Intro Again

I’m not sure why, but whenever I fly I always get stuck next to the worst people possible. Right now I somehow am sitting next to a man who only the politest people possible would call lethargic. My right hand is currently being over taken by his equally upsetting wife. She asks me if I want any gum. Damn I knew it. The worst kind. Just as I want to start deciding what would be funnier, if they a) had to add a seat belt attachment or b) if they ordered extra-lunch, she has to be polite. I have a sneaking suspicion they both own the Chinese-made ab-belt advertised at four in the morning on the worst tv channels. I have a feeling that both eat processed food everyday and can’t understand why it isn’t working. I have a suspicion that they both voted Republican last election. It looks like I’ll be playing the part of the size four dress that the size eight bridesmaid tries to fit into for this flight.

“Please put your tray table up and return to the upright position.” the 51 year old flight attendant says. She has this weird way of saying things. There’s no doubt in my mind that in her mind, she’s not in a small plane headed from Denver, she’s actually in a smoky comedy club. The look on her face makes me believe that she thinks she is destroying the crowd with her acerbic wit. Some people, mostly people who arrive at the Sizzler at 4:15, agree. Right now I despise these people, despise my life. In just under three hours I’ll be arriving in Missoula, MT. After that I’ll wait in an airport lobby that was constructed entirely out of wood. After that I’ll board a van driven by a 22 year old girl, who in terms of body type, quite possibly could be related to the people I'm currently sitting next too. I’ll later find out that she has a thing for fifty five year old guys who are only reachable at four in the morning and drive a rusty pick-up truck with no back gate. She will then drive me two uncomfortable hours to my home for the next ten weeks. This of course, is all inconsequential, because right now all I can think about is how I wish my life were a movie.

Right now I wish I were sitting next a girl. Preferably 21. Preferably flying home for the summer after a year at college. Preferably with objectionable morals and an ex-boyfriend she wants to upset. She would have shoulder length brunette hair. She would be beautiful. Think Pam Beasely, not Megan Fox. We would make small talk. I’d ask about her major, she’d say English. I’d say Economics/Politics. She’d be impressed. She’d ask for a blanket. I’d put my hand seductively between her skirt.

“Sir, would you like anything to drink.”
“Sure, I’ll take a Diet Pepsi.”
This exchange is upsetting. Mostly because she interrupted my daydream, partly because I don’t know why I ordered anything, I don’t even like soda.

“How about you sir?”
My pudgy companion is eager to reply.
“I’ll take a packet of Peanut M&Ms and a Reese Peanut Butter…And ummm a Pepsi. Wait, make it a Diet Pepsi.”

Yes, please order the Diet. Hopefully he’s secretly suicidal and it’s for the cancer causing ingredients and not this newfound focus on health. I’ve never understood why people order diet sodas after gorging themselves. It’s not like the extra two hundred or so calories is really going to make a difference, but then again, who am I to judge. I’m on a plane en route to an unpaid internship in Montana for realistically no rhyme or reason. Well I guess there’s a reason. I need the internship to graduate, but really I could have gone somewhere a lot easier to get to. Somewhere that wasn’t located in a small Montana town, two hours from Missoula Montana and 75 minutes from Anacanda. I think rich people from out east would call the place quant and beautiful. They would vacation there once a year in the endless bed and breakfasts. Buy their neighbors a cowboy hat and tell stories about the time a local called them partner. But to me, it just seemed like the kind of place you had to drive an hour to get to buy beer. Beer you couldn’t even drink on the campus.

The reason you couldn’t drink beer on the campus was actually straight out of a movie. The organization was run by an old politician, who ran and lost against a very prominent Republican a few years back. He lost mainly because the guy who beat him described him in his memoir as, “Incredibly good looking and terminally odd.” Which quite honestly is probably the best way to describe a guy who currently spends his day aimlessly wandering around Montana telling yours truly that his glasses tell him he’s a vegetarian.

A few years back the man best described as “Incredibly good looking and terminally odd” entered the dwellings of his thirty some interns only to find a large amount of them having sex. Not like normal, casual, awkward, sex, that college kids take part of daily, but the kind of sex you can only find in movies that are sold in paper bags or starring Christian Bale. The only thing this incident was missing was an intern dropping a chainsaw down forty flights of stairs. After this, hard alcohol was banned. I guess when college kids can only drink beer they don’t have orgies interrupted by ex-Senate candidates. Sadly, later that summer one of the male interns turned himself into the small Montana town’s police station for raping a fellow intern. Except the girl that was allegedly raped said the confessed rapist did not rape her, but rather she wanted to have sex. I guess beer makes college kids have somewhat consensual awkward sex that is later deemed unconsensual by the other party who initiated sex. Needless to say, alcohol was banned on campus.

This left myself in an odd situation. I’m thoroughly convinced that there are only a few ways to actually get to know someone. The best is clearly hallucinogens. But since this was Montana, the only drug readably available was Meth, and last time I checked Meth simply made you ugly and more likely to live in rural towns and enjoy cold weather. None of which particularly interested me. So alcohol was the only answer. Except I was living an hour from a bar, in a place where almost no-one was 21 and booze was banned.

This meant I actually had to talk to people, people who were undoubtedly a lot more committed to politics then I was, and there is nothing worse then talking to a group of committed young people about politics. They fall into two camps. The first are crazily liberal and wear Che Guerra t-shirts and fail to see the irony. The second are Pro-war neocons, which is an even sadder situation because they sprout bullshit about fighting them abroad so they don’t get us here, and talk about the “surge working”. Really, the surge is working? Well it looks like you are in your early twenties, and if it’s working so much why aren’t you fucking fighting? Being a young Republican makes about as much sense as claiming you are a virgin because you only have anal sex.

The Montana Chronicles

I’m thoroughly convinced that there are very few ways to actually get to know people. One is to take a bunch of hallucinogens with them. There is nothing more personal then getting a group of friends, buying some mushrooms and spending the rest of the day staring at a blank wall. First off it’s cheap. Second off, it makes something as banal and meaningless as staring at a blank wall unmistakably fun. Thirdly, it undoubtedly leads to talks about big questions: Like why are we here? What do I want to do with with my life? And really, you can learn an awful lot about a person by how they answer these questions. Lastly taking drugs makes you ask less meaningful questions, like why don’t soda companies put vitamin C in the drink and market it is “sodalicoius” or why does my dick intrude into my body like a frightened puppy when I take mushrooms? Sadly I was at an internship in Montana for the summer and with the exception of Meth, most drugs were in short supply. On the bright side this gave me ample opportunity to meet the people who I’d be spending the summer with in a coherent and legal manner.

The organization I was interning for hired around 30 interns, who arrived in a staggered fashion. I arrived in late May in Missoula, MT via a flight from Denver, and almost immediately began to second-guess my decision to take an unpaid internship working for a political organization that was based an hour away from the nearest gas station. I got there relatively early, meaning I had nothing to do for two weeks. I could have been closer to civilization if I was living in Baghdad. At least they have plenty of pirated porn there.

The first few weeks were uneventful, highlighted by the fact that one of the fellow interns, a Political Science student from Duke, told me that he’s a lot like Josh Lyman from the West Wing, in that he is intelligent, ruthless, and has problems with girls but yet gets his fair share. I should have told him that I’m a lot Will Smith in that I hail from west Philadelphia, and once took down an Alien warship by using a virus written on a Macintosh computer. Sadly, I think I would have been more accurate in describing myself. The kid was the epitome of awful and quite honestly was what I was expecting from this internship. Every thing he said somehow turned into some self righteous debate. He was actually proud of the fact that he sabotaged some kids academic career down at Duke during a ‘heated’ Freshman class President election where he was a campaign manager. I found this hilarious because I was unaware that promising more soda machines in the cafeteria necessitated the need for a campaign manager.

The girls weren’t much better; instead of an intense insecurity brought on by years of lying to themselves about being intelligent, ruthless and getting women, they developed an intense desperation that only isolation could bring out. Living an hour from civilization surrounded by a group of guys who developed an intense erection when their cousin told them they, “looked good in those jeans” somehow made them notice their vaginas slowly growing dustier. Normally this situation would be awesome. Look, I would never call myself the Michael Jordan of getting girls, but I am at least a Jalen Rose type- A solid career highlighted by a few big games. So I felt quite good about my prospects.

The problem was that when the girls who got there gazed into the mirror, it was quite simply not an attractive person that reflected back. This left me in an odd situation. I could take the easy win, and compromise the remote shot that a hot girl would come later in the summer. Or I could hold out right now and if the opportunity never arose, repeat this question in a month or so. Being a follower of sustained development I chose the latter, and quite honestly I’m happy with the results. (Side note—This choice led one of the girls, Jessie, to spread rumors that I batted for the other team. Her reasoning was stellar. That I rejected her and drank Diet Pepsi)

Eventually the summer chugged a long a new people came, new people that unlike the others could actually have conversations with the opposite sex. The first guy was from the south and named Taylor. Simply put he is the greatest drinker I’ve ever met and coincidentally one of the most outrageous. My favorite part about him was that when my parents visited he pretended to be a southern gentleman. It was awesome. The same guy who set the record for vomiting 13 times at work later in the summer introduced himself to my parents with his full name and place of birth. My only regret is that he regularly didn’t wear a white suit all the time and talk about the “colored” problem. In fact, his political opinions made me wonder how the south is Conservative. His haterd for George Bush was second only to his love of Busch Light and big women. His only downside was that he was just shy of his 20th birthday and lacked a fake id.

Clearly a Southern Gentleman

The next was a frat guy from Arizona named Jim who among other things could grow an awesome mustache (Always a plus in my book) and had a sweet laughed that was latter dubbed the “___ chuckle” (Trust me, it was a lot funnier when you use his real name). Jim and I bonded instantly. I think mainly because a) we we're both 21 and needed drinking buddies and b) unlike most of the interns neither of us had any political ambition at all and both simply needed an internship to qualify for graduation. Since both Taylor and Jim belonged to frats they shattered my perception of frat guys. Frats simply weren't big in the midwest. In fact I'm pretty sure they closed down the last remaining one at my school because no one would join. Think about it, why would anyone pay for friends?

Mandy was last. She was a journalist from out east who loved to drink, could talk to anyone, and had a really nice rack. Last time I checked I love girls with those three qualities.

Next -- A crazy girl fingers herself in the backseat of a Mitsubishi Eclipse and other hilarious observations