Flying High
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, then a short essay, then the past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics written and drawn by my partner, Wayno whose weekly blog post I recommend highly.
Here’s the ANSWER KEY to this week’s Secret Symbols in the Sunday comic, above.——————————————————————————————————
I completed and submitted this week’s Sunday Bizarro cartoon (above) six weeks ago, not realizing that the weekend it would publish (now) would be a travel weekend for my wife and me. Olive Oyl and I had planned to meet one of my daughters and her fiancé in St. Louis to attend a family wedding. We did all of that and it was lots of fun but it was fraught with airline troubles. Perhaps the phrase “airline troubles” is redundant. I’m sure there are other industries as rife with bullshit as commercial flights but I can’t think of any.
O2 and I flew to St. Louis on Thursday and arrived in the early afternoon, about an hour before a huge storm front moved into the area and canceled flights for the rest of the day. That was lucky, but it was the last travel luck we’d experience during this excursion. My daughter and her man were supposed to fly in a few hours later and meet us for dinner Thursday night, but their flight was canceled due to the storm. The super-helpful airline they used (American Airlines) was not able to put them on another flight until Saturday morning. In case you’ve lost track, that was a full day and a half later, which cut their four-day trip in half. Did the flight or the Airbnb cost less? Of course not.
We had a lovely weekend, attended the wedding, and did some cool stuff. Monday morning, we got up at 3:30am to catch a 5:30am flight to Dallas (also on American Airlines) where we’d change planes to Mexico. We book this way because early flights are much less likely to be late and you don’t have to worry about missing your connection. That itinerary would have put us at home all the way back in Mexico by noon.
Instead, as soon as we arrived at the airport, we found that our flight had been canceled. That much bad news before 5 am isn’t easy to deal with. It’s the kind of thing people endure weeks of hellish training in military boot camps to prepare for. By 5:15, we were standing in a long line of angry people waiting for an irritable airport employee to rebook several hundred people.
By 6 am, they’d booked us on another flight to Dallas that wouldn’t leave for another six hours, then a late-night flight from Dallas to Mexico, getting us home close to midnight. A full twelve-hour delay from our original plans.
So as I type this on Monday, I’m sitting at the St. Louis airport. I’ve been here for more than five hours and our first flight doesn’t board for another hour—around half an hour from when we were originally scheduled to be at home in Mexico.
Another delightful aspect of this kind of consumer abuse is that you then have to eat several meals at the airport. Oh my, we’ve not enjoyed such unhealthy, mediocre, absurdly over-priced food since we camped out in a movie theater lobby. The people who own these restaurants are likely making so much money they can doubtless afford to vacation at exclusive Caribbean resorts and hire a private Learjet to take them there. God knows they’d not be foolish enough to rely on a commercial airline to get them there.
To be fair, most of our trips are fairly problem-free but once you relinquish all control to a commercial enterprise, if the least little thing goes wrong, you’re in a nightmare of collapsing dominoes you can’t wake up from. Truth is if you fly often enough, you’re eventually going to get the ice-water enema. Yes, it could have been worse, it could have been a molten lava enema, but ice-water is unpleasant enough.
The final kick to the jewels is that I have RLS (Restless Leg Syndrome) and it kicks in (literally) every afternoon and tortures me until dawn if I don’t treat it. The safest, most effective treatment is cannabis, which I use at home because it is legal, safe and affordable. It’s also legal in Missouri, where I was flying to and from, but not at U.S. airports which are federal property and where it is still a class one felony, as if marijuana were as dangerous as heroin. If I’m going to be flying in the evening, I smuggle some paste or tincture with me but since I had no plans to fly in the evening this time, I did not bring any. So I’m now looking at several hours of utter misery and body jerks on a flight I never wanted to take. I could legally bring opioids with me—a dangerous class of drugs that actually do kill millions of Americans every year—but not a healthful, harmless plant that grows wild. At times like this, I really wish humans in general and governments in specific did not have their heads so far up their asses.
And because we were late comers to these flights we did not intend to take, they stuck us in middle seats. Once I start kicking and moaning, the people next to me are going to wish the government’s head wasn’t so far up its ass, too.
On days like this, I really envy geese.
Let’s find out what Wayno did with this week’s Bizarro cartoons, shall we?
Does this mean that Humpty was pregnant when he fell off the wall? I’m confused.
These girls raised on Disney movies can be pretty demanding.
I hear this also works with tequila.
Get your book cover or company logo printed on mini-blinds.
Is a popsicle stick colder when dressed or naked?
They’ll spend their retirement years learning sign language.
That’s the light at the end of the cartoon tunnel, Jazz Pickles. Let’s hope it isn’t an oncoming train. If you enjoy what we do (FOR FREE!) and that we don’t have ads or clickbait, please consider helping us keep it this way via the links below. We’ll be as grateful as a person whose flight was on time.
Until next time, enjoy your week and don’t fly anywhere that you might be able to hitchhike to faster.
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