Three days before Christmas I showed up at the airport to make my annual 3,000-mile holiday journey back East. Ten a.m. and already the terminal resembled a low-grade soccer riot. I found an available kiosk and did my best to satisfy it. I plugged my passport into the passport slot and answered the requisite questions. (No, kiosk, I do not have any flammable paints, or crossbows, or dry ice in my luggage.) Once the skeptical kiosk was more or less satisfied, it kicked out one of what should have been two boarding passes. Hmm, I thought. I’ll have to get this minor oversight resolved when I change planes in Toronto. I didn’t know it at the time, but this would be the first harbinger that my bicoastal journey would not go smoothly this year.

The second harbinger occurred a few minutes later. The conveyer belt that was designed to spirit away our luggage quit working. This resulted in an instant bottleneck of sighing, toe-tapping travelers. If there’s a more melodramatic lot than The Somewhat Put Upon Traveler I don’t know what it is. A portly mechanic sporting a toolbox arrived. A few people applauded. The mechanic, enjoying his moment in the sun, took a bow. Without hesitating, he crawled along the luggage belt. He and his toolbox disappeared into the hole where the luggage was supposed to go.

A hush fell over the crowd. A few travelers looked at their watches, timing the man’s disappearance. One guy let out a whistle. “He’s been down there a long time,” he said. A woman said, “Maybe someone should go in after him.”

We never saw the mechanic again. He might still be down there for all I know.

This baggage hole, which now had a taste for man-flesh, was out of service. An Air Canada employee appeared and told us so. Then she began reconfiguring the maze of elastic ropes around me and the other toe-tapping travelers. She did this with an amazing amount of skill, clicking this rope here and that rope there. Old pathways were blocked; new pathways opened. The new maze now led us to another nearby baggage hole. This one was still operational.

I make my living as a D-grade television personality. When I’m waiting in line in a public place like this, I will sometimes wonder if I’m in any “danger” of being recognized. It happens once in awhile. An example: when I was at the airport a few weeks earlier a man posted a Tweet saying that he’d spotted me. “Scott C. Jones!” the man wrote. “Saw you at the airport. Wanted to say hi but you looked angry about something.” Ever since I was a boy people have been quick to inform me that I “look angry about something.” The truth is this: I’m not angry about anything. Not usually. If left to its own devices, my face, for some reason, settles into a natural state that can accurately be perceived as an angry-about-something face. It’s what it does. I’ve made my peace with the fact that I can’t do anything about it. I’ll sometimes catch a glimpse of myself in a Men’s Room mirror and think, What’s that guy’s problem? Oh, that’s me. Jesus.

I made a study of my fellow travelers, to see if any of them were visibly excited to find a celebrity in their midst. I tried to look fun and approachable. I noticed the lingering gaze of one particular man. He was bald and short. He looked a little anemic, like a miniature version of the vampire, Nosferatu. The man wore a baseball hat low on his bare head and held a squirming two-year-old child in his arms. He looked familiar to me. When I looked back at him, he quickly averted his eyes. Hello there fan of my esoteric TV shows, I thought. I knew how things would play out from here. Once he’d worked up enough courage, the man would approach me and request an autograph as well as a cell-phone photo. He would tell me that he watches the shows every day. There was also a 75-percent chance that he would ask me what my co-host Victor Lucas was like in “real life.” (“So nice!” I always say. Which he is.) Then the man would launch into a detailed explanation as to why 1993’s Shining Force II for the Sega Genesis is without a doubt the greatest video game ever made.

The man was still two maze-turns behind me. I placed my bag on the conveyer belt. The fan, I figured, would catch up with me on the far side of security.

The Christmas trip, of all the trips I make each year, is by far the most difficult. It involves a full day of travel on both ends. It requires a beat-the-clock, terminal-traversing plane change in either Chicago or Toronto. This year I’d selected Toronto, which was a decision I would soon come to regret. The trip leaves a dent in my credit card balance that takes months to square. (Seats range from $1,500 to $2,000 this time of year.) The final leg involves an airplane that’s so small I can practically smell the Axe Body Spray on the pair of pimply-faced teenaged pilots who are attempting to pilot the plane. The worst aspect of the trip is that it requires me to do something that goes against one of the core tenets of my personal beliefs. It requires me to go to a place—the airport at Christmas—where other people are also trying to go. If I’ve learned anything from two decades as a city dweller it’s that life is easier if you make an effort to anticipate where all the other people are going to go and then not go there. This is why you’ll find me eating in an empty restaurant at five o’clock in the afternoon or watching Captain Phillips in an empty theater at the 10:45 a.m. showing.

My brother lives in a large house at the end of a long driveway in the woods of rural Central New York. The house is located less than a mile from the high school that he and I graduated from. You can see an honest-to-God babbling brook through the snow-shagged tree-line in his backyard. Deer and wild turkeys and a river otter with a patchy coat occasionally come out of the woods.  These creatures look around for a minute, maybe take a crap in the snow, and then return to the woods again. Magic. My brother has two beautiful daughters, a terrific wife, a good job. His sports teams are the Dallas Cowboys and the Philadelphia Phillies. His beer of choice is Bud Light, which he always purchases in money-saving 30-packs. He’s funnier and smarter and better looking than I’ll ever be. I’m proud as hell of the guy.

My mom and dad are self-proclaimed snow-birds. They spend their summers in Upstate New York, but retreat to a microscopic one-bedroom apartment in Florida for the winter months. They make the long drive North for Christmas. The end goal of this decade-long tradition is for all of us to hole up in brother’s snow-bound house for 72 hours in the name of rekindling some of the old holiday magic.

So I pack a suitcase and go. Because this is what middle-aged men of modest means who do not have wives of their own, or families of their own, must do.  We eventually become the Weird Uncle Who Sleeps In The Basement.

A few days earlier, while walking home from the office through Gastown, I was crossing an intersection when a driver piloting an oversized pickup truck—this thing was as big as a space station—was attempting to  make a lefthand turn prematurely. He wheeled his front bumper flush with my knees. As a longtime pedestrian—I haven’t owned a vehicle in almost 20 years—one of my peeves is when drivers feel the need to menace me in exactly this way. Look, I understand you’re in a hurry to get to wherever you need to get to. But you’re sitting inside a vehicle that has adjustable heating and a radio. I’m out here in the cold, trying to get home before the really heavy rain starts to fall. If anyone is entitled to the right of way it’s me, 100-percent of the time.

I did what I always do in this moment: I paused, turned, and, facing the driver, gave him a look before stepping out of his vehicle’s path. Canadians, being the overly polite people they tend to be, usually shrug helplessly and mouth the words “I’m so sorry!” through the windshield before driving on. This driver did not do that. What this driver did was this: he turned down his window, leaned out so that I could see his bald head, and he said, “Move out of the way or so help me God next time I will run you over.”

I’m no fan of conflict. I don’t wake up in the morning and seek it out. I haven’t been in a fight since the fifth grade when another kid and I windmilled our arms at one another for about 10 seconds after a tense game of kickball. So, to my complete surprise, I found myself giving it right back to the guy. “Are you blind? Do you not see me walking here? Do you have no understanding of rudimentary traffic laws? The pedestrian, no matter what, always has the right of way. Always.”

His face, which hung out the window, turned red. He was chewing gum, his jaw working. He stopped chewing and spat his gum at me. The gum didn’t travel very far at all, falling far short of me, the intended mark. “If I see you around here again, I will beat your ass,” he said. Then he began to drive away.

Again, not sure what got into me that day, I was somehow giving it right back to him before I had a chance to stop myself. “Hey, buddy,” I said. “I’m standing here right now. And look at you! You’re the coward who’s driving away.”

That cinched it. He braked hard, then wheeled his truck over to the far side of the road. He put the truck into park. He got out and took a step towards me. We stood there looking at each other, me on the sidewalk, him standing in the open driver’s-side door on the far side of the road. He was rail-thin and a full head shorter than I was. He was breathing hard. I could see in his eyes that he was afraid.

I was afraid too. I couldn’t believe how quickly my otherwise peaceful walk home had turned into this. This goddamned city, I thought. I started laughing. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said.  “That’s enough. I don’t want any trouble here. That’s the end of it. Get back into your truck and go home.”

He continued to glare at me. Some of the fear went out of his glare. He seemed satisfied with himself. Then he turned, and without a word, he got back into his truck. I think he was probably as relieved as I was. His window was still turned down. I said, “Enjoy your holidays!” Just to be a smart-ass. He looked straight ahead, not acknowledging my phony holiday wishes. He put his space station back into gear, squawked the tires and sped off.

There was no doubt about it: the angry driver, of course, was the miniature Nosferatu who was standing two maze-turns behind me in the luggage line. He was looking at me not because he watched my TV shows and was a fan. He was looking at me because he too must have been recalling our Gastown standoff from 48 hours earlier. And, as we would both soon learn, not only were we both in the same luggage line on the same day at the airport, but—it’s a Christmas miracle—we were also on the same flight to Toronto.

More to come.