Departure Point

Not a lot of time to work out here, as I've obligated myself to experience the Worst Airport Pick-up Experience in At Least North America, Maybe The World™. If you aren't from the area, I invite you to google "LAX horseshoe" and see what kind of exploratory invective and neologistical swearing you can find. Nothing fires human creativity like a little discomfort. It's why so many artists refuse to take any kind of mood stabilizer, for fear of muting the keening screech-song of their muses. Yes, as a result, a disproportionate number of artistic types are untreated insufferables. Nobody said the discomfort needed to make art had to be their own.

I'm just a few minutes away from having to get in my VERY FANCY new electric car and have a running series of anxious panicks as I do my first not-entirely-local trip petroleum free. Range anxiety is a real thing, people. I've got like 300 miles of battery life to make like an 80 mile trip, but about 10 days in to this whole experience, it still feels like I'm pushing it. And "pushing it" is specifically what I'm trying to avoid.

It'll be fine. I'll be fine. We'll be fine. I have to pick up an adult child and then another stop on the way back to pick up the adult child's adult cat. It's a matryoshka doll set of nested responsibility I bought for myself when I elected to procreate. This would be a prime opportunity to complain, but doing so negates the Parental Martyr Karmic Equity I'd be earning otherwise. If you take the Suffer In Silence option, you can yield as much as 10-15% extra on your return, to be paid out when you watch your adult child have to do the same thing for their own kids at some point in the future. It's risky if they never actually have kids, though. But not ruinously so. More of a 401k scenario than a T-bill, say. If they never give you the satisfaction of seeing them suffer exactly as you have, you can always spend it in other ways, like by breaking your hip right before they're supposed to go on some OTHER goddamned vacation. That'll show 'em.

For now, however, I'm still functionally dual-hipped and primed to sit in traffic, in the chorusing near-silence of my embatteried zero-emission science fiction chariot. The look of stress as I watch the battery tick down I will have to work on if I'm going to perfect my electric car smug face. Though admittedly the bar is lower when you're doing it in a Chevrolet. I'd never make it in a Rivian.