Hoping for a Tail Wind

Usually, when I’m traveling on a day ending in Y, getting laid is better than getting layed-over. I’m a very direct person, especially when it comes to my flights. Toronto to Tokyo was becoming an annual pilgrimage before governments told everyone stop it with the orgies. Though, I haven’t actually been on a layover in so long, I’m feeling some sorta fuzzy way about it. It’s almost charming, with a new route of delivery.

Ecstatically I’m off one plane and headed toward another. Now officially en route to A Whales Vagina, I’m the figurative Don Ready. One compoundingly* seducing early-morning flight in hand, and I rock steady my way through Chicago. (*is “compoundingly” really not a word yet?) I realize don’t even know which of the Windy City’s dueling airports I’m in. Nor do I give a flying fuck. Midway or O’Hare, don’t care.

Wait, we’re not boarding by zones? Gracias, Allah. Danke, Buddha. Arigato Elegba. Praze Jeebus. Whatever you’re into, thumbs up. 👍🏽 In the US&A, we put In God We Trust on our currency, even though many of the founding fathers were atheist. Hmmm. Common sense is my deity and you’re telling me the rona got airlines boarding from the rear? The obviously efficient has finally emerged victorious among us. Color me fantastic; I like sitting in the back and I like to board early. He shoots. He scores.

Space is most definitely tightening up in what is basically the third class cabin. Almost as if the last 11 months were some math problem where the tray table and my belly were moving toward each other at the variable speeds of x and y. The bathrooms are even more ridiculous. I’ve heard the mile high club had been shuttered for years, but I’m not sure I could even take a shit in there without dislocating my collarbone when I went to wipe. Eh, Confucius says it is better to shit on the ground than in the air, anyway. My basic confined space training, average height and double shot of Pfizer all have me comfortably in my seat on a nearly full flight. 28 D, motherfucker.

Whoa. Tenet comes on my mini screen for free. I needed to see this twice anyway. Coffee come out efficiently. I break my cheap paper mask and they bring me a new one in a napkin. The kick is up and it is good. I can’t help but wonder if the experience of flying on the cheap has somehow gotten better for me. My mind once more drifts off into bike tour logistics, reveling in the profound suffering that the first-day climb out of Saahn Dee Ah Go and into the mountains will be. Like a factory of satisfactory. Yin. Yang. Gang. Touchdown.

As I sit in this peculiar tin can of a dead bird flying backwards, contemplating all sorts of logistics, The Fugs, “CIA Man” blares loudly as fuck through my AirPods. The kids call it loud AF, but an affinity for four-letter words and grammar apparently precludes from such indulging in such hipness.

“Fuckin A, man…”

With my passport-stampability surgically neutered, this is the first flight I’ve been on since last February – the longest personal stretch in well over a decade. To be completely honest, that shit felt like a jail sentence. Having survived contracting the covid 19 virus back in November – as well as being a humane human who accepts science – I’m sensitive that for many it was a death sentence. But if I’m being honest, I feel sort of liberated from my first-world-problem rendition of solitary confinement. 11 months of binging Netflix and my somehow first flight since the pandemic is to Chicago. Manhunting to go anywhere got me at cruising altitude and feeling like some sort of travel Unabomber. But instead of bombs, my well-publicized kink is this renewed adventure travel. Wait, can I even type bomb – or Unabomber – on an airplane? Meh, we live in public.

“Who can kill a general in his bed? Overthrow dictators if they’re red.”

Almost in spite of the books I’ve read in college, paranoia bubbles up like George Clooney after he shot Brad Pitt in a Coen closet. Or was Billy Bob more nervous? Now I’m convinced that the flight attendant is either going to offer me a drink or put me on a no-fly list (or both). There’s no passport stamp and no unpronounceable foreign street food coming my way at the end of this carbon footprint heavy rainbow. Nonetheless, traveling somewhere – anywhere – has already exorcised a good half dozen pandemic demons. Shoutout to Linda Hamilton. I trust that my offsetting an aforementioned footprint via Pacific to Atlantic pedal will unleash the rest of the kraken from my quarantined soul. Mountains tend to do that.

“Who can get a budget that’s so great? Who will be the fifty first state?”

An estimated 3,200 mile ride – I’m no longer including metric since being trapped in the land of the King’s foot and yard over something or other – it would be my first time crossing the continent west to east in a decade. I am concerned about the security of my shit. My age and my weight are at all times highs, in a direct relationship to the ignorance oozing out of every gaping American orifice, especially mine. My mind drifts away from similes and metaphors and hyperbole, focusing on the challenge that awaits, like frickin’ Jewish space lasers.