Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Taking a dump at 32000 feet.

Have you ever watched a plane fly over, late at night and during the small hours when nobody around you is awake, and imagined what was going on up there in that little tiny improbable capsule of comfort, isolated and exposed? You can probably assume that at least the pilot and the copilot are awake and busy talking to air traffic control and getting ready to land that thing. And there are probably at least one or two passengers either jibber jabbering away about something or another, or maybe reading a book or watching the last few minutes of the in flight movie, or fiddling around with their phones, or doing something else to occupy the time, like sleeping or just sitting there being quietly terrified, which is normally what I'm doing when I'm up there in the sky in a plane, a gazillion inches above the ground and rapidly losing altitude.

Or maybe somebody is simply taking a dump up there in the sky. Just think about that for a minute. Out of all the billions and billions of people who have ever lived and died on planet earth during the last several hundred thousand years - since there was even such a thing as people - only we few who have been alive during the last 50 or so years since planes with communal lavatories have been regularly criss-crossing the skies can claim the distinction of positively having been very nearly or possibly even exactly underneath a mile-high crap as it was being taken. I mean, it's simply an inevitable statistic that a dump has been had by someone, or more likely several somebody's, directly above your location at some specific point in your life. Probably many specific points.

So that's what I find myself frequently thinking about at times like these, at night, when I'm out walking and observing and soaking up the probabilistic expressions of quantum fluctuations as collapsing wave forms. What's going on up there right now above our heads in those hundreds, or even thousands of big, hollow lozenges that are constantly sailing through the skies at ludicrous speeds and getting ready to not explode upon impact at Love Field, DFW, or maybe even the Denton Airport?

Is that weird? Not that all of those thousands of mid-air loafs are being pinched every single day... no. What I mean is, is it weird that I even think about it at all? Is that weird? Am I weird... e.g. defective, and/or deformed? Mentally, that is? Has my fragile little mind been warped by 43 incessant years of jury-rigged jihad by the tin-hat terrorists?

I don't know, but it keeps me up at nights. See what I mean? It's 4 o'clock am (4:23 now) and I've been thinking about this since at least 12:30.