It’s obvious that my brog has kind of devolved into this cesspool of parenting, wrestling and occasional sports posts, and that I don’t really write so much about the variety of topics that I tried to spread out throughout my ability to write.  Parenting has really shrunken my general world into a very small space that I obviously need to focus on more than anything else these days, but every now and then a slice of the world outside my own manages to sneak in through social media, grasp my attention, and trigger an avalanche of thoughts, and ultimately words that I can put down onto a word doc and call it a brog post.

Normally, when I hear that an alleged victim is of a conservative variety, I expect to get ready to roll my eyes and imagine at what nonsense a white person is going to be bitching about next.  But in this particular story that someone found its way to me, about a girl who is enraged with American Airlines, because she was on a flight where she was the unfortunate middle seat in between two, morbidly obese siblings, for a three hour flight, I kind of get it.

I think it’s a safe bet to say that I’ve flown more than the average traveler.  And in my travels, I have sat in more than my fair share of middle seats, especially considering all the standby traveling I did where middle seats were really my only option versus not making it out at all.  And let me tell you, in the age of seats getting smaller and smaller so that more seats can be crammed onto aircrafts, I have definitely been this girl more times than I can count, where I’ve been victimized by people whose girth far exceeds the confines of a standard airline seat.

Of course, I am no small individual by any means.  I’m probably like 20-30 lbs. away from an ideal mass ratio, but for the most part, I fit adequately into the boundaries of an airline seat.  Sometimes my shoulders exceed the boundaries, not necessarily because I’m swole or anything, but because everyone’s shoulders usually exceed the boundaries of a seat, and most of the time it’s a domino effect of everyone in a row gradually leaning to one side in order to try and get some physical reprieve.

Except in the case of this poor girl, there was no reprieve, because she was literally sandwiched in between two mammoth masses of humanity.  The fact that they were spread out with a gap seat in the middle indicates that they knew they were both blobs and needed the space of a seat in between them, but the fact that they didn’t just outright purchase that seat meant that there was always the chance of some poor unfortunate soul getting booked in it, which is exactly what happened in this case.

And normally I tend to not feel much empathy for those who proudly identify as conservatives, but as a fellow human being who has traveled on his share of airplanes, I completely feel for this girl.  It is absolutely the worst feeling in the world being stuck next to a blob of a person who is oozing into your personal space, and you’re stuck touching these usually less than hygienic My 600 Lb. Life patients for more than two hours otherwise you might’ve driven in the first place.

I have loathed every time this has happened to me, and in my case it’s usually been from one side, but it has happened where I’ve been the schmuck stuck between the Natural Disasters and it is the absolute worst.

The ironically funniest thing about this story is that after the initial, fairly nonchalant response from American Airlines to this girl, is the secondary follow-up response where AA basically sided with her, low-key admit our bad, and gave her a voucher for the horrendous atrocity of having to endure a flight being a literal Jill sandwich.  It’s like after the initial shot was fired, some case worker actually analyzed the scenario and realized how miserable she was and had the empathy to reach back out and offer a peace offering.

It reminded me of my own experience, where the above photo was a picture that I took on an AirTran flight coming back from Las Vegas.  We were surrounded by a family or three where everyone was massive, and fortunately they weren’t in my row, but they definitely were all around me, and because of their girth, they were obviously uncomfortable in their seats, resulting in them constantly getting up and meandering all around me, to where at one point, they just gathered in the back, right next to me, just so that they wouldn’t have to be seated in tight quarters on account of their blobbiness.

I contacted AirTran about the incident, and they actually sided with me with no resistance, and gave me a credit.  It’s like they too know how much of a pain in the ass huge motherfuckers are to the airline travel experience as much as everyone else does, but because so many Americans are so fucking fat, it’s just something that happens on the regular, and they just hope people don’t reach out to complain about it.

Anyway, this chick obviously got blasted by the internet for being so callous as to fat shame, but the funny thing is that there was also a notable amount of sympathy for her situation, because at the root of it, just about everyone who’s ever had to deal with it themselves knows just how much it sucks flying next to a bunch of fat fucks who ooze all over the place.