I never did like to fly.
Ever since I was a boy, the thought of airplanes made me sick to my stomach. Thankfully, my parents always opted to drive for family vacations, but now I’m 38, and since my job necessitates flying, I’ve been constantly in touch with my uneasy stomach. Its never been about the height– I’ve scaled enough trees in my school days to erase the primal fear of falling– but rather it’s the abstract nexus of concepts connected to flying that I hate: the feeling of shuffling aimlessly into a cramped sardine tin full of slack-jawed strangers and expensive suitcases that smelled like new shoes, the noncommittal lurch of the aircraft upon takeoff, the ersatz courtesy of disposable stewardesses… all of it feels like some bizarre traveling charade of generic cardboard-cutout people borne atop the clouds, and there in the middle is the pilot, directing the action as the vaudeville ringleader for the entire experience. The only things missing are the elephants.
The clinical sterility of the entire experience is the worst part. Whenever I fly anywhere, from entering the first airport to unlocking my car in the parking lot for the drive home, I always feel as if I’m tumbling across some odd inter-dimensional rift where all the hospitals, DMVs, and Starbucks franchises are fused into some postmodern amalgam of disinfected human interaction. The entire air travel ritual acts as some kind of social Muzak experience. Everyone goes through the motions, everyone says the right words, wears the same aseptic smile, points you in the right direction, but it’s all surface communication- polite distraction. Underneath that, there’s nothing. It’s all of the movements and none of the soul.
This flight in particular has been a test of my patience. I got the window seat again, which makes me feel what I imagine caged birds must feel like. You spend all of that time staring at the space you could be occupying, thinking of all of the things you could be doing, what you were built for, but in the end, you have to turn around and face the fact that you’re still stuck in a cage with no way out. It always makes me a bit uncomfortable when I get like this because I can sense some kind of simile for my own existence wrapped up in that kind of thing, but it always eludes me, always just beyond my grasp.
You know the feeling, I’m sure. That gut reaction of a mystery denied because you’re simply too stupid to figure it out. No decks stacked against you, no pity to be had, just apathy and ignorance. Now that is truly frightening. I figure it has something to do with having wings you’ve never been allowed to use, or something easy and pop psychoanalytic like that. Freud would probably say it has something to do with the fact that I haven’t had a true intimate relationship throughout the entirety of my life. Who knows… maybe he would be closer to the truth.
Now some kid in the opposite row is waxing supersonic about some new fad sweeping primary schools across the nation. He has the sales pitch from the television memorized, and he’s spitting it back verbatim to his uninterested mother. It’s the ultimate goal of advertising realized- suggestible children as proxy salesmen. It seems to me that the more children are exposed to the television, to magazines, to all of those sources of celebrity news and sitcoms, the more that final nail gets driven into humanity’s coffin. The death knell for our species is a commercial jingle.
Seeing children such as this one makes me realize just how quickly I’m falling behind in the tides of life. Everything is getting so much smaller and so much faster that I can’t possibly hope to keep up. What’s that saying? An analog fly in a digital world. Yeah. That just about covers it. Heck, I still use a typewriter and tip the paperboy.
My family, my job, my hobbies… they’re all outdated, unremarkable relics of some age that sold itself to be the next one. I shuttle back and forth, scribbling on my paper, going to bed and waking up, and in no way does it matter. I think I made it onto the boat, the proverbial great Ark of the Zeitgeist that grants men meaning, but they throw you overboard when you stop rowing.
I get to thinking like this and I inevitably come back to thinking of the caged bird. All that potential wasted. All feathers and no flight. Here we all are, slurping down our novelty sized alcohol and peanuts, watching an in-flight movie, wasting away in a tin tube, but coming in loud and clear as the Great American Flying Circus.
And suddenly I understand. I catch the meaning. An epiphany at 2,500 feet.
Nothing matters. Nothing. No thing. Not myself, not this Earth, none of the people in it. Everything that I set my mind to, the things I love, the things I invest in… they all add up to zilch. The sum of the equation is and will always be zero.
Turbulence.
We’re programmed from birth to run away from death until finally it catches up with us. And nobody’s ever outrun the end, only into it. We fill our days with ways to forget that at every moment, we are dying. Some use God, some use family, some use fame and money, but we all willfully become amnesiacs to death in our own way until, in our last days, we remember.
All aboard for the final joke. Last call for the last laugh.
Why run? If we have no part to play, then what’s wrong with a little improv? I’ll play the part of the disillusioned consumer having a nervous meltdown. I’ve always wondered how hard you’d have to pull to get that big handle on the escape door to give way. I find out.
So
this
is
what
it’s
like
to
f
r
e
e
f
a
l
l
……
