You mind if I let you in on a little secret? You seem pretty trustworthy, based on the image I have of you in my mind right now, where you are a talking polar bear who somehow knows how to use a computer to read blogs, instead of eating penguins. Here’s my dirty secret, my trustworthy arctic friend. I have never flown in an airplane before. 33 years old and not one single solitary flight. That has been what’s defined me as a person for the last three-and-some decades. Yessir, I have never flown before.
Until today.
I am writing this blog to you from however many feet in the air airplanes go (Is it a million? It feels like a million. I’m afraid to open the window.) and I just have to say, it is not terrible, or at least not as terrible as physical pain and/or death, and will you excuse me for just a second? I have a thing I have to do. I’ll be right back.
GYYAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!! AYAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH! OHMYGAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!
Hmm. Weird that I typed my screaming out, instead of just screaming. I’ll leave out the part about the peeing.
Anyway, I’ve already flown from Bismarck to Minneapolis, and now I am flying back in the direction I came from towards Seattle, so when I go over Bismarck I’ll be sure to wave. Please wave back, so I won’t feel foolish. And also, if my plane appears to be on fire in any way, could you please let me know somehow by leaving a comment? Because I can’t see if the plane is on fire right now, and it is driving me crazy.
So here’s everything I know about flying:
Close confinement equals conversation. On my first flight, there were only two seats per each side of the aisle, which means you sat immediately next to a stranger for the flight, in case you forgot to bring someone else with you, which I did. By necessity, since you are now as close to another human being as you are capable of being without marrying and/or intercoursing them, you must now become best friends. I had a flight-long conversation with a very nice gentleman from Wisconsin who was a printer and had a friend who oversees Channing Tatum’s production company. During our hour together, we had a long, easy conversation about families and politics and writing and Halloween candy. I even just got an email from him, which is nice, because I like pen pals. And in every row behind me and in front of me, the same exact thing was happening, with total stranger bonding over the fact that they were practically sitting in each other’s laps. So, the smaller your plane is, the more likely you are to make friends.
Non-close confinement equals no conversation. On my current plane, there is now three seats per aisle, and the middle seat is, in most rows, unoccupied. Without that same immediacy, there is a strange amount of tension in the air, broken up only by the occasional cough of people with diseases that I will soon have. In my aisle is a younger girl who appears to enjoy goth clothing and dyed hair, who has been working on some kind of rope braid necklace which appears to be very well made. I have yet to say one word to her, nor her to me. Maybe that would change if I sidled up next to her in the empty seat, but it’s a chance I’m not willing to take not currently being a weirdo. So here we all sit with out space and our realization that at any given moment, we might all fall out of the sky and die together, but before then we will all remain quiet, because we are all desperately afraid of each other.
Turbulence sucks. There is some happening right now and I do not enjoy it. I want to scream and cry, but there is still a good deal of flying left to be done and I don’t want the thing that brings all of my fellow plane inhabitants together being their shared laughing and pointing.
Free drinks! Did you know they give you things to drink on airplanes? And that you don’t have to pay for them? And pretzels! I almost forgot the pretzels! They are also free, and they are awesome. I like when I don’t have to pay for things, almost as much as I enjoy continuing to live past today.
Denial rules the day. If you have your window closed and you pretend hard enough, you can fool yourself into thinking that the plane is not flying, but rather is driving on the ground to your destination, and that sometimes it goes off road and gets a bit bumpy, but you should still be okay, because even if you do run into anything you are in a plane and planes are very big and mostly indestructible. That is a good thing to think about, rather than that you are in a giant hunk of metal that is somehow able to leave the ground and that if even one thing goes wrong you fall out of the sky and into the ground at a high rate of speed.
Pretzels. Did I already mention the pretzels? I need to think about the pretzels right now.
I don’t enjoy children that aren’t my own. There’s a kid who keeps yelling for SpongeBob in my section of the plane, and I want to tell him that SpongeBob can’t hear him, because he’s not on this flight and also is a cartoon character. But his mother looks mean and I was already not all that great at fighting on the ground, so I’ll just let him continue to believe that if he screams loud enough at SpongeBob that he will eventually get an answer that isn’t his mother beating me up.
Okay, so we’ve determined now that my previous life choice of not flying was a correct one and this is probably my last ever post. It’s been great being both a blogger and alive, and I hope that you will all remember me as a great person even though I clearly was not. Thanks for reading, and I’m going to go see if I can operate an air sick bag.
Bismarck resident Erik Hagen is the author of the SodBlog and AAAAAAHHHHAHHHHHAAAHHHHH!! Send him emails he’ll never read to or visit his website he already wasn’t updating on a regular basis but now really won’t be at sodblog.com.
Erik,
You are right, Denial is Key!! You have made me feel a lot better about flying by myself on Sunday. Hope you make it in one piece and enjoy your trip.
Having survived my ordeal with most of me still intact (everything except for my innocence), I can tell you that your likelihood of surviving is quite good. Just don’t do what I did on my flight back home, when I started to imagine the ground underneath just my seat in the plane breaking away and me falling 30,000 feet to my death, which elicited a small but noticeable panic attack when I started trying to choke out the guy sitting next to me. Actually, that was kind of a crappy thing for me to mention. Forget I said anything! I could delete it, but I’ve come too far already.
Thanks for introducing me to a new gerund: intercoursing.
I’m 36 years old and I have never flown in my life. I have had opportunities to fly, but the threat of terrorism coupled with the possibility of mechanical malfunctions are more than enough to make me shy away from it permanently if I can help it. People usually give me the line about the percentage of car accidents vs. airplane accidents, but logic suggests that’s simply because there are more cars on the road than there are planes in the sky! I don’t have a cell phone either… I’d rather not get brain cancer just to hear friends tell me about their latest divorce or yeast infection.