☆ STARSAILOR ☆

Well, I’ll just drop the bottom line right here at the beginning:

Last saturday I took a flight from Knoxville airport (TYS) to Laguardia (LGA), and when I was getting off the plane, I realized

SOME JERK HAD TAKEN (STOLEN?) MY BLACK DUFFEL BAG FROM THE OVERHEAD COMPARTMENT FOUR ROWS AHEAD OF ME

. . . and now I can’t find it! Inside WERE about two weeks worth of clothes, many of which were T-shirts I had owned for 10+ years, and many of which were limited-run prints from bands I know and had been given to me as gifts. Oh no! There was also a grey pencil case with my medical cards, Oakland library card, debit card, and on and on . . . not to mention Monty’s copy of WISE BLOOD she gave, which I was real excited to start reading. Oops!

See: Back in August last year, when I began traveling around aimlessly for six months, supposing my life was over, I visited dozens of cities in the United States and Canada with just my backpack and duffel bag. I had it straight-up dialed in . . . I had the perfect amount of clothing and Travel Stuff to sustain myself indefinitely while riding trains, planes, buses, ferries, and rental cars to see my friends all over. I had everything EXPERTLY TETRIS’D into those bags. There was no wasted space. This is a sort of auxiliary skill you accidentally develop when you are completely reliant upon the strength of your body to get from place to place. I had to carry this shit everywhere!

Though yeah: I had flown on a small plane that seated probably 70 people max. I was in row 18, seat D. As I walked down the aisle to get to my seat, a flight attendant in the back announced there was no more space in the overhead compartments beyond row 14, so I placed my bag there and sat down and fell asleep to FLOOD:

An unseen hand pressed a button which triggered that little chime to let us know we could stand up, and so everyone stood up. I did not, because I’m a rebel badass with a heart of gold who doesn’t play by society’s so-called “rules”. I always sit in the back of the plane and wait to stand up until my row starts filing out. I have never understood doing it any other way, though I don’t fault anyone for going the other way. OK?? Well, I sure wish I’d stood up that day, because by the time rows 14, 15, 16, and 17 had passed by my bag, it had been taken from the overhead compartment by either an absentminded or nefarious stranger.

I bolted out the plane the and down the jetway to see if anyone ahead of me had my bag. Of course, this was LaGuardia at three in the afternoon on a Saturday, so there were hundreds of people wading into a sea of madness in all directions. In vain I scanned their hands but saw nothing. My instinct then was to head to baggage claim and see if anyone was hanging around the carousel, which is exactly what I did, but again I did not see my bag. I even stepped through the automatic doors and out onto the sidewalk at arrivals to see if anyone was waiting there for a car, but still the ghost eluded me.

By now my hair and clothes were drenched in cold sweat and I looked a guy who was a couple cans short of a six-pack. I smelled like the bubonic plague. In a haze I asked airport staff for help, but every department they directed me to just sent me back to the department I had just come from. The police were completely disinterested. I asked if they could start a police report for me, and the guy said: “Well, the bag could still show up.” (My not insisting upon a police report will end up being a massive headache later on . . . I’ll get to it!) No one seemed to know what to do when a passenger brazenly swipes a big-ass carry-on bag from a flight carrying only 60 people and proceeds to walk off the jetway into one of the most secure and heavily-surveilled airports in the entire world.

I slumped against a wall and took out my laptop, which had not been stolen. I filled out forms with the airline, Port Authority lost and found, and notified my bank that my debit card had been stolen. In my mind I saw a phantom vision play out. It was of myself unpacking my bag. And I remembered and saw there every single thing that had been inside it, now almost certainly in a dumpster somewhere, or else in some asshole’s hotel room. And I could not help it: I despaired . . . not necessarily for the things I had lost, but because I felt so violated by a jerk thief, a thief being one of the lowest and most vile kinds of people when their target is Just Some Guy as opposed to something like an international conglomerate or a fascist government.

I had intended to spend eight or nine days in New York, and take a train to New Haven and rent a car there, and then drive far north through the vertical length of Vermont to Montreal, where Laura is visiting home. And afterwards I would go west to make it to a birthday party in Toronto, and finally into Detroit and Chicago to visit Kelsey and Hali and Gayle and Sarah, and so on. From there I would fly to Houston and then Austin . . . and into Denver to see my cousin and his wife and daughter, and down to Sante Fe to see Mikaylah and Helen, and west again towards Los Angeles before finally going north to spend a few weeks with all the final people I know in the Bay Area. But unless I wanted to do all this with a small backpack and the disgusting clothes I had sweat-laminated to my body, there was no point in going on. What a huge bummer. Alas! The Thief had completely taken a planet-sized dump on my plans.

And so I purchased a $30 ticket to Washington, D.C. that would depart from a gross parking lot next to Penn Station in Manhattan in two and a half hours. I had taken this bus dozens of times before and now dreaded sitting inside its cold darkness which smelled like a scented urinal puck for another four and a half hours on what had nightmare-twisted from a Night of Good Clean Fun with my friends to a real Dog Shit Day.

From LaGuardia I took a bus from Queens and a subway from Brooklyn to Penn Station and finally to the gross parking lot which smells like hot summer piss. I saw New York for a grand total of 45 minutes, and then I endured the total misery of the bus. I arrived in D.C. at midnight and caught a ride down to my hometown to collapse on the floor in my sleeping bag. In the morning I woke up and Remembered. I decided I would rent a car and drive the 400 miles back to my father’s fortified-compound in Tennessee to help him out, on account of he needs a lot of help now that my grandmother has died. And anyway, I figured it best I lie low for a while and attempt to recreate my travel bag so I could get the hell on with it.

Just like Roy Orbison, I drove all night:

Meanwhile, a Reddit post I had written about getting ripped off by some scumbag at LaGuardia had Gone Viral albeit in a little baby minor sense:

Still, this was definitely the first time I’d ever had nearly 130k (now 140k) people look at something I had written, much less something I had written only 24 hours before. In writing this thing, I had hoped that maybe someone who had accidentally taken my bag would read it and get in touch with me. This is the equivalent of throwing a pebble into a black hole and hoping it spits out a Christmas present, though I reckoned it was better than doing nothing at all. At the time of my writing this here post, I have received over a hundred comments from an overwhelming majority of kind and sympathetic people, and then a handful insufferable Told Ya So’s, who informed me I should have placed an AirTag in my bag, or else tied brightly colored string around the handle, or that I should not have sat four rows behind it, even though I had no choice. Yeah, well, I guess I should have also invented a time machine to stop this from every happening. Like . . . OK man. Thanks for the weird and condescending Hot Tip.

ALLOW ME TO WRAP THIS UP FOR NOW:

My credit card has a whole bunch of Perks, one of which is an extremely valuable travel insurance clause. I called my bank and explained what had happened. They said they would replace my bag and all its contents up to $3,000. Said I: “Whoa.” I have gone ahead and bought as much of it as I could minus the aforementioned band T-shirts given to me by my friends which hold zero sentimental value to anyone other than me. The only thing they require is a police report, which the police would not give me that day.

I called the LaGuardia police department and managed to speak to a detective there. She told me I would have to come in person and answer some questions and have an officer take down my information, and then they’d kick it over to her department to begin the investigation, which I assume means scrubbing through security footage to catch the thief at the gate. I told her I was nearly 700 miles away (actually, 666 miles on the dot), and she sympathized but told me that police would absolutely not budge on this.

And then I thought about how absolutely insane this rule is. What if my bag had been stolen, and I had a 30-minute layover at LaGuardia before I flew to Australia? What if I had no intention of returning to LaGuardia? Would I have to miss my expensive flight and ruin my vacation just to talk to some guy in a broom closet who would take a photocopy of my driver’s license and ask me when my birthday was?

Well: There is only one way out of this, and that is to return to New York this weekend. If I do nothing, then I cannot be reimbursed by my credit card company, and the cops will never nail the perp. And so I looked up plane tickets and saw that they were $500 for a whole 24-hour turnaround. Forget that! The last thing I want to do is sit on a fucking plane again. I was mad at planes just then. Meanwhile, a rental car was $100 and a 10-hour drive through Tennessee and Virginia and Pennsylvania and New York. I know people in all those places, so I could leave at 10 am on Saturday and drive all day till I got to the police station at the airport, which is open 24 hours a day, have some dude ask me ten questions and sign a piece of paper, and then drive to Brooklyn and stay with Monty or Cecelia or Molly, or else down through Harrisburg where Darin lives and crash for the night.

WELL, GUESS WHAT

. . . that’s exactly what I’m gonna do. Why not? That right there is the same distance between Oakland and Portland, which is a roundtrip drive I have done about a hundred times, and though rural Tennessee and Pennsylvania ain’t exactly the lush green mountain-lined evergreen forests of the Pacific Northwest, it would feel real good to shotgun gas station coffee and drive through all those strange little towns that feel stuck in some past alternate decade. I can do a 10-hour drive no problem. I have gone hours beyond that even! . . . to the point where I eventually saw my own ghost riding alongside me in the midnight darkness of Lake Tahoe. Though listen: I’m always having fun, even when I’m not, if you know what I mean. My dad said today: “It’s crazy that you’re doing this.” And I said: “Yeah.” This is an insanely stupid enterprise I have undertaken, but then most of my life is like that. And even if my life is often bad at least it is never not interesting. All noble things are touched with that melancholy.

Anyway: I’ll keep you abreast!! See you next week at my funeral!!!

SOME JERK HAD TAKEN (STOLEN?) MY BLACK DUFFEL BAG FROM THE OVERHEAD COMPARTMENT FOUR ROWS AHEAD OF ME

ALLOW ME TO WRAP THIS UP FOR NOW:

WELL, GUESS WHAT

DAS ENDE.