"Now here's what I don't get about you," the fallen angel Loki says to his partner, Bartleby, as they walk through the Wisconsin airport in the film "Dogma." "Why do you feel the need to come here all the time?"
The angels watch a reunited family share a group hug.
"I like to watch," Bartleby says after a minute. "This is humanity at its best. Look at them. All that tension, all that anger and mistrust, forgotten for one perfect moment when they come off that plane."
He gestures to a young couple as they rush toward each other and begin making out feverishly. "See those two? The guy doesn't even know that the girl cheated on him while he was away."
Loki looks shocked. "She did?"
"Uh-huh," Bartleby says, nodding sagely. "Twice. But it doesn't matter at this moment because they're both so relieved to be with one another. I like that. I just wish they could all feel that way more often."
Ever since I saw that movie, I keep my eyes open when I fly and I'll be darned if "Dogma" writer Kevin Smith wasn't on to something. For every hundred people you see obliviously talking on their cell phones while the ticket line backs up behind them, you hear one toddler shriek happily when he spots his father in the waiting area. For every florid security guard that apparently wants intimate knowledge of the entire contents of your toilet kit, you see a couple of highschoolers in the eye of a swirling mass of travelers, speaking softly with their faces very close together, and you think to yourself, "Damn, those crazy kids just might make it."
Of course, that toddler’s going to be getting yelled at for pulling his sister’s hair within the hour, but this is one of those things it just doesn't pay to get too philosophical about. People are not very well equipped to appreciate most things until they've seen them stripped away, but at least that’s something, you know?
I came to understand all this in the John Wayne International Airport. I was waiting out a layover at one of those depressing airport bars where travelers go to drown the desire to hunt down the pencil neck back at Homeland Security who decided to make toothpaste a controlled substance.
I was flying alone, which I do a lot. I ordered a Heineken, the least of only about six evils in the woefully understocked bar, and watched people. I saw the standard families, the bickering couple and a sweaty guy not too much older than me working through a row of whiskey sours; the knot of his tie off center and sitting a few inches lower than it should have. I was guessing the job interview hadn’t gone so well.
I wondered what I looked like. I’m the type of person who strangers address as “sir” one moment and “sweetie” the next with no discernible pattern. Sitting at the bar in a t-shirt while I drank beer from the bottle, I almost certainly looked like a college kid with a good fake ID. But if I shaved and unpacked my nice shirt and used my reporter voice, I could probably convince everyone I was on assignment for Rolling Stone, or at least the local paper. It was nice to have options, even if I didn’t use all of them.
Airports are cool because they are the only real crossroads that remain in this country. Remember that “Three Stooges” episode where there’s a hallway full of doors and Larry chases Curley through one at the end of the hall and comes bursting out of one on the other side of the hall all by himself? Airports are just like that hall. You could, in theory, go through any one of those doors whenever you wanted and who knows where you’d come out.
And that sounds like my final boarding call. Thanks to everyone who has read my work here over the past two years and to everyone at the R-P and elsewhere who helped me scrabble my way from copy editor to general reporter extraordinaire. This column will henceforth be available only at http://mattfarleysforcedperspective.blogspot.com (notice that there is no “www” in the address). The site is already up and running and new stuff will go up every Thursday, just like the old days. If you’re like me, you’ve already forgotten the address, so you should probably bookmark it right now before someone throws the paper away and you lose it forever. See you there.
•••
So kiss me and smile for me. Tell me that you'll wait for me. Hold me like you'll never let me go. 'Cause I'm leaving on a jet plane. I don't know when I'll be back again. Oh, babe, I hate to go.
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