transitory relevations...

i'm in an odd situation right now. it's been slowly dawning on me an unrealised consequence of travel which is that when (as i am right now) you're in transit it's kinda hard to say that you really are where your GPS says that you are. you see, geopraphically i'm currently sitting in the VirginBlue Boarding Lounge 35 (a concrete-floored wasteland of ultra-ruggedised, easy-clean furniture and fittings, industrially designed to be comfortable to sit in for a as much as an hour but simultaneously impossible to sleep in unless you've OD'd on muscle-relaxants). realistically, on the other hand, i'm in the Transit No-Man's Land; a place where people are but no one lives. it's kinda like Tasmania, really. people come and go, but everything's temporary, transient. the people you meet here, they're your friend, your confidant, or maybe just a meat chicane you dodge around when they realise that they desperately needed to use the toilet they just walked past.

the guy sitting across from me at the moment, slicked back hair, sunglasses pushed up on his head, chiselled good looks and fashionable shoes, he's not real. the hairy guy in black sitting on the 1.5x4 metre strip of carpet conveniently located in front of the power point, me, no i'm not real either. everyone here has their coping mechanisms. there's the old lady just getting into her pulp-fiction novel. there's the family sitting on the carpet in Lounge 34 who are play cards with the kids. the Islander lad dawdling on the travellator because he's got nowhere to be for a couple of hours while grannies with zimmer-frames overtake him on the tiles. the opportunist who's plugged his ultra-portable into a handy powerpoint and looks around at the people walking by while he bashes at the keyboard because... well, he can touch-type. can't you? newsagents and book shops running a roaring trade in temporary print. news today, olds tomorrow - sell out today, get the shipment in then sell out to a wholly different bunch of transients tomorrow.

and a thiving ecosystem has sprung up to cater for all these neuvo riche, the grateful recipients of the modern era of inexpensive air-travel. anyone can go anywhere, so everyone does and airports rapidly reach a critical-mass of the number of aeroplanes that can use a runway through a day. efficiency and economy dictate that a seat on the flight unsold is a seat wasted, and so cross-matching databases are written to keep track of it all so that you can tell it that you need to get from Canberra to Perth and it'll suggest stopovers in everywhere from Adelaide to Sydney, discount the under-utilised routes and recommend the chicken so that the airports can move the absolute maximum number of people from where they are to where they need to be while balancing the load so that no one terminal explodes and goes splat.

of course, this means that there's no end of people who've just travelled 300km in the wrong direction so that they could save a buck. people who were happy to accept a 3 hour stopover so that they wouldn't have to fly on the red-eye and endure 5 hours in the air on a discount airline with overpriced stale sandwiches. people who'll seriously consider overcooked 10$ noodles from the foodcourt if it means not being tempted to eat the equally shitty, but even more expensive food on the plane. don't forget here that bored people in our consumerist, throw-away society are prone to shop:

"i'm just going to have a look in Witchery, dear."
you packed enough clothes to last a month and we're only away a fortnight... anyway, didn't you just go shopping on the weekend?
"oh, just go get some coffees. it's not as if we don't have time to kill and maybe i'll find something nice for that dinner out with your parents."
yes sweetie...

and so the cycle of unnecessary commerce continues and thrives, populating what one might consider a hostile environment with more and more plastic and plywood facades with smiling waitrons there to take your order for double-priced cappuchino and cake which you're only eating because it kills some time and inevitably leads to your undiagnosed diabetes causing a hyperglyceamic attack halfway across the Pacific.

oh, it's all entertaining. seriously, don't mind me. i'm just killing time. i have mental images of this place after the bombs hit and tribes of survivors take up residence in the Boarding Lounges. it'd make a great 4 hour Kevin Costner film - he could film it with Mel Gibson - where Grorg unites his tribe after a border-dispute and takes control of the 30-series lounges before waging war against the evil, brutal forces of Kerglit to avenge his girlfriend who was kidnapped to replenish breeding stocks depleted in the great salmonella epidemic of 2053 (result of the discovery of a batch of old fossilised KFC). the battle scene in the Food Court would be epic. and to make it better, it'd be filmed entirely in the re-de-re-de-reconstructed dead language of the Yidrikaanarin and despite being 4 hours where Costner and Gibson jerk each over off in the background while underpaid actors jump around in filthy high-vis clothes it'll still make a fucking mind, and the whole thing would come about because Gibson and Costner got stuck in transit for a couple of hours on their way somewhere equally pointless.

on the plus side, at least the airline hosties are quite attractive.