On Being Diverted From Burbank To Ontario
The Gratitude List #21
I spend much of my life now inside planes and airports. A blessing and a curse. The longer I do comedy the more I realize why the go-to hack premise, a topic so hacky even non-comics would do a Seinfeld impression while mentioning it, is airplane food,1 even though I don’t think a single normal person has had a meal on a domestic flight since before Obama took office.
All airports are liminal spaces, and most airports in America are the creepy kind, where you feel like you’re in some depressed 7th grader’s Minecraft level. You’re about to be the main character in a Backrooms creepypasta walking to your gate. “This feels desolate,” I think while getting on the waitlist for the Capital One Lounge at DFW. Ten feet away from me a woman is annoyed that she can’t just run upstairs and get, like, a coffee, something grab-and-go to eat, not even sit down. The lounge employee does a customer service-y shrug. We all know she should be allowed to get, like, coffees and grab-and-go, but we can’t. Too many other people have been watching the same travel tip TikToks. She goes to her gate because her flight is boarding. I get a text: I am next on the waitlist. Soon, I will be able to pee in a bathroom that smells good, pick at breakfast from a “locally-inspired buffet,” and take a sandwich to go that will later give me food poisoning.
Later: I am on a plane to Burbank Airport. We’ve failed to arrive. The pilot has tried to land once, failed, bailed. We are circling the Valley as he readies for a second attempt. You could cut the tension with a knife, if you were allowed to have one on this plane. We begin our descent. see Universal Studios and the high school sports fields and the CVS parking lot, and then the runway, that glorious Burbank Airport runway, where we’ll get off the plane right onto the tarmac using jet stairs like we were politicians or 70’s movie stars or 80’s drug smugglers—but not right now. The pilot is bailing once again.2
Have you ever heard an entire plane groan “what the FUCK?!” Not an encouraging sound!
Now the pilot is on the intercom, voice drenched in sweat. We don’t have enough fuel to try another landing, we have to get some in Ontario. People are paying $17 for Wi-Fi to send angry texts to their group chats. People who have almost certainly never flown a plane are screaming about how they could fly better than this idiot.
We land at the Ontario International Airport, where a flight attendant who keeps pronouncing it “on-TAR-ee-oh”3 is glad to be the first person to welcome us here, to the place none of us want to be. That’s the official American Airlines script and by golly she’s sticking to it. She knows we have other choices when it comes to air travel, and every soul aboard is wishing they’d taken one of those other choices.
After the “gas-and-go” that will take “10, maybe 15 minutes” turns into the entire crew has timing out, and now we have to wait for the next crew to get bussed in from Burbank in order to get airborne again. It’s all $40 Subway sandwiches and carpet strategically patterned to hide stains and until the new pilot swoops in to save the day.
It’s around this time that I remember that how I react to the circumstances I find myself in at any given moment is worth taking note. As much as I enjoy the guy with a billion Raising Cane's pins on his backpack yelling obscenities on the plane as we deboard, I don’t want to be that guy. One of those lingering lines from a really great share pops up: I don't have problems, I have things that require my attention. And right now I need to put my attention on not puking and sending some emails, in that order.
By the way: the whimsy of flying totally evaporates during the part where I’m just doing work in an airport. Working on a plane feels remarkable, working at the gate feels desperate, typing like I’m living through the inciting incident in a movie about the stock market crashing.4
About three hours later, after we are saved by the new crew and I have drank several cups of water to try and keep my head and body from hurting (to no avail), after I have thought “well maybe I should’ve taken the bus to the Metrolink to the other Metrolink to the Burbank Airport and I’d be at my car by now,” after we land at Burbank and the passengers applaud in what any other circumstance would seem corny but here feels weirdly appropriate, I’m about to be home. Still plenty of time before DG and I are supposed to go out for a fancy dinner to a restaurant I’ve had marked on Google Maps for 4 years.
Then I'm driving home and I almost puke on the side of the road. I swing by Vons to get my wife a Valentine's Day card and I almost puke in the parking lot, because I have never noticed just how strong the smell from the McDonald’s is until this moment. And I almost puke at the self-checkout and I think "huh, something might really be wrong here," but I stave it off until I get home, where I tell DG all about this hellish travel day before telling her I need to meditate.
While I am meditating I keep thinking "you should puke. You should throw up. Do you have the flu? Everyone has the flu right now. Is this the flu? I don't think it's the flu but you should throw up and see how you feel." So I throw up. How I feel is a million times better.
I tell DG to stop calling people to see if they'll take our dinner reservation, we're going out, we're painting the town. And then I get to the restaurant and a couple of bites into bread and salad I think I'm maybe going to paint this patio in puke. I go to the bathroom. I hold it down. I go back outside and tell DG that we need to go, that I will not make it through this dinner.
And as I lie in sandwich-induced agony on the couch, watching The Pitt while DG eats the salmon they boxed up to-go, my body tells me there are worse fates than having to be diverted and rerouted. I could’ve had to fly into LAX.
THINGS I’M GLAD I SAW IN THE LAST WEEK (OR SO)
THE SNL 50TH ANNIVERSARY CONCERT & SPECIAL
Probably the greatest 6 hours of “throw it on in the background while you do work” TV viewing ever conceived. Just like anything related to SNL, some of it was great, some of it was weird, and some of it was unwatchable. But the highlights – like this all-timer Digital Short from the Anniversary Special, or the Marty and Bobbi Culp medley from the Anniversary Concert – were pretty damn high!
THIS SKETCH ABOUT VALENTINE’S DAY
What a nice little walk through the rain talking about when you shouldn’t break up with your girlfriend from Eli Leonard, one of the greatest WRONG! contestants of all time, and his pals Evan Walter, and Bethany Michalski.
THE BRUTALIST
I watched this at 10 AM at the AMC at the Americana at Brand, which is a decision that I think every single character in this movie would have hated, all for different reasons.
Anyway: it's brilliant. Every piece intricately and purposefully crafted, the triumphant first half and disquieting second half coming together to make a meaningful whole. You have to put the windows at the top of the 60 foot ceiling so you can see the light shine through.
A BRIEF DISPATCH FROM RECOVERYLAND
A thing I am reminded of when I make a flustered outreach call to a fellow as I leave the Burbank Airport short-term parking lot: sometimes if you are in the middle of having a really bad travel day, you also don’t need to take a business call. Sometimes if you’re having a really tough day it’s okay to set a boundary and wait to have that conversation, until you’re in a better headspace. Do it just for today. Just for yourself.
WHAT ABOUT ME?
This week, you can find me:
doing shows in LA - full show calendar is here
getting ready to host my comedy game show WRONG! in LA on March 1st at 11:45 PM, get your tickets!
And if you haven’t watched my new special, please do. If you have, maybe tell a friend about it!
Until next time, friends. Thanks for reading, I’m glad you’re here!
What’s the deal?!?!?!?!
something I have been thinking about a lot since this flight: I wonder if pilots think of airports the way comics think about comedy clubs, where some of them are “easy rooms” and some of them are “hard rooms.” From a flying standpoint Burbank strikes me as the equivalent of a really chaotic bar show. Maybe me and the other Burbank Airport stans have never considered how the thing we love so much might absolutely suck for them. Like how audiences now treat crowd work. The average person who might just be showing up to a comedy show because they saw a 27 year old with cheek implants ask someone where they're from or call someone gay in a silly voice, and boom, that’s what comedy is now, just like how every time I go to the Burbank Airport I think this is what every airport should be like.
as you may have suspected, it’s pronounced “on-TARE-ee-oh”
Don't even get me started on working at an airport lounge, which has become the bane of my existence after serving me a questionable sandwich.
The last line.
Me: HAEH HAEH HAEH HAEH HAEH!