Getting there without going insane

There was a moment after I hit the "purchase" button, buying my ticket to Vietnam, that I was overcome with a great sense of serenity.  I had been wrestling with the decision for a couple of weeks: should I go to a completely foreign and unknown place alone?  Or should I go to an already known place where I will feel safe and comfortable?  Once I made the decision to venture into unknown territory and bought the ticket, it felt right.  I felt good about it. I still do.

However, there is the issue of the plane flight.  I, like everyone, hate to fly, especially long distances. Going to Paris non-stop was about 12 hours and that was long enough.  The flight to Vietnam, via Taiwan, is a total of 16 hours!  The first leg, from SFO to Taiwan, is 14 hours!  ACK!  That is making me very anxious, being aloft for so long.  I always thing being 30,000 feet above dirt is an unnatural act and staying there for 14 hours makes it a very scary unnatural act. 

The good thing is that the plane departs at five minutes after midnight so the first 8 hours will be sort of like night-time and one can pretend that one will sleep for some of those hours.  But even if 8 hours are taken up in sleep (which is highly unlikely), that leaves another 6 hours of pure, unadulterated freaky boredom.  And since it is on China Airlines, I can only assume that I will be surrounded by people speaking Chinese and other Asian languages, which (not to seem racist) isn't the most melodic or pleasant of languages to my ear.  French or Italian, fine.  Asian sounds, not so much.

Drugs will have to be involved.  Any suggestions out there?  I have some Valium, and I can always drink a lot, perhaps not with the Valium but maybe so. (Me and my boys Jack, Jim, Johnny and Mark are great friends.) I also have some roasted spiced almonds with some high grade shake, which usually make me totally body-stoned and I sleep like a dead person, but I am not sure that's the way to go on an airplane.  I have a month to figure out the best way to alleviate the feelings of panic that I get when trapped in a small space with lots of other people.  At this point in my life, I can't even sit in the back seat of a two-door car because it causes me to hyperventilate and freak out.  I can't go into wine caves, either, because of the feeling of being trapped underground.  So being in a long, narrow metal tube for 14 hours with people speaking grating languages and no where to go makes my heart beat really fast right now.

Deep breaths. Visualization.  Drugs. Booze.  Something has got to work......  I will experiment and see what it might be.  And I am serious, any advice out there would be greatly appreciated.


.