In just a few minutes I'll be leaving for the airport to fly to Wisconsin (well, Chicago first of course (from Denver in case you haven't been able to read my previous journal entries)). Just a minute ago
PeaceOrchestra left herself to LAX to fly to Florida for a while. In saying bye I told her that I hoped she gets a window seat and to not forget to plaster her face against the window for the entire flight. I ended up going off on a rant. Here it is (with some additional explaining).
SPOILERS! (Click to view)I have no idea why it is that people who fly on flights close the window blinds. I mean for fucks sake, throughout all of eternity pretty much every single person has looked up and seen birds fly and wished that they too could fly. For pretty much forever people have wished that they could see what the earth looked like from the heavens.
Now, for about the price of just 3 or 4 pizzas you can fly round trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and see what every human being before you has dreamed of seeing. Now you can see with your own eyes what is one of the biggest wonders that any humans have ever created. Even the moon landings don't compare to the level of complexity and technological progress needed to fly all those commercial jets around the skies. And these people actually don't care enough that they close the blinds and try to fall asleep. Fucking retarded.
I mean here you are accellerating from 0 to over 100mph in just a few seconds. to 300mph in not that many seconds more. Yet they sit and think "Um, yea. That's what's supposed to happen." You're up flying at 35,000 feet where no birds, insects, or any living creatures can survive (it's like 100deg below zero up there) and traveling along in complete comfort. Yet still they don't care. Fucking retarded.
And it's not like I'm new to this whole flying thing. I was flying almost every day from the time I was conceived in my mommas belly, through her pregnancy, and even after I was born I would go up with my did in his plane just about every day. Had a lil car seat that he'd strap into the back seat of his Cessna 172 and take me up so I'd be familiar with 3d movement, the noise of aviation, and being airborne. Once I was able to hold onto the controls at a few months old they'd bring me up and set me on his lap and I'd hold onto the controls. Once I got to be old enough to actually control the plane my dad would let go of the controls and I'd fly it around up at altitude. Barely able to speak and I was zoomin the plane around the skies, bankin n turnin, zippin it around just having a blast.
Aviation has been even more a part of my life as the english language. At least up until I was about 10 when my dad had to sell the plane when we bought our house. Even then we'd go out to the airport and rent an airplane (it cost $35 per hour back then) to fly around every week er three for quite a few years until he couldn't pass his physical because a swollen thyroid was affecting his eyesight and couldn't renew his private pilots license.
Still, with aviation being as familiar to me as cars, I never once took being airborne for granted. Every single time I'd go up I would still love every second of it with my head plastered against the window watching everything. Watching the ground like it was a train wreck. And that was just flying at 150mph at 6,000 feet. You get in a commercial airline and you're flying at almost 500mph at 35,000 feet. 6 n a half miles up.
The fact that you can experience this for such a paltry amount is fucking awesome. What's more, why anyone would ever want to actually NOT see and experience every part of it is well beyond me.
I mean sure you could use the whole people being afraid of flying thing, but me, I know that I'm gonna die and when I do I want to see it all. I want to experience everything. I hope to god that when I die I won't be drugged up at all. I mean that's the only part of life (besides birth but you can't remember that anyway) that no matter what you can only experience once. I have no idea what it'll be that finally kills me (although I've always thought that statistically since I was always riding motorcycles on the limit all the time that it'd be a crash from one of them) but whatever it is, I'm gonna want to see, feel, hear, smell, and experience every part of it.
Spose not everyone feels that way but it's really tough for me to be able to relate to anyone who doesn't feel that way. It's all I've ever known.
Take care!
I'm gonna try to get a fake ID so I can hit up bars when I'm down. And rad shows and shit.