Yes, I Recommend You, Jet Blue

I recommend you because when I went to the lavatory and then asked for extra cashews as I emerged, the flight attendant placed two packages of cashews in my hand and asked if I wanted a beverage with that.

I recommend you because you obviously have a decent dental plan because I saw two sets of braces on your flight attendants and another overbite you could hide a WMD under, the possessor of the overbite clearly waiting for probation to be over and the dental insurance/some orthodontia covered to kick in.

I recommend you mostly because of those Direct TV viewers in the back of each and every seat, plus bulkheads as necessary. Yes, there were 36 channels, which made the six-hour flight from Boston to Oakland pass with minimal existential angst.

Here I must enumerate. Thirty-six channels of Direct TV are good because:

1) Television not only diverts us from reality, it narcotizes. Not only do we pay less attention, that attention is itself dulled. Indeed, the enemy of happy flight -- in addition to the stale air and the cramped space -- is our imagination. None of us are mathematicians on airplane flights, happy in the fact airplane is quantifiably safe. We are all Tom Clancy, conjuring up rococo disaster after rococo disaster.

2) Also, there is comfort in mediocrity, in wallowing in the fact in most of the ways we are and live as human beings we are members of the lowest common denominator. We are exemplars of the non-exemplary. We do not need to hide from tragedy. We are not kings or generals. We are not even grandiose crazy people.

Why would tragedy single us out to make some sublime point? Television is a warm bath with what looks suspiciously like pubic hair floating in it. As riders in planes, we are the few, the proud, those whose arrogance in their assertion of superiority over gravity itself would vex me if I were a god. But as watchers of television? My word, the gods say. How many shows does Dick Wolf have on the networks anyway, particularly when you factor in syndication.

And we change the channel once again and then again because our attention spans are pitiful. And the gods turn away.