THE GREAT GADFLY:

Nothing Happened

This weekend I went home to The Land That Time Forgot to visit my mother for her birthday. I had to take one of those itsky-bitsky little Gilligan's Island charter shuttle planes from Chicago to the Hoosier Motherland, and I decided this weekend that I Hate Those Planes. And I mean hate. Hate like the way Fred Phelps hates Rip Taylor. I mean hate like the way David Duke hates Little Richard. Hate. Cold, steely, cancerous loathing. I hate reading sentences that begin with this, but remember that one episode of The Simpsons where Marge has a flashback of being a little girl and getting a tricycle shaped like a little airplane, and as soon as she sat on it, a wing fell off and it instantly burst into flame? That's how I feel about those damn little charter planes.

Oh God, and the people who get on these planes DISGUST me. Everyone's a fookin' comedian. "Looks like we're goin' on a field trip, nyuk nyuk!" "Well GOL-DURN, are we at King's Island, nyuk nyuk?" "This here aeroplane, it runs on D batteries! HAW!"

Here's the little joke I wanna blurt out:

SHUT. THE FUCK. UP.

Those planes, I tell you, they're lightning rods for bad vibes and mortal foreboding. They're really bad, man. Bummer trip. Here's how bad it got for me on that plane this weekend: it's hard to really put into words accurately without being overly morbid, but I'll do my best. I basically resigned myself with dying while I was on the flight this weekend, both on my flight to Indiana and on my flight home. It got to the point where I just wanted something horrific to happen so we could get it out of the way, because it just seemed inevitable that we'd get kissed by doom in our little flying deathcan. "Well," I thought to myself, "I've had a good run. Lived to see most of the Star Wars movies, got to have a few things published, went to some good concerts, got laid a lot and had good friends. So be it." Now, I didn't want to die - I just figured that if this was indeed going to be it, then I wanted to take the path of least resistance and go down with serenity rather than as a screaming, incontinent ragdoll on fire.

That was my state of mind 14,000 feet aboveground this weekend. To calm myself, I read chapters from a William Burroughs biography I'd purchased months ago. Yeah, not exactly a contender for the Top Ten Tomes Of Comfort. What can I say - I don't "do" Chicken Soup for the Soul.

Here's another strange thing - I've never been afraid to fly. The first time I ever flew was when I was a wee tot, on a tiny little private plane piloted by an ex-Hell's Angel-turned-televangelist with one arm and one leg. I sat in the cargo section of the plane with the man's daughter, a jolly little girl with the unfortunate name of Sea Swan. And I loved it. It was great. Didn't think about catastrophe at all. The possibility never occurred to me. The second time I was on a plane was a couple of years later, when I visited my grandparents in Kansas and they put my nine-year-old self on a flight all by my lil' lonesome. And again, I loved it. A man had a heart attack during the flight, and I thrilled to the drama. After a childhood of "Airport" movies, I think I'd have been disappointed if there wasn't some form of airplane drama.

And so it's gone through the years - a plane has always been just a bus with wings to me. Heck, I've even flown on the dinky little cheepie charter planes before, and my worst reaction was that there was no room to do anything but silently ingest the bad breath odors of fellow travelers. But this weekend, I dunno. Maybe it was because I was sick all week. Maybe it was because I was fighting the obligation to travel with every last pebble of my being. Maybe it was a dreadful medley of recent world events projected onto the relative vanilla of my day-to-day life. I don't know. I guess the bottom line is, nothing happened.

A cloned goat gave birth to some damn cute babies, we're at Code Orange and Michael Jackson gets grosser by the day with the momentum of an amphetamine centrifuge. I think this week I will give focus to washing all my towels and perhaps making time for a post-work visit or two to the library, where nothing terrible ever happens.

Oh, crap - amidst all this Final Destination also-ran talk, I completely forgot to mention that last weekend's new AbFab Goes To New York special featured a scene shot at my old job! How bizarre to see Joanna Lumley propping herself up against my old desk. Gorgeous.