I Took Edibles Before a Flight
And this is what happened.
I was on my way home to Los Angeles after spending a week visiting my family in Alaska. I’d broken up with my girlfriend of nine months a few days before my trip, so having a little escape to take my mind off her was exactly what I needed. I usually have FOMO when I leave LA, but with the writer’s strike and the break-up, the stars aligned perfectly, so to Alaska, I went. I’m the only one of my four siblings who is unmarried and childless. Plus, I get gayer by the second. I didn’t bring much to Alaska, just a suitcase full of my dirty clothes, because it’s easier to fly thousands of miles to do laundry at my parent’s house than it is to take my hamper from upstairs to downstairs. I also brought a wide array of edibles because LA has the best weed, and I couldn’t risk being sober around my family all week.
I’m not a stoner by any means, and my tolerance level is very low. I take ten or fifteen milligrams a night, and that’s enough for me. And if I’m feeling really crazy, I’ll add a mid-priced bottle of Cabernet to the mix. I got into edibles during the Pandemic when I was catfished by this girl, Ashley, who lied about being a Physicist and professor at MIT, and turned out to be a low-level con artist instead. She would pretend to take ten milligrams, like me. But eventually, I realized she was taking closer to one hundred milligrams a day or more. I’m sure it was to escape her existence. I don’t take edibles to escape, I take them to enhance my life. I love laughing and sinking into my couch; is that a crime? Once I got on the edibles train, I wondered why I hadn’t been high my entire life, including when I was a baby.
My parents dropped me off at the Fairbanks airport for my red-eye to Seattle. As soon as I got to my seat, I pulled out a marshmallow-flavored tincture to help me pass out during the four-hour flight. I bought it for my most recent ex because she had sleep issues, and somehow, I won the tincture in the breakup. I put twenty milligrams under my tongue and patiently waited thirty seconds before swallowing. As our plane taxied down the runway, I started feeling a very chill high. When the plane took off, I closed my eyes and woke up four hours later when we touched down at Sea-Tac.
I woke up feeling groggy but snapped out of it quickly when I had to hustle to the train to take me from the N terminal to the C terminal, which is on the other side of the world. When I got to my gate, C-18, I was pleasantly surprised by all the empty seats. I did a little location scouting and grabbed a chair furthest away from all other humans. My flight wasn’t boarding for another forty minutes, so I took a few perfectly timed edibles, thinking they would hit as soon as I got to my seat. In the meantime, I charged my iPad and journaled for the next thirty-six minutes.
As I put my journal back in my bag, a family of three came over and sat directly across from me. It felt like a personal attack, like, do want to gay bash me while you’re at it? There were hundreds of empty seats around us. But of all the seats in all the world, they sat directly across from mine. The Mom pulled out a bag of Arbys. I counted fifty-five burgers and fifty-five fries (shout out if you get the reference) to split between two adults and a ten-year-old girl. I didn’t even know Arby’s did breakfast, it was offensive. Everyone knows the best early morning airport food is two Egg McMuffins and hashbrowns. I tried to drown out their heavy Southern accents, but even their open-mouthed chewing had a drawl. I didn’t get up and move because I was there first, and my plane was boarding soon. So I distracted myself by reading an article in the Atlantic about the Idaho student murders.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, we’re about to start the boarding process on flight 1290 to Burbank. At this time, we’d like to invite members of the military, the elderly, and anyone else who is either a war hero or on the brink of death to board the plane.” Fucking hell, the edibles kicked in much faster than I anticipated.
Lucky for me, I was in group two, so I got to board quickly. My high was kicking in, and I floated to my seat, 8F. A young twenty-something-year-old guy was already sitting in the aisle seat of my row, but the middle seat was empty, and I silently prayed to the airplane gods to keep it that way.
“Wow, lucky! Window seat!” Aisle Guy said, a little too enthusiastically for five in the morning. I smiled and said, “Yes, I’m extremely blessed.” But the truth is, I always book the window seat because if the plane goes down, I want to watch. He continued, “I fly all the time, but it’s usually last minute, so I never get to choose my seat. Last week I flew from Raleigh all the way across the country smushed between two fat guys!”
“That’s a bummer,” I responded while desperately searching for my AirPods. Thankfully, Aisle Guy got bored with me and went back to scrolling through Reddit on his phone. But then moans, groans, and fuuuuuucks rang out through the main cabin starting about ten seats behind me. I looked back, and another young guy in his mid-twenties said, “I missed my seat. It’s way up there!” He pointed at my general direction. I have no idea how you can walk that far passed your seat. I’m high as fuck, and I found my seat with no problem.
The aisle was packed with people holding luggage, most of it oversized, trying to get to their seats. And now Missed Seat Guy is squeezing past the crowd trying to get to the front. Then he did something that would’ve gone viral on Passenger Shaming; he crowd-surfed over the middle seats, crawling over eight rows, directly over people’s heads. He looked like Pacific Northwest Spiderman. When he got to my row, he did a somersault into the empty middle seat next to me, his dirty Merrells nearly kicking my money maker, aka, my brain, in the process. Since I was high, I wasn’t phased by the over-seat somersault, I was impressed. He looked at his ticket again and realized that he was still in the wrong row. He threw his bag on the floor behind him and did a backward somersault into the middle seat in row nine.
I opened my iPad and got back to reading about the Idaho murders. The article was so well written that it distracted me from the murders themselves. It made me want to be a better writer, and a better murderer, and maybe I could be if I wasn’t such a fucking idiot. The edibles were hitting me hardcore at this point, but at least I was in my seat, and nobody could take that away from me. Not even a straight white man.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. Basically, this plane is broken. It didn’t pass our inspection, so we are not going to fly it. What we’re gonna do instead is deboard this plane, and head over to another plane that’s waiting for us at terminal N, gate twenty-two. Seating assignments will stay the same. The new departure time is eight-fifty, so you’ll have plenty of time to grab coffee and get to the other terminal.” Oh fuck, I’d rather stay on the broken plane than go all the way back to terminal N, but I don’t think that was an option.
It felt like I was in a simulation, and my character was facing her first big challenge- to get to the other side of the airport with all of my belongings. I get really forgetful when I’m high. Like that time I DoorDashed Silver Lake Ramen, and ten minutes later DoorDashed Homestate, and ten minutes later DoorDashed Din Tai Fung. I didn’t have the munchies, I just kept forgetting that I already ordered dinner.
I’d forgotten our new terminal and gate number by the time I got off the broken plane, so I followed a stout middle-aged bald man in a yellow Hawaiian Shirt who sat a few rows in front of me. He was my north star. I followed him down to the train. If you’ve never flown out of Sea-Tac, the amount of stairs you have to go down is equivalent to the descension into Hell.
We boarded the train and picked up more passengers at Terminal B. A large group of tall blonde teenagers got on. I mean, really tall. And my tallness tolerance is high because my Dad is six foot ten, and my baby brother is seven feet tall. I rarely notice tall people, they’re normalized to me. But this group of giants had platinum blonde hair. It was like the Children of the Corn, all grown up. I don’t think they were related to one another, they looked more like test tube babies who grew up in a Swedish laboratory. Two of the boys were talking really closely, I thought they might kiss, then bashfully look away. But now that I think about it, it’s probably because the train was packed. I enjoyed creating a gay storyline between them. I held onto the pole and never took my eyes off them; I was so incredibly high. At the next stop, Hawaiian Shirt Guy got off the train, so I did too. And then I followed him into the men’s bathroom but realized immediately that I’m not a man, thank fucking god. I waited for him to come back out like we were a married couple who met on the show Ninety-Day Fiance. Dream on, Hawaiian Shirt Guy. I followed him to Burger King, and then our new gate, where we broke up.
A crowd got up to leave when the gate agent got on the speaker and announced, “We are swapping gates. If you are flying to Burbank, you’re at the right place. And if you’re flying into LAX, your new arrival gate is C-18.” They were swapping us out by sending the LAX people to the broken plane we all just came from. I didn’t warn them.
The new departure gate was packed, but I managed to find a place to sit. A woman three seats down from me asked me if I could watch her stuff while she got a coffee. I said sure, even though the announcement just finished warning people not to look after strangers’ luggage. But I’m a pretty good judge of character when I’m not being catfished, and I was ninety-nine percent sure she was not a threat to society or on a terrorist watch list. If anything, she was too trusting, and that’s her toxic trait. I was so high that I forgot I was watching her stuff within the first three minutes of her absence. I also forgot what she looked like, and now I was pissed she didn’t offer to get me a coffee, too. This woman has no idea about my checkered past as a thief. I got arrested in high school for shoplifting from Gottshalks, the only department store in Fairbanks. And who’s to say I won’t relapse one day?
My high continued to escalate. When we finally boarded the new plane, I walked on and was greeted by the same flight attendant the exact same way as before, deja vu. Aisle Guy was already sitting in our row, except this time, he stood up when he saw me walking towards him. He passed the facial recognition portion of the flight. I waited for him to say how lucky I was to get the window seat, but he didn’t. And no one was doing parkour over the middle seats. It felt like the whole plane was fucking with me like I was in an episode of the Twilight Zone, where everyone was doing the same thing, but correctly. We got a second chance, a do-over, and we were nailing it.
Our new plane was freezing, so I hugged my iPad for warmth. I don’t like being cold. And I hate being hot. I don’t think I’ll ever be at the perfect temperature. We finally left Sea-Tac, and at this point, I was higher than the plane. Shortly after leveling off at ten thousand feet, we hit some turbulence. I whipped my head back while clutching my imaginary pearls. I could’ve sworn I heard the roof of the plane caving in. I seemed to be the only one paranoid that we were tricked, that they sent the LAX passengers to the good plane, and they sacrificed the Burbank passengers to the broken plane. That is exactly what would’ve happened if this was a movie.
The flight attendants were in the aisle offering their beverage service. I wanted the gay flight attendant, but I got the tired one instead. I asked for a coffee, black. Usually, I’d ask for almond milk, but that seems like a pipe dream. Airlines will never give us what we want and deserve.
The woman across the aisle from me ordered four airplane-sized bottles of scotch and a can of Coke. It’s ten am somewhere, I thought. She was caring for her elderly mother, who was in the middle seat and nearly completely dead. I’d be drunk, too, if I had to care for another human. I watched Drunk Daughter inhale a bag of Doritos. She didn’t use her hands but would pick the individual Doritos out of the bag with her tongue. She got my attention again when she tilted her head back and shook every single last orange crumb into her mouth. Her eyes were crossing, and I could tell she was shit-faced. She turned the Doritos bag inside out and started licking the silver part. Her Mom watched in horror, and I could tell she was begging god, “Please, take me NOW!”
I got startled and nearly hit my head on the call button when the man sitting directly behind me started sneezing. It sounded like a coven of Banshees was trying to escape his system. I imagined him sneezing so hard it blew the emergency exit door open. God, that would suck.
My high came down as the plane descended into Burbank. We flew over several prop and costume department warehouses, and I was so relieved to be home again in the land of make-believe. Our landing was rough, it probably could’ve made the news. The whole flight could’ve made the news. It felt like one of the wildest adventures of my life. Or maybe it was just a normal adventure that was exacerbated because I was high. This is a good reminder of why I should only take edibles on my couch. But would I get high again on a plane? The answer is absolutely. That was fun as hell.