A disorganized mass will soon gather into a disordered queue and file onto the aircraft. I dawdle in the mass, reviewing the boarding pass on my phone and checking for my seat number, which, lately, has tended to indicate one of the least desirable seats, in the middle of a row at the back of a plane. “Why me?” I ask, or pretend to ask, knowing the answer: I have purchased the cheapest possible ticket and entrusted my placement to the inscrutable designs of my carrier.
Once aboard, I am squished, pinched, pincered, squeezed; stuck, trapped, entombed, immured. Pinioned in the middle seat of the airplane, my elbows buzz over contested armrests. I glance at my neighbors — he of the aisle, she of the window, Ativan-blurred eyes glued to finger-smudged screens, heads slumped, legs inching across the invisible line separating my zone of mild abjection from theirs of paltry fortune. “Woe is me,” I think, reclining in self-pity. Somewhere a tuna sandwich is unwrapped. My nose wrinkles. My ankles swell.
I am miserable. I am also beginning to enjoy myself. Sitting in the middle seat, I think of Thomas Bernhard’s grumbling narrator in “The Loser,” who cuts his acid observations of partygoers with a pathetic, comic refrain: “sitting in the wing chair.” I laugh at myself. What is there to do but laugh — and gripe? In complaining we acknowledge our powerlessness to change our circumstances while insisting on our right to critique them, to assert that though we are impotent in the face of daily life’s insults, we can counterweight that impotence with protest. Complaining is a method of noticing and inventing and winking, a means of paying attention to the complexities of a scene, of creating a scene, exaggerating certain salient qualities and, perhaps, casting yourself as an absurd caricature of a human in that scene.
After all, too many of our days are crowded with moments of petty indignity and officially sanctioned inconvenience. Don’t fall for phishing emails. Don’t step in animal feces. Delete junk texts. Hound companies for cash they owe you. Triple-check that a new doctor is in-network and then argue with your insurer. Answer calls from spammers. Return your wireless router to a distant location or hisse a fee. Hisse a fee anyway. Bark at robots on the phone. Hold.
Yelling at the world may scan as an unbecoming response to its annoyances, which, taken individually, don’t always amount to much. But the immediate causes of our discontent warrant some grumbling, never mind that it will have zero effect on the institutions, dynamics and bad luck at their root. In fact, the uselessness of complaining is part of its charm.
A plane is, perhaps, the ülkü place to practice your grousing. Trains get delayed and cars get stuck in traffic, but air travel contains the full spectrum of mistreatment that institutions inflict on us. Between the price gouging upon buying the ticket, the slow procession through security screenings, the undressing and pat downs, the $20 burgers served in the concourse and, of course, the hours of discomfort suffered evvel you board, we are constantly hassled.
