The Mick Man Did Two (2) Airplanes

The Wright Brothers. Amelia Earhart. Coley Mick. Just a few of the famous aviators known throughout the annals of history. Soaring majestically throughout the sky with the grace of an eagle, thumbing our noses at God for not creating us with wings. Truly a miracle of modern times.

I used to fly all the time. Not weekly like some sort of traveling salesman who had to fly city to city selling vacuum cleaners and cheating on his wife or whatever the fuck. But a couple times a year. Never had any problems. Then a few years back I stepped aboard a red eye flight from LAX and the next six hours were hell. I felt like I wasn’t attached to my seat. I felt dizzy and disoriented. I couldn’t tell up from down. I tried to sleep it off but every time I closed my eyes I got a sinking feeling in my chest and would suddenly feel like I was free falling. It was like when Wile E. Coyote unknowingly walks off a cliff, pauses, looks to the ground, realizes how high off the ground he has found himself, only for his eyes to bulge comically out of his cranium before beginning his descent to the Earth. That was my entire flight. I was Wile E. Coyote.

I watched Bone Tomahawk back to back to back to try and distract myself. It was the only movie I had downloaded on my laptop. I don’t know what that says about me but it was all I had other than a Bill Russell documentary and I was too afraid to let go of my seat for long enough to change it. When the plane finally landed in Boston I swore off leaving the ground for the rest of my life. I could never feel that way again. Train Life was the only way I would be traversing this great nation of ours. And for the rest of the nations? Well, fuck ‘em. Got no use for ‘em. They can come to me if they so please.

I thought my problem was only confined to flying. I figured it was vertigo, because my father suffered from the same for the second half of his life. He struggled driving over bridges, driving at night caused him to lose perspective of the road and the sky, and standing up too fast could cause extreme dizziness. Shortly after that flight I started to notice these things slowly and surely seeping into my daily life. But for the most part it didn’t have much impact on my day to day – sitting, watching tv, smoking, tweeting, working. None of those things fucked with me so I figured I would be fine. And then the move to New York happened. I was excited to be in the office, working around likeminded people and creating for the masses. I had been coming to New York my entire adult life. I have no problem with this trash heap of an island. And upon moving here I discovered this problem wasn’t just flying, or driving. I was immediately overwhelmed with the amount of people I came into contact with on a daily basis. The concrete jungle, the massive structures constantly on top of you literally blocking out the Sun as C. Montgomery Burns had intended. All of it made me feel small and insignificant. I would think of how many people were around, how many people are just alive right now, how we’re really just on a stupid water rock floating among the cosmos for no rhyme or reason in perpetuity until the Sun eventually explodes. I would take the train to work and have to sprint from my stop to the office. I dreaded that walk. Sometimes my train would get stuck underwater coming from Queens to Manhattan and all I could think of was my impending water casket on the fucking R train.

So now not only was this problem not allowing me to fly, it was fucking with my day to day. It didn’t become known publicly until Dave dragged me to Sirius one day. I can’t even remember why we had to go there but once I got to the building I realized this was going to be a problem. This fucking tower is MASSIVE in the middle of Manhattan. I paced around the lobby waiting for Dave to get there. Trina showed up with an entourage reeking of something potent. I couldn’t even keep it together for the baddest bitch. Finally Dave showed up, security asked where we were going, we said Sirius, they told us it was on floor 36. I got on the elevator, just trying to keep it together, it would all be over soon, I can do this, c’mon man Deion Sanders is on this elevator keep it together. They have those elevators that go faster than the speed of light, so we were on the 36th floor before I even knew we had left the ground. That, surprisingly, didn’t help. I took a step off the elevator and took a left, because that was my only option presented to me. Instantly my eyes took notice of the floor to ceiling windows they had looking out. I felt like I was on the edge of a cliff. Naturally the studio we were walking to was directly up against this window. I took three steps and semi-passed out. I caught myself on the wall, Dave noticed exactly none of this, and I quickly scampered away and ran into the bathroom. I threw some water on my face hoping that would help. It did not. I tried to walk back to that studio and fell again. Jim Norton stepped over me like fucking Allen Iverson. Dave called me and asked me where I was. I explained what was happening and they put me in the producer’s studio on the other side of the floor. He came out and we called into the show he was doing so they could make fun of me. One of the hosts said something about my jacket, which was fire, and I chirped him for being a swagless poor. He came back with making fun of my current predicament which was fair and indefensible. After Dave hung up the phone he told me to hang out there until he was done. I couldn’t. I retreated back to the elevator, went down the lobby, and got to the nearest train. I texted Dave, profusely apologizing, and went back to the office and waited for him. He had already tweeted about it, so I got to walk into the office to a whole heap of questions.

Doctors wouldn’t give me Xannax because I would ask for it by name, because I do my research. They called it “drug seeking behavior” which I think is fair because I own several mirrors and recognize I look like a guy you’d happen upon at 4 am on Revere Beach rummaging for clean enough syringes. A doctor finally gave me an SSRI. SSRI stands for “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors” and it definitely worked. It definitely put my anxiety at ease. It also removed sleep from my daily life and made me feel like I was inside someone else’s body. I told them before they prescribed me this drug that my job required my personality stay in tact. I realize I’m no one special but being able to come up with a caption for a highlight or viral video, or a quip on a podcast, or a video, requires my fucked up brain to stay in the balance of fuckedupness I was accustomed to. What this SSRI did was take out all of the charm and leave just the horrid thoughts typically reserved for long showers and staring at the ceiling at 2:35 AM. After three days on the drug I stopped. I’d rather deal with anxiety than the thoughts this was giving me. It took me months to feel “regular” again. Listen, doctors are some of our smartest members of society but most of them fucking stink at listening. My new doctor rules and has been a tremendous help specifically because he does listen and react rather than act like he knows everything. Shoutout him for not making me want to take Derrick Rose’s advice.

Over the last two+ years I’ve had to turn down countless opportunities which could have furthered my career simply by taking a plane. I just couldn’t do it. Taking the train to Atlanta was funny and, also, a massive waste of time just because of this complete anxiety. Which, let me again make the case against planes because it remains insane to me how people are seemingly so OK with them.

For starters, planes are built and maintained by humans. I don’t trust humans. They fuck up every single day. Sometimes intentionally, other times because they are inept. Humans start racking up more consistency and I’ll give them their credit after the fact, never before. All you need is one guy to not do his job on a given flight and that’s it. I know the statistics about how you’re more likely to die in a car crash on your way to the airport than in a plane crash. I know trains even crash more frequently than planes. Don’t care. And also, bro you’re just trapped in the fucking sky for hours on end with THOUSANDS of other planes simultaneously tearing through the atmosphere. It’s truly a modern miracle there aren’t constant plane crashes like that scene in BREAKING BAD. Shoutout air traffic control.

And I completely understand how entirely irrational my fear was and remains. But this is my career. This is the life I have. If I want to keep climbing I need to get over this mental hurdle to better myself. And just so I can generally feel like less of a goddamn loser. It was embarrassing to me, something I was able to do so freely taken away from me after one bad experience. A couple months ago I started forcing myself to get off earlier than my train stop so I could face the herds of people, the shadows of the skyscrapers, all of it. It wasn’t easy. And then it was. I don’t know when it clicked, but one day I got to the office and realized I hadn’t once thought about how far away we are from the Sun, how about it’s equally as terrifying to think we’re alone in this universe than if there is other life out there, none of it. I just walked to work like a regular, functioning member of society. A few weeks later I walked a few blocks, stopped and looked up to see the top of the Empire State Building. I didn’t feel dizzy. I didn’t feel hopeless. The world wasn’t crumbling down around me. I was fine. I was probably blocking a large chunk of the sidewalk because I’m a freakishly large humanoid type of creature, pissing off the droves of humans walking around me, but I didn’t care. That tiny, insignificant moment was, embarrassingly enough, a massive accomplishment for me. I’d lived here over two years, never once looked up to see maybe the most famous building in the world. I physically couldn’t without feeling like I was about to pass out. Now I do it every day.

And that alone gave me the confidence to fly again. That and two Xannax. And my incredible girlfriend who I made hold my hand like a baby the entire flight both ways. And my incredible support system I have here at Barstool. From Dave and Erika to KFC and everyone else. They all knew how tough this had been for me and were all incredibly happy for me that I was able to overcome this obstacle that had been hanging over me like a dark cloud for so long. The only person I didn’t tell ahead of time was Caleb because he likes to wear “We Are Marshall” shirts on flights and I didn’t need his shenanigans in my life this weekend.

PS: While I was in the sky I couldn’t tweet cause plane wifi stinks and certainly isn’t worth it. So these were my thoughts while I was trapped in a metal tube jettisoning through the friendly skies for the first time in years.