Air Travel, Social Distancing, and Full-Figured Flyers

First things first…I enjoyed Gresh’s last blogs on his cataract surgery, but I’m sure glad he didn’t get a hemorrhoid removed.  Ah, the selfies he might have posted…the horror of it all.

So the topic du jour is air travel (and I sure have had a bunch of it in the last 30 days) and masks.  The secret mission business has come back with a vengeance, and what that’s meant for me is the air travel has been nonstop.  It’s all been domestic (I hear travel overseas is a bit dicey still).  It seems the Covid thing is still a problem in other countries…

Covid?  What Covid?  We don’t need no stinkin’ Covid.  And the 6-foot social distancing thing?  As Tony Soprano might have said: Fuhgeddabout it.  The airports and the airplanes are packed, and you’d be lucky to get 6 inches (let alone 6 feet) of social distancing.

I’ve been on about a dozen domestic flights crisscrossing the country in the last four weeks, and every plane has been full (as in completely full, with not a single empty seat).  I always seem to be seated next to fat folks, and to make a long story only slightly less long, those tiny airplane seats make the experience more intimate than most of my high school dates.  There’s a lot of full-figured folks in America, and it’s only gotten worse during the pandemic.

Yeah, the Covid thing is still around and I’m a bit apprehensive about being herded into tiny places with an amazing array of strange and oversized mammals (it’s what flying has become), but I guess the good news is that we’ve been kicking Covid’s butt.  If we weren’t, the air travel thing would be in one mainstream media story after another about super spreader events.  But it is not.  The rates are continuing to come down (the Covid rates, that is…not the ticket prices or the media’s fear mongering), so the vaccines and the masks seem to be making a difference.

Ah, the masks.  God, I hate those things.  Breathe out and the world fogs over.  Without realizing it, I have adjusted my vision and worldview to seeing the world only when I inhale.  But the masks and the vaccines, I think, have helped us.  I’m not looking for a political argument here.  I’m just stating my thoughts.  Hey, it’s America.  You’re free to be wrong if you think otherwise.