The only way to endure a window seat on a long coast-to-coast flight is to submit to a kind of meditation. You have to slip into a Zen hibernation state. You have shut off those parts of yourself that want to get up and stretch or cross your legs or anything in that realm. You have to focus on writing and reading, and if you do a really deep drill that awful sense of suffocation and imprisonment will slowly go away.

For me watching mediocre films — 95% of the movie menu on this fight is pure fizz — seems to make the flight go more slowly.

Thank God there are only 90 minutes left, give or take. Right now we’re passing over western Colorado. Estimated LAX touchdown around 1:55 pm or so. Add another 30 to 40 minutes for runway taxi time plus the always interminable fuselage disembarking plus the luggage carousel.

2 pm update: Touched down five minutes ago.