plane travel and crashes

It goes without saying that my electronic device was turned off. We had only started our decent and the last thing I wanted was to face the wrath of a cranky stewardess. Looking out the window I could see the shiny blue of the lake beneath us and the city of Chicago beginning to creep up on the horizon.

Being that I am so tall and lanky the last thing I want to do is bring my seat back into the upright position but the pressure in my ears was telling me that it was time and, again, that ferocious stewardess was patrolling up and down the aisle wearing the expression of a hungry jackal. (Paul is right you know, you ain’t nothing but a waitress in the sky.)

So my electronic device was off and I was looking out the window as we began to circle Chicago, banking over the Northwest suburbs as we approached O’Hare. My head was pressed against my little window opening and I was absentmindedly tapping the stylus from my electronic device against the window. Looking down. I could begin to make out individual buildings now as we got lower. The stylus moving against the glass of the window without me paying much if any attention.

Then it happened.

It took me a few seconds to put the pieces together. I’m looking down when I see this tiny dot sort of move erratically beneath the plane. Then I realize that it had followed the same movement as the stylus.

Hmmmmm.

By now I could begin to make out cars and trucks on the highway and I wondered if I had just witnessed a crash of some sort. We were still high enough that it was difficult to tell and I could find no trace of whatever it was that had slid across my line of sight. I would say it was done more idly than driven by curiosity but either way my stylus touched upon one of the automobiles on the highway… and I dragged it across both lanes of traffic, through a small field and into a wooded area.

“That’s strange” I thought to myself.

Briefly I sat back into my seat and thought through this moral grey area. While it was, of course, clearly reprehensible to cause any kind of traffic accidents it was also clearly impossible for my stylus to have had any part in what I just witnessed. Therefore I once again returned to my little window to explore this phenomenon further.

This time it was a small box truck. My stylus touched upon it and dragged it at least a mile at speeds that must have exceeded 150 mph right into a Chevron station. The ball of fire created was all Christmasy orange and looked no bigger than an inch across from where I sat. The weird part being that from where I sat this explosion was silent. I could only imagine the shrieking of sirens and bystanders, the heat of the flames and the smell of gasoline turning the pleasant early afternoon of whatever intersection I had moved the box truck through into chaos.

The next car my stylus lighted upon had a hell of a ride. I had tried to run it headfirst into another car but missed so I was forced to double back and keep trying to hit the other vehicle as it dodged and swerved to avoid this horrific end. I couldn’t help but wonder if my car was keeping its tires on the road or if I was literally lifting it and moving it above the pavement. On some of the turns I was making I was sure it would have shredded the rubber right off the rims if in fact the car was still earthbound.

What was this driver thinking? I had to laugh a little. One second he or she is tooling along… the next their car is flying around, totally out of their control, trying to hit another car. Ah to be a fly on that wall.

Finally I got the car to smash into the other fleeing one. Just to make sure I kept slamming it into the disabled vehicle again and again. Was that smoke I saw?

As the plane got lower it became harder and harder to manipulate the vehicles. By the time the wheels started to be lowered the best I could do is cause cars and trucks to be pulled sluggishly into ditches and medians. Apparently there was some relative stylus-to-object size/influence consideration. By the time we were on the runway the best I could do was to knock the hats off the crew working on the ground. Funny but far less satisfying.

Soon my scowling stewardess had my rapt attention as she implored us to remain seated until the little light went off above us at which point all the inexperienced travelers jump to their feet like some Pavlovian experiment. “Sit the fuck down, they won’t open the doors for another 5 minutes you dickwads!” I said under my breath.

Anyway … I’m sure you must have read about this string of ‘accidents’ and the accompanying fatalities in Chicago the other day. I trust you’ll keep this crudely-written confession to yourself. No one would believe you anyway I’m guessing.

Flying back to Philly soon. I wonder if the stylus will work the same.

Only one way to know for sure …