Fly boys crack me up, and I love airport bars, there is truly nothing better to combat the atmosphere of this awkward and sterile vestibule in between real life than alcohol, and airports would suck bad without it. I am sitting at my gate in the Philadelphia airport right now. It is nine at night and I will soon be flying back to Chicago. Let me first just say that the Philadelphia airport should have its blueprints photocopied and launched into space to one day birth some wonderful utopia in a distant galaxy. There are quality stores, duty frees, bars, and rocking chairs galore (I shit you not – white, old thyme rocking chairs in between gates and terminals so you may sit and contemplate your travels, where mother can nurse child, where fat American pant loads can sit and breath normally for two seconds without inhaling shit right off floor into their gargantuan lungs.) Man, this post is already pure gibberish, but I am in time zone limbo right now so I thought I’d report on it. I have become everything I once hated, a rambling narcissist who seems to think people are interested in hearing about a day that I didn’t even find interesting living. Bottoms up.

Wait, here is one minor development. Just recently I overheard a woman talking on her phone about the driving in Greece and figured I`d share with her a couple of anecdotes about my own experiences and understanding in Greco society. Firstly, Greece is a beautiful country with an incredible history and has terrific people and food. That said, like most Europeans, they drive like psychopaths on roads that seem to just be gentle reminders that you are in fact behind the wheel of a thousand pound hunk of steel and yes, you are quite mobile. It is as if as children they were simply not encouraged to crayon inside the lines in their colouring book, merely just acknowledge that they have the power to create a giant incomprehensible mess.

If you have no frame of reference here just imagine these so called roads and infrastructure as one giant pinball machine, your standard Greek jalopy is the ball that is fired without calculation into a minefield of pedestrians, dead ends, pitfalls, and other vehicles. You are instantly doomed to hit and possible leave to die whatever or whoever you hit without a moment’s hesitation and then repeat it and pretend that those pleas for mercy is not a cyclist trapped in your axle but rather just your muffler dragging, even though part of you knows that fell off years ago. Oh, and this is all done at several hundred kilometres an hour since you are traveling alongside cars that do not have functioning speedometers, probably just totally sweet stickers pulled from Sugar Crisp boxes that denote warp speed ahead.

Anyway, this woman was talking about how her uncle goes over there all the time because he owns a Toyota dealership and every time he drives there he gets hit. The most recent “accident” involved a single lane two way road, basically a game of chicken, and let`s just say this driver here did not have the benefits of time travel to learn him the values of restraint like one Marty McFly did and that the result was catastrophic. I laughed so I thought I`d share with her a story that was told to me by my one and only Greek buddy: Johnny D, aka, John the Greek (Cyprian.) Johnny has hair on every square inch of his body except his head, his compulsive generosity borderlines on a carelessness often associated with Alzheimer’s (it is highly likely he is 50 years older than he says he is) and he always knows when to hold them but most certainly does not know when to fold them (we play poker where John notoriously acknowledges his fate in time to save himself but never feels compelled to do so, something about this demands psychotherapy.) Shit, I’m off topic, and I really don’t want to talk about John anymore. Basically what happened is that he was left at an airport in Athens with a standard car (he had never driven one before) and was instructed to drive it alone across the country. I think he told me it took him an hour to get out of the parking lot, a feat only made possible after his discovery of the clutch and revelation that it was integral in starting the vehicle. I also think he described the horrors of an enormous round about that entombed him in a game of vehicular roulette for days… Hmm, the funny thing is that what I just told you is about all Johnny ever seems to recount about this road trip from Hades, the rest is just repressed into a small black pit that lay dormant inside him like so many other emotions, frustrations and possibly even new hairs (here’s hoping John.)

Good, my flight is boarding soon. Johnny D I love you and your culture and I sincerely hope I didn’t – Oh fuck! I forgot the other story I was going to tell you, about an equally colourful friend of mine. It involves getting an eyebrow pierced in the post apocalyptic slums of Athens. Mind you this is a procedure that can induce paralysis if done improperly and let’s just say that this ranks among the funniest life choices I have ever seen. Kids if you are looking to revolt and get a piercing make sure you seek out sanitary conditions to do so, not, say, I don’t know, in the fetid bowels of Athens’s Skid Row.

Try to guess which one Addison is…

I have a distinct recollection of my friend, I’ll call him Addison because that’s generally what I call him, sweating buckets in a stolen dentist chair in this little shit box tattoo parlour. From my seat I could see into two rooms, the room with the rebellious Addison awaiting what could have been the final bit of sensation he ever felt in his face, and the other room that was booming with Greek obscenities as the two piercers flipped through textbooks like they were cramming only minutes before an exam they knew they were going to fail. I knew they had absolutely no idea what they were doing for this risky operation, I also knew that Addison was concerned sitting in that hot seat, like an old dog at the vet starting to wonder why his owner is acting so strange. So as I watched both dramas play out I recall Addison looking at me through the doorway as he could hear the commotion in the next room. With worried and glassy Basset Hound eyes he then reached out to me and said,

“Ed, tell me they aren’t looking up how to do it. Tell me they know what they are doing.”

What to say to an old friend who is having second thoughts in such a reckless situation, a friend desperate for some guidance, entrusting me, asking me for help in his time of need?

I gave him the thumbs up and said,

“They know exactly what they’re doing. You’re already here, may as well do it!”

On the surface this looks pretty irresponsible, but the fact of the matter is that the procedure went perfectly and Addison secured himself as the biggest rebel in the class, topping only himself for like the 50^th consecutive time. My disregard for caution clinched the moment, besides, being cool is far more important than being able to blink in unison or comfortably hold water in one’s mouth. If they had disfigured his face, or worse, somehow killed him it is not like they would have just let us prance on out of their anyway, we’d all be dead. The honey on this Baklava is that Addison was immediately forced to remove his spike by his parents thus rendering the whole game of Russian roulette incredibly pointless, and so I hope I have somewhat immortalized this incredibly ballsy piercing here as it has since been lost forever in ancient high school lore. Ok my flight is boarding. The moral of these stories is that life is fickle, especially in the wonderful country of Greece, so I don’t know, tomorrow try and impress someone by driving really fast or looping a piece of metal through your skin. Peace.