Mr. Lawyer
Captain Airplane
ML: Do you think the state can afford to house you for 15 to life? Do you think they’re scared enough of you to even try it? You’re white for chrissakes, and you should be rich. That reminds me, you make a lot of money, yet you don’t seem to have anything or any money, and what you did have I have, how do you do it? On second thought don’t tell me.
ME: I killed somebody, and I tell you I should be locked up in jail or a zoo or a cage of some kind, probably for the rest of my life, or at least until I’m too old and weak to kill or destroy anything. I need those human-shaped automatons, the big strong bossy kind, to keep me in line. I tell you I’m close to unstoppable, I somehow get dumber and crazier and more unstoppable every day. I haven’t slept more than eight hours a week in the last 15 years and you’d need to drive a goddamn stake through my heart to stop me.
ML: Uhm, anyway, I think you’re looking at six months, maybe a year max. You really lucked out, you got judge whatshisface, old school, a real old white rich conservative cocksucker, he’ll have you back at work in no time. Your only mistake is that you left too many of your victims alive, most of them are suing you for a bundle of money, I guess it’s good in a way, that you’re broke, I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
I tell you I was stunned, I didn’t believe any of it, and when I finally went to court and the judge sentenced me to six months I became completely unglued, I started shaking and screaming “has the entire world gone completely insane? Look into my eyes for chrissakes, I’m a menace, a goddamn murderer!” Mr. Lawyer just chuckled, but the judge looked at me solemnly, started shaking his head, I thought finally, finally someone is taking me seriously, there is at least one person who knows I should be locked up indefinitely, to keep me the hell away from airplanes and people and thousands of other potentially deadly and disastrous things, at last it’s occurring to someone, my incredible potential for spectacular destruction, this old white man just might save all of us, but I was wrong wrong wrong AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN.
JUDGE: Son, I know your angle, and frankly it appalls me. If you think I’m going to ban you or stop you from flying airplanes, well CAPTAIN, you are dead wrong. First you’ll be on unemployment, then disability, and I will not reward you for vehicular manslaughter, not with any permanent vacation of any kind. We all have to WORK, Captain, and I do believe that life will go a lot more smoothly for you once you accept that fact.
I must be really stupid, this business about vacations and disability, unemployment, it never even occurred to me. And the judge was half right, jail is a huge relief, albeit a temporary one, for me it’s been a goddamn elixir, another three or four years and I might’ve come out sane, maybe even competent. Within a month I felt a lot better, I recovered my diction and balance, started putting on weight, woke up feeling not so bad. Out of sheer boredom I started exercising, even brushed up on my reading a bit, and the reading in particular was my main mistake.
I remind you I was starting to feel a lot better, more confident, overconfident in fact, and my head felt kind of clear, and I remembered a few key phrases about work, having to fly airplanes AGAIN someday way too soon that was approaching way too fast. I remembered some other phrase about accepting facts or destiny or fate and feeling better? Obviously some people are meant to be murderers and others are meant to fly airplanes and I’m meant to be a bit of both, but as I said, I was overconfident, I thought I could do it all, that maybe I could fly airplanes without necessarily killing anyone ever again someday, I thought I was good enough and maybe even clever enough to aspire to that level of comfort for myself, obviously I have learned absolutely nothing about me or my life or life in general or anything.
I went to the jail library and got out a book, on all things, about flying airplanes, about how to fly or pilot airplanes, the way it’s supposedly supposed to be done, and I tell you this, if I thought flying airplanes was an overwhelming nightmare before, after struggling a 1/4 way through this book it seemed downright impossible. All the dials and controls, knobs and leevers, holy fucking shit, I should’ve known from the bulkiness of the book, hell, I should’ve known from logging all those thousands of hours in the cockpit, how complicated it would be to do it the right way, I should’ve had at least some inkling, and that wasn’t even the worst part.
I learned that all my fears, all my worst fears, were grounded in undeniable scientific fact. For starters, I learned that I fly 747s, one of the biggest oldest deadliest things they make, a certified jumbo deathtrap. That thing holds over 500 people, and it’s powered by hundreds or thousands of TONS of powerful explosives, that’s just the way it has to be, to get something that big and cumbersome many miles into the sky for chrissakes, where it obviously doesn’t belong. Just looking at a picture of the thing in the book, the first thing that struck me was the impossibility of it, there’s no way that that thing could get off the ground, impossible, it must be a trick, some voodoo magic or mass hallucination, but like the complete fool I am I read on.
The trick is science, this unseeable force called lift, I can’t believe there are people crazy and stupid and somehow smart enough to figure this shit out. Anyway, the way it goes, it’s really surprisingly simple, to generate enough lift to get a jumbo jet into the sky all you really have to do is go really fast, many hundreds of miles per hour, and that’s where the powerful explosives come in.
These numbers and facts gave a very new and very real edge to my terror, and I didn’t like it one bit, but still I read on.
The airline I fly for (which must remain nameless for legal reasons, you can figure it out easily enough anyway) is the absolute worst when it comes to seemingly preventable accidents and fatalities. They have the biggest oldest creakiest fleet in the business, and while their argument (all airlines have the same stupid argument) is that statistically flying is safer than driving, what they fail to mention is that statistics are lies, and that also statistically, if you get into a car accident you at least have a slim chance of surviving, of not killing hundreds or thousands of supposedly innocent people. The only reason there are less plane crashes than car crashes, less pilots than drivers.
https://www.amazon.com/Captain-Airplane-H-Seitz-ebook/dp/B06Y2GK4N9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2HRE1WX7ZE5UP&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.6cQqAcnQi86XHOKK9VZQZQ.MhJXXGBoIYz-_WwlpaxBcJg_7FBazON6G0gq6_VohbI&dib_tag=se&keywords=captain+airplane+book+h.+seitz&qid=1771176870&sprefix=%2Caps%2C178&sr=8-1