It’s time for another edition of Travels with Brendo, your favorite travelog from your favorite fella! For this trip, I took a quick jaunt from LA to my hometown of Boston to attend the tribute show for my friend Dave featuring the members of his band The Rationales. The plan was to sing a few songs and film some footage to commemorate the event. Then, I was going to jaunt right back to the big La. I was planning on being quite jaunty. But before I could successfully jaunt it up, I had to get through the gauntlet known as public transportation in both Los Angeles and Boston! What a non-jaunty treat!
The trip started with immediate drama as the FlyAway bus from Union Station was caught in some traffic on the 105. I should clarify for my non LA readers - we laid-back west coasters talk about traffic on the freeways a lot. We also call routes “the 105” instead of “route 105.” It’s a thing we do, so you should choose to find it charming. Normally, it takes about 45 minutes to get from my place in Burbank to the airport. Then, once I arrive at LAX, it takes at least another 2-3 weeks to actually get to my terminal. So I like to leave plenty of time to avoid stress.
But this stoppage wasn’t typical LA freeway traffic. We were not moving at all. We could see a few hundred yards away that there was some sort of accident or breakdown, so we were just… sitting there. Almost immediately, the lady sitting next to me started practically vibrating with anxiety. She had to make her plane. She had a meeting in San Francisco she couldn’t miss. Clearly, she wasn’t a laid back west coaster like me. Her discomfort grew exponentially with each ticking second that the bus didn’t move. At about the five minute mark, she announced to us all that she was getting off the bus and walking across the freeway to get an Uber at the next exit. The bus driver smiled and kindly explained that no she certainly was not. She assured him that it would be perfectly safe - we were in standstill traffic! Still, he couldn’t risk letting a passenger off the bus on a freeway and be liable for what happened. Then, she turned to us all and said “If there are like ten of us crossing the highway, they’ll stop for us!” Now, she was pulling the rest of us into her escape plan. Shockingly, no one jumped at this sudden display of frontier leadership. She seemed genuinely surprised that we would rather wait for the traffic to open up than follow her across the highway like some sort of insane combo of Frogger and Make Way For Ducklings so we could then scour the land for an Uber that was somehow immune to bumper-to-bumper traffic. Before things could escalate any further, the highway patrol cleared the obstruction and we started moving. Total time in standstill traffic? Twelve minutes.
When I arrived at LAX and headed to my gate, I was told by the good people at JetBlue (remember when they were the good airline? Not so much anymore) that my “one carry on” did not actually mean the (admittedly large) backpack I was wearing. I needed to check that for an additional $60 fee! Rushed and annoyed, I pulled my essentials (laptop, ipad, boner medication) out of my bag and placed them in the only thing I had available - a reusable shopping bag.
In my haste, I left my keys in the bag that I checked, creating a good 6 hours of “Gee - I hope I see that bag again!” perseverative thoughts. Luckily, the guy next to me in the terminal was having a loud business conversation, as evidenced by him saying “Hey, this is business” over and over again into his phone. If you live the sort of life where you are saying “This is business” in any situation except acting in a play about an 80’s yuppie asshole, please dive headfirst into a 747 turbine. So yeah - that was the mood I was in. When I got on the plane, there was enough room in the overhead compartments for me to practically sleep in there:
When I arrived in Boston, I was immediately treated to the apex of travel comfort: the MBTA! Now, I’ve got to say - the T gets a bad rap, but those new orange line trains are gorgeous. Clean, modern, don’t (yet) smell like human or animal leavings! If you’re looking for a wedding venue this summer, you could do worse than one of the shiny new orange line trains. However - when I switched over to the red line, I was instantly transported to the set of The Warriors. Immediately, I was faced with one of the eternal unanswerable questions from my past: why does the red line train creep so slowly toward the South Shore? From North Quincy on down, we were handily outpaced by an octogenarian walker gang strolling beside the train tracks. Actually, I think it was the current day cast of The Warriors.
Although the trip back to Boston was triggered by the concert for Dave, the date coincidentally fell on the weekend my 16-year old niece was going to her first prom. Which is a little weird because she is supposed to still look like this:
I know parents talk a lot about how quickly the time goes by, but I submit that the experience is uniquely weird for an uncle. Uncle is my favorite thing that I am. For the past sixteen years, I have tried my best to be a constant presence in my niece’s and nephew’s lives, providing them with an alternate view of what life can be. I grew up in the same small suburban hometown and remember feeling stifled and beaten down by a lot of the small-minded thinking around me. Throughout their childhoods, I have tried to show by example that they were free to become broad-thinking, unconventional, and incredibly silly adults. But as much as I would love to be a ‘stay at home uncle,’ I don’t live with them. They grow and change. They are teenagers now. They have their own worldviews and get a little less excited when Uncle Brendan comes around. It’s wonderful but also sad. You know - lost youth and mortality and all that. I choked back tears as I watched my little monkey pants drive off with her prom date. But for this visit home, the tears were just beginning…
Wait… was that a cliffhanger? Holy shit - I think we’re in a two-parter, people! Who could have seen that coming?
Boogie Writes is a completely independent endeavor by one hard-working funnyman trying to make his way in the world today (which takes everything you’ve got.) If you like what you read, please subscribe, support, and tell a friend! Also - do you need advice? Of course you do! Send your queries to brendan@brendanboogie.com with “Dear Boogie” in the subject and get some solid or at least passable advice!