Airplane Experience
A chapter from my new book.
Grown men playing phone games and Facebook. It was coming but I looked the other way.
This was a terrible idea—blasting across the country in a hollow metal bird. There’s a 50/50 chance we pull through. Any second now, a bolt is gonna break and wing rip off. Wouldn’t that be something. I don't want to die alone. If I die with these people in a firey crash then I didn’t die alone, I died with overweight weirdos offering me chewing gum.
Air travel is safe, but if you listen to your limbic system, it whispers otherwise.
I’m in the middle seat between two unborns. My seat belt is not fastened, tray table not stowed, shoes are off, screen is off. No, I don’t want caffeine, alcohol or sugar. No, I don't want your tap water. I’m drinking Icelandic glacial water pH 8.4.
98% of my molecules are water, 66% by weight. H2O molecules are light. I digress.
Butts glued to seats and screens glued to faces. This is a common reality, but it’s rare for me to see it on display en masse. Every now and then I glimpse a commercial and avert my eyes. I’m endlessly bewildered that people's brains are fixed on them. After not watching television for, I don’t know how long, this is a bizarre experience.
“Sir, snack?”
The gay snack guy is interrupting my thoughts. A homophobe is someone who’s scared of gays. I’m not scared, it’s just not my preference.
The snack gay offers me carbs, carbs or carbs. The guy to my left, with a scraggly beard drinking Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and playing a game while he watches a car movie, gets “Cheez-Its.”
The old woman to my left is drinking Minute Maid apple juice. I turn on the light to read the label. It has 37 grams of sugar which is almost the government recommended daily dose. She gets plantain chips—dried sugar to go with her liquid sugar.
The guy behind me orders red wine at 9am. Even the gay guy is surprised.
The woman is doing email on her iPad. I watch her enter her SSN to claim her prize.
She gets a lot of emails from her friends and deletes them unless they have a cat photo. Lots of photos of cats. She saves them all. There are countless emails about IRAs. I cannot believe how many emails Judith has. The Netflix email got deleted without reading it, but then she closed email and opened Netflix, so I guess it worked. The great Pavlov experiment burns on.
I’m eating Oregon hazelnuts that I bought in New Hampshire. I’m bringing them back to Oregon. They’re as excited as I am.
I'm swimming in silence, watching other people’s TV screens. It’s hard to believe that sunlight turned itself into TV shows. Sunlight heated hydrogen, and eventually those molecules started converting sunlight into television shows. Ain’t that something: from the sun, the TV shows are formed.
Scraggly is sending an email. It’s to four people.
Subject: innovation campaigns.
He addresses them as ‘Gang’.
He writes platitudes.
He considered an emoji but didn’t, thank god.
I’m staring at a black screen watching a reflection of me chewing nuts. My beard looks good.
Scraggly’s phone has six cameras.
He’s reading a book. The section title is “accommodating rules.”
He finally flips the page. There’s a list of “key-points”.
“Rules, Hidden Uncertainty, Rules are Glue”
Judith fell asleep. I’m trapped. It isn't the first time a sleeping woman has trapped me.
Scraggly is flying through the pages now. Not even reading, really. The next section is “Different People are Different.”
Cross this book off the list.
The next section is “Another brick in the wall.”
He closes the book and cracks open a big bag of M&M’s.
I wonder if this dude is watching me write about him. Does he know? This mundane plane experience made it into the book because it’s my main exposure to these zoo animals.
I’m doing yoga in the plane’s lavatory. Downward dog is a tough one. I’ve decided to stay here for three hours.
Tonight I’ll be at a dinner with people who think they’re blood-related to me. Our genetics are different. It’s not them I’m scared of, it's me. What am I going to do to these people who are perfectly happy asleep in their dreams?
There’s a small animal making animal noises. I’ve come to the conclusion that bringing 1-3 year-olds on a plane will incur a $5,000 fee.
“Excuse me,” I approach the despondent parent. “Excuse me ma’am, is there an estimated time that this is going to end?”
“Hopefully soon.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Excuse me child, what’s your name?”
“Caden.”
“How many fingers is this?”
“Four.”
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s time to be quiet because if we make another noise, the pilot will get scared and crash the plane, and we all die. Do you want us to all die?”
No response.
Scraggly’s phone has a CNN headline: “Liberal fury over Supreme Court ruling.”
Maybe that’s what this kid is screaming about.
The kid screams and Judith jumps in her chair.
“Sounds like a murder,” I say. My first words in five hours.
“I’m sorry for the parents,” she says.
I stand up to address the audience.
“I have extra xanax if anyone wants one. Or ten.”
I hope the plane lands better than that joke did. I look for a parachute under the seat. No dice.
Scraggly is on Chapter 9: “The Greatest System of All.” I wonder what it is. I don’t.
The airline tries to sell us credit cards, then it’s over.
This is a chapter in my book, All Outcomes Are Acceptable. The paperback version is on Amazon and is now available for $16.99. Readers are loving it. I got this lovely email from reader: Just letting you know that this was an excellent read and I enjoyed every minute of it!
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Have a great rest of your day.
Photos
Music
What I’m Reading
Spiritual Enlightenment, Damnedest Thing, by Jed McKenna.
Reading my paperback book, All Outcomes Are Acceptable, for the third time. It still hits. I set out to write a book that I would enjoy re-reading. I did it.
Don’t Wait by
. Love reading and meeting writers in my region.
What I’m Listening To
My friends Malcolm and Simone on their podcast. I’m single right now, by the way. I’m writing about the dating situation. Solving the dating problem will drop once I’ve solved it.
Support with a one-time payment via Buy Me a Coffee or Venmo @Chris-James-31
😂😂😂
Carbs - and processed carbs, too - is why air travel with children is miserable. We are the ‘richest’ malnourished nation, ever, since the Dawn of Agricultural Civilization.
We flew four infant-to-preschoolers from LA to Tokyo in 2015. And we were in the front row (with the bassinet) (Singapore Airlines).
We were in the front row, and *everybody* (so it seemed) was already seated, so *everybody* watched us put our bags in the overhead compartments & buckle our seat belts. You could feel the collective apprehension 😂😂😂
But our kids were angels - because they were all eating very low to ultra-low carb 👍🙂, and high in healthful animal fat.
What’s still shocking to me, each ‘n’ every time, is how ticket agents & stewardesses & passengers, too, go out of their way to tell us - basically - how surprised they are by the children’s good behavior.
That’s just another way of saying that our society is sick, both body & mind, unimaginably sick compared to my Older Boomer parents’ childhood experience of the USA. And just another way of saying that our sick society weighs on me, emotionally. It’s heavy.
Thanks,
Gerald
Very relatable and a funny perspective! Appreciate you reading my last essay as well!