Disclaimer: the following post is going to contain a
ridiculous amount of exaggerations and embellishments. It’s all for the humor,
pals. < /disclaimer >.
I like flying, I tell myself, in that way that you tell a 4
year they like broccoli. “I do?” they
ask, and then they try it and they hate it and the seeds of betrayal are sown.
I like flying, I say, but in reality, the only thing I like about flying is
going somewhere, and getting there fast. I happen to know for a fact or
possible hoax that more people are killed every year by donkeys than in plane
crashes, but even with that reassuring statistic, I am just not logically able
to justify climbing into a giant metal tube and zooming off into the ozone with
only the wind holding me up. “Egads!” maybe you’re saying, “Everything in that
sentence is not accurate!” Listen, as far as I know, that’s the way it
basically goes. So, for me, with my level of understanding, this is crazy town
up here.
At this moment I am 1 jillion feet above earth, traveling at
a rate of about 700 miles an hour, held in space and time by wind currents and
a 70’s seat belt. It’s not that I’m actually afraid, it’s more that it just
seems like an absurd risk. Still, when it’s a tossup between a couple of days
in a minivan or a couple of hours in a cosmic pencil case, I guess I’m cool
with taking the risk. It’s mostly the takeoff and landing that bother me, that
tenuous moment when the pilot has to wonder if he’ll pull it off again, or if
gravity will finally have its revenge. During those moments, I just close my
eyes and think, I am in a van, a bumpy van. I am in a boat that is sailing
merrily along and TIPPING PERILOUSLY ON ITS SIDE AM I RIGHT WITH GOD oh, I am
in a bus, a bus.
I think about lots of things up here, though. Maybe it’s the
proximity to God that makes me reflective, but I think about things. Like the
lavatory. In a plane, I know that logically,
there is some kind of tank that contains the what-not, and that when you flush,
the toilet does not actually open up and reveal the sky. Still, I think about
it every time, about being sucked out of the plane via the lavatory receptacle,
if you catch my drift. I’m deep, I won’t apologize for that.
Another mystery of life and humanity is the SkyMall catalog,
which I love deeply. Someday, when my books have become smash hits and then
movies, or maybe if I invent a diaper and milk drive-through, like Starbucks,
only useful and become fabulously wealthy,
then maybe I will buy things like a Massage Helmet , in chrome or fuschia, or a
Hug Sofa, that is shaped like a giant supine teddy bear and wraps you in its
furry sofa arms. BTW, I invented those things, just now while I was typing. But
they would totally work in a SkyMall. Or maybe some ClimateGlasses, where there
is a superimposed image of your favorite landscape, like mountains or a beach,
so you can look for the Great Value Nasal Tissues with a lovely scene in the
horizon. I could go on all day, I could. Especially because typing all this has
almost made me forget that I am a pawn in a science experiment to see if
humanity can be suspended in midair and propelled from location to location at
a staggering pace.
30 minutes to landing. All is well, all is well, all will be
well.
Oh man, YOU'VE HEARD THE DONKEY STATISTIC TOO.
ReplyDeleteFlying makes me think too. Last year, I had a layover in Iceland and it was so beautiful to fly over that I thought to myself, "If this plane goes down right now and I die, I hope my family knows that I was happy to die in Iceland." Later that evening, I had another layover at JFK. There was a thunderstorm, when I was landing, in the pitch dark. All I could think about was that I did NOT want to die in New York in a thunderstorm at night. No way! That would be horrible! "God, if you were going to take me today, You should have done it in Iceland."
ReplyDelete