i like the ground. the ground is good.

i have never been on an airplane. i've never even been in an airport. i used to regard this almost as a shortcoming, and then i learned to embrace it as one of several unique traits that make me slightly less... civilized? adult? real, in a way, judging by the flummoxed looks people shoot at me when i tell them that i let my driver's license lapse three years ago and never renewed it, that i don't know how to ride a bicycle, that i walk home from work because it takes so much longer. they make me myself, anyhow, and that's super by me. i enjoy walking. other people don't. we all have justifications for our choices. i walk partly for the exercise and partly for the exposure to sunlight, but mainly because a lot of the time i simply can not get close enough to the dirt.

my dearth of stratospheric adventures hasn't, historically, had anything to do with a fear of flying, like many people's, including my mother's (a woman who has never and will never set foot on an aircraft. if i were to die unexpectedly overseas and no one else could identify my remains, she would let my body congeal in a foreign morgue for as long as it took her to make the journey by boat. she has told me this right to my face, that and that it would serve me right for flying off and leaving her here when i know how she feels about that sort of thing. she's a bit mad, bless her addled little heart). now it's a lack of funds and wanderlust, but in the past it was a fervent and ecstatic love of being alone in a car for endless periods of time. i routinely made weekend trips to places five or six hours away just for the sake of the journey, and i still wouldn't fly to any place i could drive to instead. it was just a personal preference, though, the expression of my opinion that earthbound solitude deserved two thumbs way up. the fact of airplanes, their existence and underlying mechanics, the number of them in the air at any given moment, was odd enough to make me uneasy if i though about it for too long, but so is everything--the word "food" becomes surreal and grotesque if i think about it for more than fifteen seconds--and we take our lives into our hands every time we cross the street. i had no strongly negative thoughts about the odd and unnatural airplanes.

until recently.

an indonesian jet crashed today in medan, killing all but nine of its 117 passengers, and probably dozens of people on the ground. i read the headline and instantly thought, oh, god--another one? it seems like i've been hearing about a major plane crash every couple of days, and i can't remember hearing about them with any sort of frequency in the recent past. is it that i haven't been paying attention?

nope. five commercial airline crashes this past august resulted in a total of at least 334 deaths worldwide, the most airline-related fatalities in a single month since may of 2002 (485 casualties), and only 61 fewer than the total for the seven months preceding it. there were eleven crashes between june and july, but only one resulted in a large number of fatalities (see the aviation safety network database for complete details). as far as i can tell there isn't a single link between any of the crashes; three of those that occurred in the past month involved boeing 737s, including today's in mandala, but only one looks to be the direct result of an equipment failure.

still... i'm beginning to develop a daedalus complex. do so many of us really need to be spending so much time up there? machinery is only as infallible as the human beings who create and control it, and recent events have proven to anyone who might have needed the evidence that you can't count on being safe anywhere, not even in your own home. at this moment i can't tell you how happy i am that everyone i love is down here next to the dirt with me.