RS: My Cover Is Blown

I was on an airplane when it happened. My new job is about 75% travel, so my ass is adjusting steadily to the luxuriousness of airplane seats. My new job is also not particularly interested in my backside, so I get to travel coach. So much for luxuriousness. I'm a bit of a long-legged thing; and the good folks at Continental and American and, it turns out, Alaska Airlines don't seem particularly interested in my backside or my ganglier appendages. I doubt seriously they care that much about any of my appendages, but it was the ganglier ones causing me troubles.

I had been sitting on that plane for about 4 hours en route from Dallas, a monstrosity of an airport, to Seattle, a perfectly fine if forgettable little airport. I had a crick in my neck from my parent's dinosaur of a mattress that I had the pleasure of sleeping on the night before. My work took me near, well, 5 hours near, so I popped in for the weekend to leak a little gay into Booger County. Yes, I come from a place lovingly referred to as Booger County. Can't tell you the origins of our phlemtabulous nickname, don't know. The town just enjoyed its sesquicentennial. No doubt a whooping good time remembering the racism and in-breeding of generations past. Not that much to remember since both still go on. And that is not a nasty little exaggeration about my town. When I was in 7th grade, a girl I'll call Beth because that's her name got pregnant by her father. Okay, not so much your textbook in-breeding as incest, pedophilia, and rape but it qualifies. That's my town—slap the dog and shut my mouth—it's home sweet home.

Regardless, the town contains some of the most wonderful people I've ever met—there just aren't enough of them. I miss the people but never the place. I did enjoy surprising my family though. I was sitting at the table at the Red Lobster when my mother walked in. You don't get to cause that kind of delight very often in your life—and you add cheese biscuits to that and you got a little piece of paradise right there. Then my sister (whose birthday we were celebrating) walked in, and I got to experience causing some delight, albeit markedly muted compared to my mother's, again. My stepfather and I had arranged it because he is the only person in my family who can keep a secret. Mostly because he doesn't retain anything that he doesn't think is important and most of the crap we gossip about isn't. But it caused particular delight in him as well to surprise everyone. Hell, we were lousy with delight.

A day later, I was back on a plane, drifting in and out of fitful sleep, trying desperately not to drool on the lady next to me. She was reading a book on the process of reading. That seemed a bit redundant to me, but she was having a dickens of a time. That's dickens, small dick, not Dickens, big Dick. Actually, it was something about Proust and the Squid. Even the title bored me so I didn't care to retain it. Like father like son. My back was scoliosing with each passing mile; and while the numbness that had completely overtaken my ass was working its way up my southern exposure, it never quite made it to pain central along my L5. Each fidget to relieve and stretch my back sent thousands of little pricks of feeling into my substantial buttocks. I couldn't win; but then, who can feel the winner with any number of little pricks on your buttocks? Don't mean to be shallow or sizeist. . . but I am.

Upon descent, I decided to squeeze my altitude enlarged feet into my cute little shoes. It would have helped if I'd been a contortionist. I wasn't, so it happened. I heaved my foot toward my knee but Miss Fully Reclined in front of me combined with the Pack 'Em In Like Pigs at a Sale Barn Airlines' crawl space and my new favorite pair of skinny jeans (skinny compared to the Big and Bitter dungarees I'm used to) conspired to create physics of impossibility. Why it didn't occur to me that a harder yank on my foot would not alter said physics, I can't tell you. I wasn't thinking clearly because every chakra was in frickin misery. Surely, something had to give. Something did. The better part of the inseam of my favorite new skinny jeans. Fortunately, I've been running of late so the hairy cottage cheese of my inner thighs has diminished from a Costco sized tub to pint and a half mounds. What remained exploded into my lap like Pop Secret. I started a reconnaissance mission that I should sell to Homeland Security. I was simultaneously, though somewhat futiley, containing and stuffing like a bionic baker kneading over yeasted dough. I extended my pinkies to pull up the bottom of the rip to create a cover fold that I tucked up into that little arm pit-like part of my hip that usually enjoys a little attention but, apparently, not an accordion of denim.

I put those little, seldom used muscles to work; and they were gripping with everything in them as I hobbled like a pirate with a peg leg through the airport wrestling a coat, a heavy computer bag, and a suitcase that was about to bust like a dog tick. It was, from the ripple of stares that escorted me all the way to the rental car booth, quite a sight to behold. This morning I realized that I either overworked that little muscle in my crotch or I woke up with one leg suddenly shorter than the other. And I'm pissed. I loved those jeans.