From Row 15X, Seats A and C

Women could be feeling that they’ve somehow failed. Not at all!

We’re all, men as well as women, simply in the first stage of the victimized state of grief, in which other stages of grief will surely follow as we work our way south, or just rest for awhile in the shade of the arboreal dell where the river is full of beer and we can warm ourselves by wearing grandmother’s paisley shawl.

I, a man, have finally figured out my troubled relationship with flying! That I must surrender, surrender is what it’s all about, that when I’m flying I cannot care whether I live or die. It’s taken me years to come to terms with the situation.

Alaska Air, PDX to SFO, the 9 pm flight, every seat occupied. I already don’t want to be here.

The flight takes off—though I’m hesitant to use the word flight, rather I am a passenger pigeon, a very small bird, or a sparrow perhaps, sitting in an aisle seat, then thrust into a kind of tubal space, a contraption made of metals and plastics that shakes and rattles from side to side. The turbulence is wet and juicy, a storm moving from east to west, first over The Cascades and then The Sierras.

I have to care, no, I don’t care, I can’t care, I must simply surrender as peacefully as possible, with the purest intention possible. Perhaps the feeling I have is not unlike the feeling of being in mother’s birth canal itself, in limbo somewhere between birth and death, while be made conscious of every move inside myself while thinking, ‘yes please, I’ll have the abortion immediately.’

I suppose I could get used to this feeling as a kind of surrender. Not a truce, but the sort of full blown submission so many women have had to endure for eons, with the added burden too of having to go through another excruciating presidency, a trip through hell with political analysis narrated by pundits and other experts.