How to get drunk at the airport / Can you make an airport bomb from chocolate, iPod wire and port wine?

Passing through the cute, harmless, relatively tiny Spokane airport on the way back to the goodly San Francisco bubble after spending a week and change up in the Pacific Northwest with the family for the holidays, entering the security checkpoint and of course doing my all-American duty and basically taking off all my clothes so as to help protect my country because, you know, it's Spokane. Islamo-fascist terrorists really hate Spokane.

Off came the jacket and the belt and the boots and the jewelry and out came the laptop and into about five plastic bins went everything, all the while figuring I'd zip right through, given how careful I'd been in my carry-on packing, nothing to raise any alarms and nothing to cause any sort of delay, no liquids and no lotions and no Astroglide travel packs and this time I even had the foresight to remove the tiny 1-inch Leatherman Squirt from my keychain (my third one — I keep forgetting) because everyone knows how easy it would be to hijack a goddamn jetliner by, say, threatening to give the pilot a really awful pedicure with that badass 1-inch nail file.

Except, oh holy hell no, something's amiss, they need to inspect my bag, probably something weird showing up in the scanner with my camera gear or the various rechargeable battery packs or maybe the handmade candles I'd received as a gift or ... well, it's airport security. Who the hell knows what it could be.

And suddenly, I saw it. The port. Oh holy dammit, that's right. Last minute of my of packing, I'd switched the new, sealed 375-milliliter bottle of 16-year-old vintage port wine from my checked suitcase over to my carry-on due to concern for the former's overall weight, somehow completely blocking out the no-liquids thing and despite all my careful packing and awareness just prior. My hand went to my forehead, and slapped. Idiot.

The security guard carried the bottle over to me, shaking his head, but in a nice way. "Sorry, this can't go." No kidding. Damn. What a waste.

I pondered my options: Lots of time before my flight, but no real way to check the bottle, no way to ship it to myself, and I wasn't about to call the sister who'd dropped me at the airport and was now well on her way to Seattle and who didn't even drink alcohol to tell her to come back to pick up a small bottle of really good booze, just so I didn't have to toss it.

I was ready to suggest the security guy take the port home and have a lovely new year, ready to extol the virtues of this particular not-at-all inexpensive Krohn 1991 vintage and say it wasn't no cheap swill, that he should maybe light a fire and sip it carefully after dinner and wouldn't that be nice, when he said the words I didn't expect to hear.

"You want to go have a few sips before you come back through?"

Wait, what?

I paused. This was cute little Spokane airport. There were no bars back down by the entrance, no restaurants or even little cafes (the few the airport had were all up beyond security), nothing but a sterile, bare-bones baggage claim and a handful of ticket counters back where he was gesturing and, beyond that, 19 degrees of bitter cold winter.

"But there's no bar down there," I stammered, momentarily confused and momentarily trying to be some sort of upstanding, law-abiding citizen. Or something. "You mean I can just swig an open container of booze out in the open? I don't need to be in some sort of designated bar area?" Duh.

He looked at me curiously, like I'd just returned from the jungles of Malaysia and had clearly lost all sense of how civilized society functioned. Then he shrugged, and smiled. "I don't think that matters. Up to you."

It was 11 a.m. I had two egg salad sandwiches, some spelt pretzels, a small bag of gourmet chocolate mints, a well-loaded iPod, a laptop. And an hour and a half. I didn't ponder for long. "Well hell, OK then."

I strolled back around and back down to the baggage claim area, found a seat in a quiet, empty corner, got comfortable, opened the first sandwich and peeled the foil from the port, popped the cork, and glanced around.

Horrible fluorescent lighting, random airport stragglers, assorted families picking up or dropping off, baby strollers and assorted screams and yelps and car horns and no one really caring about much of anything in the calm after the holiday storm.

I took my first big swig, and proceeded to enjoy one of the stranger, warmer, fuzzier late-morning lunches I've had in awhile.

It was pretty good port. At least, for 11 a.m. on a Saturday in an airport baggage claim. Dark, fruity, sticky and chocolatey and thick like murky dreams. After about the fifth sip, I had the profound insight that I was sharing this surreal moment with roughly one million other travelers worldwide who had equally (or rather, likely far more) obnoxious, annoying, unusual airport security tales to tell, from the profound to the silly to the stupid.

I recalled the story on the Associated Press newswires just before Christmas about the 64-year-old German genius who, furious at having his bottle of vodka yanked from his carry-on in a Nuremberg airport, decided to chug the entire bottle right there in line, thus guaranteeing himself a trip to the emergency room, permanent liver damage and charming international headlines.

Also, the tale I'd heard from my own mother of her friend who was returning from a vacation in Italy, a new bottle of limoncello lemon liqueur in her carry-on, and was stopped at a Milan airport checkpoint. Rather than toss the bottle, she headed for the nearest place available to enjoy a sip or two — the airport restroom.

In the restroom, she saw another woman standing over the sink, shaking, breathing heavily, trying to calm her nerves. The woman was, it turns out, terrified of flying.

Limoncello was promptly proffered, gratefully accepted. And so, for a few minutes, there they stood, chatting, laughing, drinking most of the bottle, the latter woman's nerves sufficiently marinated until she could fly and the former's sufficiently entertained so she'd have a tale to tell of the limoncello that never made it back home but that might have very well saved someone's sanity.

Wishing to remain upright and mostly coherent, I didn't finish my bottle. An elderly Spokanite sat down not far from me and I turned to him, asked if he was a fan of port wine. He looked at me oddly, said he'd never tried it before. I explained what it was, and my situation, showed him the half bottle remaining, told him this was premium stuff and might he like to take the rest home and kick back and perhaps sip a couple glasses after dinner with the wife in front of the fire and have an even happier new year? "Well sure," he said. "I'll try some of that. What the hell. Thanks very much."

And lo, the world shrinks, the year is off to a good start, and the terrorists lose again.

Mark Morford's latest book is 'The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism'. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is markmorford.com. For his yoga classes, workshops and retreats, click markmorfordyoga.com.

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