Tag Archives: flying

Flying sucks

I was on an airplane this weekend for the first time in over a year. Flying sucks, but what are you going to do? Instead of letting your insane fears dictate the course of your days, slowly making you too scared even of leaving the house, you’ve got to deal with unpleasant stuff now and then if you want to get to experience other aspects of life which are slightly more pleasant than your regular routine at home.

But yeah, flying really does suck. Getting to the airport several hours early, everybody complains about that. And TSA, I can’t believe that all of those security measures are necessary. The taking off of the belt and shoes, the placing my computer in its own separate plastic bin apart from everything else. As if the giant, full-body X-Ray machine wasn’t serious enough, every once in a while you get some blue-shirted not-quite cop pull you aside for some extra interrogation. You’re going to check me? For what? I don’t have anything worth checking out. You’re wasting everyone’s time giving me, or anybody else here a pat down, all right, I feel stupid, and I hope that you feel stupid running your hands up my legs, because it’s not necessary.

I’m getting carried away. The seats. I get it, airplane travel is expensive, but it’s not nearly as expensive as it would be if the entire industry weren’t super subsidized by the government. So you can’t really say anything, those seats are totally selling themselves. Still, I have a huge issue with companies that, as a matter of business, as a matter of making money, constantly look for ways to take more money out of your pocket, to charge you for services that used to be free.

I’m talking about everything, the two bags that you used to be able to check suddenly subtracted to one, the in flight entertainment that now costs something like two bucks a program. It’s bullshit, all of it. Imagine if a restaurant tried to pull a stunt like that? Extra ice? Certainly. I can offer you five cubes for thirty-five cents, and I only take credit or debit. That place would be out of business in a heartbeat.

I’m talking about the exit rows. At a pretty-tall six-foot-five, I used to have it down to a science: getting to the airport early, talking with an airline agent, them happily giving me the emergency row, and those sweet, precious, three or four extra inches of leg room that come along with the understanding that you’re willing to assist in the unlikely event of an emergency.

But that’s gone too. Some d-bag executive probably got wind of the whole emergency row agreement between tall people and gate agents and said to himself, you know what? That’s definitely an area in which more money could be going to the airline, to the shareholders. Fuck the customers. Exploit, exploit, exploit. And so now you have to pony up for “Delta Plus,” or whatever they want to call the same shitty coach seats that would have at the very least made me feel like a little more of a human being for the duration of the flight.

And you know why it really sucks? Because of course I’m not going to pay for that emergency row. Because I’m only flying once every other year or so. Because I have no money. So what you wind up with is some not-so-tall guy letting out a nice, audible, “Ahhh!” sound as he extends his perfectly regular-sized limbs as far as they’ll stretch, all while I’m a few rows back, the guy in front of me could barely wait to reach cruising altitude before clicking his seat as far back as it’ll go. Click! He’s trying, he pressed the button and the back started to sway. But what’s that? Some sort of resistance, it’s as if there’s something behind him making it impossible to recline all the way. He fusses a little more and kind of turns around. Oh, it’s just some guy. That’s just some guy’s legs I’m crashing into. Better push back harder. And so it’s that two-or-three minute push and pull, to the point where eventually my knees hurt and I give up.

Why do you even give the option to recline? For real, what is anybody getting out of that equation? Come on airlines, this is the area that you need to monetize. You’d like to recline your seat back? Certainly, that’ll be a dollar seventy-five, and I’m sorry, but we don’t accept cash, just debit or credit. Think of the shareholders! They must be satisfied! Give them more money! It would eliminate at least this little morsel of my in-flight suffering.

Yes, I hate flying, blah, blah, blah, this is all recycled nonsense, complaints about plane travel, I’m practically falling asleep at my keyboard writing all of this garbage. Seriously, I should have been born like ten thousand years ago. Talk about complaining. I probably wouldn’t even have the proper linguistic skills to even formulate my thoughts into a coherent whiny diatribe.

But you know what really kills me? It’s that moment while you’re taxiing down the runway, just as the engines kick in for what you know from experience is going to be a jarring takeoff. The plane lifts off the ground and you get that visceral sensation like it’s going to bounce right back down. But it doesn’t. And now everything below is getting really small. And in your mind you can just imagine exactly what it’s going to look and sound and feel like when the engines suddenly die and the plane plummets straight to a certain doom.

It’s probably not going to happen. But it might. It happens every now and then. And what if you’re on one of those unlucky flights? What if the people on previous doomed voyages had those same thoughts that you’re having right now? It’ll be OK, they tell themselves, trying to quiet the ever-present feeling of dread, unsuccessfully doing whatever they can to stay out of their imaginations, and then something does happen. Because it happens, right?

You’re just trying to go on vacation here, you’re sitting in a seat that’s not big enough to hold your entire body and you’re suddenly hit in the face with the cold fact that your life is finite and, even if this plane delivers you safely to wherever it is you’ve decided to give your money to get away from wherever it is that you happen to be making your money, you’re still going down, someway, eventually, nothing’s going to last.

And then you get pulled out of your nightmare daydream for a second because the flight attendant is telling you that, unfortunately, your carry-on is jostling around too much in the overhead compartment, and some of the passengers are complaining, and, well, you have to put it on the floor in front of you, even though there’s no room, you can’t feel the tips or your feet, you try to protest, politely, but you get some non-answer line about “FAA regulation states that …” Yeah, OK, thanks.

Man, I can’t wait until we have self-driving cars. I can’t wait until we have the Hyperloop. Because, yes, it’s unreal that we have an industry devoted to flying us to wherever we can afford to go on the planet. But flying on a plane sucks. It just sucks. There’s got to be a better way.

Originally published at Thought Catalog.

I’m not afraid anymore

I used to be really scared of bugs, but come on, bugs aren’t that scary. Sure, some of them can sting and pinch and poison, but for the most part they’re all really small and harmless. Like I saw this silverfish hanging out on my bedroom wall the other day, and I looked at it, and for a second I was like, man, I hate bugs. But after another second I was like, I’m not scared of bugs, I’m not scared of this silverfish, that silverfish should be scared of me. So I reached for a slipper and – smack! – right against the wall. I had to clean it up though, and now there’s kind of a little stain. But I don’t really know how I’m supposed to go about getting it out of the bedroom without killing it. Whatever, at least I’m not really scared of bugs anymore.

I used to be really afraid of getting in a car accident. But then I thought, why am I so scared? I’ve already been in like ten car accidents, seven of them were definitely my fault, and I’m no worse for the wear. Obviously I’m not trying to diminish the seriousness of automobile safety or anything like that, and yeah, if you or a loved one has been through a life-altering car crash, I hope I’m not coming across as insincere. It’s just that, from my point of view anyway, from my experience, I can’t afford to be scared of car accidents anymore. Like I said, I’ve already been in like a dozen, maybe fifteen or sixteen car accidents, the majority of them my fault, like this one time I was driving a big cargo van and I sideswiped this lady’s Jaguar, it was a really slow speed, like we were in a parking lot, but still, I got out of the car and she was like, “My Jaguar! My baby!” and I apologized and, yeah, that sucks, I didn’t want to mess up her Jaguar, but the insurance took care of everything. And besides, a year or two years later, I was driving my car on the highway when an SUV sideswiped my two-door Hyundai Accent at full highway speed. And the SUV pulled over and these big meat-heads came out and the one guy gave me two hundred bucks, cash, like he wasn’t negotiating, he wasn’t saying to me, “Do you think we could settle this for two hundred dollars?” no, he just handed me the cash, got back in his car and drove away. And in the cosmic scale of justice and the universe and everything, I think I’m tit-for-tat with that Jaguar lady, and so what do I have to be afraid of? The universe will take care of everything, me being scared isn’t going to change a thing.

And it’s like, I used to be terrified of flying. I never had any panic attacks or anything, you know, every time that I’ve had to fly somewhere, I’ve always boarded the plane, taken my seat, everything without incident. But I used to sit there in complete terror as the plane taxied down the runway, imagining how just after takeoff, there’d be a sudden loss in power, everything would go dead, and I’d actually feel it, the sensation of being subtly lifted from my seat as my body and everything around me starts to free-fall. But come on, I can’t waste my time being afraid of planes. Nothing’s going to happen. And if it does happen, whatever, I just take three or four Xanax right before the flight anyway. If that free-fall thing actually started to happen, if I wasn’t already in the middle of a chemically-induced superpower nap, I’d probably enjoy it, the floating on the plane matching the floating in my head.

And I always used to get so bent out of shape about global warming. I’d imagine all sorts of prehistoric bugs and snakes making their way to my northeastern climate. But then people started telling me stuff like, “It’s not just global warming, OK Rob, it’s climate change.” And I’m like, that’s not too bad. More extreme seasons? I actually kind of prefer that. Because, don’t you hate it when you get all the way to March or April and there’s hardly been any snow? You can’t go skiing, the schools never close, I never get to call up my boss and say stuff like, “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to make it in today.” No, I want like real seasons. And if the climate’s changing around me to make that actually happen, then I’m totally behind it. Or if not behind it, at least I’m not scared anymore.

I used to be really scared that I was too scared about everything, always worrying, playing out these horrible nightmare scenarios in my head. But I’m not scared anymore. Because what’s to be scared of? I heard this song on the classic radio station, and at the end, the singer records himself in a really old-time record-sounding voice, he says something like, “You don’t have to be scared of anything, except for fear itself.” And it really just stuck with me, because nothing’s going to happen, right, it’s like that car accident I was talking about before, even if something does happen, how bad can it be? What’s the worst that can happen, really?

Reoccurring dreamland

Does anybody ever have reoccurring dreams? That was a stupid question, of course people have reoccurring dreams. I was just thinking of an interesting way to open this up, but that wasn’t interesting at all, that rhetorical question. I don’t get reoccurring dreams. Not in the sense of an identical dream happening on different nights.

I do experience reoccurring themes in my dreams. And from what I’ve read online, some of this stuff is pretty universal. Like the dream where your teeth fall out, apparently that’s common. And I’ve had that dream, kind of. It’s not like they just fall out, it’s usually more of, I’ll be really angry in the dream, and my jaw is just really clenched, like totally clamped down, to the point where my muscles are cracking my teeth, and slowly they start breaking and crumbling and falling out of my mouth.

A few times I’ve woken up suddenly with these images fresh in my mind, and my jaw will be tight, as if I’d been acting out the dream with my mouth. My bottom teeth might even be out to the side, or locked in a weird under bite, and it’ll take half a minute or so for everything to relax itself, all the while I’m still coming to, running my tongue along my gum line, making sure that everything is still where it was before I went to bed.

Or there are those dreams where I’ll be in a fight with someone else, I’ll be really angry, a full-blown rage. All I want to do in my dream is to pummel my opponent with my bare hands, but all of my blows land without any force. I’ll punch as hard as I can, but it’s like I’m underwater, there’s some sort of invisible resistance rendering my attacks totally useless. All the while, whoever I’m fighting is just standing there, laughing at me, not even bothering to fight back.

Speaking of underwater, what about the dreams where you’re face down in a puddle of water, but you can’t muster the strength to roll over? I’m thankful that I don’t get these too frequently, but they’re an often enough thing that, when I do find myself in dreamland being suffocated by an inch or two of standing water, something in my brain kicks in, it says, easy Rob, this is that puddle dream, you’re going to be fine. And even though I’ll realize it to be true, I still can’t help but to resist, futilely rocking my immobile body from side to side, the imminent sense of suffocation inducing a palpable terror so real that, when I finally pry myself awake, I do so with exaggerated breaths, I’m gulping for air. I think, is this like my jaw being locked, was I really not breathing in real life?

Probably one of the more frustrating reoccurring dream themes I experience is where I’ll realize that I have the ability to fly. Sometimes it’s just me that has this power, but a lot of the time it’s like everyone can fly. I look above me and there are swarms of people taking to the skies, everyone is euphoric, it’s like the whole population discovered their abilities all at the same time, and it’s this mass celebration, there’s not a single person left on the ground.

Except for me. I can fly, but only kind of. I’m trying as hard as I can, but the best I can manage is to float maybe six inches off the ground. And it’s a struggle just to maintain what little height I have. I can feel all of the muscles in my body clenched, and every minute or so, I have to rest on the ground, like I can’t keep it up, even though I know that I have it within me, if only I could just figure out what I’m doing wrong.

But then maybe I’ll be floating along, six inches over a puddle when I’ll lose it, I’ll plop down into the water and I can’t breath, so I struggle and I squirm but I can’t push myself back up, and I’m getting so frustrated, every muscle in my body is tight, even my jaw, especially my jaw, and through the muffled sounds of my choking for breath, I can hear the cracks, my teeth are splitting, cracking, they’re all falling out. By now I totally know that I’m in a dream, but part of that terror is still so real, despite the realization that I’ll wake up any minute in my bed, caked in sweat, checking to make sure that I haven’t chipped a tooth or punched the wall behind my bed.