Flying

I'm going to be on a plane, soon. Oh joy, oh bliss.

Flying is, as Mike Warnke notes, an unnatural act. You're getting in a hollow metal tube and you're letting a complete stranger take you to 35.000 feet and travel in excess of five hundred miles an hour.

"If there should be an emergency, please fasten your seat belt."
"What emergency?"
"Well, we could fall out of the sky."
"Oh, yeah, then it'll be a real help to be strapped to the wreckage."

It seems like every comedian has an airplane routine. There's a reason for that: flying is frightening, and comedy is, like so much else, rooted in insecurity.
Personally, my problem is takeoffs. Actually, I'm not sure what my problem is, anymore, since I seem to have developed vertigo in the last five years or so. But takeoffs are just brutal. They wouldn't bother me so much if they didn't always happen at 110-degree angles.  (A few weeks ago I had a dream that I was blasting off in something like a space shuttle and I almost puked. Wouldn't that have been fun to explain to my darling spattered wife. Yes, love, I was somewhere over the Pacfic when my stomach let go...)

I haven't flown much within living memory. There was a trip to Florida in '84, Venezuela in '86, and Vancouver in 2003. That flight out to Vancouver I remember quite well. There was a half-hour delay on our Air Canada flight out of Toronto because the nose wheel had to be changed, which left me picking my nose and calculating angles and terminal velocities.  (Do they have to call airports "terminals"?) When we finally left the ground, a helpful little screen informed me that we were rising at over a hundred meters a second. This was information I did not need. I clutched my seat with white knuckles, as if that would help me in any way when the plummet came. We had just levelled out and seat belt sign had gone off when it came back on, prompting another workout of my sphincter muscles, and we hit the only turbulence of the flight. Which was, in hindsight, minor. In hindsight. (We hit an air pocket somewhere over northern Florida in '86 and I'm pretty sure they heard my scream from the ground. In fact, it might still be echoing around.) Turbulence is just not fair. You can't see it coming and every shake, rattle and roll leaves you wondering if the next one is going to bat you out of the blue and into the black.

(Yeah, my mind refuses to stay where it's put, in that safe, upright position).

We were in row 20, directly over the port wing; Eva had the window seat, which was a-ok by me. She'll get it this time, too: I don't want to have to look. The guy in row 19 had his seat on a yo-yo. That'll come in handy should it happen again: it'll be one more thing to grab. Breakfast was surprisingly delicious: blueberry pancakes and hot oranges.  I'm not sure how wise eating on the plane will be this time. We'll be at the back of the plane, and if my experience on roller coasters is any indication, this means we'll be rising at a 135-degree angle. Everything in my body is going to be shifting downwards and seeking egress at great speed. I think I should undergo colonic cleansing a few days before the flight, what say?

I like to read things like this that claim the survival rate for airplane crashes is 95.7%. Flying is supposedly the safest means of transport there is. (And the back of the plane is the best place to be.) Just goes to show you again, Ken, that the stuff you dream up in your mind's eye almost never comes true. I'd really like to find a way to stop imagining the worst (or in this case, the wurst: I'd be people pâté).

Can I just say I'd like for there to be bullet trains everywhere? It's really not the speed, it's the actual off the ground aspect of flying that bothers me. That may be irrational: I seem to be an irrational being, sometimes. I have two friends who between them have flown to the moon and back a few times, I think. They're still here. I will be too.

I hope.

Fasten your seat belts.