Getting Started Early

 O  ne week from this evening I will be on a China Airlines flight -- don't worry, I'll give you the details, so you can follow my missile-stamped path down into left-state New York if they decide to target my center fuel tanks (hell, ask Pierre Salinger)  or, if you're extraordinarily possessed with brain cells (a rarity these days) you could actually follow my progress on flightaware.com.

I'm actually quite pleased that this amazingly rare aircraft mishap occurred at a major US airport when it did -- people are going to be paying MUCHO attention when I board my flight, from the dude who cleans the bathroom at the airport to the dude who sits up front and says "My Airplane."

It quite frankly could not have come at a better time. It takes the onus off worrying about terrorism and more on "Who the fuck is flying this plane?"

This is all A1 GOOD for me, not, mind you, that I was EVER at any point nor have EVER been, worried about my personal safety in a commercial aircraft. My sister has some more harrowing tales to tell about her iffy journeys in über and sub-Saharan Africa with various cowboy outfits, but I must remind you that she got hazard pay on top of her usual Homeland Security happycheck so it was more a moot point of "Do I arrive alive?" because the answer to that always was "Well, I'll celebrate by spending $XXX at the nearest boutique."

This is not the way I travel, unfortunately. Gone are the good old days of multiple thousand-accrued miles, where I could pretty much sweet talk a ticket agent into a first class seat just by wearing my outrageous peach linen jacket, black shirt and day-glo orange tie, along with the most agent-friendly attitude you ever done saw.

Nope, I have to slum it like the rest of them these days.  Nooooo problem! I have ways to umm . . ."pillow" my hard landing in seat 42A.

Besides, and this is what most folk forget, I actually LOVE being in an airplane. Sitting down in that newly-vaccuumed seat and buckling that belt while dragging my magazines out of my carry-on and gazing munificently about the cabin really make me feel as though I have just grown a new, pressurized aluminum skin and from then until I exit said plane, I am INDESTRUCTIBLE. and, 99.999999999999999999999999999 times out of 100, I AM.