Travels: Boise, Idaho (The Trip Out)

On April 7, 2009, RJP4 and I flew out to Boise, Idaho to visit our friend (and former occasional guest DJ), Stone. RJP4 is moving out here, and I am thinking about doing the same if my all my shit goes pear-shaped. Which, you know, is what is happening. Anyway, I decided to detail our exploits on this here web log for your singing and dancing pleasure. I will try to withhold anything that might result in either RJP4 or myself being arrested and killed by stoning. Which is what they do here.

On Tuesday the seventh we left the Wilkes Barre/Scranton airport at 6:09 pm on the smallest jet possible. "This feels like a bus," I said to RJP4. "No," he said. "Buses are larger." This is why I hate flying out of the local airport. The closest thing we have to an actual commercial airliner is a World War I era biplane flown by an old man in scarf and goggles. It is unsettling to be able to look out the window of a plane and be eye to eye with a man standing on the runway. Once they cleared away the goats from the runway by means of blowing the great horn we were able to take off. It was roughly an hour and a half out to Chicago, and RJP4 and I were seated behind a baby who screamed as if in a meat grinder.

Chicago's O'Hare airport is the size of a small city and is a surreal place to say the least. We had to go to concourse C from concourse F--and you can take a shuttle, but RJP4 has feelings about such things. We decided to take the long walk through the strange--passing on our way the skeleton of a brachiosaurus, and riding one of those movable walkways in a tunnel with blinking neon tubes on the ceiling. "O'Hare is a massive robot," I said, "and we are riding though it's horrible brain." RJP4 was unfazed by our surroundings, quite like the semi-sinister Willy Wonka in the tunnel of terror--I was almost expecting to turn to me and start jabbering disturbing poetry about being lost in the belly of a great phosphorescent whale. This is the airport in Chicago.

Our plane out of Chicago was a proper one, thankfully. But our seats were taken by a family with several screaming children. They were largely unapologetic, so RJP4 and I scrounged seats behind them against the wall of the bathroom. During the flight the children were yelling and walking around while the flight attendants were trying to tell the parents "UH YOU CANNOT HAVE THE CHILDREN ROAM AS FREE AS CHICKENS" and "UH YOUR SON AND/OR DAUGHTER HAS CLIMBED OUT ON THE WING PLEASE RETRIEVE." I assume the family was Mormon for the following reasons: first, they were as blond and blue-eyed as the American Jesus. Second, at one point the father told a bedtime story to his daughter about space aliens with large families who don't like black people. Either way, like many observational comedians, we consistently sat behind ill-behaved, screamy children. And, in one case, creepy Mormon children.

Once we landed at Boise we were picked up by Stone and his friend Veronica. On the way we picked up another of Stone's friends and went to a bar in downtown Boise called Mulligan's. It was odd to be downtown at night. I grew up in a place where those who trespass upon the night were practically gauranteed to be, at the very least, raped. We sat at tables outside, and the worst thing that happened was that a drunk woman came by and asked for a drink of Stone's beer. He obliged and she thanked him and continued on her way. No one was raped.

But that is not to say that Mulligan's is the best place to take someone on their first Boise experience. While the bartenders and bouncers are nearly suspiciously nice, the clientelle is composed of a strange demographic which I have termed "metal hipsters." They look like hipsters but with more tattoos and worse taste in music. They have long hair and scraggly beards and look like they will stab you to take the pins from your backpack. RJP4 and I played pool until about 2 AM. I am very bad at the game, and RJP4 was drunk, so it turned into an hour or so of flailing and cursing and shame being brought upon our families.

After last call we got a ride home to Stone's house. I went to bed assuming that Boise was composed entirely of vaguely threatening ponytailed twenty-somethings that view skateboarding as a legitimate and age-appropriate mode of transportation.

Next time on SQR: Day One of Boise, wherein our hero discovers that Mulligan's is a dive that caters to what passes for assholes in Boise--and that the city itself is actually quite nice indeed.

Stay tuned!