Eight Miles High

I recently had to fly down to sunny Florida to attend to some family business. The flight was mostly uneventful and even pleasant due to the general excellence of Jet Blue Airlines. I got to see The Last King Of Scotland (Lazy eyed Forrest Whitaker is as good as everyone's saying. The guy deserves an Oscar...) and watch a recap of the Giants 1986 Superbowl victory (Yay!!). Jet Blue is the best. They deserve any success that comes their way. Sadly, that experience is not the norm. Flying, as I'm sure many of you know, is a royal pain in the ass. Especially if you live in the New York City area. If Amtrak wasn't run by a bunch of silly retards, they might even begin to appear as an alternative to air travel since there are so many compelling reasons to avoid flying and there seems to be more every day:

• Hurry Up & Wait, Sucker! — The DMV is a model of efficiency compared to most major airports I've been to. I'm lucky enough to live near a small, manageable one, but if I had to leave from any of the Big Three NYC Airports, I might as well kiss the day goodbye. The FAA recommends that you arrive a ridiculous two hours early for your flight. If you're leaving from JFK International, which often feels like the travelers version of Abu Ghraib (especially on and around holidays), you should give yourself two hours just to fight traffic. Parking at JFK is so far from anywhere on Earth, you could hide WMD's there and no one would ever find them. I used to take cabs and car services to there or LaGuardia and, besides being outrageously expensive, it was always a near miracle if the driver knew where either airport was.
• Airlines Are Greedy Fuckers And Deserve Bankruptcy — I long ago learned to accept that Airlines just won't serve meals anymore. You're lucky if you get a soda and a bag of peanuts. Cost saving measures like that may seem petty, but they probably save millions of dollars a year. However, it's inexcusable that they often overbook flights and overfill reservations past capacity. Loading a full plane takes a long time. Especially when you board the plane 47 rows at a time, guaranteeing that people will rush the entrance trying desperately to board ASAP so they have room to jam their carry-on luggage into the woefully undersized overhead rack before the fucker next to them gets there first. People often carry on as much as possible so they can avoid checking their luggage, which sometimes takes hours to retrieve, if it arrives at their destination at all. I remember one time, years ago, Tower Air sent my Grandmother to Miami and her luggage with all her medication to Chili. I really felt bad for the people on the same flight whose pets were sent to Peru. Now they were angry.
• Color-blind Profiling. Who's kidding who? — Thanks to my Sicilian/southern Italian ditch digger roots (a stereotype, I know... But better than the predominant stereotype of my ancestors), I have a semi-olive complexion straight out of a Scorsese movie (especially when I get some sun), thick eyebrows and curly hair. When I don't shave, I could pass for Saddam Hussein's third cousin once removed. No one's ever going to confuse me for an albino or a Swede. I expect to be stopped and searched. Please, go ahead. It's fucking annoying, but I fit the visual profile of someone who might be smuggling C4 up my anus while screaming about forty virgins. That's an unfortunate reality of this shitty, evil world we live in. Had the geniuses who let me pass bothered, they would have discovered a suitcase full of ratty Mego t-shirts, ancient, more-or-less clean underwear and a dog-eared copy of Bad Movies We Love. They would not have found a pipe bomb or an Al Quaeda membership card. I could then have been on my way, happy in the knowledge that our nation's passenger screeners were vigilant and wary; fighting the good fight and always on the lookout for the next screaming lunatic out to kill innocent people in the name of their motherfucking religion. Of course, that's not what happened. I breezed through, which was wonderful for me since I wasn't inconvenienced or held up in any way. I did see them "randomly" rifling through an elderly woman's carry on. She looked mildly confused and agitated at the idiocy of her situation. The screeners looked like brain-dead automatons, blankly searching through this ladie's bag while sporting a "I'm just following orders, so shut the fuck up and let me finish bothering you" attitude. I'm sure she wasn't smuggling "Osama For President" posters and pearl handled revolvers aboard but that didn't matter. They were randomly doing their jobs so as to not offend our terrorist-looking brothers who are as American as you and me, goddammit!! At least no one's feelings were hurt. They might have had to call their therapist and pay for a good cry session. Boo fucking hoo. Political correctness should not trump common sense. Let the grandma's in wheelchairs pass, please, and start concentrating on young males who comprise 99% of the terrorist work force. It's OK to occasionally pick some folks out at random, but the current policy just wastes time and money.
• "Please return your seat to it's upright position" — One must accept the fact that flying coach means you're "enjoying" the next three to five hours crammed into a seat designed for a 36lb amputee midget. You should consider yourself lucky if you're not squeezed in next to some human/manatee hybrid who's body is comprised of 30% Big Mac. But how, pray tell, is straightening my seat from it's far-from-relaxing 88° tilt to an apparently much safer 90° right angle going to save me if the plane goes down? Will that 2° save me from being pulped as I slam into the earth at 500+ mph? I doubt it. Maybe in the propeller days, reclining seats during landing meant the difference between a safe touch down and a fiery inferno. I'll bet there's no real reason besides some idiotic law held over from olden days. Aviation's equivalent of riding your horse down 5th Avenue between 2pm and 4pm. It's just stupid.

Oh Well, now I'm just nit-picking. There are a multitude of other reasons to avoid flying in this post 9-11 world, but then I'd just be rehashing gripes others have expressed often in the past and much more eloquently. Feel free to contribute your own, however. I'd love to hear another opinion.