I despise air travel

I despise air travel. I’m writing this while sitting at the Orlando Airport. I am delayed by about five hours because my flight was oversold, and I took the bullet (and the generous travel voucher) so that some other poor soul wouldn’t have a meltdown in the happiest place on Earth. If you ask me, overselling flights during the holidays season is an insidious practice.

Mind you, I am not afraid of flying. I am not afraid of heights and confined spaces. I actually enjoy that kick from the engines at takeoff. Flying is, in no uncertain words, magical. Common air travel, however, stabs, tramples, and poisons every bit of this magic.

Security. I still giggle when I take off my belt and shoes. It feels like a bad dream where you end up naked in front of the gym class, everyone laughs, and you want to die from embarrassment. Everyone else is either annoyed or takes it too seriously. I guess if your day consists of hunting and eliminating a stray shampoo bottle, those are your only emotional choices.

The airports are just sped-up, anxiety-driven malls. There are two states of being at the airport. The first is madly racing through the crowd to catch a connection. The other is a slowly creeping stupor of being trapped in a glass cage for an indeterminate amount of time. If a connection is more than an hour, it might as well be some sort of slow mental torture. Simple decisions become awkward exercises in mathematics. Are forty-five minutes enough time to get a hamburger? Use a restroom? Sit down in a restaurant? Everything is gaudy and fake. Reality devolves into something shapeless and weird. You are caught in a loop, where the reality replays itself every five minutes. Every repetition is somehow both more boring and more terrifying than the last. There is the constant fear that you have somehow missed your flight, even though it’s still two hours away. The concept of “hour” has stopped making sense a while ago, though. It may have become a negative unit of time. You may become trapped here forever.

I’d recommend stranding someone in an airport for a day or two as a means of “enhanced interrogation,” but by this time they may lose their self of identity so completely, they will be of no further use. At best they’ll be able to recite the standard public safety announcement and guide you to a Cinnabon.

The airplanes are cramped. I half-expect a sturdy stewardess to put a put a booted foot squarely on the chest of a patron in the first row and push, just to see if the passengers can be compressed just a bit more, and another sweaty family covered in suitcases and Goofy neckpillows could be squeezed on board.

I am not a man of excessive frame, at 6″ and 190 lb. Not diminutive, but surely not of unreasonable proportions. Yet I still feel like most airplane seats are a prank, and somewhere, someone is giggling hideously while I try to arrange a folding tray, a book, and a scampering bag of pretzels. I’ve given up on trying to use a laptop. I just end up curled in unnatural ways, stabbing myself with hard plastic, at mercy of the person in front of me who might decide to lean back slightly at any moment and crush my delicate arrangement completely, with grievous consequences to my person and property.

Air travel is overwhelmingly pedestrian and offensive. I may extend my policy of “I’d rather drive” to about twelve hours. If I have to have another six-hour stint at an airport, I become temporarily rabid.

I hate flying. Someone, for the love of all that is good and holy, get me out of here. My flight is boarding in an hour, and I don’t know if that’s enough time to safely get a hamburger.