Lord above. The simple act of lunging from Ireland to Portugal is made so much harder to bear when other people are part of the equation.
People get everywhere. I was surrounded by you lot on my way here last Friday. Thin yous, fat yous, poorly dressed and swanky yous. Breathing, every last one of you; greedily sucking the air, molesting and disfiguring it, churning it through your sickly systems before wheezing it back out all covered in words.
I can hold my nose and count to forever and pray to Tarzan and NORAD that your stinky word air doesn’t breach my defences, of course, but my ears are tarts and will only get lusty with your noise, regardless. They’re like me as a teenager – slut! slut! – and seem determined to behave like drunken imbeciles.
They have no door policy, they allow every last slobbering word to use and defile them just as roughly as they very well please. Wantonly opening their tiny ear-legs, they make a brothel of my brain. Grunt, splat, thwackety-thwack, screechy screechy screech. It’s bedlam in there, a wall-to-wall nightmare of other people’s uninvited mouth disorders. Layer after layer, voice after voice, swirling with a savage glee.
At least my eyes have matured. If they see something undesirable – a working class person, say - they know to look away. Nobody likes to see stuff like that. My ears, however, just sidle up and start hitting on every intensifying adverb and unfinished sentence and totally ask them all round to my head for tea and carnage, like, innit.
It’s not just the passenger-sheep (in their fiercely competitive Airport Clothes) talking gibberish, to be fair - it’s the airport staff, too. Everyone’s talking clank. But those people in positions of airporty authority – those people, in other words, who would be far better employed going round the zoo making sure that passengers aren’t engaged in conversation – are robotically talking drivel themselves; oblivious to everything bar the words they’ve been programmed to speak:
Did you pack this bag yourself, Sir?
No, I took advantage of the cheap rates offered by The Mohammed Atta Packing Service and a couple of their guys did it for me. They seemed legit.
Good. Any sharp objects or flammable materials?
I haven’t checked. I’m guessing yes, though.
For crying out loud. People just talk for the sake of it. They come out with crazy stuff. Why ransack the air with verbalised carbon dioxide to ask questions that serve no sensible purpose? Get your mouth-noise the fecking feck out of my airspace.
Boarding at Gate Five, Sir. Enjoy your flight.
Make me.
Roll on teleportation, I’ll tell you that for free. This is a tin can packed with petrol and louts hurtling through the air. What’s to enjoy? I can’t even indulge the shabby fantasy of falling out of the sky anymore, either, because I’m so hideously well-balanced and stable these days, medicated to within an inch of agreed normality. (No, really.)
Such a pathetic state of affairs to have to take drugs (and not even the good kind) in order to block out your own thoughts. How will I ever know how I feel? It bothers me a bit. A lot, actually. Makes me want to push things further to see if I can feel something. Hard to explain and I’m doing a poor job trying, so I’ll shut my face.
Anyway, that’s got precisely nothing to do with anything. The heart of the matter is that (other) people talk too much. That’s just a fact.
Even in the sky at five hundred glorious miles per hour - with a beautifully lit up France (and then Spain) below - people witter on incessantly in a disastrously dreary manner about nothing and so very much less, barely glancing at the divine tragedy unfolding beneath them. Why do they not hear the greater call to silence? It’s deafening.
