Last Saturday, I returned home from a much-needed trip to Florida, staggered into my apartment, kicked my suitcase to one side, gave the cat a quick pat, and peeled off every stitch of clothing before the front door had even swung fully shut behind me. I absolutely cannot abide that airplane smell – that fusty, funky, contagious stench, reminiscent of a couch that has gotten used as an ashtray for cheap cigars, thrown up on by the entire Limburger Cheese Appreciation Society, and left out in a driving rain composed of condensed bad breath – and it had permeated my clothing, so I stripped down and fumigated myself with a cloud of CK One.

I strongly dislike plane travel, and if I can devise a feasible way to drive to my destination instead, I will do so, because I would rather spend fifteen hours in the car than fifteen minutes on a commercial aircraft. It isn’t fear of flying, either – the likelihood of my perishing in giant fireball is evidently quite small, and much less bothersome to me in the abstract than the prospect of death by drowning or cancer. It’s a deadly-to-the-nerves combination of misanthropy, impatience, claustrophobia, and a low tolerance for icky smells. The total of under-the-breath “not”s I utter during any given flight numbers in the tens of thousands. I can’t stand flying.

I can’t stand most other people, which doesn’t help. I find the sheer number of people who have zero familiarity with common courtesy, the concept of rules which apply to all, or the idea of personal space utterly astounding – and extremely annoying. Sociologists probably have a more official-sounding term for this, but I’ve discovered that many people will behave the same way when surrounded by strangers that they do when alone; in other words, if they don’t know you personally, they don’t feel obligated to behave politely around you. They don’t feel obligated to say “excuse me” before bulldozing past, through, over, and around you to reach their seats or haul their heavier-than-uranium carry-on luggage over your toes. They don’t think you’ll mind if they brush their waist-length hair and deposit the strays on your messenger bag (and yes, Overly Tanned Depilation Expert Seated In 7B On Flight 260 From Fort Myers To Newark Departing At 7:30 A.M., this means you). They pick their noses, they chew with their mouths open, they sing along with the music on their Walkmen – irritating enough behavior at a safe remove, but positively psychosis-inducing when wedged into the cramped quarters of coach class. Wake up, folks – you don’t walk the earth alone. If the armrest feels a little softer and squishier than normal, hey, why not try looking down? Because you’ve probably pinioned the tender flesh of my forearm with your very very very sharp elbow. Another indicator: me, seated next to you, tapping your shoulder and remarking, “Excuse me, so sorry to bother you, but FUCKING OW!” Yeah, hi. Hi. Get off me. Thanks. Something else to ponder: if the flight attendants ask passengers to remain seated until the fasten-seatbelt sign goes off, you know, they might really mean “all the passengers on the entire plane,” rather than, say, “all the passengers on the entire plane except you, Grandpa, because you and your Sans-A-Belt slacks merit privileges unavailable to mere mortals, so think of yourself as a frog and the other travelers as lilypads, and hop right on over them to the front – that’s right, just step on their heads.” That mini-bottle of Dewar’s didn’t give you superpowers, In-A-Rush Limbaugh, so sit your floodpants-clad ass back down like everyone else, because nobody can go anywhere until they open the door to the jetway. No, not even you. Sit down. And stay down.

Not that I can’t sympathize with the strong urge to deplane as quickly as possible, because I certainly can. Planes reek. In fact, I can’t believe planes don’t reek worse than they do, given that the average flight multiplies stanky coffee breath, incorrectly applied or forgotten deodorant, lower-GI disturbances originating with Mexican food, and clouds of noxious perfume by a couple hundred times, then overlays these pre-existing stenches with the odor of the in-flight “meal,” which usually involves some sort of simulated egg-white product, simmered in denatured chewing gum and liberally seasoned with wood shavings collected from the floor of McSorley’s Tavern during the Kennedy administration. Or so the smell would indicate. Curious, then, that the meals have no flavor whatsoever. Both going down to Florida and returning home, my family and I breakfasted on grain flakes and a banana – or foods that looked like grain flakes and bananas, but which had none of the properties you might ordinarily associate with cereal and fruit. Most cereal and fruit tastes like cereal and fruit, and most cereal does not require a full twenty minutes of chewing per bite. The meal also included a muffin from which, presumably in an effort to avoid offending anyone, the airline chefs had removed anything resembling a taste. I would tell you that it tasted like cardboard, but I have tasted cardboard, and this muffin tasted nothing like cardboard. This muffin tasted nothing like, well, anything. This muffin had no taste at all. A brief experiment revealed that the paper cup in which the muffin came had no taste at all either. Oddly, the lack of taste, familiar consistency, or anything else which might prompt the average person to eat the meal, instead of throwing it back at his or her captors with a screech of rage, did not stop anyone on the plane from eating it, and it did not stop the plane from filling with the odor of masticated bran flakes and banana. When I asked for a cup of coffee to wash down my Honey Bunches Of Gravel, I think I saw the flight attendant dip a brown crayon into lukewarm water. The coffee did have a flavor . . . the flavor of a crayon . . . dipped into lukewarm water. I don’t expect the airline to provide chai or fruit smoothies on the beverage service, but would it kill them to brew a pot of fresh coffee? Because, much though I enjoyed my thimble-sized cup of Crayola Zinger, I could really have used the caffeine.

Planes also get loud. The child directly behind us on the flight down shrieking, “I DON’T WANNA SIT IN THAT SEAT! I DON’T WANNA FLY ON THIS PLANE!” seven hundred and eighteen thousand times before take-off. (We laughed at that, actually, mostly because we could totally relate to the kid’s outrage.) And the engines. Throats clearing, noses blowing; magazines and books rustling. The call button dinging, usually fifteen times in quick succession, because if the flight attendant can’t get from first class to Row 33 in 3.7 seconds, she’s just not trying. The pilot droning on about local weather conditions. Babies yowling at the pressurization of the cabin. The video telling all the passengers without frontal lobes how to operate the stupid goddamn seatbelt for the eighteenth stupid goddamn time. Other planes taking off. The Bunting family grumbling, “Any day would work for us. Any day this week. Got the whole week open. Any day will do.”

I could cope with the smells, and the noise, and the people in my face, and the hassle of getting to the airport, if only the entire process of getting to and boarding and taking a flight didn’t take such an excruciatingly long time. The day of a flight sounds like a day in the Army: hurry up, then wait; hurry up some more, wait some more; rush around, then slump in a plastic chair; hustle about, then sit for an hour. Hurry! Okay, just wait. Run! Okay, sit down. I rush to get to the airport, and then I have forty-five minutes to kill before boarding. I dash to the end of the line with my boarding pass, and then I stand in line for fifteen minutes, and then I shuffle into the plane, and then I hustle to get my carry-ons stowed, and then I sit in my seat tapping my fingers until take-off. Then we take off – ooh, exciting! Look at the little cars and houses, getting smaller. Okay, bored. Read a book. Hey, the meal! Hurry to order! Hurry to eat it! Fantasize about flavor! Okay, meal’s over. Bored again. All right, we’ll land soon! Oh, not for half an hour. Still circling. Still trying to land. Yep, landing. Landing. God, just drop it on the Turnpike already, I can hitchhike from here. What the hell – yay, we landed finally! But we have to sit in the plane while the pilot looks for a parking spot. Not moving. Bunch of gates free, no planes in the way. Not moving at all. Found a spot! Okay, let’s wait for everyone in the front to pick up their umpteen illegal carry-ons they called “purses” and shamble out. Shamble shamble shamble. Woo hoo! Out of the plane! Smoke time! Okay, where’s the luggage? Luggage? Heeeeeere, luggage luggage luggage! Okay, got the luggage – sprint to the cab line. Wait. Wait. Smoke. Wait. No, Brazilian family, you cannot fit eight people and nineteen suitcases into a single taxi. Or even two taxis. Please figure this out. Please hurry up, so that I will not have to wait anymore. Hurry up, wait; hurry up, wait. I can’t take it. I want to arrive at the airport, drop off my bags at curbside check-in, and get sucked via pneumatic tube into my seat on the plane, which will then take off at exactly the time listed on the ticket, and I don’t care if we miss another 747 by inches during take-off or have to do a 3G vertical roll during the flight pattern as a result. I want to take off on time, land on time, and get the damn flying OVER WITH so I can go home and get changed and get on with my not-smelling-like-the-love-child-of-baby-puke-and-cheap-rum life.

I had a lovely vacation. Of course, after a flight, I could have the car service drop me off in downtown Teheran and still have a great time, and I could go almost anywhere with my brother and have a great time regardless of the mode of transport, but at least the flight down had a sunny, seafood-gluttonous reward. Alas, I had to come home, and now you, dear reader, have to hear about it.

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