Some fleeting reflections on a plane flight which felt distinctly riddled with metaphors for life.
Each in the mask of their own molecule, perfumed scents flying unexpected lives.
Some sit in first class.
Some sit wedged between some others who were given unfortunate slices of life.
Some dealing with nascent life intentionally. Some intentionally but originally without intention. Some purely without intention.
The occasional, but honestly expected, bump.
The terrifying lightning bolt that extends its gnarled, oxygen-deprived blue finger down down down Crack Flash Silence.
A phone’s battery slowly dripping down, volume attenuates like receding hope.
Recline at your neighbor’s expense, although can you call them a neighbor if you can’t see them?
Which do you prefer, the window, the middle, the aisle? You’ll need to have been a passenger first if you want to strain and hold close a heavily informed opinion. With just one flight, paradox flies in your face.
It’s rare when you can really be connected to the world, that damned WiFi.
The shorter the plane ride, the more fortunate, although some of the shadier folks like the serenity and the seclusion. I’m inclined to think masochistic their desire for unending flight.
You are, however, a unique kind of masochist if you spend your time watching the seat-back embedded map. Oh my word does time crawl so, so slowly.
Tasteless things to chew on. Well, the crunch might be nice. But will those pretzels and nuts ever be filling? And it’s hard to know if your neighbor has an allergy. Well, it’s easy to know but hard to find out. By which I mean it’s hard or even undesirable to ask. So it’s hard to know if your neighbor has an allergy. Probably best to not think about it.
Lips go desert-dry. The experienced passenger spends not an airborne moment without Aquaphor on hand (in pocket), ready to bring comforting moisture to an uncomfortably de-fluidified set of lips.
Some of us fear this time terribly. Some get more used to it the longer they go, having begun as children with a freshly-born Build-A-Bear to hug crushingly tight to their chest. For some, the slightest hitches spell doom, although for the weathered travelers not much has the capacity to raise the heart-rate; well, perhaps on the furthest end of the spectrum some experience a heightened heart-rate out of excitement instead of terror. Turbulence has such a thrill, does it not?
The safety card is there if you choose to look. But if you choose to look you also might wind up rather unsatisfied with the crude drawings of plane entering water, earth, fire but surprisingly no air. The simplification seems sinister. So it is advisable to look at the safety card, but only to look and not to read or even glance at its contents. Proceed at your own risk; you must sign the waiver before takeoff.
The cup of styrofoamed liquid fidgets nervously, any unexpected (or even expected) bump has the potential to send it flying. All you can do is keep your arm a combination between loose and tense, absorb the shock however you can to spare first and foremost your new white t-shirt and beige pants, second and foresecond maybe your neighbor, maybe your neighbor’s electronics, maybe the maintenance man or woman in the afterlife who’s going to see the stain or maybe the person in life 2.0 who’s unfortunate enough to encounter a not-wiped-up-in-the-previous-life puddle of cold or warm but definitely staining liquid. Yes, this one’s a bummer.
All it takes is a glance across the aisle to see and become engrossed in one traveler’s head nestled into an adjacent traveler’s shoulder.
Would you like a plastic glass of complementary barely champagne? It really is a step up from the service we provide to other passengers sitting behind the strange curtain, which can only really be attributed to tradition if we’re to consider its implications in the context of modern progressive thought.
What’s more comforting, a pilot piloting or an autopilot piloting? Sorry, it was probably most comfortable not to even ask the question. C’est la vie.
Sometimes the plastic seat backs have vestiges of older days and past lives. Who on earth would be dialing, and who on earth would they dial?
The Amazon of the Sky Mall.
Perhaps on lengthier flights your shoes come off. It generally works. Sometimes the stink sucks for someone. But not always, so it’s not worth worrying. Unless the air-conditioning is cruelly cold, in which case you suddenly discover the magical and physics-breaking warming properties of shoes.
It’s amazing how the white but combustive noise blends into the background. It’s amazing how money can pay for its mutability. But it’s not muting. It’s antithetical matching. You match the noise of life’s engine with money then spend money to pipe more sound that’s elegantly composed and hopefully overtakes the unquestionably chaotic grumble sitting just outside the double-paned plastic that sometimes, somehow, contains an asphyxiated insect inside.
The bathroom line. The puzzle played by puzzled people who puzzle over where to stand to avoid never-acknowledged but always-cogitated unfortunate and awkward contact between body parts that in another context shouldn’t touch unless there’s mutual consent to call it dry-humping.
It’s anyone’s guess what the bathroom will be like. Sometimes it’s an achy yellow. No, the light. Sometimes it’s a party-bus blue. Those are the best. They really do accentuate the cheek bones in front of the mirror. It leaves you wishing that damned WiFi would work so you could snap a picture and send it to friends and maybe if you’re feeling bold to an other of profoundly nerve-wracking but adrenergic significance.
As a man with a bladder full of tepid airline coffee everyone drinks to combat the low air pressure, you curse evolution for neglecting the penis bone and curse Darwin for even incepting you in the first place with the curse-able concept of evolution, because in ignorance man finds bliss. You are, of course, a phallic pendulum subject not just to gravity but also to the buffeting and differentially temperature’d air on which this flying life floats.
And as a woman you curse the lack of penis bone, and you curse the lack of a lack of a penis as you wonder what on earth you’re to do with the material science marvel of a toilet seat, two pancaked planes machined with precision: plastic, and urine.
And there are mile-high fantasies.
That damned sound of retribution as you press the button and suck away your waste. You don’t actually know where it goes; you secretly hope it gets dumped out from 30K+ feet and you don’t really mind whether or not it disintegrates in the air before landing on what’s likely farmland (because that’s what most of the land is like; empty except for things that keep us from being empty). Maybe you secretly or not secretly hope you’re unexpectedly over a metropolis and the air failed to do its dissolution job. That would be comical.
Perhaps you’ve been bestowed with the either very-minimally or very-maximally existentially taxing duty of sitting next to an emergency exit row. At some point you’re required to give some sort of verbal confirmation that you’re willing and able to perform. In the minimal case, you potentially pay one action potential’s worth of attention and concern. In the maximal case, your bestowed responsibility precludes the other experiences of this flight from shining in their glory and horror.
Ah, then the hunger seeps in. Of course there’s not much to do about it unless you planned beforehand or don’t mind the packaged items of questionable origin – as a rule of thumb, nothing so flawlessly replicable ought to be ingested.
And of course, we can’t forget the ambition. The bag made extra-heavy with books. And if operating systems bore weight, the operating system bent down extra low under the pressure of many and heavy-worded documents. But, laughs the low air pressure. Closes the eyes. Drifts, drifts, drifts...
The ascent and descent are inevitable. Usually harmless, occasionally traumatic if you’ve been granted permission to have a cold or otherwise compromised sinuses. Every seat-back has an icepick for your ear, in case your request for a cold was approved. And a jolly strongman whose sole mission in life is to swing that pick with precision bounded by one half the diameter of your ear canal. Those, I would submit, are the most fun flights.
If you chose the more reflective of the seats, and can see out the window, and clouds decided not to come today, and your vision is sufficiently good, and your neck sufficiently flexible, maybe you get a glimpse of the hyper-urban super structures and the other super structures and patterns and fluidics that underlie them. Maybe you, for a moment, reach a point of ultimate understanding. You perceive a level of abstraction attainable only to the Gods. Note Bene that it’s the Western norm to consider God a deity residing in the sky.
It is, of course, only fitting that even granted all the above Bernoulli probabilities resulting in Heads, you reach clarity primarily on the descent. And even that is more beautiful when night obscures the colorful details and all you see are the lights.