Phutatorius

It's been a while — I've been away — but I'm back in Cambridge and back online. Sunday night's flight home from Hilton Head might be passable as eventful: the Wife and I had a brief layover in Charlotte, and a 10 p.m. flight out to Boston. We were well-settled on the flight out of Charlotte and winding our way across the tarmac when the captain reported over the PA that an undesirably blinking light on his control panel warranted a return to the gate. As it turned out, the light would not stop blinking, and we had to disembark and board another plane. The flight left probably ninety minutes late, and the Wife and I were home by 1:30.

Make no mistake, good readers: I do not harbor any delusion that the above story is at all blogworthy. Rather, I tell it because it is so awfully, irretrievably, and dare-I-say typically uninteresting. As I watched fellow passengers labor to fit their carry-on baggage into the overhead compartments — come on, people! You had it all stowed in an identical plane an hour ago! — I made the following bittersweet prediction to the Wife: at some point in the coming months we will make use of this nonevent as conversation fodder during a dinner out with some other married couple.

And really, nothing quite lights up a thirtysomething double date like a game of Air Travel Incident Pong. Take the following:

BARNEY: ". . . and I'm looking out the window, and the guy with the deicer falls off the wing. I mean, I actually saw him wipe out, and I hit the call button to tell somebody. We were delayed twenty-five minutes at the gate while they waited for the paramedics."

WILMA: "Here's one for you. You know the little rotating clip that holds the tray table in place? Well, mine broke off on the plane back from Bermuda. The flight was full, I couldn't switch seats, and I had to sit there and hold the tray table in place with my hands during taxi, takeoff, and landing."

BETTY: "Come on, guys. I was in the middle of a story. Now where was I? Oh. Yeah — so the woman at the counter says to me, 'You can take the 6:30 flight, but it will cost you an additional fourteen hundred dollars.'"

And then FRED weighs in with "You should have seen that coming. Plane fares never make any goddam sense. But the FAA regs — you've got to be kidding me. Last September they had us get off a plane and get on another one, just because of a blinking light."

Why every night out seems to devolve into these mile-high tit-for-tats is one of life's deeper mysteries. My guess is that conversations veer inevitably in this direction because air travel mishaps are the purest fuel for the empty banter to which Dinner For Four is so awfully susceptible. The narrative alphabet is familiar. Everybody knows the letters — tray-tables, beverage carts, fare adjustments — and they can generally be arranged into a story just interesting enough to be worth telling, but not meaningful enough to draw us out of the petty self-absorption in which childless couples are so comfortable. Once you have kids, of course, you can devote your empty talk to them instead, since you'll no longer be traveling.

In the meantime, air travel allows you to cast yourself as hero ("So I said to the woman, 'There's no way I'm paying fourteen hundred dollars to fly to Philadelphia.'") or Picaro ("The flight attendant tore off my toenail with the beverage cart — that's the last time I wear sandals in an aisle seat."), to flush out some of the lowest forms of villainy ("The jerk in front of me brought his seat back before we reached cruising altitude."), to develop quest narratives ("They ended up routing us through Bangor, Maine. Bangor, Maine.").

Makes you wonder about what routine misfortunes couples discuss in developing countries. When Merv and Wanda Ngebe dine out in Lagos, do they carp about how Wanda's cousin was almost stoned to death for fornicating? Do Lance and Barbara Subramanian gripe over Mai Tais about the Islamist militias that always seem to swoop down on their hostage raids in the middle of Saturday Night Live?

Anyway, check this out. Richard offers interesting insights about the geopoliticus — and for whatever unrelated purpose he links to me as well.

I turn 30 years old today, with some amazement at my dumb luck in making it this far. There were times in my life when many of you who are closest to me (admit it!) did not believe I would live to see the 21st century. But here I am, on the cusp of my fourth decade, stronger than ever, and I want to thank all of you who stood by me through all the shit, through the drinking and hard drugs, the brigandage and warlording, the legal troubles, the bankruptcy, the Comeback Tour — everything — to see me through (even carry me through, at times) to the other side.

There comes a time in a man's life when he finally understands that he has to take control of his future. That time came for me three years ago, while I sat in a South African prison awaiting extradition to France for trial on gun-running charges. What is this? I asked myself. What am I doing? I'm killing myself, and I'm tearing the guts out of the people who love me. At some point during that long week in Solitary, I vowed that I would stand up on my own two feet and turn my life around.

And my old nemesis, Inspector Desailly, who for so many years played Javert to my Valjean — oh, the dances of intrigue he and I danced, the cat-and-mouse games we played in the early 90s! — he must have seen something different in my eyes on that sunny afternoon in October 2000, as he watched the authorities lead me down to the tarmac at Charles DeGaulle airport. He put his job on the line for me, recommended leniency to the prosecutor-judge, and I was able to plead down to money laundering.

There would follow eight months of soul-searching in Luynes, then a year of study and deeper introspection in Tibet after my parole restrictions expired.

I write to you today a changed man, thirty years wise, from my desk beside the window of my bucolic Appalachian homestead, the cheese farm that I've chosen to be the succor of my middle age. As I type these words, I watch little Bartolocito (my love-child with Phillippine president Gloria Arroyo) milk the sheep after school, and I want only the simple things from life. More than anything, I want to be deserving of the love of those closest to me — my beautiful wife, who gave this broken-down and rebuilt man a second chance at happiness, and who opened up her heart and home to a small boy from a distant land, because it meant so much to me to be his father. And my son, God love him, so innocent, so real. I can only hope that the next thirty years of my life will pass like today, in peace and quiet, without the turmoil, anxiety, addictions, and compulsions that battered me through the 1980s and 90s.

But once I hit 60, look out, world, because it's back to hellraisin' for your devoted correspondent,

Phutatorius.

The Blue Cross/Blue Shield website — like most advertising vehicles of companies that purport to provide intangible services, but in fact screw you out of your money — bears photographs of a collection of people of all races, ages, and genders, all of them visibly satisfied customers whose ear-to-ear grins are no doubt directly traceable to their belief that, whatever life foists upon them, Blue has their back. As an aesthetic matter, I find this sort of suggestion wholly implausible.

A Big Mac, granted, when placed in front of a hungry customer, can curl the corners of one's mouth into a smile wholly attributable to McDonald's. But people just don't walk around smiling all day because they bank at Citizen's or Fleet or are privileged policyholders with Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Likewise, just as T.S. Eliot faulted Hamlet for its lack of an "objective correlative", I find it a bit of a dramatic stretch to suggest, as a recent TV commercial does, that a black middle-aged male would take such satisfaction from his home security system that he would stand on the end of a pier and shout over a placid lake at the top of his lungs, "NOW I CAN FINALLY RELAX!" (no doubt dispersing his anxiety to his white neighbors, who pile their angelic children into SUVs and flee to more remote summer-home venues).

Well, my picture is not on the Blue Cross/Blue Shield website, and I ain't relaxin'. They're telling me down at the MGH Travel Center that BC/BS won't front for the battery of immunizations I need to get before I go to Brazil. Bad news for BC/BS: you didn't have Phutatorius in mind when you devised that particular cheap-out policy, and I'm going to stick you for it. My plan? To forgo the immunizations and do my damnedest to contract yellow fever, so that when I return to the States, stricken with illness, You Know Who can pay through the nose for my extended period of hospitalization. This green Jello and chicken broth are on you, Blue!

Of course, now that I've gone and written that, you can bet BC/BS will void my policy before the end of the month.

From what I hear, though, the hip disease to get down in Brazil these days is "The Dengue," another mosquito-borne inside-outer, but one for which there apparently is no vaccine. It seems to me that the accrual of the definite article "the" can be a great reputation-builder for a disease — I am, for example, a prouder survivor of a routine bout of "The Croup" than I am of the scarlet fever and pneumonia that could well have extinguished the Lux Phutatoriensis in my early childhood. Since November's Amazon trip will of necessity expose me to a "The" disease, I don't see the need to spend my hard-earned cash on a measly yellow fever shot just to limit my insurance company's risk.

So there you have it — Phutatorius will brave the tropics like the great Spanish explorers of old, or at least the Blues Brothers: unprepared and unprotected, convinced he is on a mission from God, and most likely with a few communicable diseases of his own to introduce into the ecosystem. Onward to glory!

And if I change my mind in the meantime, I still have my vaccinations appointment blocked out at Mass. General.

Here's a tracklist of an album I hope to record someday, once I've taught myself to play the guitar:

1. The World Is Over, and I'm Still Here
2. Walk It Off, Brother
3. I'll Be in the Overhead Bin (If You Need Me)
4. Your Sorry Ass for $100, Alex
5. Flathead or Phillips? (Instrumental)
6. She Said She Had "Standards"
7. (I Wanna) Climb the Walls like Spiderman
8. They'd Love You in Burma
9. (It's All About) Torque
10. Tastes Like Asbestos
11. The Legend of John Henry's Hammer

I just added the Cash cover today, because — God love him — he sure was a hammer-swinger. We'll miss you, Johnny.

I thought that my unemployment would be the font from which brilliant, imaginative, and insightful blogging would spring. Maybe Day Two will go better.

It seems I can't walk down a street these days without somebody accosting me and asking me how they can license themselves to sell upholstery in Virginia.

Message to The Onion — the Simpsons writers called. They want their Comic Book Guy schtick back. I'm assessing ten points for the blatant ripoff, returning five for turning up a real-life dead ringer for the cartoon character. So you're still in the running for the House Cup.

That said, all this might explain the Sea Captain lookalike — complete with black-billed white hat, blue sailor's jacket, and frothy white beard — that several of us saw driving up I-71 toward Cleveland last weekend in a Buick LeSabre. We had no clue what that was all about at the time (my best guess: he was on his way to audition for Shakira's upcoming "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" video), but now I'm figuring the guy was driving to an Onion photo shoot.

Oh, and because I haven't said it before, blasting from the past is pBump.net.

Before the rumblings I'm reading on the Internet flower into a full-bloom media scandal, I want to take this opportunity to explain why I did not appear on this year's Jerry Lewis telethon. The short answer is that Phutatorius & Co. just dropped the ball on this one. I took a long weekend in Columbus, Ohio to attend a great old friend's wedding, got back late last night and went through the stack of fan mail on my desk, which I review and answer as necessary every couple of months. Imagine my surprise when I saw the half-dozen unopened envelopes from the Muscular Dystrophy Association, postmarked as early as May 15! It appears that the intern who screens my mail put these invitations in the "fan" pile, and not the "business" pile, which I address on a daily basis. I implore you not to rush to judgment, good readers: I swear to you that had I seen any of these invitations in time to do the gig, I would have cleared my calendar.

And Jerry, I know you have scheduling deadlines to meet and that the August gear-up is a particularly busy and stressful time for you, but I have to say I resent both the tone and implications of your last letter. We go too far back for you to be writing some of the things that you did.

You can rest assured that this bureaucratic snafu will be discussed at our next staff meeting, and that a generous donation will makes its way to the MDA before the end of the fiscal year.