Fly the Smarmy Skies

I’m afraid of flying. It’s the worst fear to have, because it’s the one fear no one respects. You make the mistake of telling someone, and you're rewarded with a carnival of crass number crunching (with The Cruncher prattling on like he’s the first one ever to say it): “You know statistically, you’re safer in the air than you are on the ground!”

Everyone is an actuary all of a sudden.

Yessssss, I knowwwwww, plane crashes are improbable. So is encountering a dangerous spider. But an arachnophobe suffers no barbs for going public with his fear. No one says, “’Fraid of spiders?! DU-DE, you’re safer around a spider than you are around your wife! Don’t you read Zoobooks?”

It isn’t the odds of a plane crash that scare me. It’s what happens if the odds go against me. A bell curve-shaped parachute ain’t gonna magically open when I’m spiraling into the ground.

“Let’s see, Gaussian analysis of the flight’s risk profile should mean--SPLAT. Oh right, still dead. Uh, what are the odds on resurrection?”