It occured to me during yesterday’s JFK-to-LAX flight (departed around 5 pm Eastern, arrived at 7:40 pm Pacific) that we were crammed into a kind of sarcophagus. An airborne tomb for people pretending to be semi-comatose. Sitting coach on a cramped coast-to-coast flight is never pleasurable. You just have to Zen it out. You need to suck it in and button yourself down and endure it and don’t look at your watch too often or the flight’ll seem longer. Focus on your reading, listening…focus on that shitty little screen in front of you. I sat next to two 20-something women. The one next to me started eating some greasy takeout food (battered fish, fries, spicy ketchup) soon after we took off. The aroma was disgusting but there was nothing to do. Sure enough the guy in front of me eased his seat back…asshole!…but not as much as he could have….semi-asshole! I watched my True Confessions Bluray and crashed around 11 pm, or 2 am New York time.

Coach seating on a wide-body jet of some kind (a DC-10?) sometime in the mid ’60s. A wide-angle lens delivers a certain distortion but still…