Rawdogging it

By Bill Pearse on March 26, 2026 • ( 0 )

The antiseptic smell of the airplane cabin, people entering codes on their phones, mating machines through digital glyphs. The way the plane jostles a bit like you’re on a boat. All the little green lights on the seats to charge electronics. The smell of burned cheese and coffee. Attendants like smiling mannequins or automatons. The way the morning light spills through the portholes where some have left their shades ajar. How you can lose all sense of time flying over long durations.

Rawdogging it is what they call it to deny yourself stimulation when flying and just sit there instead. The guy next to me is a talker. Most—but not all—of the attendants wear blue rubber gloves. They use their phones to record sales. I can watch people watch movies or the woman on the other side of me use her computer to work. When they get to my seat they ask do I want a chocolate or cocktail and I say chocolate with a coffee and cream.

I like watching other people’s movies on flights without sound. Someone is watching the strange film Bugonia and I rewatch it from the start. The guy playing Jesse Plemmons’s sidekick is autistic IRL, wears a white man’s afro, beard, no mustache. Jesse Plemmons’s character doesn’t shampoo by the looks of it, the way his hair keeps stiff when he brushes it aside. Emma Stone, who plays the CEO accused of being an alien commander, has her head shaved and looks nuts. The woman next to me is blowing through her email, toggling between windows. When she types she moves her head in rhythm and looks like she’s playing the organ. I blow through my chocolate. They come back with the trolleys to collect the trash. Everyone rolls their packaging into tight balls and consolidates, stuffing their trash into cups. Most times you forget you’re flying it’s so smooth.

It’s shocking how small the bathrooms are on planes. With all the mirrors I can see my head from multiple angles like I’m at the hairdresser’s but after looking, I wish I hadn’t. More and more I look like my dad. In photos of the two of us we’re often in a similar pose, mirror images. Dad turns 78 next month. We’re same-digit ages every 11 years with me 55 and him 77. Next time I’ll be 66 and he, 88.

When I was in early recovery I couldn’t imagine flying sober. I made detailed plans to smuggle edibles on the plane or at a minimum ingest them at the airport before boarding. But I feared I’d have some weird reaction or the plane would get hijacked and that would be bad, like the time I got high before flying out of Schiphol. I had devious plans to smuggle my cannabis pills but then I saw it all as so shameful and sad. Ironically it was easier to quit than to ask for help.

My friend showed me a picture of a ring on his phone that was carved out of a meteorite in the likeness of the Hindu god Ganesh and given to Tom Robbins by the town of La Conner, then regifted to my friend after Robbins died last year. My friend’s eyes are different now, static and unmoving. We are alcoholic kin and call each other brothers. He was my hairdresser for 20 years, a death doula and mystic. There is a funny similarity to the plot turns in the strange film Bugonia and my friend’s stories as both sound far-fetched, heavy on the aliens, tightly braided plots. Ganesh is the deity with the elephant head, god of new beginnings, wisdom and luck.

When we land and deplane and I’m hurrying to the car rental I will have no memory of any of this, the uneaten plane treats stowed at the bottom of my bag, my phone fully charged, the cleaning crews at work before we’ve even vacated moving in a kind of insect rhythm.