CHAPTER 10 / 2. THE REVERSE BIRTH CANAL ENTRY™

STEP 1: COGNITIVE FAILURE You approach the aircraft from the wrong side. Not because it's efficient. Not because it makes sense. Maybe you’re French. Maybe you’re concussed. Maybe your frontal lobe just filed for early retirement. But instead of stopping—assessing—rethinking your life choices—you commit. Torso first. Straight toward the window, because there’s no door on the left side of a Super Cub and you’ve apparently forgotten how airplanes work.

Kalli, the mechanic, is already watching.
Not in shock—he’s used to this.
He watches the way a man watches a gas leak under a lit match.
Deadpan. Already emotionally detached.
He doesn’t speak. He just recalculates the value of his own time.

You pause. Realize. Panic.
Then shuffle around the nose like a criminal returning to the scene of a botched robbery.
No one helps. No one claps.
You’re alone in this circus of shame.

And just when it couldn’t get worse—you do it again. You commit.
Like a salmon flinging itself into a meat grinder made of aluminium tubing, broken dreams, and the ghost of every checklist you ignored.

STEP 2: THE INVERTED INVASION

Now the real humiliation begins.

You twist.
You writhe.
You wedge.

You contort yourself through the side door like a breached oil pipeline under pressure—one leg dangles like a failed rescue attempt, the other is locked in a precision duel with the rudder cable, as the stick uppercuts your lineage so hard your ancestors flinch.

Your belt buckle finds the door latch like it’s magnetised to failure.
The stick slams into your crotch with the grace of a vengeful ex.
Your shoulder rotates into a position last seen on Discovery Channel’s “Predators of the Amazon.”

Your headset?
Now a garrotte.
Your dignity?
Evaporated.

Your inner ear detaches spiritually from the situation, leaving your body to navigate this ritual alone.

Congratulations.
You’re crowning.
In reverse.

And there’s no checklist for what comes next. Just pain and poorly-placed tubing.

Only witnesses. And permanent psychological side effects.

STEP 3: EXISTENTIAL REGRET

At this point, your knees are still outside. So is your reputation. Your torso, however, is jammed somewhere between the seat pan and a rusted screwdriver from 1963 that’s been quietly waiting under the flap handle to pierce your will to live.

Your headset cord has wrapped around your neck like a Renaissance painting of poor decision-making and divine punishment, while one boot kicks the elevator trim like it's trying to time-travel.

Your spine is at war with physics.
Your hips have declared independence.
You are technically inside the aircraft—but only in the same way a crime scene is inside the tape.

Your dignity?
Gone.
Evaporated like Avgas in midday sun.

Your scream?
Internal. Continuous.
The kind that ages you five years per second.

You have entered the cockpit.
But at what cost?

And the worst part?
You’re not even seated yet.

STEP 4: WITNESSED BY SATAN HIMSELF
Because there’s always someone watching.
Always.
This time it’s the mechanic. Kalli.
He’s on his lunch break, halfway through a sandwich.
He makes no move to help.
He just watches your reverse-exorcism unfold with the weary look of a man who’s seen this twenty times before and still hopes for a fatal outcome.
And then, with a voice dry enough to sand paint off a Cub, he mutters:

“Shouldn’t have watched YouTube, dumbass.”

Meanwhile, your wife—the one who used to believe in you—is now curled up inside Kalli’s tool cabinet, cradling a torque wrench and whispering prayers to forgotten gods, quietly re-evaluating every life choice that led her to this hangar,

this man, 

this moment.