Tweeting about airline difficulties

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We were camped at 5 p.m. outside Gate 32 at the Orlando International Airport. Every 15 minutes a Spirit Airline employee would say our 2:55 flight back to Latrobe would be delayed another 15 minutes. 

That meant every minute after that some jerk in an obnoxious shirt would loudly announce he’d just Tweeted to his 1,200 followers to never fly Spirit Airlines again.

Shame on you if you think I’m talking about myself.

My Tommy Bahama shirts are perfectly tasteful, I don’t shout my opinions to airport strangers and, geez, I only have 202 followers.

That last part confounds me.

Is our Twitter society so moronic it would rather follow a goofball who Tweets “#SPIRIT SUCKs!” or me, a guy who last week tweeted this @8Days2Amish gem:

“Loud bulimics make the worst neighbors. They can never keep it down.”

Now, that’s a tweet.

Here’s what I’d have tweet/shouted if I felt compelled to share my opinions of our plight:

“Those of us who enjoy reading don’t care if the plane’s a little late. Lighten the f*&#$ up!”

Of course, part of my reaction may have been that I’m an uncomfortable flier with plenty of time on my hands.

I’d have been relieved if they’d have announced, “Look, we’ve all decided flying is a preposterous way to transport human beings so we’re canceling this flight and will instead issue you all free Amtrak tickets along with vouchers for a bag of pretzels and one free domestic beer.”

If they make flying more comfortable, more of us would fly more often. Instead, flying is so stressful most of us go to great lengths to avoid it. 

If we can’t, well, then I’m reminded of the late Lewis Grizzard’s motto: “If given a choice, I will never fly. If given no choice, I will never fly sober.”

This was my fourth flight in the past month. I was nervous about the first one because I feared a recurrence of past claustrophobia issues.

Turns out that problem has vanished. Of my four flights, three of them were in the middle seat and I felt no queasy anxiety or urge to run up and down the aisles screaming, “Mommy! Mommy!” which FAA regulations strictly forbid.

So when we finally boarded two-and-a-half hours late, I was far from the most uncomfortable passenger on the plane.

Turns out that guy was in my seat.

His name was Mitch and he lives in nearby Indiana, Pa. He’d made himself at home in my aisle seat directly across from the three seats occupied by my family.

Armed with the proper ticket and righteous privilege, I sort of said, hey, pal, you’re in my seat. Scoot over.

“Would you mind sitting in the middle seat?” he asked plaintively. “I’m very uncomfortable about flying.”

I felt like high-fiving him. Me, too!

So I look at him and I see myself. He was in his 40s, had the flop sweat on the brow and looked like was on the verge of begging. He was miserable. 

I’ve been there. I knew exactly what the man was going through. 

So how on earth could I say no? I couldn’t.

I climbed into the middle seat I’d spent the last eight weeks or so dreading. I was feeling none of his obvious tensions.

Plus, it gave me the opportunity to play therapist to a fellow sufferer. I sympathized, consoled and shared with him the aforementioned Grizzard tip. I got to be a lowercase hero to a struggling stranger.

I felt especially proud that I didn’t use my act of humanity as a sales pitch to buy “Use All The Crayons!”  which I felt would have tainted my kindness.

Spirit chose to compensate us each with $50 vouchers for our next flight, so I assume that jerk lied to his 1,200 Twitter followers. He’ll fly them again soon, I’m sure.

I’ll bet he didn’t tweet that one.

Want to know what I tweeted after all this? After the delay? After my gesture?

“The romantic in me still sometimes wonders if Barnacle Bill the Sailor ever found true love.”

Now, that’s a tweet, too.

Related . . .

• Return of the panic attacks

• Honk if you’re for increased airline safety

• Plane truths from a real road warrior

Randy Travis & the perils of driving while naked

News that Randy Travis was arrested for driving drunk and naked had one reporter wondering if “he’s hit bottom,” an interesting turn of phrase about a man ready for a good spanking.

It had me thinking, man, there’s something I’ve never done.

And I’m talking about the driving naked bit.

In fact, there’s more. It turns out the country singer -- and I’m a big fan -- tried to buy cigarettes naked.

That’s something else I never dreamed of doing. Don’t you need pockets for that sort of thing?

At the minimum, he’d be holding keys, a wallet, a lighter and probably a smart phone. Even people like me who often consider pants a nuisance have to admit pockets add a certain utility to daily life.

I have some great memories of being naked in a car, but none of them involve driving solo to fetch groceries.

Or I should say “nekkid,” the difference being, according to the late great Southern humorist Lewis Grizzard, that “naked is being without clothes; nekked is being without clothes and up to something.”

The best of it was in high school some 30 years ago. Me and my friends were avid skinny dippers.

We weren’t the most popular kids, but we always managed to find a few young pretty girls reckless enough about their reputations to want to hop a fence with us and sneak into someone’s backyard pool for a little illicit fun.

Some of the happiest times of my life involve being a proud father. Some of the others involve trespassing naked in the backyards of vacationing strangers.

Cruel age can steal my wits, my mobility and all my earthly possessions, but I hope it never robs me of my memories of what happened during those adolescent romps. I’ll be a happy old man, a happy, dirty old man.

So as you can surmise I bring a sympathetic point of view to Travis’s escapades.

But I’m having trouble understanding what kind of fun you’d have driving around Texas nude and looking for smokes.

I try to put myself in his shoes. Understand a strict constructionist would say for him to be truly naked, he wouldn’t even be wearing shoes.

Not me. I think sensible footwear is a necessary part of doing many fun things in the nude, other than the obvious ones that are done nude and mostly horizontal.

I can see myself walking into a Texas mini-mart nude, maybe on a dare, but I can’t see myself walking fully-clothed but barefoot across the gum and butt-studded parking lot of one. I have sensitive feet.

Then there’s this: Travis threatened the arresting officers saying he would “shoot to kill.”

Was he packin’?

Again, a pocket would have probably enhanced the threat. Either he was wearing an unreported holster or else he was using his finger gun, which would make it one of the world’s most entertaining dash-cam videos ever.

Anyone remember my stories last summer about National Nude Recreation Week?

I learned a lot about nudie fun and much of it stayed with me. For instance: a game of 8 Ball played between two naked men is still called 8 Ball.

I also learned that nudists like to say they’re most comfortable in their own skin.

So, given my personal and professional experience, I know a thing or two about public nudity.

None of R.T.’s episode strikes me as recreational fun.

As I said, I’m a big fan. He was king of Nashville in the late 1980s when I was a young reporter there.

He raised eyebrows in 1991 when at 32 he married his manager, Lib Hatcher, a woman who was 16 years his senior. The pair divorced in 2010.

The speculation may be rash of me, but I believe Travis might be what I call a “slomosexual,” a person who devotes his or her life to the self-proclaimed virtues of public heterosexuality before finally coming to grips with their true sexual identity.

I suspect Travis’s troubles stem from a fear his mostly conservative fans will turn on him if he’s honest about what’s bothering him.

I suggest he seek advice from Elton John, another popular entertainer who in the mid-1980s participated in a sham marriage that lasted just a bit longer than “Benny and The Jets.”

It saddens me when someone like Travis, who’s made so many people, can’t find happiness himself.

Let’s hope with this he has hit bottom, so to speak.

And that a man who’s now enduring ridicule for being naked will find a way to finally be comfortable in his own skin.

Return of the panic attacks

Lewis Grizzard, the late, great Southern humorist, used to say he belonged to a no-fly club. Their motto:

“If given a choice, we will never fly. If given no choice, we will never fly sober.”

I wholeheartedly support the sentiment without practicing it.

But I thought long and hard about getting all gooned up for a long flight from Houston to Pittsburgh Sunday night.

I thought it might help me from succumbing to a panic attack, something that hadn’t happened in almost 10 years.

First a little background.

I have no fear of flying. I’ve flown in hot air balloons, bi-planes, stunt jets, have twice gone skydiving and once leaned out the open cargo bay deck while tethered to a C-45 military mule that was cruising at 10,000 feet.

It was all very cool, as I like to think I am.

My odd problem isn’t flying.

It’s flying commercial.

In that regard, my panic attacks make perfect sense.

Few people recall it, but one of the biggest news stories of the summer of 2001 was the congressional consideration of a passenger bill of rights.

The flying public was fed-up.

Exhibit A in the necessity of the legislation was a Northwest Airline flight from, I think, Detroit.

I vividly remember reading all about it in a front page story from the Wall Street Journal. It told in painstaking detail what happened on the flight where weather delays necessitated passengers be held captive on the tarmac. This one lasted nine hours.

Toilets backed up, stagnant air fouled, children screamed, passengers fought; To this day, I remain amazed someone didn’t pull the emergency chute and slide to sweet freedom.

There’s no explaining the irrational mind of man.

I made the mistake of reading every word of the story and thinking, man, if that ever happens to me I’ll go right out of my mind.

This seemed unlikely because it seemed to herald a tipping point where everyone agreed, enough’s enough, this must never happen again.

You may not remember it because of another big news story that swept it from the front pages.

That was 9/11, the day when passenger rights instantly became a quaint notion of bygone days.

Of course, you can by now guess what happened to me on my first post-9/11 flight.

Dangerous weather diverted my New York to Pittsburgh flight to Cleveland. Every 15 minutes, the pilot came on and updated us that we’d soon be on our way.

We were stuck there four hours.

I can tell you from personal experience that a jail cell is less confining than coach seats on a 737. In a jail cell, you can at least get up and pace.

In a typical jetliner, you can’t move even an inch. The feeling becomes more acute when the plane isn’t going anywhere either.

It began with a cold sweat and an overwhelming need to get up and run. I felt as if I’d been sealed in a great big coffin. I knew once the plane got rolling, I’d be fine, but I felt if I remained in that middle seat I’d go out of my mind.

Here’s another thing: There’s an utter lack of humanity on commercial flights. No one jokes. Few are civil. It’s oppressive, as is the entire air travel experience.

Looking back I wonder if one of the triggers may have been I-90.

I could practically see it from my seat. The very next day my buddies and I had planned to drive to Detroit to catch some baseball games. I knew if I could just get off that plane I could arrange for them to pick me up on the way. My unjust incarceration would be over.

I finally bolted from my seat and confided to the flight attendant I was coming unglued.

Well, she couldn’t have been nicer if she’d have pulled my head to her breast and told me to call her Mommy.

“A lot of people have been having strange reactions since 9/11,” she said.

She gave me a cool, damp towel to put on my neck and let me stand there near the open door. Just seeing access to escape soothed me. The panic passed.

But once I’d experienced it, I became hyper-aware it could happen again. And it did. Two more flights in the next six months experienced delays, one of them for two hours while they fixed a stupid Julia Roberts movie that wouldn’t play.

I’ve hated Julia ever since.

Somehow, I made peace with the discomforts of flight and have been what passes for normal for the last decade.

So none of that was on my mind as I strapped into my aisle seat for last week’s flight to Houston. As I settled in, I noticed that the guys in the middle seat beside and behind me were buddies.

“Here, you guys are friends. Take my seat,” I offered.

What a great guy! They were very appreciative at my generosity.

Had I surveilled the seats previous to opening my mouth, I never would have made the offer.

Occupying the aisle and window were two enormous stoics. They didn’t nod at me or acknowledge a fellow human being would be practically in their lap for the next three hours. I began feeling the stirrings of the old panic.

It built for over a minute before I said enough. I told the guy I’d changed my mind. I needed my aisle seat back. Pronto.

The sudden retraction of my offer baffled them. I didn’t care.

There’s no explaining this irrational mind of mine.

The return flight was sober and uneventful. I had an aisle seat and a slender female next to me who smiled when I sat down and engaged in pleasantries.

So it seems the requirements for guys like me to fly are an aisle seat, on-time flights and petite seat mates who look like they might hold my hand if I start feeling odd agitations.

My fear is the airlines might read this and realize a good percentage of their customers would pay extra for these kinds of civilities that should be common practice.

Maybe I should think about hiring a skinny hooker to fly with me next time.

It’d probably be cheaper than flying first class.

What you're reading right now

One of the things I enjoy most about blogging is it is virtually self-perpetuating.

It used to be pre-internet columnists for newspapers had to maintain a level of consistency or be banished.

“I could write the world’s greatest story today and then I’ll have to wake up tomorrow and write another one just as good or everyone will say I’m slipping.”

That’s what one of my old favorites, the late great Lewis Grizzard, once told me. Thrice married and divorced, he died of a congenital heart defect at just 47.

I had the pleasure of interviewing him the equivalent times he was married and I think one of our interviews exceeded the duration of one of his marriages.

The man was a doozy. And a great writer.

But I think about his point whenever I peek at my stats page and it tells me someone is reading a story I posted from maybe three years ago.

That’s the beauty of writing in the internet age.

To turn Grizzard’s phrase on its head, I could have written the greatest story three years ago, given up writing to sell insurance and today that story could make me famous.

Today our stories are eternal.

I’m reminded of this nearly daily when I see that people trolling the internet have found my blog and mined something I barely remember writing and, bless their hearts, have begun referring it to all their friends.

I thought I’d give you an example and show you the top 10 stories people are reading right now and my thoughts that some of these arbitrary deadbeats are actually starting to make me proud.

I’ll omit a couple of obvious high rankers from the last two weeks.

No. 1 party boy from America’s No. 1 party school, August 2 -- Reaction to this boozy love letter to my Ohio University alma mater has been very gratifying. It got a huge readership right out of the gate and continues to draw near daily readers from all over. I think I was just a bit hungover when I wrote it.

Turn the page: A Bob Seger salute, January 21 -- I could really be onto something if I just picked one cool celebrity and focused laser-like on the subject. Anytime someone googles the great Seger song, “Turn the Page,” or other Seger-related queries, this post pops up.

Even stink bugs need love, September 30, 2010 -- This one continues to plod along and doesn’t stink at all. I thought it had some nice subtle sweetness about how even the lowliest creatures deserve some tenderness. Favorite line: “How can dedicated entymologists be anything but bug-eyed?”

Talking to nudists about Casual Fridays, June 3, 2011 -- I enjoy the daily updates to the newly added “search term of the day” feature up there in the right hand corner of the blog. I thought it would be fun to include some of the oddball ways people find my site. Guaranteed, at least once a day someone finds my site by including some variation of the search term “nude.” There’s been “amish nude,” “casual nudes,” and “nude recreation week.” I did a story about National Nude Recreation Week back in July and had a lot of fun with the research. I expect this one will be evergreen.

Time on my hands & everywhere else, August 31, 2009 -- This surprised me when it landed with a thud. I sort of thought it was the kind of breakthrough post that would really drive some readers my way. Wrong! But it’s becoming a little engine that could. It turns up in the readership rosters all the time. It’s a good one if for no other reason than the opening premise: “I’m thinking of getting a $75 tattoo of an $18,000 Rolex on my left wrist.”

R.I.P Buster the 19-year-old cat, September 4, 2008 -- Well this is certainly a surprise. Someone’s trolling around in the back catalogue and stopped by on the birthday of this post I wrote exactly three years ago. So odd. It’s not bad, but it makes me wonder if I should go back and weed out some of the ones I don’t really like. I have over 500 blog posts now and the world would be none the wiser if I trimmed that in half. Heck, maybe I should just delete all by the top 25. I’d look like a genius.

A Brad Pitt-y Party, January 13, 2009 -- A fine selection. I feel like a snooty waiter complimenting someone on selecting a rare vintage. This is the kind of oldie but goodie I’d keep if I whittled down the stack. Bashing celebrities is so much fun I wonder why I don’t do it more often.

867-5309, February 15, 2011 -- I contend this is the last phone number we’ll all remember. Our numbers have become our names. We just dial the contacts. This doesn’t pop up too much and I’m always pleased when it does. “Jenny! Jenny! Who can I turn to?” So much digital nostalgia.

Boston Corbett: America’s Greatest Eunuch, April 26, 2010 -- What a fascinating and insane man. Corbett’s the man who killed the man who killed Lincoln. This gets a lot of traffic. I like to think bleary eyed and scholarly researchers stumble on this and are revived by a strong shot of historical irreverence.

My 2010 office party: Canceled!, December 22, 2010 -- Just what the hell this is doing here I can not explain. Just about every day of the year for the past nine months someone, somewhere clicks this on. It’s confounding. It’s okay, but what’s the big deal? If today’s like every other day, at least a dozen people from all over the world will tap into this story that was topical for about two days last winter. Amazing. Oh, well. What can I do except wish those readers a very Merry Christmas!

And Happy Labor Day to the rest of you!

Thanks for reading!