. After thirty minutes of turbulence I was not OK. But I managed to calm myself down by picturing myself as Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove, riding the nuclear warhead, hooting and hollering all the way to the ground.



The second leg of my flight was hell. I was sandwiched between a huge serial killer looking dude and a manic-incessant talker who over-shared stories of her drug addiction and the car-crash-related death of her boyfriend. Thankfully the talker gravitated more toward the old man across the aisle (he didn't have dark sunglasses on, earphones in, and a book hiding his face). If that wasn't enough to fill me with overwhelming joy, there was a screeching baby one aisle up. It was like the drunken Red Sox fan of babies — the Sox win, we riot and burn dumpsters; the Sox lose, we...riot and burn dumpsters. This devil-baby screeched in bliss, it screeched in frustration, it was not very discerning about its ear-splitting screeching. Oh, and all that screeching and talking made the serial killer mad, mad, mad. He twisted his large carcass in his small seat, exhaled loudly, and rubbed his face in irritation. If he had snapped, I would have gotten it first. Thanks stupid baby and chatty lady, look what you did, I'm dead now...that's just great.

At some point during the flight I had that "Oh Shit!" moment, realizing that I had forgotten my helmet. I will be duct-taping my Contour HD by V Hold R to someone else's helmet on Saturday, I hope. I mean, while it's on my head. I'm not going to duct-tape a camera to some random dude's head. I've also got a camera on loan (with the option to barter bike parts for it) from Results-Rooter. It's a Mino Flip HD. It looks way more legit than my Stylus-Not-So-Tough, which I've been using for my Cyclingdirt interviews. Now maybe Jeff Schalk will take me seriously when I accost him in the porta-potty line at NUE races.