6:33 a.m., Terminal C, Gate 45, Tampa International Airport
Be careful, they say.
It'll be the time of your life, they say, but be careful.
Boarding begins in about half an hour for my flight to Cleveland, the site of the Republican National Convention, and friends and colleagues have been telling me for weeks what an adventure I'm in for over the next couple of weeks: The fanfare. The celebrities. The speeches. The promise of glitzy, vapid pageantry a Donald Trump candidacy brings. The protests. The open-carrying white supremacists. The looming threat of shit going horribly, horribly wrong for no good reason in an election year to which people on both sides of the aisle have repeatedly referred as a dumpster fire.
Yeah, I'm excited and anxious about all of those things, but some more mundane things are occupying my mind at this bleary, garbage hour (sorry dude, I'm hard-wired to be a night owl; ask my mom).
Such things as:
How will I get the amount of physical exercise sufficient to make my brain work the way it's supposed to?
Will my dogs (pictured above) miss me?
Will the shitty pair of beige wedges I brought suffice, or will they break on the first day?
How do I avoid carbs?
Plus, there's the whole thing about whether the fruits of my labor, fermented and carbonated, will constitute a good, crisp bottle of bubbly or the sickly sweet stuff that barely passes for a mimosa base as I cover the RNC as well as the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia next week.
But it's an absolute wonder that I get to, as Bowie would put it, turn and face the strange; to witness the two most important political events in the unprecedented, dumpster-fiery lead-up to November's election…and its possibly sickening aftermath (border wall…life imitating Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale because Berniebros never say die…).
Fortunately, I will have a small team of talented journalists with me to help capture the momentous events of the coming weeks, as one would Pokemon, I guess (by the way, if there's a Pokemon on Donald Trump's head, and we pray there will be, you will read about it here).
Well, shit. My flight is boarding. Hugs! See ya soon.
P.S. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter: @cl_tampabay.
This article appears in Jul 14-21, 2016.