I am the rocker, I am the roller, I am the out-of-controller!

The new commercial airplanes that clutter the sky are nice enough, but the fact that there’s a television screen positioned less than two feet in front of each set of eyes means that you’ll never have to wrangle with even a millisecond of boredom: A chicken in every pot! A TV above every seat back pocket! For some of us, this now means that the in-stereo flight experience is brought to passengers by advertisements that accompany a seatbelt fastening instruction of increasingly loud volume levels. For some people including yours truly, this can turn one a normally peace-loving human kinda batshit crazy.

The tyranny of convenience

Further to this point, I really hate the fact that I can’t manipulate the dimmer button that is conveniently embedded in my armrest until after we are airborne. I am forced to look past the “subscribe now to keep watching this crappy show” advertisement until at last the incessant mashing of my dimmer switch finally works. First world problems, I know— but good god couldn’t we all do with a straight-on vantage point that yields nothing of the moving picture variety?

They’ll tell you where to go/But till you get there yourself you never really know/Where some have found their paradise

As relatively uninteresting as they might be, I prefer to gaze out my window at the Sim City diorama that clusters the Dulles environs once we start to gain altitude. I find this far superior to DirectTV’s latest update on the Deflategate final ruling (yay, by the way). Or whatever else they happen to be advertising to the hungry masses.

The drone of flying engines/Is a song so wild and blue/It scrambles time and seasons/if it gets through to you

I suppose that most people are like me and have little desire to fill their two hours of transit stasis by staring at that tablet-sized monitor located just ahead of them. I mean, it kind of feels like a personal feed bag for the eyes— and who wants that?  But still, I always find it intriguing that most people chose not to dim their screen to darkness once we reach a comfortable cruising altitude. Why is that?

True colors fly in blue and black/Bruised silken sky and burning flag/Colours crash, collide in blood shot eyes

It’s not exactly related, but I’m selling my car before I move back abroad in a few months’ time.  There were compelling reasons to both sell and hold on to my beloved Volkswagen TDI, but at the end of the day, I found that it was precisely the moments spent in mindless transit that I needed the most. These are the only opportunities where I’m be able to sit, propelled in a seamless state of motion, where I can sit and wander through my most satisfying or peaceful junk piles of thoughts that may or may not yield something.

You know I took the poison/From the poison stream/Then I floated out of here

Maybe it stems from being a kid and taking my first trans-Atlantic flights (there were no TVs in the seats back then— only my trusty Walkman that incredibly would play the same songs that I still enjoy on my iPhone). Perhaps I miss these simple journeys. And perhaps staring at the fuzzy horizon reminds me of my dad and the thousands of times he must have gazed into the same blue and white over the course of his aviation career. I don’t really know.

How long, how long, how long/How long to sing this song?

All I know is that these moments— the ones without the obnoxious automated intercom announcements about tray tables, or the intrusive in-flight entertainment screens— comprise some of the most therapeutic moments of existence for me.  I’m no pilot, but there is something to be said for spacing out while up in the air. I’m hoping that train travel over in Europe will provide me with a bit of the same thing.

…or perhaps the landscape will just be too damn interesting to keep me awake. But then again, naps are pretty great things too.