The dread feeling of flying

I don’t know when this will go up, but I’m penning it from the Atlanta Airport.

There is something to be said about growing older and how things that used to excite you as a kid gradually become more cumbersome and uncomfortable the older you get. One of those things for me as I’ve gotten older is flying. Ironic that this only comes up in my brain when I’m mid flight as much like going to the dentist or to a doctor where you’re forced to get some awful shot, you think to yourself “this time will be better”. For me its not so much the crampt feeling of being inside the plane smashed up between complete strangers for hours at a time, although that is a concern. I often do wonder how the luck of the draw is for me that I’m often in a middle or window seat with people on both sides of me being larger than life passengers who generally take up a seat and a quarter of mine. When I get my boarding pass is there a key on the keyboard that says “skinny dude who would fit between two fatties?” I’m thinking so because it tends to happen every flight. The one I just got off of is a good example. It was however more pleasant than the last flight I was one and was smashed up against the window by a very large and very smelly Armenian gentlemen. The problem wasn’t being Armenian, but the fact that he smelled like eggs and onions and probably hadn’t showered in a good week or so. Let’s just overlook the snoring factor.
No, my real problem with flying these days is heights and shaking. Turbulence. As a kid that’s all fun and games. Kind of like a fun ride on an already awesome plane ride that you don’t get to do every day. You can see the world from a completely new perspective and no matter how many times you see it, its always fascinating to see the world like some small scale model laid out underneath you. For me however, it has become a feeling of pure terror at 10,000 feet. I have age and television to blame for that. Getting older means understanding how the real world works and realizing the frailty of how life really is. For example, unless you see something devastating in person you probably don’t have a real fear of it. Take car wrecks for example. Sure they look pretty terrible on tv and everything but if you haven’t experienced one they may worry you a bit in the back of your mind, but you don’t tend to think about them that much. That is, until you have one. I got in a pretty nasty wreck, all things considered not that bad but worse then anything I’ve ever experienced before, that left me pretty shaken up and to this day still freaks me out sometimes while I’m driving. Even though I was driving that day I have real issues not being in control of the car if I’m not driving. The same goes for planes. I’ve never experienced a problem on a flight, but the older I get the more I realize it could happen. Now how often does it? Not much really, but more often than you’d think. But if I already am afraid of heights and being shaken around makes me want to piss myself, put the two together in a “hey it’s the safest way to travel but if something goes wrong you’re going to die” kinda way, far be it from me to not get a little nervous when the plane starts shaking miles and miles in the air.
The real kicker comes from some of my favorite shows. TV rarely catches my interest these days, but specific shows do. Like a lot of other people I was pretty hooked on LOST, but anyone who knows about that show knows its about a bunch of people stranded on an island. Stranded because their plane went down. Horribly. I’ve never seen something so frightening in my entire life and anytime I get on a plane that’s the first place my brain goes to. Ironically now I’m typing from the plane itself and on this particular flight I’m on the tail end which would mean I’m going to break in half right in front of me and if I’m not immediately sucked out from the hole in the plane, I might drown in the ocean or just be beaten to death by a large African man who doesn’t put up with anybody’s shit, not even polar bears.
Being fearful of airplanes is slowly becoming a trend for me, yet I still travel on them. I guess I’m a glutton for punishment. Either that or I just can’t take all that many long road trips like I used to. The only embarrassment is when you are in a dead sleep and due to turbulence you wake up with a start, pulse racing and hands gripped onto the armrests like you own that bitch. The last time I flew on a plane I was sitting between my older sister and my fiancée. They both laughed at me. Damn you Lost. Damn you to hell.