In-Flight Massage
The mutedly carpeted floor is starting to whine back at the roar of the engines just outside the worrisomely thin plastic windows, the honeycomb view boxes cut to show the insiders what an unbelievable feat humans have reached in and through flight. As always, my blood hurts as it courses through my arms and legs, that familiar adrenaline pang that also accompanies catching yourself on the banister just before you slip and fall down a flight of stairs because of your stockinged feet. The intermittent coughs and children’s cries converge to form the muzak of the moment, blending (as muzak is wont to do) in with the rest of the scene, but still just audible enough to be annoying.
My feet are cold and my head is hot, and if my sense of smell were better I might be able to pick up faint whiffs of two hundred different farts being recycled through the plane’s respiratory system and fired back down at me through those annoying little nipple-like spigots overhead. The woman behind is adding to my ecstasy by jerking her knee into the back of my seat every so often, and it gives me the feeling that I am sitting in a Brookstone massage chair that has malfunctioned and grown and evil will.
Hell is an overly full 747 about to embark on a 14-hour flight over the Pacific Ocean, and I have come to it, as the saying doesn’t go, in a chair the size of a hand-basket.
To reduce it all to dualism and cliché, though, I must say that the situation’s design is quite ingenious. One endures the worst humanity has to offer in order to experience the best. There is no hot without the cold.
