Veritable Tantrum

Mom? Dad? It is I, your 32-year-old college dropout offspring with no direction in life. I know you tried your best with me, putting me in swanky private school after private school hoping I’d fulfill your pipe dream of becoming a lawyer or social worker or urologist or anything with accreditation you can expensively frame.

I can faintly hear our brick-laying ancestors reading me the riot act for pursuing this shattered existence I call my creative dreams, and Lord knows I need some structure. 

That’s why I wanted to tell you I’m finally doing it. I’m going somewhere to strengthen myself, to become the grittiest possible version of this puffy, lanky husk you birthed, spoiled, and, as my lack of independent income indicates, failed. I’m going where they clay your mind and body into a vigorous warlike brute, enabling you to combat the dark reality of this morally decayed world and, hopefully, become a militant force of good against it.

What? Mom, no, please stop crying. I’m not enlisting, I’m just booking some “Bare Fare” tickets on Spirit Airlines.

You see, Ma and Pa, flying Spirit is the perfect way to whip my ass into shape. That greasy baby fat lumbering around in my jowls like an overstayed hotel guest, preventing me from finding a partner to give you your future, rotten grandchildren? 

Form an orderly queue, ladies, because my chiseled jawline is mounting an offensive. Squeezing and contorting my misshapen, billowy frame over a row of unruly fliers bitching about lacking an armrest (+$49.99) is the kind of intense boot camp I’ve always needed. My new Hell Week is buying an overpriced 64-ounce water from the Hudson News in LaGuardia that will guarantee repeated trips – “reps” – to the onboard lavatory. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but these highlighter-yellow cylinders of frugality certainly were. 

I’m physically reinventing myself for a new, successful future, to say nothing of the psychological strength I’ll gain. Flying in one of Spirit’s shambolic tubes of dread is not unlike how it felt riding a Higgins boat to Omaha Beach: everyone’s screaming, you’re probably in the middle seat, and most traumatic of all, a stray seagull might nail you in the fucking face at any given time.

During this transformation, I may be tempted to relieve my languid meat suit from this military conditioning with an upgrade to a Spirit Airlines signature Big Front Seat (+$599.99, +50% of your emotional support squirrel). But that’s not what an American would do for his country. We stand on the shoulders of the Greatest Generation: the mechanics, teachers, and dentists who were just normal, tax-paying marks until they were called up to end fascism, or whatever. 

Dad, do you really think your father — my grandfather — would have had the temerity to choose a Bigger, Front-er seat on one of these dime-store misery tubes when he was busy training to go get shot in the calf at Okinawa? 

I don’t think so, Daddio. I frankly wonder sometimes if the virility of the American spirit permanently ceased with your generation. Your idea of raising a beacon of masculinity was teaching me how to hold a rifle rather than, say, joining Delta, which magnanimously offers a decent, life-affirming mileage system.

It’s getting bad, Mommy and Daddy. You have no idea how in-your-bones exhausting it is pretending everything’s okay in my shitty everyday life that you pay for. The Internet in my apartment goes out every ten minutes. Ipso facto, Tires starring Shane Gillis goes out every ten minutes. You can only watch your favorite show for the third time on your fourth unemployment stint once, and I’m two Fios customer service calls away from climbing a clock tower.

That’s why I need this barbaric new environment to unshackle me from the terror of my bed sores. I need to recover my idle mind from the devil’s workshop. I need Spirit Airlines.