📍Kitchen floor beside dog, San Francisco, CA
Over the intercom, you hear: …it is my pleasure to welcome you aboard flight 2843 with service to Chicago– It’s time to board the plane. You got there at a respectable hour, plenty of time before it was time to board the plane. Arrived at the gate something like 30 minutes before, at least. And yet, somehow, it’s now indisputably time to board the plane, and you’re not ready.
It’s mostly that you’ve got all these new items – the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf1, the plastic Proteinacious Snack Pack with two abandoned, unsuccessfully preserved apple slices, and the Smartwater®.2 You look between the line of passengers at their pillars, organizing themselves sequentially A1-30 — and the nearest trash receptacle? A journey away. And then there’s your luggage.
But the trash receptacle is just right there, really. Not “a journey” at all. And you know you’re not supposed to leave your luggage unattended. Because bombs. And you know you really can’t say the word “bomb,” so you probably shouldn’t even be thinking it. Who knows, maybe you have some kind of late-blooming Tourette’s, and would now really be the time to find out? Plus, the narrating voice in your head is so loud, anyway, you might as well be saying it out loud. But the trash bin… it really is just right there.
So you grab the plastic container with the mush-apples, and give your luggage a stern “stay right there” look, and you hustle over to the bin, taking care to toss your head over your shoulder no less than thrice just to make sure. It’s like you can feel this massive, invisible rubber band stretching as you move further away, your sphere of influence over your personal belongings growing tenuous.
You’re at the trash receptacle. You’re standing with this plastic snack box with its plastic lid. The thing is entirely, transparently, man made except for those two slimy slices. And you’re about to throw it into the “bad” side of the trash, not the blue side with its three arrows behaving like an ecologically-forward Ouroboros. Well hold on a sec, Mother Nature whispers, interrupting the loud narration in your head. If you just tip out the apples–
Groups B1-30 starts lining up. And you think how you’re B28, aren’t you? Are you? Your hands are full of the almost entirely recyclable trash, so you poke at your pockets with your elbows, detecting no hard rectangle. And then you see it – your phone! Back at the luggage, shiny and so take-able. It’s sitting right there on top of the jacket covering your luggage, not underneath like anyone with any desire to keep a hold on their personal belongings might have done. It’s not even plugged in. Completely untethered, so grab-able it is.
So into the mean side of the bin the mostly recyclable plastic box goes, and honestly, you go ahead and throw the completely recyclable coffee cup in after it. You scuttle back over to your luggage like the environment-killer you are, and you grab the phone, all lit up and ready with your boarding pass.
***
On the plane, you plan on heading to a seat a bit further in the back. You know it’ll take a sec — no rush permitted — to maneuver your luggage up and in. It’s heavy, stuffed – you had to zip the compression zipper this time, and you never have to do that. The last thing you’d want to do is have it fall and kill somebody, like whatever happened to the OxyClean guy.3 So after you step across the jet-bridge-to-plane threshold, you swing your luggage in front of you. Its gimpy wheel makes it nearly impossible to maneuver in its upright omni-wheel exploiting position, so you can’t even really brag about being able to glide your luggage like the best of them. No — instead, your wheel sticks and your foot kicks, nudging it on, on.
You’re at Row 21, and that feels far enough. The guy behind is just getting settled in Row 17, so you’ve got time. You throw the seven dollar Smartwater® and your phone onto the middle seat, drape the jacket over your loose-leaf belongings, wizened. Throw the bag up and overhead.
You have to take some pretty dramatic steps back under the heft of the thing, but that’s okay ‘cause– er, no. There is someone sitting in Row 21, on the other side. Two someones. And their luggage is already up there, book-ending the compartment. But your luggage is already overhead, dangerously bottom-heavy, and the bin directly above you is closed for some reason, and the rest of the passengers are gaining. People settle in to Row 19. So you swing it in.
And it’s in – sort of. You shove. And then you’re banging, putting as much thrust into your wrists as you can, not quite tall enough to have much forward thrust at that angle. And finally, miraculously, it’s in for real. You grin at the people across from your Row 21 – the DEF to your ABC – smiling at them like they were cheering you on all the while, and not just on their phones trying to download the most recent season of Sex Education on the shitty runway WiFi. You sit.
***
Did you doze off? Maybe. But you certainly didn’t buckle up. And you forgot to cover your lap so it looked like you had. It’s not that you’re some kind of rebel. You just don’t like feeling strapped in. Honestly, if there was ever an instant where you needed the belt, really needed it — in the air — the belt would be the least of your worries. But a kind flight attendant reminds you to buckle up before she proceeds with her safety demonstration.
Now that you’re awake, if dozing really was what you were doing, you’re not quite sure what to look at. You didn’t plug the phone in earlier, so you can’t pretend to craft an e-mail. You already know your complimentary beverage order.4 The only thing vaguely stimulating is the kindly attendant going through the motions. Seeing all of the heads around you turned lap-ward while this woman holds up a disembodied seatbelt wearing her flaccid flotation vest, up-do, ascot, and lipsticked Stepford Wives smile… you feel a little bad for her. No one is watching her. Maybe no one has ever watched her. So you pay attention to her safety demonstration.
In the event of a loss of cabin pressure… you carefully observe how she mimes putting the mask over nose and mouth. She doesn’t actually pull the elastic band behind her head, but she does make sure to give it a couple of illustrative tugs to ensure there is no confusion vis-à-vis functionality. And you’re grateful, truly, for her sake, that she didn’t actually put it on lest her french twist be upset for the remainder of the flight. Breathe normally, the accompanying intercom suggests. And then the woman notices that you’re paying attention.
Instead of grateful, she’s confused. Concerned, even, carrying on with a little pinch of tension between her eyebrows. It hits you then that maybe there’s a real good reason why no one watches the safety demonstration. Everyone aboard – they’ve got this. They could stand up there and take over, Rock-Horror-Picture-Show-style shout out all of their favorite lines themselves.5 Operating in a screaming plane crash? Just like riding a bike for these air-safety veterans. That, or they are in a carefully maintained, fragile state of denial that anything that could require these measures of safety might possibly ever actually even happen.6
So, when you started watching, well… not only were you endorsing the possibility of a flaming sky-wreck, but you also made it apparent that, in the event, you would be utterly incompetent, given you require coaching in inserting the metal fittings, pulling the strap to tighten.
You go back to ignoring her, the thing that is right and good.
Soon the plane will leave.
Because the Starbies line was too long. Not that you actually *like* Starbucks, of course.
Because your prior statement of “I’ll remember to bring my own water bottle next time” apparently didn’t include this time.
RIP, Billy.
(Coulda-Hadda) V8 Tomato Juice or Bloody Mary Mix (as long as it isn’t the spicy one).
Provided they had a cute navy uniform and knew how to do something tasteful with their hair.
Certainly not to them.