Fly By Night

I love taking off in an airplane.

The sounds of the engines whirring to life, creating that gutteral rumble throughout the fuselage and up into your reproductive organs as the vessel taxis out to the tarmac. The rush as it accellerates down the runway, faster than a human was ever intended to go, and you wonder if it might just fly apart right there instead of to your destination. And as the runway lights shoot past your window, flickering, perhaps betraying the frame rate of the human eye, the rush of speeding toward death but without the commitment. Hopefully.

And as the plane ascends, the airport's lights give way to the rest of the city. In my case, O'Hare being swallowed by the rest of Chicago. Watching those lights. Wondering at them. Suddenly thousands, millions, nay, billions of globes of artificial illumination, staring back at me. Suddenly below holds more stars than above, and I am curious as to the stories of each individual bulb, how they were individually placed in their fixtures by the hands of mortal humans, whom I am above now. This is god territory. I could shit on the Earth from here....or save it.

The points of light begin to cluster up, no longer individuals, but pixels conveying the layout of Chicago's gridded roads, and I take my time drinking in the traffic patterns and jams, emergency vehicles rushing through them, and the artistic works of all the museum and corporate architects who perhaps never intended their masterpieces to be viewed from this vantage. It is glorious. There is so much life, and so much machination, beneath me that I could just reach out with my dirty boot and crush this colony of cyborg ants.

Our altitude continues to increase, and the grid has become  vast ocean. We soon exit the city, and that ocean tapers into lakes, then pools, more and more sporadic as the flight continues.

I love to fly at night.