FLOWN

I like flying in planes. I know they crash sometimes, that they can leave one feeling piscine and salted, that they are often staffed by beaming dunderheads all too delighted to make available to you their pinchfisted “hospitality” of a pretzeled pittance and what beverages might remain of an under-stocked bodega, post food riot. Yes, even knowing these things, I like flying in airplanes. Looking down on home from that high is like transcending dimensions, unflattening at first into a tilted bedotted place of lumps and pools, and then flattening profoundly into a pictorial plane, at once the literal view of our cartographic abstractions and an abstraction of our own ground-hugging impressions. It’s amazing (with a window seat), and, apparently, the decreased air pressure inspires dumb run-on sentences.

As we passed over the northernmost Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians, I wondered how the first geologists and cartographers to fly must have felt, looking down on their theories and certainties and projections writ true. What could be more vindicating? IN YOUR FACE, DOUBTERS!

Speaking of doubters, as I sat down in my aisle seat for the next stretch of my journey, the man at the window was clearly a Talker. You know this immediately. The Talker greets you, and not just perfunctorily. He smiles. I dove into my book, but he asked what it was about. I sketched the plot for him, and dove back in, but he wanted to know what I was going to do in Colorado, which lead to school, which lead to defining the iSchool, which lead to interface design, which, somehow, lead to Creationism. I had on my hands a card carrying believer. And he was not a blind-watchmaker, unseen hand kind of Creationist, this man knew, and believed his bible, cover to cover. So we talked about biology, about the age of the planet, about stem cells, about the veracity of the Bible, and, thankfully, I found that although I disagreed with him on almost every single way we approached the world, we still had a very civil, cordial conversation. We managed to boil our differences down to our approach the unknown. For me, the unknown is something to hypothesize about with sufficient data in hand, but without sufficient data, I’m fine remaining ignorant until more data arrives. He was unsatisfied with that, with the enormity of the Universe, with our inability to comprehend the entirety of even the most commonplace things, and wasn’t satisfied with tempered ignorance, so he required agency, divine intent, and belief. I thought it was fantastic that we got there without yelling at each other. He realized that the only way to break my atheism was to witness a genuine, supernatural miracle, of the burning bush, walking on water variety, so he promised to pray for God to send me one, and I thought that was great. Still waiting for the miracle, but I appreciate the gesture. Sadly, I think the only things that might shake his faith are far more sinister than combusting shrubbery. I hope he never encounters them.

In airports, I always find myself looking at the people waiting at different gates, trying to decide if they look particularly Texan, or Alaskan, or whatever. Does the Oakland flight look more Oaklandish than the SFO one? This almost always fails. Californian flights seem to have a few more Asian folk, and of course there are the accents, but otherwise it never seems to work.

For some reason, I wrote “Bob Costas Mark Hamill’s brother?!” in my notebook. I do not know why.