travel brings something out of me in idea barrages

1.) A series of Jethro Tull remixes where they take out all the flute parts called “Jethro Null”.

2.) Your story about Biggie Smalls’ reincarnation will be called THE CONTINUOUS B.I.G.

3.) Whenever I hear North Korea referred to as a “rogue nation”, I imagine them all inflicting 1d6 bonus damage if they have advantage due to their Sneak Attack feature.

4.) Cheese and your colon enter into a binding agreement.

5.) We gather around the charger station at the airport for warmth, much as our ancestors did at the campfire. Artificially scarce resource, sure, but it makes the flickerboxes shine just the same and so we huddle.

6.) CBGB branded restaurant at the Newark airport. Simulated graffiti on a wall, they tore the real graffiti in the city down for a Starbucks or God knows what then replicated it across the river.

7.) Airport full of hand-sanitizer stations & touchless bathroom faucets, we must paw at a grubby communal iPad to order our food. Christ, we’re paying our money, at least allow us the illusion of human interaction. I don’t wanna play a goddamn flash game, I want to trade cash for coffee.

8.) There’s an actual bird in this airport. I had just assumed that chirping was from some child’s pay-to-win tablet game but no. An actual damned bird, scrapping for its life in this monument to the fall of a civilization. You go, bird. Outlast us all.

9.) Boarding an airplane early is just an exercise in fooling yourself that you won’t get stuck sitting next to someone. Abandon your hope early, you are stuck, pressed against a sweating stranger like veal for the next five hours.

10.) There was a “Baywatch” movie? With “The Rock”? Recent enough where it’s on airplanes now? I just found out about it on the airplane. I am so deeply glad I am totally checked out of this culture, I didn’t even know.

11.) Your erotic sci-fi anthology series will be called “The Outer Labia”.

12.) Believium is a matter of opinion.

13.) If you must burst into a rendition of “Day-Oh” in the middle of a crowded airport, make sure not to accidentally sing “HEY MISTER TALIBAN, TALLY ME BANANA!” The authorities might well misunderstand.

14.) A Garbage Pail Kid of a computer nerd just redolent in his own snot called “Steve Gobs”.

15.) Often when I am watching a movie where a schlubby guy is with a really conventionally attractive woman, I think “Nah, I’m not buying it” then I remember, when I’ve been in relationships, people probably said that about me too.

16.) There was only one person with a barf bag out as we landed, a man holding one for his wife. As they exited the plane, screaming they might miss their connection to New Zealand, he revealed himself to be wearing adult diapers. They were in their 30s. It all fit together somehow.

17.) Food show host Andrew Zimmer looks almost exactly like a goomba from the live-action “Super Mario Brothers” movie. Now that you have seen this, you will never unsee it. You’re welcome.

18.) There is a seafood restaurant in NYC called “The Sturgeon King” which means they didn’t consult me as I would’ve pitched the much more clever “Sturgeon General”.

19.) A store that sells marijuana-infused cheese called “Smoked Gooda”.

20.) When your millenial child laughs at your primitive video game, stare she or he straight in the eye and say “You can’t spell SOLITARE without SO LIT!” and then, I dunno, delete all their selfies.

21.) All cultures are equally arbitrary and silly, including your own. Especially your own. Your own most of all. Move forward in this truth and you’ll be bagged down by bigotry a bit less.

22.) Executive decision: there are too many child actors named Zane. Half of them are required to change their names to “Bill” or “Stevie”.

23.) “Oregon Trail” except the challenge is to survive a two-layover cross-country flight without going completely irredeemably insane. In real time. Sort of like that DESERT BUS game meets H.P. Lovecraft.

24.) “Rough Night” is like the 4.000th female ensemble comedy where the supposedly “heavy and awkward” friend is actually the most attractive woman in the cast. It is also an incredibly dumb film in every other way.

25.) There is no such thing as a mediocre neck tattoo. A neck tattoo is an entirely binary occurrence. It is either incredibly bad-ass or a life-alteringly terrible mistake. One or the other.

26.) I know that “Velocidad En Tierra” on the airplane screen is just Spanish for “land speed” but I WANT it to be the name of a death metal band that only writes songs about dinosaur battles.

27.) If bachelor and bachelorette parties were actually as wild as the movies portray, they would all be outlawed immediately. Happily, they’re really mostly just perfunctory trips to depressing strip clubs and little penis-shaped cakes.

28.) Unless you are literally Jacques Cousteau, man, that hat will only make you look like a rogue garden gnome that managed to sneak onto an airplane.

29.) A remake of Brokeback Mountain with a more upbeat ending called “Life Pardners”.

30.) If you get caught trying to join the mile high club, you’ll get charged with in-descent exposure.

31.) If the flight announcement is not by a pilot or steward/ess, if it is just a robot voice telling you to fasten your safety belts, it clearly isn’t that important and shouldn’t be legally binding.

32.) This concludes “all the things Mike wrote in a notebook on the longest leg of an airplane journey, broken up into a series of tweets”. And yes, I am delirious with travel exhaustion! And not even at my destination!