As Pretty as an Airport...

Walking around an airport is a rather odd exercise. On the one hand, you're standing in the middle of what amounts to a mall, complete with multiple food courts, bookstore, jewelry store, place to buy neckties, angry people, bewildered children, and a branch of that one store next to the Apple store at Carousel that sells shiny breakable objects. On the other hand you're tethered to a 50 pound block of clothes that rolls like a donkey on rollerskates. I wonder if this is what being a parent feels like - wandering through a bright shopping district but unable to fully immerse yourself in consumerism because of the small, squat, rectangular canvas entity that hangs off your wrist.

In pre-9/11 days (when the mountains sparkled with sugar, and rivers ran with liquid chocolate with narry a diabolical dwarf in sight), travelers were reluctant to leave their luggage unattended for more than 45 seconds because of the ever-present threat of luggage snatchers, who would abscond with an easily-transportable unattended parcel in a manner similar to that employed by those wishing to elope with farmers' daughters. In these safer times, such a threat has been all but eliminated - the possibility of theft by vagrants has been replaced by the certainty that unattended baggage will be immediately spirited away by airport ninjas. Not content to merely divide their spoils among compatriots for either individual sale on the black market or decorative arrangement above a mantlepiece in place of a trophy buck (the accepted path for appropriated goods among vagrants), these unseen aerial warriors of the night use a PA system to inform all who come within their boundaries of their intentions: to confiscate and, if possible, destroy all unattended luggage. One can only assume that behind this desire lies a desperate fear of being left alone, and the drive to spare luggage (and, by extension of earlier metaphor, small children) the pain of being deserted, offering them instead the sweet release of death. While certainty can often be regarded as an improvement over possibility, progress is indeed a cruel mistress.