flying into the depths

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.