Before I receive any actual comments to my previous blogger post (ha! wishful thinking!), I wanted to be defensive and toss in my pre-emptive (more wishful thinking) 2-cents worth re: said writing excerpt.
I just want to say, I was so excited to have crammed all those ideas into one piece of writing, I was anxious to get it front of an audience and see their reaction, if any.
Now that I've had a chance to re-read it some, with the fire of just having written now all died away, it's obvious I still need to do a lot of work with it.
At the very least, it's unfinished, and not even where I arbitrarily and abruptly ended it.
The biggest issues I think are these:
1. Agnes' weird dying fantasies are perhaps too strange for her to just have, and I think I can set that up better, at least (setting it up even a little is more than what I've done so far), so that there may be at least some logic, some contrived justification for her morbid tangents of thought. Or, that is to say, the elements of her fantasies may make more sense. As to why she has this hard-on for "beautiful tragedy," I'll be honest, I have no real justification for her fascination or obsession with that. I think that's a blatant case of "it sounds kind of funny to me."
On the other hand, instinctively speaking, there's something interesting in that, and perhaps it may articulate itself to me later.
2. Agnes' mission of crime also needs to be set up more, I think.
Ultimately, I'd like the FEMME FERINES to be a novel. but I'm also thinking of exploring the possibility of sending out some sections as short stories to possible publishers to see what kind of response I'd get.
This particular episode of Agnes having to steal a comic book to "join" these other girls (I bet you didn't even know that's what was going on, did ya? See, I need to spell it out more and I think earlier, too) would make an interesting self-contained short story.
In fact, I'm going to try to develop this bit of writing in that direction first, as a short story.
In novel form, I think, I'll break up some of the introductions to the girls into one or more chapters.
3. My punctuation totally blows. I need to consult with my "editorial staff" on that front, but I was too impatient to do so before posting.
I guess that's really it. Those are my biggest concerns. Once I deal with those, I'm sure I'll discover other problems.
Anyways, thanks for listening to my desperate attempt at covering my ass...
30/168
Project 365 : first / previous / next
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Sunday, July 08, 2007
The day I went skydiving... (25/177)
Yo.
This post originally was tagged onto a previous post, the first part of my "8 Things Meme."
But, since this account was so long, I decided to cut it off the original post and just run it separate.
That's all.
Hey, I get another post out of this! Cool!*
A dear friend of mine, Amelie (not her real name), who I was actually quite fond of at the time (well, I’m still fond of her but THEN my fondness was more actively on display) (no, not like that! Shut up!), one day asked me if I would do her a favor. Of course, I said sure, absolutely. She had always wanted to skydive. Would I want to go skydiving as well, to help her fulfill this wish?
Sure! Absolutely!
Well, that’s what my mouth said, but my brain was actually more like, “wait, what…?”
Jeez, I forget what year this was, but it was the early 80s, 1983 at the latest.
She took care of all the arrangements for the skydiving. It was going to be in the summer. Meanwhile, contemplating my options, like, what could possibly happen to me when I jumped out of a plane, I began therapy a couple months prior to that impending fateful day, in an attempt to deal with some personal issues, in case, you know, I didn’t have an opportunity to do so after the jump.
Whatever happened to her unfulfilled urges to go bowling?
It was a one-day training course in Wyoming County, NY, about 6 hours long. The jump would be a static-line jump, meaning, I wouldn’t have to pull the rip-cord myself in order to open the chute. You know how in those World War II movies, where a bunch of paratroopers are standing in line on a plane, waiting to jump out of an open door, and each one has a line attached to a wire running over the door? Every time a paratrooper jumps out the door, the line that’s attached to them is still attached to the plane, and it automatically pulls their chute open. They’re doing a static-line jump. But in my case, my line was attached to a metal ring set in the floor inside the small plane.
[NOTE: Now, we could've taken the option to pull our own rip cord as we jumped from the plane for our first jump, but the training is more involved and I think that would've been a two-day course. Also, in that situation, when you jump from the plane, you bail out at a higher atltitude, 10,000 feet (vs. 3,000, which is what we did), plus two instructors free-fall alongside you. As you plummet to the ground, the instructors watch as you pantomime pulling the cord. When they figure you’re ready, they peel away from you, and you yank away. At least, that’s how I remember it being told to me way back then. But Amelie just wanted to do the one-day deal, which was fine.]
Our training course covered what to look for after you exited the plane: how to check if your chute opened properly; if it hadn’t, what to do (no, not scream and die… jerks! No, you had to jettison this opened chute and deploy your back-up chute); what to do if you land in a tree, body of water, electrical lines, oncoming traffic, angry horned livestock; how to land properly in an open field; how to gather up your chute when on the ground.
And, of course, you pay up in advance.
I remember during that day’s training, the instructor made a point of saying how carefully the back-up chutes were packed. If someone crashed into the ground because of apparent parachute malfunction, someone from, uh, some monitoring agency? The skydiving place? People with credentials from both? (Somebody.) will come running up to the flattened corpse and immediately pull the back-up chute’s rip-cord to see if that was still operable. The instructor said there was a recent incident where something like that happened. A body mooshed into the dirt, and the back-up chute hadn’t gone off according to spectators. But these guys ran up to the sky-kill and pulled the cord, and the back-up chute immediately deployed, like an Acme product worn by Wile E. Coyote. So, in the recent death cited by the instructor, it was human error for the back-up chute not being used, not mechanical error. Or choice (You know: “Adios, cruel world, etc.”). Whichever. Why this should be a comforting story to us skydiving virgins before we hurl ourselves out into space New School Lemming Technique, I’m not sure. “So, don’t worry, you nervous ground-hugging maggots! This back-up chute is guaranteed to save your life should circumstances warrant its use. The only thing that could muck up this back up system is YOU. Your life is in YOUR hands now. Screw up and DIE. You get me? Hope you were paying attention to everything we said today. Okay, into the plane! Last one in gets to be ridiculed mercilessly all the way up, plus owes everyone a skippy cup. What are you waiting for? MOVE IT MOVE IT MOVE IT!!”
Obviously, I’m being a silly ass.
The instructors were very pleasant and patient. Not a stereotypical drill sergeant in the bunch. If anything, they were laidback.
Like dope fiends.
Dammit!
It was a long hot day and by the time I got up in the air, I was pooped. But Amelie wound up going up before me with a couple other students (the plane was pretty itty bitty), so I got to see if she was going to survive this reckless endeav--, uh… if she was going to land close to the target they had set up on the ground. The target was an area drawn out in white lines on the ground, and if Mistress Fate decided to let you kiss the earth in celebration rather than very, very, VERY quickly, AND if She also decided to let you look really cool and like you knew what you were doing while you were landing, you’d land in that marked off area (like 10’x10’ or 15’x15’- not all that huge). On the ground they also had constructed a large movable wooden arrow, about 15 feet long, maybe bigger, maybe way bigger. It looked like one of those arrows you spin in a board game, except there were no areas marked with colors like in TWISTER. When you jumped from the plane, somebody was on the ground minding this arrow. Now, the significance of this arrow was this: your chute was designed with an opening in the back, like a sliver about 4 feet long. It ran the length of the outer edge of the chute and then was shaped like a wedge, about 6” wide, I think, at its biggest opening in the middle. This opening was directly behind you, supposedly giving you 3 miles per hour of forward thrust as you descended. You had two handles hanging down from the chute, each on a cord, one on either side of you, which you pulled to go in a particular direction. If there was a lot of wind that day, you might overshoot the target. So, while you were floating down, someone on the ground was aware of the wind’s speed and direction, and their job was informing the skydiver via the arrow’s direction as to what direction the skydiver should be facing in order to (theoretically) land close to this target.
Well, Amelie had an amazing landing.
Right in the square!
Crap! The pressure was on to not only survive my fall, but to also land competently.
Double crap!
Somewhere, there’s actually super-8 footage of her landing. It was fun, and disturbing, to watch this bit of film because when her feet hit the ground, her body pseudo-crumples on impact. She immediately falls/rolls to the side as instructed. When she quickly gets up, she’s all happy and laughing, obviously, because she’s not a huge-ass stain on the grass or 10 miles from the target either. But this crumpling thing… man! When we first watched the film together, we laughed and winced watching it.
“Oh, Jesus! Look at that!”
Then we kept replaying it, like Kevin Costner replaying the Zapruder film for the jury.
“Doesn’t it look like her head’s gonna snap off? Rewind that!”
It was fun to do this because we weren’t doing this at a memorial, of course.
So, then it was my turn, and the metaphorical fledgling-skydiving gauntlet had been flung merrily in my face: land as close as THAT, you muther!
Up I go.
In the plane, the instructor attaches the buckle of my line into the metal ring in the floor. There’s a gizmo he has behind the pilot’s seat, some sort of deal he looks into to figure when to tell me to go. Probably similar to how they site bombing targets from planes during wartime, some kind of scope with maybe a cross-hair and some measuring gauge, so that they could calculate when to release the bombs. Although, in this case, instead of explosives, they just yell at you as you wait in the doorway, “Go, ya bag of meat! Go!”
Meanwhile, I remember being really exhausted when I got in the plane. The door leading into the open air opened up (or was it already open? I can’t remember accurately anymore) and the instructor told me to get into position. I shimmy over to the opening, and then carefully sit on the edge of the doorway, my legs dangling out. I feel like a bunch of lead. I look outside and man, am I high in the sky. I see a couple of the Great Lakes on the curved horizon and I’m thinking, “Man, I’m actually going through with this, huh?”
The instructor yells: “Ready?”
“Yeah!” I yell back. “I guess,” I think to myself.
I look out. I get more in position, my foot on a metal step that sticks out, which gives me something to push off of from the plane. So this is 3,000 feet up, huh? Huh.
My instructor yells: “Okay, GO!”
“Okay!” Man, I’m just a big, pooped lump sitting in an open doorway of a small plane. Long day, man…
Instructor: “GO! NOW!”
Right. Hell, I paid the money, I might as well…
Not quite in slow motion, but sort of surreally, I remember both exiting deliberately, and feeling like I just kind of, fell out. Then, my training kicked in, but it felt like I remembered to do everything after a 3-second delay. For instance, when I jumped from the plane, I was supposed to arch my body back as I pushed forward away from the plane, my arms out. That was the form I practiced on the ground while hanging from a swing set sans its swings. But as I dropped through the air, THEN I remembered to do it. I was also supposed to count, to make sure I allowed enough time for my chute to deploy before I assessed how successful the deployment went. But I think I was already staring up at the open chute for several seconds before I thought, “hey, aren’t you supposed to count?” “Oh, right! One-one thousand, two-one thousand, etc…” So, I think being tired was my main excuse for the dragged out way I did everything. Luckily, everything went fine.
My chute opened, it didn’t trail me like a dead jelly fish, or form a “bra” (where one of the lines unfortunately gets caught dragging over the entire chute, thereby forming a brassiere-like chute with two cups rather than one large cup). So, I could relax and enjoy my singular view.
I floated down through the sky, and in the distance I saw the curved horizon and lakes Erie and Ontario. The sun reflected brightly over the water’s surfaces. Ridiculously, I started singing. I don’t recall what, but it seemed I should do something to celebrate the moment and that was all I could think of.
I then remembered to look down and check out the direction that the arrow was pointing in. Way, way down there was a comically dinky arrow. I really had to look to find it. But I did, and then made a slight adjustment in which way I was facing, pulling down on one of the steering lines dangling by my head. Then I hung around and looked some more at the sight.
My ears had popped. Singing was strange because of that, because I could only hear myself in my head, like I was next door to my voice. Plus, my choice of song was not that inspired. I forget what it was, but it wasn’t anything clever or earthshaking. It could have been a Sousa march I was singing. The usual silliness from me.
At regular intervals I’d look down at the arrow and make adjustments if necessary. I remember at one point thinking it seemed that even though the arrow appeared to be getting gradually larger, like everything else on the ground, it also seemed like the distance was staying the same or further. Instead of looking down at the arrow directly, it seemed that I continued to look down and off to one side all the time.
Eventually, I was close enough to the ground that I started to realize something. I remember starting to make out small figures moving on the ground. People. Running people. Then I looked closer at the arrow. No one was actually at the arrow. Ah. Crap. No one seemed to be “steering” me. I then decided to just aim my ass (okay, my front, actually) straight at that damn, definitely growing arrow and hope for the best.
I adjusted myself a 30 degree turn to my left and tried to be as heavy as possible. Meanwhile, I’m also noticing all these trees surrounding the landing strip, looking closer than I realized. Nuts. I really didn’t want to land in a tree. For the simple reason that if I was going to land in a tree, I had to adopt “Defensive Posture ‘S’ for ‘Freaking Squirrel Motherfreak” to protect all my physical parts that were, you know, the worst areas to be pierced by a branch, such as my armpits, my crotch, etc. But, I really didn’t have the energy to go through that defensive effort and consideration. So, I focused on being as dense as possible, like planet Jupiter dense. Soon enough, I knew that when I eventually plowed into the earth I wasn’t going to be anywhere NEAR the target square on the ground. As things on the ground loomed larger in quicker and quicker fashion, I wondered if I’d land ANYWHERE near the property of the site at all. The boundary of the nearby woods crept closer but they weren’t going to be an issue after all. Hooray! No armpit and crotch grabbing for me!
It looked like I was gonna hit field, specifically field just beyond the landing strip, behind a small hill.
In MY super8 landing footage, you see me exit the plane and the chute pop open. As I get closer to the ground, for some reason I never get bigger. My body and parachute disappear ever so lamely in the distance behind a hill. My parents remember watching the plane, seeing me jump out, watching my descent, and then Amelie running over to them, agitated, breathless, upset, and apologizing to them PROFUSELY about no one minding the arrow and directing my descent and apologizing about dragging me into this exciting venture, and then my parents turned back and watched me get, well, smaller as I got closer to the ground, disappearing behind a hill.
Or, as my mom told me, “Amelie was so upset! She kept apologizing to us. ‘I am so sorry! I am so sorry!’ But this seemed typical of you, so we weren’t too worried.”
At a hundred or so feet above the ground, and that ground coming up VERY quickly now, I remembered to look up at the horizon and not down at the ground, as per my training. The ground comes up so fast, you’ll always misjudge your landing if you stare down at the dirt in order to time your roll/fall. Instead, you are to look at the horizon and prepare yourself to act as soon as your legs make contact. Which I did. I rolled/fell immediately upon impact, and I was okay.
Although, man, when you finally touch earth, you hit it hard.
My best friend Steve came running over from around the hill, super8 camera in hand. I quickly restaged my landing for humorous effect. Getting up slowly from the high grass, I feigned a comical look on my face depicting the effects of a jostled brain after landing. Amelie came running over soon thereafter. Her expression was a curious combination of elation and apology as she saw me standing there safe, unscathed and un-tree impaled. She breathlessly told me all about how they had forgotten to man the arrow and how she gave them a proper tongue-lashing.
I remember that for at least a week after doing this, I felt invincible, like I could do it over and over again. But now?
Uh-uh.
Screw THAT noise.
*I am SO cheating.
25/177
Project 365 : first / previous / next
This post originally was tagged onto a previous post, the first part of my "8 Things Meme."
But, since this account was so long, I decided to cut it off the original post and just run it separate.
That's all.
Hey, I get another post out of this! Cool!*
A dear friend of mine, Amelie (not her real name), who I was actually quite fond of at the time (well, I’m still fond of her but THEN my fondness was more actively on display) (no, not like that! Shut up!), one day asked me if I would do her a favor. Of course, I said sure, absolutely. She had always wanted to skydive. Would I want to go skydiving as well, to help her fulfill this wish?
Sure! Absolutely!
Well, that’s what my mouth said, but my brain was actually more like, “wait, what…?”
Jeez, I forget what year this was, but it was the early 80s, 1983 at the latest.
She took care of all the arrangements for the skydiving. It was going to be in the summer. Meanwhile, contemplating my options, like, what could possibly happen to me when I jumped out of a plane, I began therapy a couple months prior to that impending fateful day, in an attempt to deal with some personal issues, in case, you know, I didn’t have an opportunity to do so after the jump.
Whatever happened to her unfulfilled urges to go bowling?
It was a one-day training course in Wyoming County, NY, about 6 hours long. The jump would be a static-line jump, meaning, I wouldn’t have to pull the rip-cord myself in order to open the chute. You know how in those World War II movies, where a bunch of paratroopers are standing in line on a plane, waiting to jump out of an open door, and each one has a line attached to a wire running over the door? Every time a paratrooper jumps out the door, the line that’s attached to them is still attached to the plane, and it automatically pulls their chute open. They’re doing a static-line jump. But in my case, my line was attached to a metal ring set in the floor inside the small plane.
[NOTE: Now, we could've taken the option to pull our own rip cord as we jumped from the plane for our first jump, but the training is more involved and I think that would've been a two-day course. Also, in that situation, when you jump from the plane, you bail out at a higher atltitude, 10,000 feet (vs. 3,000, which is what we did), plus two instructors free-fall alongside you. As you plummet to the ground, the instructors watch as you pantomime pulling the cord. When they figure you’re ready, they peel away from you, and you yank away. At least, that’s how I remember it being told to me way back then. But Amelie just wanted to do the one-day deal, which was fine.]
Our training course covered what to look for after you exited the plane: how to check if your chute opened properly; if it hadn’t, what to do (no, not scream and die… jerks! No, you had to jettison this opened chute and deploy your back-up chute); what to do if you land in a tree, body of water, electrical lines, oncoming traffic, angry horned livestock; how to land properly in an open field; how to gather up your chute when on the ground.
And, of course, you pay up in advance.
I remember during that day’s training, the instructor made a point of saying how carefully the back-up chutes were packed. If someone crashed into the ground because of apparent parachute malfunction, someone from, uh, some monitoring agency? The skydiving place? People with credentials from both? (Somebody.) will come running up to the flattened corpse and immediately pull the back-up chute’s rip-cord to see if that was still operable. The instructor said there was a recent incident where something like that happened. A body mooshed into the dirt, and the back-up chute hadn’t gone off according to spectators. But these guys ran up to the sky-kill and pulled the cord, and the back-up chute immediately deployed, like an Acme product worn by Wile E. Coyote. So, in the recent death cited by the instructor, it was human error for the back-up chute not being used, not mechanical error. Or choice (You know: “Adios, cruel world, etc.”). Whichever. Why this should be a comforting story to us skydiving virgins before we hurl ourselves out into space New School Lemming Technique, I’m not sure. “So, don’t worry, you nervous ground-hugging maggots! This back-up chute is guaranteed to save your life should circumstances warrant its use. The only thing that could muck up this back up system is YOU. Your life is in YOUR hands now. Screw up and DIE. You get me? Hope you were paying attention to everything we said today. Okay, into the plane! Last one in gets to be ridiculed mercilessly all the way up, plus owes everyone a skippy cup. What are you waiting for? MOVE IT MOVE IT MOVE IT!!”
Obviously, I’m being a silly ass.
The instructors were very pleasant and patient. Not a stereotypical drill sergeant in the bunch. If anything, they were laidback.
Like dope fiends.
Dammit!
It was a long hot day and by the time I got up in the air, I was pooped. But Amelie wound up going up before me with a couple other students (the plane was pretty itty bitty), so I got to see if she was going to survive this reckless endeav--, uh… if she was going to land close to the target they had set up on the ground. The target was an area drawn out in white lines on the ground, and if Mistress Fate decided to let you kiss the earth in celebration rather than very, very, VERY quickly, AND if She also decided to let you look really cool and like you knew what you were doing while you were landing, you’d land in that marked off area (like 10’x10’ or 15’x15’- not all that huge). On the ground they also had constructed a large movable wooden arrow, about 15 feet long, maybe bigger, maybe way bigger. It looked like one of those arrows you spin in a board game, except there were no areas marked with colors like in TWISTER. When you jumped from the plane, somebody was on the ground minding this arrow. Now, the significance of this arrow was this: your chute was designed with an opening in the back, like a sliver about 4 feet long. It ran the length of the outer edge of the chute and then was shaped like a wedge, about 6” wide, I think, at its biggest opening in the middle. This opening was directly behind you, supposedly giving you 3 miles per hour of forward thrust as you descended. You had two handles hanging down from the chute, each on a cord, one on either side of you, which you pulled to go in a particular direction. If there was a lot of wind that day, you might overshoot the target. So, while you were floating down, someone on the ground was aware of the wind’s speed and direction, and their job was informing the skydiver via the arrow’s direction as to what direction the skydiver should be facing in order to (theoretically) land close to this target.
Well, Amelie had an amazing landing.
Right in the square!
Crap! The pressure was on to not only survive my fall, but to also land competently.
Double crap!
Somewhere, there’s actually super-8 footage of her landing. It was fun, and disturbing, to watch this bit of film because when her feet hit the ground, her body pseudo-crumples on impact. She immediately falls/rolls to the side as instructed. When she quickly gets up, she’s all happy and laughing, obviously, because she’s not a huge-ass stain on the grass or 10 miles from the target either. But this crumpling thing… man! When we first watched the film together, we laughed and winced watching it.
“Oh, Jesus! Look at that!”
Then we kept replaying it, like Kevin Costner replaying the Zapruder film for the jury.
“Doesn’t it look like her head’s gonna snap off? Rewind that!”
It was fun to do this because we weren’t doing this at a memorial, of course.
So, then it was my turn, and the metaphorical fledgling-skydiving gauntlet had been flung merrily in my face: land as close as THAT, you muther!
Up I go.
In the plane, the instructor attaches the buckle of my line into the metal ring in the floor. There’s a gizmo he has behind the pilot’s seat, some sort of deal he looks into to figure when to tell me to go. Probably similar to how they site bombing targets from planes during wartime, some kind of scope with maybe a cross-hair and some measuring gauge, so that they could calculate when to release the bombs. Although, in this case, instead of explosives, they just yell at you as you wait in the doorway, “Go, ya bag of meat! Go!”
Meanwhile, I remember being really exhausted when I got in the plane. The door leading into the open air opened up (or was it already open? I can’t remember accurately anymore) and the instructor told me to get into position. I shimmy over to the opening, and then carefully sit on the edge of the doorway, my legs dangling out. I feel like a bunch of lead. I look outside and man, am I high in the sky. I see a couple of the Great Lakes on the curved horizon and I’m thinking, “Man, I’m actually going through with this, huh?”
The instructor yells: “Ready?”
“Yeah!” I yell back. “I guess,” I think to myself.
I look out. I get more in position, my foot on a metal step that sticks out, which gives me something to push off of from the plane. So this is 3,000 feet up, huh? Huh.
My instructor yells: “Okay, GO!”
“Okay!” Man, I’m just a big, pooped lump sitting in an open doorway of a small plane. Long day, man…
Instructor: “GO! NOW!”
Right. Hell, I paid the money, I might as well…
Not quite in slow motion, but sort of surreally, I remember both exiting deliberately, and feeling like I just kind of, fell out. Then, my training kicked in, but it felt like I remembered to do everything after a 3-second delay. For instance, when I jumped from the plane, I was supposed to arch my body back as I pushed forward away from the plane, my arms out. That was the form I practiced on the ground while hanging from a swing set sans its swings. But as I dropped through the air, THEN I remembered to do it. I was also supposed to count, to make sure I allowed enough time for my chute to deploy before I assessed how successful the deployment went. But I think I was already staring up at the open chute for several seconds before I thought, “hey, aren’t you supposed to count?” “Oh, right! One-one thousand, two-one thousand, etc…” So, I think being tired was my main excuse for the dragged out way I did everything. Luckily, everything went fine.
My chute opened, it didn’t trail me like a dead jelly fish, or form a “bra” (where one of the lines unfortunately gets caught dragging over the entire chute, thereby forming a brassiere-like chute with two cups rather than one large cup). So, I could relax and enjoy my singular view.
I floated down through the sky, and in the distance I saw the curved horizon and lakes Erie and Ontario. The sun reflected brightly over the water’s surfaces. Ridiculously, I started singing. I don’t recall what, but it seemed I should do something to celebrate the moment and that was all I could think of.
I then remembered to look down and check out the direction that the arrow was pointing in. Way, way down there was a comically dinky arrow. I really had to look to find it. But I did, and then made a slight adjustment in which way I was facing, pulling down on one of the steering lines dangling by my head. Then I hung around and looked some more at the sight.
My ears had popped. Singing was strange because of that, because I could only hear myself in my head, like I was next door to my voice. Plus, my choice of song was not that inspired. I forget what it was, but it wasn’t anything clever or earthshaking. It could have been a Sousa march I was singing. The usual silliness from me.
At regular intervals I’d look down at the arrow and make adjustments if necessary. I remember at one point thinking it seemed that even though the arrow appeared to be getting gradually larger, like everything else on the ground, it also seemed like the distance was staying the same or further. Instead of looking down at the arrow directly, it seemed that I continued to look down and off to one side all the time.
Eventually, I was close enough to the ground that I started to realize something. I remember starting to make out small figures moving on the ground. People. Running people. Then I looked closer at the arrow. No one was actually at the arrow. Ah. Crap. No one seemed to be “steering” me. I then decided to just aim my ass (okay, my front, actually) straight at that damn, definitely growing arrow and hope for the best.
I adjusted myself a 30 degree turn to my left and tried to be as heavy as possible. Meanwhile, I’m also noticing all these trees surrounding the landing strip, looking closer than I realized. Nuts. I really didn’t want to land in a tree. For the simple reason that if I was going to land in a tree, I had to adopt “Defensive Posture ‘S’ for ‘Freaking Squirrel Motherfreak” to protect all my physical parts that were, you know, the worst areas to be pierced by a branch, such as my armpits, my crotch, etc. But, I really didn’t have the energy to go through that defensive effort and consideration. So, I focused on being as dense as possible, like planet Jupiter dense. Soon enough, I knew that when I eventually plowed into the earth I wasn’t going to be anywhere NEAR the target square on the ground. As things on the ground loomed larger in quicker and quicker fashion, I wondered if I’d land ANYWHERE near the property of the site at all. The boundary of the nearby woods crept closer but they weren’t going to be an issue after all. Hooray! No armpit and crotch grabbing for me!
It looked like I was gonna hit field, specifically field just beyond the landing strip, behind a small hill.
In MY super8 landing footage, you see me exit the plane and the chute pop open. As I get closer to the ground, for some reason I never get bigger. My body and parachute disappear ever so lamely in the distance behind a hill. My parents remember watching the plane, seeing me jump out, watching my descent, and then Amelie running over to them, agitated, breathless, upset, and apologizing to them PROFUSELY about no one minding the arrow and directing my descent and apologizing about dragging me into this exciting venture, and then my parents turned back and watched me get, well, smaller as I got closer to the ground, disappearing behind a hill.
Or, as my mom told me, “Amelie was so upset! She kept apologizing to us. ‘I am so sorry! I am so sorry!’ But this seemed typical of you, so we weren’t too worried.”
At a hundred or so feet above the ground, and that ground coming up VERY quickly now, I remembered to look up at the horizon and not down at the ground, as per my training. The ground comes up so fast, you’ll always misjudge your landing if you stare down at the dirt in order to time your roll/fall. Instead, you are to look at the horizon and prepare yourself to act as soon as your legs make contact. Which I did. I rolled/fell immediately upon impact, and I was okay.
Although, man, when you finally touch earth, you hit it hard.
My best friend Steve came running over from around the hill, super8 camera in hand. I quickly restaged my landing for humorous effect. Getting up slowly from the high grass, I feigned a comical look on my face depicting the effects of a jostled brain after landing. Amelie came running over soon thereafter. Her expression was a curious combination of elation and apology as she saw me standing there safe, unscathed and un-tree impaled. She breathlessly told me all about how they had forgotten to man the arrow and how she gave them a proper tongue-lashing.
I remember that for at least a week after doing this, I felt invincible, like I could do it over and over again. But now?
Uh-uh.
Screw THAT noise.
*I am SO cheating.
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