Meditations on Air travel

Rain beads up and drizzles down the window like falling tears, as if the plane itself mourned for the crowded condition of humanity and for the hidden fool that's decided a fart would somehow, in somebody's world, be appropriate for this situation. I don't even know how he or she manages to lift a cheek, so squeezed are we. I got nothing else to do but sit here and think on this gray metal death trap.

I've eaten my pretzels.

The air is solid white. There's no vision, only light, and a wing. I am directly over the left wing, so close I could touch it by leaning out my porthole window.

It's keeping me alive, this wing...

We've been flying low over the clouds for three hours now, and it has been a revelation. In places resembling massed white brains and in others snowy mountain redoubts, I can see now that the cloud tops are where God hides the things he has waiting for men! Innumerable clefts and valleys unseen from below store up his wrath in small, white-shaded packets, scattered across an endless cloudscape as far as the eye can see. No wonder human history is such a long charade of tragedy. God's supplies dominate the battlefield. He can outlast us! If I could somehow crawl out onto that long, bent wingtip and vomit down into those gnarled crevices I surely would, on behalf of all the farting crushed and suffering.

So here's a word to the wise, all you philosophers, theologians, economists, generals, and politicians: now would be a good time to surrender! You cannot possibly win! I've seen the armada, vast as the continent itself, and beyond.

You cannot possibly win.