When they overrun the defences
A minor invasion put down to expenses
Will you go down to the airport lounge
Will you accept your second class status
A nation of waitresses and waiters

Wedding weekend down South was as beer-soaked and happy as hoped. Heterohugs all around. But then.

The girlfriend and I left our hotel two hours prior to take off, but somehow in the rush from hotel shuttle to public transit bus to the train to the EZ-Ticket machine to the Delta customer service phone kiosk to the actual Delta ticket lady, our flight took off without us.

Next flight didn't leave for six hours. After five minutes of cursing everyone and everything, girlfriend and I realized we were just going to have to make the best of our sadsack circumstances.

So we did our best to suck the marrow out of Atlanta's Hatsfield airport. Our conclusions, presented for you:

Concourse A: a little too deluxe, too pricey, too self-satisfied. Archetypal store: The Sunglass Hut. Avoid, unless you're looking for a highbrow bookstore (it was in Concourse A that I came across this wretched fantasy tailor made for grit-eating secession monkeys. I never bought into the Newt-as-Beelzebub line of political attack. Welfare reform? Okey-doke. Flogging the dolphin to the idea of Confederate hegemony? Um, no. How the hell does this get published anywhere other than alt.general-lee-fetish.fan-fiction? This blog will hereafter refer to all southern revisionist historians as Newtbags.)

Concourse B, AKA "The Strip Mall": The place to go for undercooked TGIFriday's spinach dip or a nice macrobrewed beer. Archetypal Concourse B person: that guy wearing Steelers cap, Steelers sweatshirt, black jeans, vacant look.

Concourse C: Horribly self-satisfied hell on earth. Tennis on the TV instead of the Falcons, neither Jim Beam nor Jack Daniels behind the bar. Killian's on tap. Ick and yuck. Archetypal Concourse C employee: waitress who told a big pot-bellied man that they couldn't get the football game on their TV. A demonstrable lie.

Concourse D: if Hatfield's concourses were the children in an abusive family, Concourse D would be "the lost child." Quiet, passive, with no brain waves discernible behind its chain-store facades.

Concourse E: the drive-thru concourse for the international traveler who demands a space seperated from the sweating stinking domestic-traveling masses. Equipped simply with a food court and a Duty Free shop. Archetypal comment by my girlfriend: "When I was young, I always thought Duty Free shops were hilarious. They're like, 'We're Duty Free! All these other shops got doodie everywhere!'"

Then the plane came and I fell asleep.