A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Airport

So I had a great visit to El Paso, Texas last week.  Thanks for the hospitality, ICE and UTEP.  And I have a funny to share from the morning of my departure.  I was in Texas the night of the primary so I stayed up late watching returns and listening to local commentary on exit polls.  But then, around midnight, I realized that I needed to be up at 4 am to get to the airport in time for my flight.  I booked a 4:30 am cab, set a wake up call for 4 am, and then tried to drift off to sleep while worrying about oversleeping.  Hence, I didn’t really sleep.  4 am came.  I shot out of bed, brushed my teeth and then— blackness.  The lights went out in my hotel room.  I looked through my peep hole.  The lights were out everywhere.  I called the front desk.  The phone rang empty.  And then every single horror movie I’ve ever seen or deliberately not seen flashed through my mind.  No time to panic because I needed to get ready.  Except how do you get ready in the dark.   I grabbed my phone, lit up the screen, and held it to my suitcase so I could find my clothes.  Dressed and teeth brushed, there really wasn’t more that I could do in the dark to get ready so I packed everything up, steeled my inner-strength and opened the door to have my way with Freddie, Jason, Cujo, and Hannibal and every other scary monster waiting for me.  Looking left to right, I couldn’t make out any figures.  I creeped down the hall to the stairway, knowing that was where I was going to get my licking.  At the bottom of each flight, there was a nook.  This is the thing about being a writer.  You have enough of an imagination to write the rest of the story.  And it is a mucked up imaginatiom all twisted together over time and experience.  So I knew what was coming under one of those nooks.  And it wasn’t good.  I flew down the stairs.  Made it into the hallway, sprinted towards the lobby where Frederick, THE IRONY, my cab driver, was waiting.  At the airport, I hit the restroom where I suddenly realized that I had no idea what I looked like.  And, you know what, I was so relieved that I was alive that I couldn’t imagine how my cowlick or not having on mascara could possibly matter.  It didn’t even matter that I had managed to put my underwear on inside out.