They always say that flying is the safest way to travel, but of course, on Star Trek, they always say that about the transporter and it seems like every other you hop on the dang thing you end up either getting caught in some kind of subspace rift where everyone has a goatee, or at the very least, you make it down to Rigel VIII with your pants on inside out. At any rate, I as hoping that at the very worst, I’d be stuck with the inverted pants option (The Inverted Pants Option being of course, a most excellent name for a band) as I boarded a small plane bound for the gleaming metropolis that is Newark, New Jersey, shining doorknob of the East Coast that it is.
Never having flown outside of
At length, a video came on in which a man who looked a great deal like a very jocular yam told us all of that stuff about life vests, emergency exits, and what to do if we ran out of peach schnapps (curl up into a little ball and wait for death to overtake you). Also, in what was for me the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, they told us what to do with our seatbacks (put them in a fully upright position, of all things). They also told us that there were life jackets underneath our seats, but I kind of felt down there and found nothing but one more facet of the wretched and abominable web of lies that is the American airline industry. A little while after they brought drinks around, a stewardess came by with a plastic bag which I rightly took to be some manner of communal barf bag. Not wanting to appear rude on my first flight, I did my level best to Ralph into it, but my all too sound digestion failed to oblige me in this affair. Looking ever so disappointed with me, the stewardess withdrew to the front cabin. After this point, a strange cardigan-bound fellow whom I can only describe as some sort of a bizarre man-stewardess began at intervals to peek out at me from the cabin like some kind of a high altitude whack-a-mole, casting me an occasional look of mixed pity and concern.
About this time, and shortly after passing through a cloud that looked like a bunny rabbit (though the resemblance turned out to be wholly superficial) the plane, with a great thud, hit something. Now, while I’m no veteran of the airways, I am very well-versed in the auditory cues of roadkill, and I thought for a moment that we had surely just struck a rare and delicious sky possum (though, of course, most of them have long since flown South for the winter).
Without further incident we landed, in that famed and legendary realm of mystery,
