Air Sickness Bag Collecting

There are some topics that you can only discover through a random occurrence.

To wit, on a flight today, as everyone was getting on the plane, the guy next to me called the flight attendant and nervously said, “There doesn’t seem to be an air-sickness bag in here,” pointing to his seat pocket. He was quickly given a bag, which he thankfully did not need.

Later, Jacqueline said, “Maybe he was a collector,” in that postmodern tone that decodes to, “This would have been a joke in the relatively recent past, but in all likelihood there are actually air-sickness bag collectors.”

A Google search immediately surfaced several sites, including Yahoo’s official recognition of the subject at:

Directory > Recreation > Hobbies > Collecting > Air Sickness Bags

And where there is collecting, we can also expect buying, selling, and trading. Indeed, an eBay search for “air sickness bag” had 28 active auctions for air-sickness bags as of 8:30pm PST on 1/8/2007. Several listings tout their items as “new” or “mint.” I wonder what one would get for items with the condition undeclared.

So the cat—or maybe some other substance—is out of the bag: I, and now you, know about the secret world of air sickness bag collecting and commerce.