You can only survive so long off airplane pretzels.  They used to offer peanuts on flights, but society has become too weak for peanuts.  Pathetic.  The fact that a peanut can drag an adult into shivering anaphylactic shock.  Reprehensible.  Maybe not in terms of the individual, I guess, but as a species.  So easily suffocated, punctured, broken.  One bad mushroom, the wrong combination of Tylenol AM and PM, prolonged diarrhea, an extended seventy degree bubble bath – humans are frail. 

Either way, I shouldn’t have to battle starvation and dehydration every time I take an cross country flight.  Bring me water and bring me a fucking bag of peanuts, a piece of fruit – some sustenance.  Your pretzels are degrading.  Tangled wads of salted cardboard lying dead in a tiny pouch, all situated on a bed of their cremated siblings.  I’d be better sated chewing through the vomit bag or gnawing the edge of the tray table.

And you have the ill sense to offer me a ten dollar cheese sandwich.  Was the 180 dollar baggage fee not enough?  You’ve got me captive at 38,000 feet, why not bend me over the flight attendants trolley while you’re at it?

A cabin packed ass to ass like a psychotic game of human Tetris.  Every cubic foot impregnated with the funk of dirty airport socks. Recycled sneezes coming through the vents, disguised as a breeze.  All of the miscreants in economy class scratching themselves, smelling their fingers.  Picking scabs and dropping them down the shirt-back of the person in front of them.  Uneasy shifting, bloated post-vacation bellies speaking in code to one another.  Row after row of farts muffled by buoyant seat cushions.    

The torture required to defy gravity.  I’ve got my knees jammed so far up the ass of the man in front of me that we’ve created a new species.  A malformed centaur with dry lips and abdominal pain. We sit folded onto ourselves until the turbulence shakes the last bit of hydration into our bladders.  Then we stumbled to the lavatory to squeeze out a few painful drops of sulfur. 

Eleven hours.  Do you expect me to regurgitate the slop served by your cunning associates at the airport?  Vomit it into my mouth and chew my cud like a lama?  I should spit in your face.  Stab you repeatedly with your silly wing-shaped pin.  

I would act on these aggravations if my life wasn’t entirely in your hands.  In that sense, you’ve got all the leverage you need.  You’ve got me by the balls.  I have no choice but to sit back here and suffer with the general population.  I don’t care what you do up there in the cabin, just stay awake – and don’t fly me into a fuckin cliff-face. 

But, for fucks-sake, would it kill you to toss back a few peanuts.