I need to vent.
Today is March 19th 2014, a day when the NSA is secretly keeping our emails and texts, the IRS can go practically proctological on us, and I can’t even get through TSA without feeling violated. We have satellites that can see people pick their nose from thirty miles up in space, a telescope that still transmits from outside the solar system, and people living halfway to the moon. So, the idea of a plane being able to just disappear gives me a severe case of the howling fantods.
Seriously, we’re talking 250 people in a big effin’ jet that has Rolls Royce engines, which signal every turbine turn and fuel burn. Nearly everyone on that plane probably carried a cell phone and the jet had a black box that is about as indestructible as the fruitcake I got on Christmas.
I don’t know if this is some international spy ring, or a terrorist group or pilot suicide or perhaps some ridiculous David Copperfield trick, but I don’t want to see planes disappearing, It’s not cool.
When I get on a plane, I want to feel cramped in my seat and eat shitty, hard-to-open bags of seven peanuts, and receive half-filled flimsy plastic cups that spill with the slightest turbulence. I want to pee in a Hobbit’s closet of a bathroom, and hear the ungodly sucking sound of my urine being shot out into the atmosphere. I want to have someone’s overweight ass in my face as they stand up and reach for the luggage in the overhead bin because they forgot to remove that stupid magazine prior to sitting down and now feel that it’s ok to inconvenience me in order to find out which celebrity got a DUI this week – frankly, I don’t really want this but since it’s going to happen, I might as well mention it. I want to rub up against complete strangers who haven’t showered in at least a month and who want to talk while I’m trying to sleep and who think that the perfect time to climb over me is any goddam time they feel like it. I want my seat kicked incessantly by a four year old and to hear his baby brother’s pteradactyl-like shriek from take-off to landing. I want to eat my food off a hot plate with plastic-wrapped silverware and spill salt and pepper on my food in ways that evoke images of an avalanche and then take tiny bites of really disgusting beef stroganoff before heading off into a too-rapid bowel movement. I want to get my head slammed by a drink cart when I nod off into the aisle because the cabin’s air-to-ovygen ratio is somewhere south of Pi. I want to bang down on tiny wheels and hear screeching brakes to remind me that a few two-inch discs are supposed to stop this many-tonned airliner. I want to stand at my seat for twenty minutes while short women attempt to reach their baggage and while the passenger population navigates the insane labyrinth that is plane exiting. I want to hear that well-coiffed and well-uniformed stewardess say “Thank you for flying with us” while the satisfactorily- feminine male airline attendant winks at me. I want to see the cockpit doors open as I exit and make my way to the horribly unattractive terminal where I can discover which of my bags have been lost.
What I don’t want to happen is this:
That is not cool!
bewareofdogmadotnet 