Left work early so I could catch a 4:30 flight to Seattle. I thought it’d take me an hour to get to the airport. Google Maps and traffic suggested otherwise. I got there in an hour and a half, I was at my gate with about an hour to spare. Sat at the gate reading my book, In Cold Blood.

Decided at the last minute to grab a snack at the kiosk across the way, and there’s a line. The woman checking people out is terribly slow. And then I can see that they’ve started to board the A-group, of which I was a member (thanks to “checking-in” online) and finally I’m the next person in line and the woman is taking her time to refill the cash register with coins shrink-wrapped in plastic tubes, and it looks like the dude in front of me is going to pay with a credit card. And I see the A-group dwindling down to nothing.

I huff and drop my bag of Cheez-its and get on the plane. It actually occurred to me to just take them. For all the time I spent waiting in line, for my willingness to pay, evidenced by my brandishing a 20 dollar bill, by the ultimately low cost of the bag of cheez-its ($1.50 at most) I felt as if the world was conspiring to refuse my money. Which just goes against the grain of our overtly capitalistic society. This is the kind of fuzzy ethics that start me thinking about the problem (or the charade I should say) of paying for digital content online. But that’s another blog post entirely.

So morality won the day. Or did it? Maybe I just didn’t want to be seen to be stealing by the people behind me in line. The woman at the cash register didn’t look like she’d have cared or even noticed. There’s a sign at Aroma’s in Santa Rosa that says “honesty is what you do when no one is looking.” This is there to guilt people into paying 25¢ for self-service coffee refills. I think about that quote every time I’m waiting for my drink. I haven’t come up with a sufficiently snarky response yet.

Flight was uneventful. In my book the Holcomb murderers have been caught.

Picked up by Christy and Chloe and we immediately made our way to the Paramount theater in downtown Seattle. Timing was perfect, we got there with about 20 minutes to spare, which we used to fill our bellies with some warm chowder. Saw Gillian Welch and David Rawlings in concert, and now I’m back at Christy’s with eyelids drooping.