Here's the short story I wrote on the plane to and from Mexico City. I don't know if I'll leave it as it is, or do something else with it, but hey, dig it either way.

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Q. What percentage of airline passengers talk to one another in flight? Of this percentage, what further percentage can be said to enjoy their conversation? And, as a final subset of passenger statistics, how many (expressed as a percentage) passengers go on to form lasting social relationships (amorous or otherwise) once the passengers have exited the plane and disappeared into the alternately airy and gloomy depths of the world’s airports?

A: Dear sirt, thank you for your inquiry. Unfortunately, the FAA does not compile statistics pertaining to passenger behavior, save for incidents of violence or other irregular activity. We are sorry that we cannot assist you further in this matter.

I cc’d this letter to the TSA, the flight attendants’ union, some sociologists, and anyone else I thought might be able to answer my questions. If I could’ve afforded it, I would have flown around on airplanes and done the research myself, but as it stood, stamps were a lot cheaper than plane tickets, as my uncle put it. He was the one who bought the stamps, since he was the one who knew anything at all about money. I sure didn’t but I blamed that on being sixteen and having been home-schooled until tenth grade by my now-dead parents, who, hated people so much that they withdrew from society to the greatest extent possible. Fine by me, except that they were quietly ashamed of being misanthropes and therefore cloaked all their loathing of homo sapiens (and his predecessors) in religious terms. I need not describe the damage that that kind of upbringing has done to my social development; if you’re rading this and can’t figure it out, then you are, as my parents both used to say, “one horrendously bad excuse for a living creature,” although they applied that particular epithet mainly to the people on the farm south of ours, and never to those people’s faces.
After my parents died (read; killed themselves with almost identical revolvers only minutes apart and at different ends of our 14.71-acre farm-cum-retreat), I went to live with my mother’s brother, who despite having a thing for chaw and nearby cups and glasses, wasn’t so bad. He taught me the basics of dealing with people, and even though I still haven’t grasped those basics very well, I’m enthralled by the possibilities that arise from talking to someone and not immediately assuming they’re a waste of God’s carbon. My uncle says, in between squirts of chaw into empty Pearl cans or iced tea glasses or (even once) my cousin’s friend’s unfinished bowl of cereal, that folks are generally all right, and that it’s a shame that Melinda, that hateful bitch, had to have a kid and ruin it for him, i.e. me. My uncle wasn’t cursing my existence, of course, but rather that I had been born to a crazy, hateful bitch like my uncle’s sister.
It was because of my uncle’s general but not particularly warm regard for other people that I became interested in human interaction on airplanes, and because of his unwillingness to spend money on airline tickets that I couldn’t do any firsthand research. Six months passed, and I gave up on the confined-space experiment in favor of watching baseball, or more accurately watched the people that attended baseball games. While all those fans were technically in a confined space, the atmosphere of a ballpark was less claustrophobic, and easier to study, than an airplane’s. Unfortunately, I still couldn’t gather any firsthand data; my uncle said that going to a ball game cost as much as a month’s worth of cable TV, and that watching the Astros play was a waste of time anyway because they’d blow it sooner or later.
I asked my aunt why my uncle was so reluctant to spend money, and she snorted and said “Don’t listen to him about the Astros— this is their year.” She then offered to give me a ride to the ballpark and buy me a ticket one day while my uncle was at work. I felt a little bad that I wasn’t planning on watching the game, since my aunt was clearly excited by the prospect of watching the Astros, but at least I was going to get to study people up close. It was as if I would have nine innings in which to make up for the misanthropic home education that my aunt calls a shame, a crying goddamned shame.

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I didn’t make it to the ballpark. The truck broke down between Porter and Kingwood. The trip to the mechanic’s that followed wasn’t anywhere as useful as the trip to the ballpark would have been, although I did learn from a man about my uncle’s age that mechanics are like cops and mothers-in-law and can’t be trusted. This man reminded me of my father, except that my father had fixed his own car and was dead.

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Q. How many fights occur at Minute Maid Park per annum? How often do similarly socially unacceptable or unusual events take place (e.g. coitus [public or semi-public], threatening behavior, nudity [partial or complete], throwing of objects on the field, etc.)?

A. [No response received]

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Q. Since 2002, how many letters of inquiry into human behavior in specific close-quarter group environments have you written? Of these letters, how many were answered, and of this number, how many responses would you rate as “satisfactory” in terms of data provided?