My old band Mule Train did a cover of Willie Nelson’s “Bloody Mary Morning”, a song about a lovelorn Willie managing a cross-country flight from LAX with a stiff plastic cup of vodka and spicy tomato juice. It’s a great song:

Bloody Mary Morning (mp3)

My friend Leland, a will-be-well-known author who has written three novels and counting, travels around the world for work, and treats his time in the air as time to write, time to think. I envy that amount of dedicated writing time, but fundamentally hate flying: I find it terrifying—yes, I know all of the typical arguments about the safety of flying vs driving, biking, etc, but those things are on the ground, somewhere human beings are meant to be, not thousands of feet in the air, where birds and the spacemen are meant to be. For instance, here is something meant to be in the air:

Here is something meant to stay on the ground:

Rationalists ask me, what is so awful about flying? Some death-defying lunatics actually enjoy it, with no reservations. First off, there’s the sheer impossibility of it (your book-physics be damned,) but there’s more at play than that. For me there’s a certain amount of claustrophobia (thanks for that particular neurosis, mom!) involved. But more specifically, at least in my case, it is the lack of agency. Sure, I’m more likely to die behind the wheel of a car, but it’s me behind that wheel.

Bullshit, some have said in response to these arguments—being behind that wheel provides only an illusion of agency.

Which is an absurd response: it’s a rational response to an irrational fear. Rational responses have no place here—if they did, I’d have already been convinced by the fact that the human race has flown in planes for a century now, to generally positive results. Gung-ho rationalists who make such arguments treat irrational fears as if they’re noble savages to be defeated by good olde European steel. So by sheer dint of extrapolation, we can see that these rationalists are as terribly small-minded as European Colonialists, and their unimaginative arguments in favor of measured reason should be censured as such.

Despite all this, I have come to appreciate flying to a limited degree, fortunately in time for this trip to Australia and back. Living on the opposite side of the country than your family and friends, you’ve got to find something to like in it.

My old boss and misanthropic spirit animal Rob Miller wrote in an old issue of Punk Planet about his flight regimen: Xanax, Ambien, and approximately 3-5 alcoholic beverages. For me, it’s similar, though my doctor is not as forthcoming with the good drugs as his, apparently. In lieu of good drugs, I have to provide myself with a ridiculous number of diversions, not unlike a parent with a child. I’ve got my netbook with a backup battery, a couple of books (currently reading: White Teeth by Zadie Smith and Black Swan Green by the unimpeachable David Mitchell), a literal stack of magazines—Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker, National Geographic, Seed, the Atlantic, and BBC Knowledge, and an iPod Touch loaded up with about a hundred hours of TV documentaries and podcasts.

Carrying all of this content around can be a pain in the ass (first Facebook commenter to suggest a Kindle gets a virtual kick in the nads!), but giving myself this many options helps allay the sensation of physical claustrophobia. I rarely use these diversions—or tire of them quickly, within the first hour of the flight—but having access to a limited set of them at least offers some relief. To quell the remaining anxiety, a few Bloody Marys help, as they did for Willie.

Once bored by the static buffet of diversions, flying becomes a great opportunity to be confined to one place and write. As I flew back from Sydney—14 hours across the ocean, four hours in SFO, another 4 hours to Chicago—I hit up Qantas’ complementary drink service liberally and went to work, locked in a hermetically sealed writing chamber with few outside distractions, save for the half hour of turbulence that was so horrifying that half the people in the cabin were screaming for at least 15 minutes of it (not I, what with the British stiff upper lip genes that I inherited and all that, you know.)

No endless tabs of distraction in Google Chrome, and a limited field of movement—time to be productive. I made it through three blog posts—I often write these a while before posting, so I can sit on them and think about what inflammatory statements I really want to stand behind—a couple of show previews, and, most productively, six scenes in a play that I’m working on. Since I know absolutely nothing about writing plays, even less than than I know about any other form of writing,  I would distract myself at some point for a couple of endless jaunts through playwriting blogs in most circumstances. Isolated a few thousand feet above the ground, without that apparent luxury, I just downed a few drinks, put the headphones on, and began writing.

The only place that I can enjoy this sort of focused work time is on a plane, unfortunately. While I imagine I could replicate the conditions, it would take a level of self-discipline that I rarely have.

The takeaway, in red text a la the new Newsweek, for readers who dislike reading more than 30 words of anything: flying is a terrible, terrifying act of tempting the fates, an act of man’s hubris as he mocks the gods with his makeshift flying machine fashioned from blood, toil and steel. Still, if you get suitably drunk while in the air, it can be a great opportunity to get some writing done without Internet and other distractions of the landlocked world.