The Opposite of Success

Misery misery son of a bitch of all miseries. Madrid Airport defeated me. I mean defeated. Completely defeated. Is there any other way to say it? No, there is not. Defeated, completely.

A third party could, I guess, say that I did not complete every last single necessary step to ensure succesful boarding at the gate. He might say that a more attentive passenger would have heeded multiple emails from the airline--full, as they were, of the most tediously small fonts--emails advising about some boarding pass stamp. Still, I do not know its name or exact purpose.

The flimsiest of operations! A spiny haired, self-loathing twenty-five or twenty-eight year old man, who wasn´t altogether unattractive, but still, a man who clearly rued the day that RyanAir ever burst into existence, this character took a fleeting look at my passport and stamped my boarding pass. It took one minute. Less. This was, of course, as my flight was departing. And I was hardly looking my best, and I was certainly not on my best, airport, good citizen type behavior. Sweating like a whipped horse and my hair crazy and everywhere. In actual fact, I looked more like a security threat in that moment than in any other moment in my life. Huffingly--that is to say, out of breath--demanding idiotic bureaucratic stamps, cutting the line at security. If my hair had been covered--forget it!

In any case, I´m flying to London today instead.