the smoking sections in the terminals at the Atlanta Airports are crazy throwbacks. They'd probably be gone by now were it not for 9/11's crazy disruptive effect on airport security and not letting you leave your terminal during layovers and shit like that— a glass box full of octogenarians and businessmen, all leathery from their habit, the place smells like many different things depending on your past: a VFW hall, an AA meeting place, an old greasy spoon, a pawn shop, a grandmother's condo. The room seems purposely built to concentrate the second hand smoke, and to provide a save viewing area for more health-conscious sorts. The floor is hardened linoleum, the seats are those banks of injection molded plastics that show discoloration from where cigs have burned with a faint coffee colored ghost. The ashtrays are those odd egg-shaped, lever actuated that hide butts beneath until they pile up too high.
Its almost as though it remains unchanged not out of love, but because making improvements would necessitate some request to a bureaucracy that has a modern mandate to stamp out such Jurassic habits. As gross as it is, it is truly the last little corner of air travel that is authentically of the era when flying was a cool 60's thing that only cool people did. Air travel now is like how I always imagined bus travel was. That, of course, was until I actually visited a bus terminal, which was most similar to a dog track. Maybe that's why they call it greyhound.