(If men were meant to fly, we’d have been born with peanuts.)
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I don’t like airports. Mostly because being in airports leads to being in airplanes. And being in airplanes can lead to flying in airplanes, eventually, though these days, you never know.

These days, if you must travel, it makes more sense to just drive to your destination, unless you’re going to some foreign country, like Iran, or Detroit. For me, flying holds zero allure, what with all the downsides: the prices; the pre-flight security; the takeoff and landing delays; the weather delays; the lost baggage delays; the risk of getting a window seat next to Tom DeLay.

Hassles aside – and they are legion – I don’t care for any activity where the primary instruction is “stay calm.”

But don’t take my word for it. Here…I’ll let the airport speak for itself:

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In the Airport

[Disembodied Female Voice]

Welcome to the Midtown International Airport, and to another slog through the grueling and dehumanizing gauntlet that is airline travel. Congratulations on having deciphered the various parking options, and for having avoided crippling injury or violent death in the curb-side pickup/drop-off lanes – an area we affectionately refer to as “The Ego Coliseum.”

You are now in the Main Ticketing Concourse, which may contain the nastiest piece of no-culture carpet in the solar system. For your convenience, we have removed all references to the real world outside, including windows, clocks, and realistically priced food. On a personal note, the baggage handlers at Midtown International would like to thank you for showing up with more luggage than Ike used to invade Europe.

At this time, please spend a few irritating hours trying to find the check-in desk for your chosen airline, from whom you optimistically ordered tickets online, and which we forgot to mention is now operating under another name, at the far end of the Midtown International concourse complex, which is located in Cleveland.

Until then, we hope you’ll enjoy lugging your checked and carry-on tonnage back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, through our highly configurable, bank-teller-style, customer queue walking trails, a switchback system that converts a direct four-step walk into a winding, eleven-mile trek, using a design based on a 90-year-old Parisian cheese-maker’s small intestine.

And speaking of impacted bowels, don’t forget to visit our convenient bar and dining area, the Tarmac ‘N’ Cheese, where you can experience the culinary confusion of paying five bucks for a dry cookie that tastes like it might have been a Sesame Street stage prop, or sip a cocktail while pondering the marketing mindset that led to shamelessly charging $17.50 for Eve’s original apple and a ptomaine-teased tuna fish sandwich.

Before your flight issues its “boarding now” announcement, which could be, oh, just any day now, be sure to visit our gift shop, the Shuttle Crock, filled floor-to-ceiling with chintzy local mementos, inedible snacks, and bulky, hardback copies of books by every author you can imagine, as long as you imagine Dan Brown and Danielle Steele.

And folks, please remember, in case you’ve been in a coma for the last twenty years and didn’t get the memo: this is a non-smoking facility, just like every other structure in America that has a roof, including your own car.

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In the Airplane

[Disembodied Male Voice]

Ladies and gentlemen, your attention, please. This is the Captain. We’ve received clearance from the tower to begin cautiously hoping for a conceivably eventual takeoff, which my co-pilot and I estimate should put us in the #1 position on the runway sometime between, say, 4:46pm and the next major continental shift.

At this time I’ll ask everyone to return to their assigned seats, buckle up, and try to relax, even though your seats are so ancient they still have ashtrays in the armrests, and despite the fact that those seats, we’re pretty sure, are firmly bolted to a lowest-bid plane that we’ve been using since women wore velour gauchos.

Now, please direct your attention to the front of the cabin for the Obligatory Safety Lecture. And, again, thank you for flying Deep Budget Cuts Airlines.

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[Steward-person of the female persuasion with savagely white dental work]

Hi! My name’s Binkie, and on behalf of Deep Budget Cuts Airlines, may I say ‘thank you’ for flying with us today, assuming all things go well. We’re grateful to you for choosing our airline, and for submitting to a full-body cavity search by a uniformed, snotty, staggeringly undertrained, 350-pound civil servant!

In just a brief moment, we’ll ask that you please direct your attention to the front of the cabin, where, as part of the Obligatory Safety Lecture, we will present a short film on our Deep Budget Cuts custom 16-mm movie screen with that slight tilt and the duct-taped patches.

But first things first! Please take a moment to find the plane’s exits, which I’m more-or-less pointing to now with these vague semaphore-like arm gestures. It’s important that you plan, in advance, how to reach the exit nearest you in the unlikely event of a life-ending tragedy while flying at 300 miles per hour, some 30,000 feet above a bunch of really hard landscape, in a 42-year-old metal tube that’s theoretically being maintained by a bitter, underpaid mechanics union.

And remember! While you’re blindly groping for the nearest exit in hellish, smoke-filled darkness as you plummet inexorably into gravity’s grip, please remain calm.

Under your seat is a 1960s-era flotation device that is utterly useless, given our departure and destination points. I mean, the chances of this flight landing in an ocean are about as likely as Michelle Obama offering to ‘go dutch’ on a hotel bill.

And now let’s turn to the topic of staying calm during sudden cabin decompression, which is a common side-effect of colliding with a rogue asteroid duri…

[Eighty-seven minutes later]

…and in the unlikely event that anyone should discharge a weapon, regardless of their Constitutionally-guaranteed religious orientation, please use the provided stationery to write to your Congressperson about gun ownership, while remaining calm.

Finally, should we experience a water event (don’t even ask), please figure out how to put on part of your seat, and how to fend off sharks with that lame in-flight meal knife, while remaining calm.

Thank you for your attention, and please enjoy this spot-welded foil bag that contains two peanuts.

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Nope. Not for me. I’m driving to the business meeting in Cleveland. See you at the hotel.

I’ll be the one that’s on time.

With all those peanuts.