Tag: Status

Categories
Aesthetics Startups Travel

Day 1905 and Run of Show

I have very particular traveling habits. I like things to be packed in cubes, labeled with contents and in a cascade of backpack, carry on and checked bags should something go awry.

As I’m heading to our nation’s capital soon I am taking extra care with my “run of show“ as I’ll have more varieties of events to account for over my stay. I expect humidity and rain so that should be fun for hair and makeup. All men need to worry about is sunscreen and maybe a bit of hair gel.

Now my travel wardrobe must account for visits to historical sites, nice dinners, late night parties, internet friend meetups (see you at the Polymarket’s Monitoring the Situation bar?) and a conference that is somewhere between startup event and defense contractor conference.

If you are a woman, you are probably nodding your head and thinking well that’s at least 4 different pairs of shoes and two purses. Then there is evening wear, day blazers and skirt suits, sweaters and other mix and match separates, and heaven forbid I find time to exercise so sweats and all the undergarments.

All that packing must work with the additional run rate risks of TSA slow downs (can Congress pass a budget) while presumably needing additional care and attention to security. Given we are embroiled in a war with Israel in Iran it’s hard to count on smooth sailing. So I pack as if I will encounter unexpected difficulties. Hopefully none more irksome than long lines.

As a woman who mostly spends her time in Montana or otherwise in the middle of nowhere, you can imagine that my makeup these days has a bit more in common with tinted sunscreen than it does with a smoky eye with a cut crease let alone a full powdered contoured beat fit for television. However I’ve heard polished full makeup is the preferred look on the hill including eye makeup basics.

I’m hoping I’ll be able to rely on my skills without additional practice, but I won’t lie I did a couple dry runs on new palettes I’d picked up and a few new colors. Very little new made the cut. When traveling, rely on what is reliable.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 1902 and Cynical Victories for Hollow Lies

I know it’s sweet bordering on stupid to engage in good faith when it comes to politics, but maybe I’ve grown soft in my old age. I really do believe that Americans are capable of building wide coalitions in a pluralistic society.

Call me naive but most Americans, even most humans, have more to bind us together than to break as apart. We are social animals even the most introverted of us.

So I hate seeing groups who share common values fall apart over schismatic propaganda pieced together explicitly to worsen your weaknesses and widen your vulnerabilities till you are both tied to horrors you’d never have condoned.

The trouble with Utilitarians is they say up front that the ends justify the means. Thats your starting baseline. Which is at least clean. Then the Machiavellian’s say it’s alright to obfuscate. The noble lie and all. And then suddenly the enemy is inside your gates and you are being gutted.

This is roughly what is occurring between Bannon-world who hates technology so much they have accidentally teamed up with a gaggle of one world government rationalists to…use zoning rules to save the world from…industrial parks with rack servers?

I know it doesn’t sound very sinister but everyone involved is sure the anti-Christ is going to be involved. Peter Thiel is in Rome giving lectures so the buggy man has involved.

Folks must enjoy being useful idiots as it’s strange to me to think you might align with people you loathe just to fuck up the other team. The goal is flourishing for all no? You came at me and my boys for whom all I wish is flourishing.

Which is funny as I was always under the impression that end times eschatology required the Antichrist to be quite well liked. Everyone involved in this is universally despised.

I guess if you are certain that you are in danger of being stomped out by an evil, and believe any of your actions are justified by this premise, you may as well embrace all kinds of evil.

But you do have the options of not using millenarian tactics to scare the shire. Hobbits are brave or so said the neomonarchist who can’t tweet. But I won’t forget people who threw me over for propaganda they were too dim to understand or cynical enough to believe no one else would.

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Emotional Work Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 1900 and I Have Another 100 Days of Writing In Me But Should I Have More?

Just a hundred more days of writing and I’ll have two thousand days of consecutive writing published on this humble website.

Nineteen hundred days is a little over five years. It is a lot of writing and a testament to my own capacity to keep going. Every threshold I cross requires asking if I should keep going.

Day 2000 will towards the end of June. And what then? On July 4th hopefully I’ll be celebrating America’s 250th birthday with a crew who built a working nuclear reactor that I funded. The near term has goals and milestones. The long term is much fuzzier. Scarier. Murkier. Beyond my sight.

I’ve covered a lot of life in half a decade. There was lot of work and lot of investments and a lot of change. I’m glad I have such thorough records of my thinking. As more rupture, dislocation and chaos emerge from the acceleration how do I best hang on? Can I steer?

I can use this material to provide context on my mental model and worldview. This was intended both for myself but also the many other models built on content from humans on the open internet. I contributed a lot to training artificial intelligence models just by showing up.

Now that the models have shown up how safe is it for individual humans to show up? Remaining visible and human seems quite risky. When you strip the niceties of civilization and my place in it realism rears its ugly head. I am little more than frail woman in a dangerous world.

Maybe the sooner I stop showing up publicly the safer I’ll be. I am almost certain that is that will be true. I doubt it is the good, the beautiful or the righteous thing to do.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics Travel

Day 1891 and So Much for Santorini or Status Hierarchies for Abundant Ages

If you watch me closely (which would be weird but I make it easy enough) you have surely noticed I spend much of my life traveling.

I’ve got no training in psychology but it sure seems like a certain personality type takes their childhood traumas and does exposure therapy till it becomes enjoyable.

I had intended for another trip to the general Mediterranean area in the spring to see family and work undisturbed by the American media timezone distractions. Now I am unsure if that will be feasible.

I am guessing that the sort of people who go to Sicily, Santorini and Cyprus to soak up the sun may find this Iranian conflict putting a wrench in their island hopping. Where will they go instead? Cartel wars bleed into the Caribbean and Bitcoin zillionaires setting up economic zones might make other things tricky. And oh the fuel costs will be ruinous.

War certainly makes me reconsider standard air bus style flying near any seas that connect to conflict areas but not too long ago I sat in a Turkish airport where “final boarding for Damascus” went over the loud speaker so maybe I’m making too much of it. Though I’m glad I enjoyed Istanbul over the winter as anything bordering Iran is now unnecessary risk.

For a world where speculative fiction bull case for artificial intelligence wiped off billions in market capitalization, we sure aren’t taking very seriously the kinetic effects of extreme uncertainty and change. Well, ironically maybe Pete Hegseth might be.

If we do make it through the Jackpot to the other side of the singularity, or just through this regional war situation, I would bet humans will find ourselves getting back to status hierarchies and power games.

If all our consumption needs are met, there will always be hierarchies. Wait your best friend summers in Block Island too? Or are those the Finnish slides from the Comme des Garçons show? Let me just call up “insert social scene’s patron billionaire” as everyone is headed to Big Sky for fresh powder this weekend.

It’s endlessly that sort of thing if you are inclined towards Bourdieu’s Distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste. If class predicts taste then we mimic the taste we think we ought to have to be a certain kind of person. I came across a sweet hand illustrated essay on the matter recently.

If we can have anything we like, then taste becomes finer and finer grained. The rich know this already and the rest of us just might find out if we survive to an abundance era. And as I’d like to do that maybe I be reconsidering heading out to sea. Caribbean, Ionian, Bosphorus or otherwise.

Categories
Politics Preparedness Startups

Day 1887 and Trust Me Bro

I don’t feel terrific so I’ll keep this as a ramble but with some links. I fear some sort of Rubicon has was crossed, which we will only recognize in hindsight, in the fight for property rights in America versus the tyranny of failing state capacity.

I am referring to the contract dispute between foundation model developer Anthropic and American Secretary of War Hegseth that boiled over on Friday night as some sort of Murderbot surveillance subplot parsed only by lawyers, policy wonks and anyone who remembers the patriotism of Chelsea Manning.

Right before America and Israel went all Epic Fury on Iran over the weekend, somehow it was felt a messy public fight between defense contractor and the civilian oversight of our military was ok? Good thing everyone is too distracted to care.

Funny how one can go from cheering on our military’s capacity for innovation one week and the next to be waving one’s arms screaming “no oh no no no” but that’s just politics as run by the instincts of reality television I suppose.

The best writing on this so far has been Dean Ball (who worked in this Trump administration on its AI position statement not so long ago) who feels that Hegseth took an approach on renegotiating a contract with a frontier AI model developer that has consequences.

Loosely and I am missing much Anthropic had its previous contract to parse classified documents in the Department of Defense (now the Department of War) negotiated by the prior administration. Some aspects of this contract wasn’t going to work for the Trump administration. Anthropic didn’t want to change it and Hegseth threatened to call Anthropic a supply chain risk unless it complied. They didn’t and Sam Altman signed a deal.

Wrapped up in this is that of course we all eventually comply with Leviathan who has the monopoly on violence. I don’t claim any expertise here but lots of people understand defense contractor law.

On its face Anthropic looks like the moral high ground and the position all capitalists and private property respected would prefer. However, it’s in Dean’s words, a bit weird for a company to tell the state that a private corporation has a say in policy as opposed to our democratic institutions.

Anthropic is essentially using the contractual vehicle to impose what feel less like technical constraints and more like policy constraints on the military

This is all complicated by the model developer having wishes for frontier AI development to be nationalized and for their work in particular to be safeguarded by a different political administration. It has become a right versus left thing as it was bound to do.

Now Anthropic gets to enjoy the full throated defense of its industry peers and even conservative policy makers like Dean, because our current state capacity is not what I’d call excellent when it comes to our civilian government capacity. Honestly our military still seems to be crushing it.

Secretary Hegseth looked a bit like he was over reaching in his command that he get his demands met. Americans are very touchy about surveillance of if’s citizens and much less touchy about autonomous weapons so it’s natural to be a bit suspicious if you are a millennial who remembers the Global War on Terror. If you are Zoomer who doesn’t know who Chelsea Manning is please go ask Claude.

However it’s not at all clear that Hegseth’s original negotiations were out of hand as of course it’s the state who decides legal use not the private company and we are meant to have laws, judicial process and all the rest. It’s just that we don’t. So what on earth do we do about it? Trust me bro is not a policy.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1881 and Attemplate

I’ve wandered far from the traditional life paths that might have recognizable to past generations of my kin.

It scares me. Any time I contemplate the change I have already experienced, I imagine how much more change I can expect to see.

How are we supposed to raise children, mentor young leaders or align artificial intelligence with the good, the true and the beautiful when we adult humans have experienced life so far from past ideals?

So I’ve been toying with a portmanteau blending attempt and template to express the idea of “an experimental framework” or “proto-template for living, learning, or skill-building.” I need templates to help me attempt to adapt while retaining my humanity.

We will all be re-skilling, re-learning, and re-engaging with our values and as I try to structure templates that help me walk a life and prototype styles that might work for myself and others.

I hoped to communicate both clarity and flexibility with the choice. We are building good ways of being in a world of rapid change. Templates must change and we must always be attempting to learn and adapt.

I liked that attemplate sounds like a natural word you felt like you may have already encountered. It does a nice job of mirroring the thoughtfulness of contemplate. A template for a new era which will be attempt to build, even if the foundations we thought were firm in the past give way to much broader ways of being.

I played with “attempate” which sounds procedural (almost bureaucratic) as if one would take a sheet of paper with an assigned attempate to fill out and live. Why yes, I took the project management attempate sheet to see if I had natural aptitude for detail work.

“Temptlate” sounded engineered. Maybe it would be suitable name for an internal tool or concept document. We will add that to the family Temptlate and see who bites on it for Saturday plans. It’s cute, playful and almost experimental, but not entirely as serious as the scaffolding one hopes to build upstairs n.

Maybe I’m the only one who feels like I lost decade between Trump Derangement Era through Pandemic Biden Gramsci End of March Institutional Capture.

What I thought was true slammed into things I wished were not. And then we fought years of anarcho-tyranny as the state refused to budge even if you attempted to follow its templates.

So here I am trying to find new ways of being for myself, for the future, and for my present. Maybe it’s entirely selfish. Templates for how to live are the anchors from which we used to build religion and power.

We’ve stripped much of the meat from life and turned past ideals into brands and merchandised them into outfits and starter packs. But it’s worth an attempt don’t you think?

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1878 and Checking Into Hotel California

Yesterday I was on about the “ride share” and gig economy intermediaries, but today it’s the “home share” economy. The short term rental world of permanent vacation properties amid a housing crisis for the rest of us.

Having had a streak of bad luck at hotels in California I am back to my old faithful of Airbnb. Except I seem to have accidentally checked myself into Hotel California. It’s such a lovely place.

But everyone else here is a Boomer but me. I’ve not seen any children or grandchildren. Everyone is over sixty. It’s a heaven ban paradise for those who can afford to live a permanent coastal lifestyle. And for those of us who can rent it for a few days on business.

The Airbnb is in a large complex that is above a stretch of beach one can hike down to for walks. Nearby amenities are yuppie in nature with bistros, coffee shops and Pilates studies. While it is easy driving to its most proximate big city, it doesn’t feel like anyone is going to an office in this suburb.

The Airbnb is run by a management company seemingly owned by an enterprising woman who got prime real estate when rates were lower. I deduced this by scraping all her listings and when they first went online.

I doubt she is interested in letting her investment properties take any damage as no one under 25 is allowed to book and she explicitly states that “it is not child proofed” so you are liable for any issues. Which would explain the demographics.

This is a place for adults, and more specifically adults who have the freedom to work where and when they like.

Or perhaps more accurately are not obliged to work any longer. What a seductive life to live. No wonder there are so many slim, fit, smiling Patagonia swaddled mature people.

“Hotel California” is, according to the Eagles’ Don Henley, a metaphorical song about the dark side of the American dream, particularly the excess and decadence of 1970s Los Angeles. Via Wikipedia

It’s definitely not a Margaritaville sort of place. With koi ponds and soft beiges and tasteful landscaping, it’s too costal grandmother in its aesthetics. But it is certainly decadent. Maybe the American dream of thirty year retirement is the decadence they warned us about in Hotel California. It’s not that they can’t check out. It’s that they won’t.

If you walk among the promenade that overlooks the ocean, you will notice many of the townhomes have signs in their windows advertising their management company. It is all second homes and beach cottages and handled by professionals.

If it weren’t a gate community with guards and a lot of security cameras I’d honestly be terrified to advertise that folks might not be home. But then again, what is anyone going to steal that these denizens can’t easily replace?

They sold out the future already. The thieves are inside the complex. It’s the rest of us looking in who should wonder why it is that no one can check out. It’s just such a lovely place.

Categories
Travel

Day 1875 and Between Heaven and Hell

I had a stupid day. Maybe things have been simmering for a bit and a blow up was to be expected. I hit a limit for humiliation and simply didn’t want to keep paying for that kind of treatment. I did not consent.

I’m doing some business in California and am paying an exorbitant fee for the privilege. And I will eat a lot of shit to do the work I love, but I will not pay to be insulted at a premium price point. A Best Western is good enough for me.

This is going to be a ramble as I am so irritated by it as it felt like every single aspect of the hotel did not function. Their bumbling ineptitude would make a Motel 6 blush, let alone a supposedly upper market hotel.

Alas, somewhere between a maid barging in on me naked and the fourth or filth time a staff member knocked on the door confused about the status of my reservation I snapped. I wanted out of my reservation which is spent hours trying to sort.

If they didn’t want to do their jobs, offer me privacy or take my money, well then I didn’t need to be there. I wanted to be literally anywhere else.

I had a late checkout and half an hour before it hit so I went full Karen. I huffed and puffed and demanded a refund. I packed up, dazed and underfed from a busy morning and went to another less glamorous hotel. And it reads like a comedy of errors.

The hotel was charging prices equivalent to five star luxury hotels in other parts of the world and couldn’t deliver on so much as taking out the trash or keeping the changes in the reservation straight. The Keystone cops were better coordinated.

A kerfuffle had developed around extending the stay yesterday. At issue was that I didn’t have the authority to extend the reservation as it has been booked under my husband’s account and not mine.

Alright fine, but plans change and sometimes (often times) my husband and I have to change on short notice. It wasn’t even as if there were amenities on offer that he was entitled to on his account versus mine. I want being sneaky.

There was no breakfast to abuse. No special amenities for the status guests. Hell there wasn’t even a pair of slippers. But somehow it became a thing. Multiple calls to the manager, confirmation details being emailed around and trips to the front desk did not fix the problem.

The front desk manager acted like she was doing me a favor by letting me pay $300 bucks to extend the stay as “she’s really not supposed to do this!” You see I didn’t book the reservation myself.

This bizarre “account owner” issue is now a regular issue for both Marriot and Hyatt owned hotels. And if they didn’t want to take my money I didn’t feel at all bad about losing my cool and walking out.

The chains simply cannot seem to provide hospitality if it is outside of their parameters and their staff is not enabled to do much of anything beyond try to calm you down while never delivering on what you paid. If you happen to have a change of plans then being the wrong spouse counts against you in their dance of protocal.

I was annoyed but alright I’ll let inconvenience him and have Alex change it and move on. I won’t try to shock them by saying m that married couples commingle many things like airline status, Costco accounts and hotel loyalty programs. You’d be shocked at what other stuff we share. It’s almost like being married means sharing your life.

Today was meant to be the first day of the “new” reservation but despite being charged for it, not a single member of the hotel staff could figure it out. I went down multiple times to change keycards and put down deposits and all kinds of rigamoral.

Because I’d been so jet lagged yesterday I didn’t get any housekeeping service nor had I done much beyond work at the desk. So once I thought the extended reservation was sorted I went to visit a sort of luxury concept mall of the likes that combines Dior and Cartier with a billion other amenities from movie theaters and fine dining with staples like a Sephora. I told the hotel I’d give them time to clean as I was going to pick up a few things.

I return three hours later to the room not being cleaned. I am irked but find I call and ask if they can send housekeeping. “Oh we thought you were checking out?!” My response was “well a cleaning woman came in around 10am without knocking while I was naked.” I was wrong to presume that she would come back despite my AI assisted explainer translating my English to her Spanish. I thought she’d understood I was leaving and she could clean. How wrong I was.

“Oh no we have you listed as checking out at 2pm which is why we didn’t clean! Ok but then why did a maid come in earlier without so much as a knock? No explanation was offered.

This goes on for another half an hour as various people come to the room, none of whom communicated with anyone else on the staff.

A gentleman came knocking to ask when I’m checking out (I am not see this is the reservation). Another came to see when I wanted them to clean (two hours ago but now is fine) and then finally on the fourth person to try to sort it out if I had a reservation (look at the barcode I beg you!) I got angry enough that they let me cancel the reservation. They seemed totally flummoxed by my upset.

Somewhere around “just send up a vacuum I’ll clean myself” and “it’s against union policies to let the guests use the cleaning equipment” we’d clearly reached an impasse on what I needed and what they would do (nothing) and they wanted me gone as much as I wanted to be gone.

I know all of this is stupid and very petty, but we’ve reached a point in many industries where everyone is paying out their noses for services meant to be delivered in an expected manner and almost never are. And the prices only ever go up. if I had ever behaved in the manner that they did when I was managing a marketing agency for a luxury hotel in New York I would’ve promptly been fired.

I didn’t need to be insulted about not being my husband. I didn’t need to work my schedule around their cleaning staff or their front desk scheduling snafus or their various corporate policies on who is allowed to book what and when. 

I want to pay a fair price to stay somewhere I can get my work done and have the basics. Hospitality is about being hospitable. And somewhere between the armed guard at the mall and the baffled maid it just hit me that this heaven and hell interplay is all we can expect from here on out. You either pay a fortune or are lucky for what you can get.

It’s not even premium mediocre now. It’s just shitty. And only Karens stand between us and the total devolution of standards for fair exchanges of goods and services. And unfortunately that means I must don the armor of the Karen and hold my line. I refuse to cut my hair and get highlights though. I’ve had enough humiliation for one day.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Travel

Day 1872 and ‘bout to take my lady to Selfridges

Ahhh how I missed London. I miss it in the same way I miss Hong Kong and even Frankfurt. So many cities are no longer places for Americans. I need nowhere else to go mind you, my edge of the American empire will be flooded soon enough, it’s just that I miss being welcomed.

It’s just I’d gotten used to the freedom of our constitutional rights seemingly applying everywhere. Team America was an ok joke by true sons of the mountain west libertarian in South Park’s Matt and Trey. Now it seems like a drop out attitude of Gen X. I am still on Team America.

The end of the liberal world order, much ballyhooed by the WEF set, has me getting prepared to be seen as the enemy. It is even time to get used to being called fascists. I’m sure Nazi won’t be far off as the Germans must always take everything too far. Ironic no?

I fear if I don’t prepare to be truly sovereign, I may face a day as a refuge in the future if Americans can’t pull off its renaissance. Though I work hard toward that end.

I’ve done what I can to invest in the young entrepreneurs of the new era, and in the great state of Montana in particular, but victory is more article of faith than assured outcome.

The Munich Security Conference is, as it ever was, a flurry of events but now Marco Rubio is singing a love song to our birth continent. As if papering over the past year of slights and jabs is enough but it is the best a neoconservative in disguise can manage.

And so I had a layover in Heathrow and I saw the flavors of what is to come. And somehow that Prada song was on repeat everywhere I went.

London is still for the globalists, even if you are not a member of what William Gibson called the klept. As in kleptocracy. The Jackpot is here.

Reindustrialize they say, but look what happened to British Empire. The sun never sets? The sun barely rises on it now, and we’ve lost them to the unforeseen consequences of the generational contractual breach.

Add in the inflows of the commonwealth deciding the island will always be a destination for the 1% and London is a pricy place.

And so I think should I go to Selfridges as the song says? The Duty Free shops that makes up Heathrow hasn’t made a deal with them but I’ve got all the luxury options and high streeet choices at my disposal.

I was once deep in the world of travel retail and I bet you can guess who owns the biggest player in Heathrow. No not Arnault. It is, as you might expect, a competing regional power who certainly wishes non-doms weren’t facing wealth taxes in London. They are good to do business with incidentally.

And so I hear, over and over again, past seasons hits and remixes and think London might be the virtual world of Malthusian post Jackpot imaginings of the Cyperpunk progenitor. And we shall compete for clout and status in the same ways as always.

[Young Adz:]

Bout to take my lady Selfridges
New drip on the way, uh-huh
Rap nigga still sellin’ bricks
Half a cake on the way, uh-huh
Take a flight, she wanna take a Lyft
Phone the molly man, he’s on the way, uh-huh
I might take her The Shard, I might take her The Ritz
It don’t matter, baby, I’m straight, uh-huh

[RAYE:]
I feel like I’m in Prince’s house
Purple paint all on the walls, uh-huh
Sittin’ down on this fancy couch
And I can’t see straight, I’m a state, uh-huh
Twenty-two, I’m in Paris, baby
Got strippers tits in my face, uh-huh
Pull up in a Bentley, I want Christian, I want Fendi

I want Prada, ah-ah, ah-ah
Ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh
I already make that paper, I don’t need to chase no clout, wow
I don’t usually pipe up, but I don’t like how you runnin’ your mouth, wow
I already make that paper, I don’t need to chase no clout, wow

I already made that paper and I don’t need to chase no clout so now what?

I’m like George Clooney stuck in the liminal window of Heathrow for a brief moment. I am not of the country (I spent $22 to register myself with their visa mobile app as I sat in a purple corridor trying to input my biometric) so it feels all wrong.

I’m not exactly out of their control until I leave their airspace. But how much longer do any of these Anglophone countries have left?

I’m a dark Swede of dubious stock and many generations of me and mine adjusted to the Weberian Protestant work ethic. I don’t want Prada but I did enjoy working for them as a client.

Categories
Culture Travel

Day 1871 and Private Terminals

The downside of living in a world where everyone posts all their luxuries, is regular people who spend too much time on Instagram worrying about things that wouldn’t add much to their lives. Instagram breeds discontentment for everyone.

My husband grew up ten minutes from a global international airport hub, and as such has unrealistic expectations of how quickly one can get from place A to B and how many legs a trip should have.

He longs for the most efficient trips complete with special passes, lines and hopefully a plane dedicated to just his crew and their final destination. I doubt I’ll manage to buy it for him but if one of my better seed investments pans out I’d acquire a gulfstream for his buddies to fly.

I’ll admit I’ve been a little spoiled as well, as by the time my family could afford to fly more regularly the old Stapleton airport had been replaced by a global United hub in Denver International Airport. A spookier more haunted airport there has never been (mind the killer blue Mustang and Masonic symbolism) but it flys connections everywhere.

Now we are in the spokes and farther from hubs. Flying can be a challenge for me as in the past fewer people abused disability requests like wheelchairs.

My ankylosing spondylitis has good days and bad days so on occasion I wish I had help with heavy bags, long lines and lugging stuff around.

Wheelchair access has alas become just another scam people run to board first, so I can no longer guarantee that I’ll even make my airplane given the lines and lines of maybe crippled as if you log disabled you often can’t even get your boarding pass from a kiosk. You have doomed yourself to the thousand person line.

Alas become used to popping Advil, throwing elbows and working my way to the front of the line filled with folks who know little of flying etiquette, status boarding times and the rest. If I can’t beat back a Balkan auntie seated in the back of the plane for my own seat at 2C then what sort of world traveler am I? I claim space but I don’t like it.

Yet as I stomp around smaller spoke airports I’ve learned it’s not too expensive to get a priority pass to private terminals. Groan I know.

In a few spots, it’s less than fifty bucks to skip check in with your airline, avoid security and passport checks with the whole airport by doing it in these terminals and they will drive you in a van to board the airplane first.

That means no more fighting for prime position in line to get prime position to board to get prime position on the bus to race up the staircase to the airplane before someone else blocks you.

I can’t imagine a better use of the time and money frankly. I could easily have arrived much later but I wasn’t sure how easy it would or wouldn’t be.

The demographic feels a bit petty oligarch with a cigar lounge and exotic alcohol but I’m just happy I haven’t had to do any heavy lifting for the moment. My bags are handled. I have food and water.