Houston Southard

Southwest Needs Santa

Friday: $40 uber to airport by Dimitri in a red charger. He's just gotten high as fuck and doesn't think it's funny that I pointed that out. Original flight  direct to San Diego scheduled to depart at 720pm. We're lined up and the gate agent is opening the door. She shuts the door, then announces they hadn't scheduled enough flight attendants so we should sit and wait for an update. We retreat to the bar. Someone came over the intercom saying there are two abandoned bags that need to be claimed. The bartender asks us if we have all our bags. I said I could always use another. She laughed the creepiest fucking witch laugh it almost sounded intentional, then she said "there might be women's clothes inside." I said um, sure. She said you know what I mean. I said I did not know what she meant. She's like "you know, because Biden hired that drag queen to be the Secretary of Energy and he got caught stealing women's clothes from the airport." I was like oh, ok. Then I said "oh that reminds me, I'm getting my future father in law one of those trump digital tokens he just made a commercial about the other day, you know the ones his team stole from google stock images that still had the watermark on them, obviously trying to suggest I have as much liberalism as she does conservatism. Not taking the hint, she says "oh I love him" and then proceeds to show me pictures of the now-fired Energy Secretary in full drag. The gate agent announces our flight has been cancelled and they're working to get us on a connecting flight through Dallas. The entire flight lines up to a standstill line to complain. We retreat to another bar. The mobile app won't let us reschedule so we drink and eat. I talk to a woman about our upcoming trip and the impending religious tribulations I'll be subjected to, specifically the coup Melissa's in-laws are planning to have us sign contracts that guarantee their grandkids will be baptized in the catholic church. She tells me about her son's catholic school and a project where everyone in the class had to pick a different culture's holiday tradition to report on. We get on the topic of ramadan and how I just learned the holiday moves ahead 10 days every year. She thinks im being racist when I say muslims didn't create this tradition for the modern man when really I was just trying to point out that fasting when the sun is up is impossible for any muslims that say live in Alaska because it's bright 23 hours a day. After 2 hours we learn we aren't going to Dallas and instead are flying out the next morning through a Phoenix connection. After talking about how I vented about the upcoming coup by writing an essay on how jesus' birthday was moved from April to January 6th to December 25th as a way to deter early christians from participating in heathen pagan lighting ceremonies, I leave the lady with the idea that it's interesting that the people who care most about jesus's birthday being on the 25th are the ones who would hate him the most if they met him today. A poor, brown, illiterate jew. A modern day hippie socialist trying to upend the institution and fight imperialism. A shoeless mangy bearded man with long hair and no job. Who hates those people today? Religious conservatives. I say merry christmas. $70 uber ride home by a Tunisian history teacher. We have a good conversation about the pitfalls of capitalism and racism and immigration.

Christmas Eve: We wake up and our flight is cancelled. We spend several hours trying to rebook through different airlines and each minute means seats are being gobbled up by everyone else in our situation. A flight option is there one minute, gone another. By the time we get through no flights are available and we snag a flight for the next day at noon connecting through Denver. We get Pho and shrimp roles and try to imitate the family feast being served across the country. We hold an olympics in the house. I dominate in pool, darts, monopoly deal. A lose-lose because Melissa needed a win but if I let her have one to let her have one she would've been more pissed and also we're evenly matched in all events so I had to give it what I had. We facetime for 3 hours with her family, watching them play a game we introduced to them when they stayed at my place last December for Melissa's graduation. They show off the feast, their merry-making, let us watch the gift exchange. We take shots with the sisters and the significant others. We sleep.

Christmas Day: $50 uber to the airport. Our re-booked flight only transfers 1 of our tickets to pre-check so we hastily add it on the way. It doesn't transfer to the boarding pass and so we pass up the massive southwest service line and a nice lady at the bag drop adds it for us. We go to pre-check and it's still not on my mobile boarding pass and at this point I don't have time to go through TSA. I sit on my bag and wait as the pre-check agent scans my id for 5 minutes until thankfully it goes through. I get stopped at security because in all the pandemonium I forget that I put my pocket knife back in my jacket after day one's cancellation. I tell them they can toss it because it's dull anyway. Also i forget to drink my water so I end up going through security 3 times but now it's ok because our flight is delayed 40 minutes. We have a drink and wait. We line up at the gate and see our connecting flight from Denver to San Diego is now delayed 2.5 hours. The gate agent says the flight has now been downgraded and they over-booked so 40 people need to give up their seats. They offer $2k/passenger vouchers plus the flight cost to volunteer to give up their seat. We consider but get on the flight anyway to try to salvage the trip. we get to Denver 2 hours later (with a supposed 1.25 hour flight time) and sit land-locked on the tarmac while discovering our flight to San Diego was cancelled while we were in the air. There are too many planes de-boarding ahead of us so we're told we have to wait 45 minutes, which turns into an hour which turns into 1.5 hours which turns into 2 hours. We de-board after sitting for longer than it took to get to Denver, but it gives us time to try to find flights to San Diego that don't exist before ultimately resigning and trying to find a flight home. Southwest won't let us rebook yet and their customer service line keeps ending the calls so we say fuck them and book a flight for the next morning back to St. Louis for $400. We book a hotel downtown for $250. We get an uber that takes 3 times as long to arrive as the app says it will. It says to wait for Abdullahim and his red toyota avalon at island 5 section h. We're at island 5 section h and the app says the toyota is too. Abdullahim calls us to say we must be in the wrong spot (we're not, he's on a different level because our gps indicator is right on top of his) so we wait more. 35 minutes to our hotel gives us time to try to find a restaurant that's not closed on Christmas night. We find a steakhouse half a block from the hotel. We check into the hotel and they were giving out glasses of champagne but they just ran out of glasses. I tell the receptionist to give me the whole bottle of prosecco and she does. Something went our way. We're suspicious. The electricity in the room is controlled by inserting our room card in some slot in the wall of our room because Denver = innovative energy conservation. That means when we get in to drop our bags off i stub my shin hard on the perfectly placed bed frame. That means I let out my first scream of the weekend with the door still open. That means the scream is fueled by all that's happened so far and it is very loud. We have a reservation in a few minutes so we go down and walk to the steakhouse which is packed. The hostess desk is shoulder to shoulder and some legless woman in a wheelchair is hogging all the good places to stand. We're told it could be a 30-minute wait so we bounce. We walk some blocks with our maps app with places that say they're open but don't account for Christmas hours. Eventually melissa gets a text saying our table is ready so we walk-run back to the steakhouse. They have us outside on the sidewalk in a tent with a heater that's now too hot because we're sweating from the hustle. The 10oz filet is $75 but we over order anyway because fuck this day. Martinis. Shots. Apps. Sides. Our bill is almost $500. We consider trying to find a bar but we need sleep so we sleep.

Monday: $50 trip to the airport by a woman who decided to drive because she noticed there were no drivers today. She's a c-suite planner who's always wanted to take the month of December off and since her mom recently died she decided it was this year. She just took up skate-skiing and she's more sore than she thought she'd be. We talk about Texas not learning its lesson with their greedy, hoosier secession from the continental power grid with their 2020 outage and subsequent death toll and how it's happening again but Greg Abbott thinks sending 50 migrants to Kamala Harris's house on Christmas day in 15 degree weather is a higher priority. San Jose is still the lone lone star city connected to the western intercontinental grid so for the second time in as many years they watch their neighbors suffer and die from misplaced stubborn neglect. We get in and now have to check our bags for extra money because this is frontier not southwest but beggars don't choose. Their bag drop stations are automated because fuck the common man. Melissa scans hers and it goes into the great beyond. I try to scan mine but get an error because I've done it at 8:24am which is the same minute boarding begins and the system won't allow bag checks after that. Not even with pitiful pleading. I say fuck it and i'll just take my bag through security and to the gate and roll the dice. We get down to security and the pre-check line is longer than most regular tsa lines usually are. We realize we were too optimistic thinking we could arrive at the airport like this was a normal day and we're not going to make the flight. The floor is jam-packed with people and there isn't an escalator to take us back up to to the ticket counter so we scramble around, down a massive flight of stairs to a bus station, back up, eventually find an elevator to the ticket counters. The southwest line is massive so we go outside and decide we'll drive. We stand in front of the rental car shuttle line full of agencies that look like they're definitely not going to the same places so we try to book a car online. No one will let us take a car from the airport and drop off in St. Louis. The closest location to allow it is 40 miles away. From there it'll be a 11.5 hour drive home. I weigh the options of renting a car under false pretenses and try looking up the cost of dropping off a rental at the wrong location. It "varies." Melissa gets in the southwest line as we look for any airlines flying to St. Louis today. She finds out we can get in the a-list line which isn't as long as the regular line that wraps around 2 corners out of sight. I find a united flight that leaves at 5:30pm and try to book with points but when i try to confirm the app pops out an error because in the time it took me to select the flight and the time it took me to confirm it united has jacked up the price. Now I don't have enough points and the cost has gone up to $2k. Melissa somehow gets us on a southwest flight that's supposed to have already started boarding but is delayed so she thinks we can make it if we do pre-check through south security (our first attempt was north) and we run to this apparently completely separate security area. We get to pre-check and once again, Melissa's pre-check is on her boarding pass and mine is not and the agent will not let me through. I tell melissa to go without me but she won't. She adds my pre-check to the mobile app but it doesn't transfer to the boarding pass and the app keeps crashing. I sit on my bag and ponder genocide. I end up getting into the regular tsa line and our flight has stopped getting delayed and is departing in 30 minutes. I make it to security after 20 minutes and have to disassemble my stuff like a pauper. Any device larger than a phone needs its own container. No shoes through the metal detector. No belt. I roughly chuck both my ipads and my macbook into bins and make it through, grabbing all my stuff without putting it in and run down the stairs to the tram we have to take to our terminal which is 3 stops away. I try lacing my boots and the tram starts moving and the lady next to us laughs at me as I fall. My look must've had weight behind it because she apologizes and moves to a different area of the tram car. We get to the last stop, our stop, 5 minutes before departure, and sprint. Up two escalators and through the terminal because our gate is naturally the farthest away. I clip several people and a little girl. We arrive with burning lungs from the high altitude (definitely not from being out of shape or dehydrated or hungover) and turns out the flight is still delayed but didn't update on the dodgy crashing app. I have no confidence this flight will not be cancelled and I whisper kamikaze fantasies to Melissa. We end up boarding. We get the exit aisle that only has 2 seats instead of 3 with extra leg room. The flight attendant wants to know if I'm willing and able to assist in case of an emergency and I tell Melissa I'm one of those things. We sit on the tarmac until departure time, 1 hour past its original time and eventually get into the air. There's semi-peace for the first time. We read. We get drinks. We land and have to take a bus to St. louis's distant terminal to try to find her bag that went with the frontier flight. It's not in the lost or unclaimed bag areas but we eventually find it at the frontier ticket counter upstairs. we uber home and take a shot of jameson Melissa immediately throws up. The only place open to eat is the only place that's somehow never closed on a Monday which the St. Louis restaurant industry treats like a Saturday. We eat and drink. More jameson. We drive to famous and play pool and drink and find comfort in being back and doing normal things. We go home. She sleeps. I watch into the spider-verse. We live and life goes on.