take your mother salsa dancing for Christmas

I have been emotionally blackmailed into going to Miami. If I don’t see my mother during the Christmas holiday, she will inevitably have some sort of nervous breakdown mid-January which would force me to go back to Iowa, so I’m here, with her, someplace warm, as a sort of prophylactic measure.

waiting for mom in the airport

For those of you who would mistakenly believe that I actually like all of this flying around from place to place, let me assure you that there is a unique spiral in Dante’s inferno for would-be jetsetters somewhere between the gluttonous, the hoarders, and the wasters. When I die, as punishment for having had too large of a carbon footprint during my time here on earth, I will be condemned to fly from one airport terminal to another in perpetuity, never being allowed to exit further than the nearest concrete parking structure. And, my sound isolation earphones will be confiscated. You know what that means… endless musak will cause me to grind my own teeth until they are all gone. It won’t be pretty, no.

parking garage as outer limitation of new circle in hell

I did manage to take a Chinatown bus for part of this trip which should count towards some carbon offsets. The trickiest part was navigating four harrowing blocks with two pieces of luggage through from the Grand Street subway stop to the Fung Wah bus stop on the Saturday before Christmas when the sidewalk averages one person per square foot. For those of you not familiar with travel in the Northeast, the Chinatown bus is the cheapest way to get from city to city out here. A mere $15 got me to South Station. In Boston, I spent not enough time with my half-sister Linda, one of the only sensible people in my family, and some more time with the rest of that part of the family, who... well, you know, families, let’s not start that kind of a competition here, it’s the holidays after all. I’m sure everybody’s family is pretty fucked-up in one way or another.

One bit of maybe-good-but-don’t-get-too-excited news I have to report is that my relatives in Iowa (aunt, uncle, mom, step-dad, bio dad, step-monster, half-sister, various cousins) are all caucusing for Obama. It never happens that these people who have famously not gotten along in the past could possibly agree on anything.

At Logan Airport, they took my tweezers. I could barely restrain myself, having much the same reaction as New Yorker with half a memory would: “What? You’re going to take my tweezers nooow?!! Lotta fucking good that is going to do. It’s not exactly a god-damned box cutter, now is it?” No, I didn’t want to get arrested so the words did not actually come out of my mouth; it was more of a look that I gave them. Logan is a fucking terrible airport and should be systematically dismantled and reconfigured into a boat to send all of the Red Sox fans out to the Red Sea.

Now, I’ve arrived in a state where I can’t believe the people are still allowed suffrage after the last two election disasters. Here’s a special message to all you people who want restitution of your property in Cuba: it ain’t gonna ever happen, you’ve been played by the Republicans for the past XX number of years, and you’ve fucked up the rest of the country with your inordinate sense of loss. Thanks a lot.

Now, let’s go find some Cuban food and drink mojitos, Mom. Then let’s go find that Gloria Estefan club, the Bongos Cuban Café, and stay out all night. She is hovering. I think it’s time to go. I got her a bunch of Cesaria Evora cds for Christmas. I hope she likes them.

more and more high-rise condo construction