Eight days and many miles later, the tour is over and I’m already nostalgic. There were many lessons learned: Don’t mess with Maroo, unless you want to get punched in the eye. Don’t mix Chardonnay and 151. Don’t be the first to fall asleep when everyone around you is drunk and insane. Don’t staple shit to your chest unless you want to bleed. Biz Markie is a big dude. Percee P is as real as they come. Etc.
But a more immediate lesson concerns our robot friends. On tour, you pull up somewhere and everyone unloads their shit and plugs everything in to charge for an hour or two. First we feed the machines, and then we worry about feeding ourselves. It’s vexing. Someone always needs to get something off of email, and the wireless is always acting up. Cell phones are out of range. Critical pieces of information are held up by the most mundane technical glitches. And yet you keep hurtling on.
So Flex and Cosmo drove me to the airport on Saturday morning, and I get to the International terminal at SFO that Jetblue is now using to discover that its automatic check in machines are not accepting credit cards. Attempting to use a credit card causes each machine to freeze and then reboot. Fifteen minutes pass, and I start to panic. But I manage to retrieve my confirmation number through a phone call and get my boarding pass and head for security. My deodorant was 4 ounces, guys, and that’s more than the federally allowable 3.4. And I handed over the lighter in my pocket once I was already through the metal detector, rattling everyone.
I hit the bar at the gate for a quick beer and saw footage of a flaming car at the Glasgow airport. This was the Orwellian moment: as Fox News insisted that airport security in the U.S. was already being increased, I had just waltzed through that bitch and saw nothing but boredom and ill-fitting maroon sweaters. The automated announcement about the Terror Threat level — orange, it claimed — continued without a change in content or tone. I hear the Transformers movie sucks, but I think it’s fairly clear that we’ve reached a tipping point. We don’t run the machines anymore. They run us.
Shout to Ty, Chris, Flex, Roo, Coz, Ryn, Rusty, Natasha, Mike, Alex, and everyone else who made the tour such a blast and let us crash all over your floors.
