8.30.2005

screws are tools

I recently took a flight from Albany, and I was (as usual) given the extra screening, where they look through your luggage for guns and drugs, or confessions that you lead a secret terrorist life, and then take away your nail clippers. This time they took away my lighter and a screw they found in my backpack. I can understand the lighter, I guess -- I might have lit my neighbor's hair on fire while they slept, or perhaps I could poop in a barf bag and light it in the aisle, and the poor flight attendants would come rushing to stomp it out, only to discover (hee hee!) that there was poo all over their shoe! But my screw! It wasn't even a POINTY screw -- it was a flat one, and it was an inch long. This I could not believe, so I asked them why they would need to take away my screw, and the lady in latex gloves replied that a screw was a tool.

A tool! Heaven forbid I use that one screw to construct a secret weapon! They foiled my plan -- I had a gun cleverly broken into two pieces, but without that crucial screw, I had no guns, and two gun-halves. Never mind that I didn't even have a screwdriver -- the screw was evidence enough of terrorist activity. It was a tool, for God's sake -- a tool of the Devil. I could channel Satan himself through it's length, and imbued with the powers of Hell, I could bring down aircraft. Yes, my fellow passengers were pretty lucky that my entire plot rested on a single non-pointy screw, and that the airport security folks so cleverly foiled the plan.

Aw, God dammit. Who am I kidding? I'm no fucking Macgyver. What, with a lighter, my screw, two packages of peanuts, and a plastic cup of club soda, I was going to construct a dirty bomb that rendered New York uninhabitable for a thousand years? I was planning to sleep on the plane, not blow it up. If I tried poking someone with that screw, they'd just ring their flight attendant button. I can't believe they took it away -- I even named him. Jim. The Screw. He was my little buddy, and we had so many adventures together. I'll miss the little guy, and I'll always remember the time we almost took down a plane, parachuted into the Atlantic, and then swam to Cuba and freedom.

dls

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