I wake up at 5:30 in a warm, comfortable bed. The air has lost any indication that summer lasted up till ten days ago. It’s crisp and cool. It’s still dark and will be for a solid hour more. I stretch. A small white dog senses my movement and instantly approaches for head scratches. I have had a good night’s sleep, or not bad anyway (only got up to pee once, heartburn stayed at bay). An optimism that can only come from being prone and without a full bladder at the same time allows me to approach the belief that today will be good.

And then I make the fatal mistake of reaching for my phone.

With 45 seconds (at most) I have been inundated with the unbelievably bad news. Not only from the day before – no no no – my phone and Reddit make it possible for me to be filled in on the world’s worst events up to about eight minutes ago. I have been informed of murders, shootings, rich peoples’ attempts to permanently screw those who made the disgraceful move of being born with less money. Before I stand up, put on my slippers, or hit the button on my coffee machine I have heard the day’s threats, complaints, and woes from the president of the United States, I have rolled my eyes at the outrageous lies of those with right-wing political agendas, shaken my head at the mere existence of ICE, and I have balled my fists in anger and frustration at the astounding hypocrisy of the American GOP.

Then I pee.

I suppose the saddest part of all this is that if you live in the Western world then my morning probably sounds a lot like your morning. Maybe not the dog. Because of real time news apps, Reddit, and any other number of apps, the worst news in the world is delivered to us at all times of the day: before dinner, after dinner, before we get out of bed, in the middle of a meeting. It doesn’t matter; it gets to us at all times.   

Fifteen years ago, this might have seemed like hell. Who would want to be informed of all the bad things going on in the world at the touch of your finger? But the funny thing is, I look at this information – eat it up, really – on purpose.

On this little box that I find that information on, I can also read poetry, any classic of literature, erotica; I can read the beautifully-poetic and resonant insights of Marcus Aurelius. I can look at any work of art that has ever been discovered.

But I don’t.

I can tell my personal AI assistant to conjure up any kind of comfort, encouragement, or positive affirmations it can think of.

But I don’t.     

I look up the bad news of the day and I spend the rest of my day under the unbearable weight of the shit world being a shit place run by its shittiest people who treat everyone else like shit.

I mean, it’s been worse. I’m sure people woke up with more angst during the Bubonic Plague. The leadup to the sack of Rome probably wasn’t a great time of comfort for its citizens, Vandals bearing down on them with quivers full of comeuppance.

Oh, I know things will get better. They have to. There will be a swing back to reason and hope and kindness. But to be honest, I’d be happy if the American president was not the biggest asshole on the planet. That fact alone would make getting up to pee at 5:31 am an easier thing to do.

Sometime in the late 18^th century, a bunch of French people got it in their heads that rather than walk around, they’d like to fly around. To accomplish this, they looked towards China where inventors in the 2^nd century BCE developed Kongming. Though this sounds like a dynasty of giant apes, it just means ‘sky lantern’. They used hot air to make paper lanterns lighter than air and used them to send military signals. It’s from the idea of Kongming that French wannabe flyboys created the hot air balloon.

Just as space programs sent chimps and dogs into space, balloonists played the same game. On September 19 1983, the Montgolfier brothers loaded the world’s first hot air balloon, a 42-foot-high balloon made of fabric and paper, with a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. The sheep was a stand-in for a its perceived nearness to human physiology. The duck was a control accustomed to high altitudes. The rooster was to test the effects of altitude on a flightless bird. We can only hope the rooster enjoyed irony. The flight lasted 8 minutes. There is no record as to the animals’ reaction.

The first manned fight took place on November 21 1783 in a paper and silk balloon. Francois Pilatrê de Rozier and Francois Laurent stood on a circular platform and fed wood into a fire through openings on either side of the balloon’s skirt. The balloon reached an altitude of 500 feet and travelled about 5½ miles before landing in a farm field. However, the sight of a fire-breathing behemoth landing near their homes had startled the locals, and the two Frenchmen were being charged by literally pitchfork-wielding villagers. The balloonists had no choice but to soothe the terrified villagers by offering the champagne they’d brought along. The world’s first in-flight drink was enjoyed a month later when Jacques Charles poured a glass of champagne for his fellow passenger while floating above France. Thus began the era of drinking in the sky.   

In the 1920s–1930s a lot of that sky drinking was done on giant hydrogen-filled airships called dirigibles. Zeppelins. Airplanes existed as an air travel option, but they were unpressurized, turbulent terror machines that flew so low that one could frantically wave to people in tall buildings. Dirigibles offered the day’s elite a much calmer – and much more lavish – experience. Dirigible travel took time (Brazil to Europe took three days) so there wasn’t much else to do but eat, drink, talk, and look out the window. The range of cocktails served on the Hindenburg, the world’s most dubiously famed dirigible, was impressive and categorized under sours, flips, fizzes, cobblers and cocktails. So much drinking was done on dirigibles that the menu offered hangover cures. With the Hindenburg disaster in 1937, dirigible air travel literally went up in flames. It seemed that televised footage of air catastrophe along with the shrieking pleas of a commentator stayed alive in people’s nightmares no matter how much booze they drank.

So, we moved on to drinking on airplanes. The Douglas DC-3 pressurized cabins in the mid-1930s, but things really changed when the Civil Aeronautics Board regulated prices and seating. This limited airlines’ competitive strategy to offering luxury services – i.e. good food and alcohol. Airlines created unique menus and signature drinks. Pan Am went luxury with coursed meals and fine wines. Delta’s Royal Service offered free Champagne, canapés and cocktails. Mini-liquor bottles became ubiquitous in the home bars of businessmen all across America. Others went slightly more off brand. In the 1960s, Mohawk Airlines places were decorated like rail cars, with stewardesses dressed as dance hall ladies serving free beer, cigars, and pretzels. Western Airlines served Margaritas on Mexico routes. Continental Airlines became the tiki-lounge in the skies, serving passengers with Mai Tais and Dungeness crab. The jet age brought lounges and piano bars. The Boeing 377 Stratocruiser featured a spiral staircase to a downstairs cocktail lounge. American Airlines even installed a piano bar. From 1969, the Boeing 747 could fit more than 1 ½ passengers than any plane up till then, potentially getting 400 passengers shitcanned in their 30,000-foot-high bars and lounges. The party ended with the Deregulation Act of 1978, which removed price and route controls. And from there it’s a slippery slope to Ryanair charging passengers for carryon bags and, no doubt at some point, to be on planes with windows.

It’s great when a plan comes together. And terrifying. We decided a while ago to get our place painted. I guess there’s something about white walls with occasional patches of ‘who knows what that was’ that doesn’t quite shout ‘home.’ We needed some color.

Well, that’s the fun part. You get to look at swatches and imagine what the flat looks like in yellow or maroon or light green or the kind of blue that looks like a nice day even when it’s raining. But the thing is, you can do that forever. You can pitch, snoop; there’s an app wherein you can apply paint to a picture of your living room. And so Burke sent me 540 pictures of me sitting in my armchair reading an e-reader and sipping a coffee with the orange, yellow, blue, and gray walls. It was like the Civil War.  

Finally, we found a company online and, after a few texts, there was a man standing in my living room suffering through my bad Czech and zapping my walls with an electric tape measure.

“Probably October,” he said.

“That’s fine.” And I meant it. For there’s nothing better than doing something and getting things into motion. But if there is, it’s doing something, getting things into motion and then not having to do anything about it for a while. I went back to my John Langan horror stories, lived my life, and breathed a sigh of relief.  

A day later a text came: How about Tuesday?

This Tuesday? As in six days from now, Tuesday?

Yeah, that one. Tuesday.

OK! Sure!

I went into panic mode. Now, I had to do things.

In the last year, the first number in my age became a 5. Now, I have not had the reaction one might think I’d have. I didn’t run out and get my lips bee-stung and while I can comb my hair with a towel, I have yet to put in an order for Propecia. It’s just getting older and it’s not too bad as long as you don’t mind permanently sore hips and the fact that you may end up in the ER if you sneeze while doing math in your head. Otherwise, I’m good.

We have so much more information these days than when my dad became first-number-5. When he did that back in the late 1990s, his doctor probably introduced his forefinger to old Mr. Rectum and told him to keep up his calcium levels. If such tests were done in the early 1970s, I’m sure the doctor even put out his cigarette to give a similar test to my grandfather. Nowadays, medical advancements help us avoid some terrible outcomes that were otherwise a fact of life for older people. And there seems to be a much more informed online peanut gallery in terms of how to age well. We now have several thousand people telling us how to be a 22-year-old 60-year-old and a 30-year-old retiree.

As far as I can tell, I should eat loads of spinach, one steak a week, chicken like it’s going out of style, and fill my mornings with flax, grapefruit, vitamins B, C, D, magnesium, and zinc. In between shovelling those things into my mouth, I need to run, lift, do palates, and as many push-ups as I can without dying on the floor. I can have one soda a year, one beer a decade, and if I so much as look at tobacco my face is going to explode.

No problemo.