When you’re voluntarily imprisoned in an airliner – buckled up and cinched in, seatback and tray table in the upright and locked position – one’s prevailing reality can change quickly. While you’re optimizing the miserly 11 cubic feet of space you’re allotted, seemingly trivial matters can swell into a wave of overwhelming stuff – a tsunami of tstuff that’s difficult to tsurf. Normally, a stable mentality can calmly navigate these matters. Then there’s me. Who, in this instance, managed to elevate what should’ve been a trivial custodial chore (tossing away a sliver of trash) into a Force 5 psychotic event.

 

 

My Tale of Airborne Angst

There’s something pacifying about having limited choices when airborne. You understand and are even comforted by these boundaries – like how a dog feels in its crate. I’m content to inhabit this space where you don’t have to contend with nagging nuisances. You’re just flying from point A to point B. There’s nothing to fuss over as you relax into your airborne limbo. And due to these pleasantly straitened circumstances, your life becomes simpler and naturally decluttered – like a cerebral cleansing where all the detritus of the day is blown away into the purifying Jetstream.

 

In these high-flying situations of clarity, little things mean a lot – a whole lot. And, in this case, a whole lot became way too much. At least it did for me. Because within this soothing swirl of airborne simplification I began hatching conspiracies where none existed. My susceptible mind became perturbed and, much to my chagrin, a bite-sized quibble, grew into an inedible hunk-a, hunk-a burnin’ hysteria. Allow me to explain.

 

Once upon a time, on a long flight to Maui, I had finished my Snyder’s Pretzel snack (good) and now I had that nasty little bag to discard (bad). Somehow, I failed to notice my flight attendant’s garbage run, as Gale darted down the aisle like a speedy donation collector at a big box church. How could I miss her billowing white Hefty bag signaling it’s time for the flock to donate their wretched refuse? Then again, maybe it was a Glad bag and not a Hefty bag. It all happened so fast I couldn’t be sure, and lord knows I have enough baggage of my own to deal with. Of course, the need for certainty on such a piddling issue like this Glad vs. Hefty baggage meant only one thing: I was deep down a rabbit hole, and my susceptible mind was now officially perturbed. For all I know, the garbage bag Gale whisked by me could’ve been a Kirkland brand. Yup, I was down a rabbit hole deeper than Alice in Wonderland. Pull up Hardiman, pull up!    

 

As Gale sped by me like I was Wile E. Coyote and she the roadrunner, a paranoiac thought crossed my mind. Was I being actively bypassed? I remember the guy next to me made his deposit and then Gale zoomed off before I could make my trashy contribution. She literally left me holding the bag – the empty pretzel bag. Maybe, when I boarded, I shouldn’t have tossed off what I thought was a rather winning remark (a bon mot if you will. Even if you won’t – I’m still calling it a bon mot). I said to her, I did; “Y’know Gale (as read on her name tag), if you don’t fit easily into an overhead bin, we’re gonna have to put you in with the checked baggage.” Gale furrowed her brow and looked askance at me. Clearly I had struck the wrong chord.  

 

C’mon Hardiman, read the room, or, more fittingly, at least fathom the fuselage. Sometimes my supposed all-embracing humor designed to move its participants down the field of play in a “we’re all in this thing together” manner, is lost on people. Then again, maybe this entire tempest was happening in the teapot of my mind, and Gale’s neglect of me and my trash, was just a simple miscommunication. Y’know…the Occam’s Razor thing whereby the most reasonable and logical explanation is usually the most reliable.

 

Unfortunately, my high-strung mind was too restless to be satisfied by a sketchy hypothesis from some pre-Renaissance philosopher named Occam. Who names their baby Occam? I don’t care if all those historical smarties ate an olive-heavy Mediterranean diet. What did they know? We had Liquid Paper to repair our writing mistakes. They used a hammer and chisel for Christ’s sake. We have desiccant packs to keep our cookies crisp and crumbly. Their cookies were moist and bendy. I’ll grant you we’re probably tied on yogurt, but c’mon – their barbers were also their dentists. And we’re supposed to bow down to these toga-wearing oracles of wisdom.

 

So, my restless mind began to wander (bad, very bad). There it was, 8 miles high, off leash and somewhere out on the ailerons battling William Shatner’s gremlins from that Twilight Zone episode. As time passed with no relief in sight, I began to ponder the enormity of having to wrestle with this unruly scrap of litter all the way to Kahului Airport in Maui – still an interminable 4 hours away. The bullet points came fast and furious:

• Was there an evil cabal forming among the flight attendants whereby I was being cunningly groomed to “ride out this scrap of trash” all the way to Hawai’i?
• Was this so-called “Hawai’i” even a state anymore? I mean when did it pick-up that new apostrophe? Nobody ran it by me.
• Did Gale purposely avoid collecting my trash, knowing it might be a tipping point sending me spiraling into an irrational vortex fed by Gale force winds?
• On the other hand, how could a conspiracy be afoot when it looked much more like an ankle? Were these uniformed flight attendants actively avoiding me and allowing my unbidden trash to fester. Naah, I was reading too much into it. Right?
• The fix was in. It was me against all the flight attendants – or should I start calling them by the “S” word?
• Now I was wishing I hadn’t said anything to her about overhead bins or checked baggage. Couldn’t I have just been one of the sheep, and she a gentle shepherd tending to her flock, instead of the mother flocker she’d become in my mind?

 

In any event, the sanctity of my simplified world had now been shattered by the affronting litter demanding my full attention. Unwelcome complications and fears mounted. I obsessed over litter storage, when the next trash pick-up might be, and the fact that there was just a very thin skin of aluminum between me and a deadly oxygen-depleted atmosphere of 100 kt winds at -50°F. Well tut-tut. One dreaded nightmare at a time.

 

First of all, I don’t know when Gale might be back – if she’ll ever come back – to retrieve my trash. I mean there was no posted pick-up schedule, and it was a holiday to boot (Memorial Day) so I wasn’t really sure when this infernal wrapper would be removed from my presence. Perhaps there was some kind of odd/even seat pick up arrangement I wasn’t aware of? Of course, if the stewardesses (there I’ve said it) hadn’t been so busy plotting against me, I wouldn’t be in this si-chi-a-shun.

 

A New and More Existential Worry

Second of all, how does this colossal Boeing 757 weighing 250,000 lbs. stay up in the air – for 6 hours? What if today was the day the laws of aerodynamics decided to stop working once they realized the absurdity of keeping this paperweight with wings aloft, even for an instant? Maybe the celestial administrators that superintend such airborne matters will take a fresh look at my plane and decide, “Wait a minute. We’ve got it all wrong. This airborne contraption weighs more than the pyramids. We will not keep it in the air a minute longer.” And with that unhelpful decision from on high, my plane drops from the sky like a manhole cover. So yeah, I had concerns – irrational concerns – but at least they were an original work coming directly from my personal machinations. These were no copycat dysfunctions. Nothing was imported or counterfeit. My histrionics were created with 100% in-house defects and assembled deep within my fearful reptilian brain.

 

Back to Matters at Hand – My Trash

Now I can hear your response to what you think is my overreaction to such a trivial matter. “Rubbish,” you say. “Exactly,” I say. “Rubbish.” Rubbish everywhere and it’s starting to close in on me as I desperately attempt to organize and tidy up the miserly 11 cubic feet of space that currently defines my existence and imbues my world with definitive structure and inarguable clarity. Right now I know my boundaries, and like a dog in its crate, I’m content to inhabit them. I’m OK right now, but if left unchecked this growing glut of garbage will overwhelm me; and I’m easily whelmed. If relief isn’t found quickly this roiling wrapper caper would be a powder keg waiting to blow. This could be Halifax on December 6, 1917!

 

But for now, I must wrestle with this useless and empty pretzel wrapper taking up almost 1/500^th of the limited space allotted me in my circumscribed world. Why couldn’t I have noticed Gale dart down the aisle on her garbage run? Then I wouldn’t be in this untidy predicament. As it is, there sits the ungainly wrapper in my elastic mesh seatback holder – menacing me with its spent condition in its disorderly omnipresence.  Should I launch a pre-emptive strike against its mocking presence and take it to the forward restroom where I could toss its snooty little ass into some serious bathroom trash? Then I’d be done with it, and this entire mental house of cards will come tumbling down like a bad Jenga maneuver.

 

No, Thyself

If you’re like me, you have a 400+ credit score, you share a litter box with your cat and you pay a private investigator named Chad to comb through Sally Jessy Raphael’s trash hoping he’ll find unsent love letters intended for me. But rather than presenting you with a braggadocio list extolling my virtues, I also want to mention some less than savory things about me. At times imperceptibly trivial matters develop (drip, drip, drip) in my psyche and then just as suddenly explode cataclysmically like the Big Bang. This can happen when you have the emotional stability of a kangaroo, or any of those incompletely evolved animals from Downunder. Like me they spent too much time alone in the Outback and are stunted in certain areas. For example (and please keep this to yourselves) I was born with a marsupial pouch I still don’t know what to do with other than to store my retainer.

 

Back on board the airplane, time passes and now I’m in kind of a no man’s land – a Category 3 Purgative Purgatory where I’ve generated trash, but there’s no designated place to purge it. In my pristine world, it’s starting to pile up; even though it’s only one scrawny pretzel wrapper. And even though it’s just a trifling empty pouch. This troublesome scrap has invaded my space and is violating me like an unwanted suppository. At this point I wouldn’t have eaten the damn pretzels had I known a swift extraction of the offending package was unavailable. And although this unbidden trash was securely tucked away in a handy little elastic mesh pocket on the seatback in front of me where it wouldn’t bother a rational person, the mesh pocket seemed to advertise the trash rather than conceal it. The mesh has more holes in it than Clyde Barrow after the G-men caught up with him and Bonnie.

 

Finding a Solution?

But what if I removed the affronting article and transported it to the forward lavatory where I could easily toss it into the waste container? That could solve everybody’s problem (even though it’s only my problem) and extinguish all my free-floating anguish. The speculations grew fast and furious as I walked myself through a scenario where, after depositing the wrapper in the bathroom trash, I emerged to find myself marooned behind a newly deployed drink cart, doomed to stand in some hellish limbo until Brad in 22C pays for his Tanqueray and tonic. But he can’t find his credit card in this cashless fuselage so I must wait while Brad rummages into the overhead bin (where maybe he’d find Gale reposing) to retrieve his emergency credit card.

 

So, I’m stuck behind the drink cart, totally flummoxed and standing in the aisle like a fish out of water. And in this completely imagined scenario I deem it necessary to strike up an uneasy conversation with the poor lady in 12D:

 

Me: (utilizing my effortless humor to move the participants down the field of play in a “we’re all in this thing together” conversation) Well, I finally joined the Autobahn Society. I think it’s important to protect Germany’s endangered highways and byways.

Lady in 12C: Ummm, OK. Don’t you mean you joined the Audubon Society?

Me: No, the Audubon Society is for the birds.

Lady in 12C: (she summons a flight attendant) Excuse me Gale, this man is bothering me.

Gale: Oh yeah, it’s Mr. Overhead bin. One more disturbance from you Mr. Bin…Laden, and I will summon an Air Marshall to taze you.

 

With this coercive G-man scenario in the offing, I decide against depositing my stubborn garbage in the forward lavatory and slump back into my seat. I grow confused and quietly begin hyperventilating into my hands. I resolved to carry on and persevere in my seat with this foil abomination masquerading as a harmless empty pretzel packet staring a hole through my psyche as it sits pinned to the seatback, laughing at me through the perversely wide elastic mesh grid. I’m in the throes of anxiety and grope for a coping mechanism involving the herding instinct. That is, I notice others of my kind coping gracefully with parts of their empty pretzel packets dangling through their elastic mesh; so maybe I can cope too. I am hopeful that I can rise above this kerfuffle, though at 40,000 ft, I should already be well above it. If only those damn conspiratorial stewardesses weren’t all aligned against me.

 

 

From Brad to Worse or, More Aptly, from Hyperbole to Exaggeration

If the story ended right here, it wouldn’t be much of a story: airborne man perturbed by non-disappearing pretzel wrapper. This premise might generate a few “Likes” on a Facebook post, but it’s not going to generate a MacArthur Genius Grant. So fortuitously for the story, but not so fortuitously for me, the situation grew more dire (direrer?). Or, more accurately, the story gets trashier. Because suddenly there’s more garbage unwittingly created by me. You see, those salty pretzels have triggered me into swilling down my entire ginger ale on the rocks thereby producing 2 more pieces of unbidden trash and my nascent serenity is completely obliterated. And who among us hasn’t had their nascent serenity obliterated? I’m so against the obliteration of emerging equanimity. The 11 cubic feet of space I inhabit is now generating garbage at an alarming rate – enough to choke a Greenpeace majordomo. My carbon footprint is now bigger than Sasquatch’s. My seating area has become an aerial landfill increasing in size faster than the national debt.

 

So, let’s recap. First there’s a spent Snyder’s Pretzel wrapper boring a hole in my head with its haunting and damnable presence, but I think I can probably cope with this. The tipping point from tolerable to intolerable is fast approaching, as there’s now a single-use plastic cup (that cannot be stored anywhere) and a superfluous napkin in need of disposal. And why do they provide you with a napkin for your drink? Have you ever given anyone a drink with a napkin chaser? Is it some kind of flimsy coaster, provided to protect the museum quality polymers found in the airplane’s plastic tray table?

 

Beyond Disturbing

I carefully examined the napkin and noticed it has Southwest Airline’s route structure on it. Which would be fine, except this is a Delta Airlines flight! My God, what else have they gotten wrong? Are we in the Bermuda Triangle? Would I be better off crating myself at night? And has anyone heard anything from Sally Jesse Raphael? I mean c’mon Chad, I’m paying you good money to find me something.

 

And another thing (as the rant portion of the story comes to full flower) why does stewardess Kylie have a husky voice and an Adam’s Apple the size of a Civil War Chess piece? OK she’s transitioning maybe, I can kinda make sense of that, but it still doesn’t explain the Southwest napkin. I mean c’mon, this is a Delta flight.

 

From Chad to Worse

Just as I feared. With the addition of the cup and napkin, my formerly benign and manageable empty pretzel package has now metastasized into a sinister Stage 4 Garbage Tumor. And all of this brought on by others – the stewardesses who supposebly (or is that supposevly) have my interests and comfort at heart. I thought they were my friends, or at least my protectors. And now they seem to be actively denying me (and only me) garbage services while simultaneously bestowing bright and shiny snacks that, unbeknownst to me, transform themselves into wretched refuse after their consumption. Am I on an airline or in a Wes Craven movie? Are the stewardesses on a garbage strike or is they just engaging in a low-level job action? Because in my mind I wonder why they refuse, refuse. Not to trash, trash collectors, but I can’t waste, waste managers’ time with all this rubbish. And now I’ve become “that troublesome, double-talking passenger in 24E, who is ripe for a taze.”

 

So, who can I trust now? The guy next to me? – I don’t know his credit score. The lady on the other side? – She’s reading Mien Kampf and petting her service gerbil. And the guy behind me is continually mispronouncing “Worcestershire.” He keeps calling it “ketchup” – the poor slob. It’s clowns to the left of me jokers to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with me.  

 

Garbage In, Garbage Out

The trash is building up faster than a snow drift in a blizzard and my nerves are fraying like a cat’s scratch pad. I’m like a pressure cooker keeping it all bottled up inside, while everybody around me is just “la-ti-da.” How can they be so calm when my personal space is being violated like a cat’s scratch pad – I said that already. See what I mean. I’m frayed. I’m very a frayed.

 

Mountains of unsettling garbage continue to build, eclipsing my view of reality. There is no relief in sight, unless you count those comically small bottles of Jack Daniels, served with a wink and a nod. But I don’t drink. So, I execute my “go to” stress reliever and begin gently hyperventilating into my hands. Y’know, real casual-like so no one will notice. This helps reduce my mental state from absolute hysteria to just your basic containable panic. I’ve been here before and think that maybe I can hold on till Kylie comes waltzing down the aisle with an inviting white trash bag, into whose gaping maw I’ll deposit all my fear and anxiety in the form of a pretzel wrapper, a plastic glass and 1 unused napkin.

 

Presently, no one is aware of my secret storm – not the flight crew, not the passengers, not even Pépé, the service gerbil, whose knowing demeanor is tranquilizing my jittery seatmate in 24F. But in 24E this passenger is ablaze with worry, and there’s no dousing these flames because (just my luck) my mental fire department is taking the day off to shoot their 2026 Christmas beefcake calendar.

 

Meanwhile beads of sweat are beginning to form on my brow, and on my iPhone too. Seems as though this omniscient Apple product is manifesting a sympathetic response to my plight. Apparently not only does Siri listen, but she feels too. I’m surprised my empathetic cell phone is reacting to my distress, because I specifically programmed it to “No Parasympathetic Reactions” to owner, in settings/hepatics/psychological transference/no parasympathetic reactions. Evidently my bodily signals were too intense, and the all-knowing iPhone recognized this and, in a failsafe background factory setting, overrode my preferred setting as if to say, “Screw his pref set, our boy needs help. We’re sweating out this one with him.” Amazing! Those Deep State Apple engineers sure know how to create a “we’re all in this thing together” safety net for us civilian users. And they do a better job of it than I do with my “we’re all in this thing together” humor. Thank you, Steven Jobs.

 

Thinking quickly, I use the anxiety-producing napkin to wipe down the iPhone. Now that the formerly menacing napkin has a use, I’m starting to feel better and functioning at a higher level. I’m now able to blink my eyes in unison, and I’m no longer troubled by the song lyrics ♫Someone left a cake out in the rain ♫. It’s just that sometimes we’re so trapped in the illusion of our separateness, that we can’t see the trees for the forest…or maybe it’s the forest for the trees. The point is, there’s a tsunami of tstupid tstuff out there preventing us from seeing our way clearly.

 

 

It’s Getting Better All the Time

I was now able to relax into my environment as sanguine thoughts began to permeate my consciousness, which would be great if I knew what the word sanguine meant. Things were looking up (not a particularly interesting thing to do at 40,000 feet) and I began to believe I could bring this thing in for a landing (if you’ll forgive the hackneyed aviation metaphor). Maybe this whole event was just happening between my ears. Clearly I had made progress surmounting my challenges. For example, I no longer needed to stealthily hyperventilate into my hands. I no longer needed the calming psychological crutch of seeing how many Hogan’s Heroes characters I could name. And I no longer needed to pretend I was driving down the interstate with Elton John, counting the headlights on the highway.

 

The Absurdity of an Entrenched and Debilitating Problem Easily Expunged

And then it happened. Apropos of nothing, and irrespective of my overwrought imagination, flight attendant Gale begins traipsing happily down the aisle sporting a billowing white Hefty bag she held open before her like a Baleen Whale with its capacious jaw agape. She’s ready to collect all the garbage krill from her school of passengers. I summarily deposit all my collected freight (the wrapper, the glass and the sweat soaked napkin) into her all-healing pouch and poof – the entire incident is defused, defanged and depurged (depurged is not a word, but the whole “de” thing was flowing along so alliteratively I couldn’t stop).

 

Aaah, at last, sweet, sweet release. The odd thing was, none of the passengers or flight attendants were the wiser to the powder keg of symptoms sitting in 24E, who, just 30 seconds ago was a mass of debilitating symptoms. But now with the catharsis of freeing myself from the diabolical menace of unbidden trash I am restored and all my tstuff is tstable once again.

 

I want to thank you for listening to my trashy tale. No one onboard the plane was wise to my harrowing predicament except for you dear reader, and me. Well, you, me and maybe Pépé were on to my situation, but service gerbil Pépé is in the human-soothing business, so he understood instinctively my PTSD. In this case my derangement was a Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder and not a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder because I fretted before the problem ever publicly manifested.

 

Now that this epic non-ordeal of mine is over and done, please keep this incident under your hat or at least in an overhead bin. But be careful opening the bin later because some of my incidents may have shifted and could come crashing down on you.

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