Ambivalence is an emotion that I value over most others. You can’t really savor the sweet little moments of serendipity if you haven’t also tasted the pain of the best of times turning into the worst of times. It is, then, that I find myself fairly content to be ambivalent about the way that my journey to PC Indianapolis went.
It all began, innocuously enough, on a Tuesday no more special than any other Tuesday, and decidedly less special than, for example, Shrove Tuesday, where one can expect to get pancakes. I had the joy of having the perfect excuse to sleep in and stay up late—I had to get on American time. With access to a cornucopia of channels and the slowest Internet connection in southern England, I had no trouble staying up precipitously late, and falling into a slumber that lasted a more than healthy twelve hours.
This would be the last I would sleep before Indianapolis.
My flight was not to be until Thursday morning, at the criminal hour of eight in the morning. Unfortunately, Heathrow airport wasn’t working on Indianapolis time, so by my body clock, this made it 2 am. As I write this I find it harder and harder to reconcile what day of the week it is, what hour it is, and what part of the world I am in. I'm like a clean-shaven hobo.
The plan was to travel to the airport on Wednesday evening and pull an all-nighter before sleeping on the plane to Chicago, making my connection to Indianapolis and having a full afternoon of GenCon fun and frolics prior to reporting my little socks off. By the end of this story, I had been up long enough that my socks were not pleasant. Foreshadowing, thy name is Tim Willoughby.
Plans have a very nasty habit of not working with me, and this was just another example. I arrived at the airport expecting a few people and maybe a coffee machine to keep me company, and was only mildly disappointed to find that I had some company, in the form of the delightful Pam, a 21-year-old Miami native who was having to stay up even later than I. We engaged in much mutual nudging to ensure neither of us fell asleep, and all was good.
Of course, at 6 am when I tried to check in, the first major hurdle came. My plane had decided to stay in Chicago. Given that I wanted to be in Chicago, too, I couldn’t really begrudge it its wish, but this did mean that I was going to have a bit of trouble reaching Indianapolis. My mildly convoluted two-stop plan got changed into three, as I got sent to Boston before Chicago. The upside of this was that I did get the opportunity to go to the pub with my traveling companion. It is a beautiful thing how early one can get a drink in an airport if one so wishes, and having been up for quite a while, I didn’t feel guilty ordering my first drink of the day at 7:45 am, in spite of the shifty looks the bar staff threw at me.
Gradually turning into the living dead through sleep deprivation and (I suppose) alcohol, I managed to stumble onto the plane, and felt pretty pleased with myself as I curled into the fetal position in the hope of catching some shut-eye. Of course this was a forlorn hope, and I should really have been roundly reprimanded for even considering the potential of a chance that I might feel the touch of the zephyr and arrive in the US refreshed. It was out of the mouths of babes that I learned the error of my ways. If I could cry for eight hours solidly, then I would probably like to turn that into some kind of a profession, like Mariah Carey. The various children on my flight seemed to be doing so just to delight in the misfortune of the funny English guy.
And so it was that I arrived in Boston, which apparently is pronounced Boorstn (an important distinction that my various English readers should try to learn if they are ever planning to pretend to be a native of the US I’m sure). Here I met with my second little hurdle, and if I couldn’t jump hurdles after being awake for 16 hours, there was no chance that I was getting over one nine hours later. My connection from Boston to Chicago was again cancelled, and I was left wondering where I was, what my name was, and what time it was locally, because clearly my body clock was not ready for the beating it was receiving.
My wits long having since deserted me, I was left with but a single weapon in my arsenal to get me out of this mess. The English accent can be a powerful thing, especially when unprepared ladies on the other sides of service counters face it on otherwise uneventful days. Putting on my best Hugh Grant, I managed to procure seats to Dallas, from whence I would be flying to my final destination of Indianapolis in first class.
A quick aside on class. In England, class is an all-pervasive smog that infects everything we do, our thoughts, our opinions, and sometimes such fripperies as our choice of car. The funny thing is that while it is split into some sort of sliding scale of upper, middle, lower, upper middle, lower middle, upper upper, upper lower, and so on, there is no clear “first” class. To be first class, I can only assume that you would need to be some sort of overlord of everything, at which point getting a bigger seat and free drinks on flights would clearly be a little underwhelming.
So I flew to from Boston, with the obligatory delays, cramped seating, and baby. I think there was a baby, though it may just have been the echoes of the previous baby’s screams which I think may now be etched on my soul. As I was busy not sleeping, I looked out the window. Somewhere below me at some point was Indianapolis. A lot later, I landed.
From there on, life was pretty good. In Texas I think I managed to hypnotize a girl of about my age that I was sitting next to while waiting for my flight. I was happily sitting, reading a book, trying to stay awake in the face of all adversity, and started to jiggle my foot a little. Next to me, I saw a far shapelier lower leg than mine jiggling, and indeed the foot that was attached to it. I switched seating positions a little. Next to me, it was like there was some kind of physical echo going on, perhaps the start of a tiny Mexican wave. As a gamer, I am always looking for a way to make my time that little bit more fun, and here I had a prime target. As my foot twirled in a circle, next to me another foot was circling about a half second behind. Like the worst synchronized swim team ever, this went on for a full two minutes or so, and I worked up to a big finish. Just as I was about to launch into a sleep deprived version of The Hustle, my flight was called. Regrets. I’ve had a few.
The flight to Indianapolis was a bit uneventful by comparison to much of the rest of my journey, and uncharacteristically positive. With my absurdly large chair and pitifully meager frame, I can only assume I looked like a tiny English Buddha as I sat in tranquility waiting to take off. I had mentally prepared to sleep for these last three hours, but soon found that I simply could not resist staying up and enjoying the decadent pleasures of first class. With a neverending supply of gin and tonics, my day ended up much as it had started: with drinking. Merrier, older, sleepier, and “in-the-right-place-y-er,” I finally found myself in Indy, all ready to game.
And now the game is on.