This is an essay I wrote in 2015 about my fears of flying and of Hell. I sent it that year to AGNI because I loved the essay "A Frame Is Also Like Love" by Elizabeth Horneber, which they published in #81. Unfortunately they accidentally sent me a rejection slip that was meant for someone else, accidentally put my name and the title of my essay on the slip where they meant to put those of the other person, and accidentally never published my essay. It's called "The Airplane God," and it's nothing like Elizabeth Horneber's essay, which is about the movie Chungking Express. I had seen the movie by the time Horneber's essay appeared before me, and thus nothing but lack of talent and personal emotional depth had kept me from writing it myself. By the way, I don't drink anymore.
I would kill to go on about what a bad writer I am, but let me instead cleave to the rappers' code, a self-fulfilling prophecy-producing spell, to cast which one merely states right off the bat that one is possessed of immense talent and gold, which coincidentally is what I am possessed of.
Also as an unnecessary, "post-script" style bonus, here is the essay I think I remember mentioning earlier. I couldn't get it past the gatekeepers, so I will throw it in the moat:
1.
After a while I got an anxiety disorder that manifested especially when I flew. I presented with all the traditional symptoms: certainty of imminent death, confusion as to the bored looks of other passengers, and realization that every sound the plane makes is the nosedive-commencement sound.
When I read about other people's plane problems I noticed in myself a symptom no one seemed to share with me: the thought-crime delusion. I have been known to jettison as much rational thought from planes as will keep them airborne, though my pantomiming of rational behavior and speech while aboard was consistently flawless. While I spoke and behaved around the other passengers as though my thoughts were produced in a veritable sense-making factory, mentally I clawed for my sweet life away from ideas about the bad things that I had done, because the airplane god had been waiting for months to steer my fate towards a plane so that he could kill me on it.
2.
Never mind that hundreds of other people -- who had nothing to do with my various badnesses -- would have had to die as well if I was meant to be punished by a plane crash. The key nonsense to this fantasy was its uncompromising self-centeredness.
Once on a plane while reading Sylvia Plath's journals I thought oh no, when she was nineteen she wrote, 'You God, whom I invoke without belief, only I can choose, and only I am responsible. (Oh, the grimness of atheism!)' so I switched superstitiously to The Name of the Rose, which is about monks. Before the plane took off I had been clutching that book to my chest on the way to my seat and a priest in the front of coach noticed it and said, "That's a good one." I figured after the Plath-scare that that guy would make it off the plane if, and only if, I kept reading about monks. If I stopped reading, we'd all immediately be thrown to the planet. In Hell I'd have to explain how I could be so selfish as to put that many people at risk, knowing how easily my sins could interact with the safety and mechanical devices of gigantic aircraft.
3.
After my anxiety developed I grew interested in Buddhism because its promise of the systematic relief of suffering was a comfort to me and just about every other anxious person in the universe. Meditation helped on earth but on planes it all just felt a little too risky. I learned that the term Nianfo denotes the mindfulness of the Buddha, and I would be tempted on planes to repeat to myself a phrase with this meaning to still my fears. In my panicked animal state, though, and at the mercy of a jealous, capricious, systemless god, the notion made me recoil in certainty that the plane would plummet, priests and babies and all, for the sake of teaching me via Hell-horror that it was the airplane god whose peace I should have sought.
4.
There is an inconsistent relationship between the other people on this plane I'm on and the people on planes I'm not on. This plane I'm on, with all of these other people on board, is guaranteed to fall out of the sky because I'm only theistic during plane-panic, and not at all times like I'm expected to be. However there are plenty of other planes up here that atheists have climbed aboard. On these planes they work on their books about atheism and have audible conversations about atheism with each other. While I am squeezing my armrests over Arkansas, in other parts of the world there are completely un-doomed planes populated primarily with Buddhists who are simultaneously thinking freely about Buddhism and not being killed.
Even in my least rational state I readily admit to these facts, if few others, for one crucial reason: none of those people are me. I am the only person the airplane god has ever been and ever will be interested in hurting.
In the brief moments of courage during which I can manage to speculate that maybe there is no airplane god, if I don't "la-la-la-I'm-not-listening" the thought into oblivion, then a subsequent thought will occur, this one regarding the unbearable revelation that, because there is no airplane god, nothing is holding up the plane.
What about all the planes that have crashed that I wasn't on? This is a category that includes one hundred percent of planes that have crashed. Before I can accidentally reason about them I drown the very thought of plane crashes in gin or whatever other non-complimentary drink the flight attendants have at the ready for dopes like me.
5.
I am looking at other passengers and some of them are complaining about things. I am oscillating between feeling superior to them and realizing that my feelings of superiority will kill me and everyone aboard if I don't stop feeling those feelings at once.
I am thinking at the other passengers, briefly, as they complain about their seats, or about the delay, or about their ears. I am thinking at them: "This is not what you need to worry about right now, you lunatics. This plane will be at every point of the flight a hair away from fully shattering the thirteen billion year long physical sequence of causality so that it can nosedive into the planet because I feel guilty about all those times when I did the wrong thing. This is what you should worry about. If you find that your seat is uncomfortable, it is because you are still alive and your dead body isn't lying on the Great Plains in a crisped heap among half-melted neck pillows and twisted plates of fuselage-metal with giant disembodied letters on them. It is because your soul isn't currently being pushed through the digestive system of a hot red monster in another dimension that you are upset the plane took off an hour late.
"If you're alive on a plane and you can order enough alcohol to read a fairy tale about a shark and an ape twice in a row, and be equally amused both times, then perhaps you are not truly discontented with anything external, rather perhaps your discontentment arises from within. Discontentment with anything on a plane other than your imminent death and eternal horror is like discontentment with your torture chamber's crown molding."
I feel smug and then I feel afraid that I felt smug and then I stop thinking these thoughts.
6.
The most recent few mental health professionals on the chain have all explained to me that the chances of dying in a plane crash are so close to zero as to be negligible, but it is rare for them to admit that the chances of dying in a plane crash for someone who's about to die in a plane crash is in excess of ninety nine percent. "What do I do if that happens?" I ask. Some of my past therapists have answered, "That won't happen," which is a non-sequitur and is hence invalid. It gave me an idea for a New Yorker cartoon to draw and be paid for: the plane's going down, and the one person says, "We're going to die! We're already dead! Oh no!" And the person next to them says, "What are you worried about? Our current situation is very rare!"
My new therapist had the best answer yet in terms of relevance: "Trance out." Her husband died in a car crash some years ago, so my worries must leave the privileged tone in her ear that I guilt myself about.
7.
In summary, it is beyond my ability to doubt in these dreadful seats of panic that:
a.) There is a gigantic otherworldly being who knows about me.
b.) This being wants to kill me for normally believing otherwise, for occasional mansplanation, sundry privilege-mismanagements, and other such crimes.
c.) This being is only interested in killing me when I'm on a plane, and doing so only by a crash.
d.) This being is uninterested in sparing those innocents who are on the plane with me.
e.) This being is uninterested in hunting anyone on any other plane for acts more heinous than mine.
f.) This being will magically forget about all of its plans if I dive down into a long gin.
g.) Everybody likes this being.
8.
This entire list dissipates into an embarrassed, empty glaze the moment the plane lands safely. The pilot stifles a yawn to tell us all how much fun he hopes we have in Saint Louis or wherever. I get off the plane with some sort of altitude-squiggled drunkenness and watch for familiar objects at the baggage claim. My head is lowered because I feel like a child awaiting punishment because he got caught spitting.