Wouldn't you just love to be able to flap your wings and lift off for a new destination. And so we do we middle class, middle world people. We burn tens of thousands of gallons of aircraft grade kerosene in order to stretch our wings and plop ourselves down a few thousand miles away. With all the fuel I could run my 70mpg Vespa, full speed several times around the world. It would be a gruesome, achy way to travel but the fuel would go a long way using my scooter.
I hate flying. Its crap standing around in lines like sheep, taking off our shoes in honor of Richard Reid the mad bomber who pissed on his own bomb, and then spending hours wedged into plastic seats breathing everyone else's germs All the while burning a giant hole in the atmosphere, or looked at more apocalyptically, when we fly we clutter the overburdened atmosphere with more burnt gasoline gas.
But every cloud has a silver lining and my wife has procured for us, by the alchemy of airline mileage credit cards and persistence, two lovely business class seats to Vienna. Comfortable travel it seems even as the plebs in the back of the plane burn kerosene wildly in their narrow plastic-lined torture buckets.
There is some other thing that is vaguely wrong and troubling to me. I'm starting to look forward to this trip. All those fears and niggling worries about being back in the lap of my family, the root of all the trouble in my early life, is melting away, perhaps because I am truly tired of being at work. Perhaps because there is nothing to fear.
So, in a few hours we flap our wings and head east, like eagles soaring into the old world. The home of Vespas, and Etruscans and American tourists in gold pants and tour buses.
