I Tell Stories. It's What I Do

Missionaria Protectiva

2009-07-16T14:49:00.004-05:00

Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teachings of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. you can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you've always known.

-- Frank Herbert

Effluvium, in List Form

2009-07-11T14:42:00.004-05:00

A smattering of things I happen to have noticed recently:

My coffee shop has four distinct styles of patio chair, though only one style of table.

USA today is only published 5 out of every 7 days.

The Creative Loafing box across from my apartment has a theft chain but it's not chained to anything.

I currently have four pens in my pocket: one red, two purple, one green but none that are black or blue.

The sign in front of the neighboring parking lot says "Parking for Chelsea Building Only" but does not indicate which building that is. Nor is the building in question labeled as such.

Strollers have gotten steadily larger over the last 25 years. The one my mother used for me weighed about five pounds and could be folded up like an umbrella. Modern strollers are nearly the size of compact cars.

There are no red maple trees in Georgia. I don't actually think there are any maple trees at all but it's the absence of the red ones that I notice.

The apartment building next to mine is falling to ruins. The interior is condemned and the windows mostly shattered. Despite this the landscaping is continuously maintained.

Doogie Howser's journal entries are so vague that, were he to ever go back and read them, he'd have no idea what actually happened that day.

Some days it's best to just look around and save the meaning of things for another time.

Clocks

2009-07-08T13:48:00.003-05:00

Wicked in their banality, vicious task masters, they count off neat quantities of an imaginary substance by which we are to measure the velocity of our lives. They force us to engage the world in seconds and decades rather than moments and seasons. Through them we are divorced from the rhythms of the world that made us and married to the tempo of the world that we made for ourselves, all the while leaving so much of ourselves behind.

They Weren't Prophets

2009-06-28T17:19:00.003-05:00

When I was younger my stepfather was fond of ribbing me about my political positions. I presume he chocked my ideas and ideals up to my uninformed youth or an unhealthy gullibility about the nature of government. Whether it was gun control, the rights of the accused, the nature of foreign policy or climate control, he almost always fell back on a handful of similar arguments, arguments I have often heard echoed by conservatives of all stripes:

'The founding fathers wanted/intended/wrote X and so X is therefore correct.'

This position is all well and good but is it really relevant to talk about the current state of America in terms of what men two centuries in their graves thought when compared against the realities of today?

The founders didn't live in the twentieth century. They didn't have the internet, aviation, mass media, telephony, urbanism, nuclear weapons, factory farms, labor unions, germ theory, mass transit, space travel, data mining, ballistic missiles, universal suffrage, universal literacy, twenty-four hour news, power grids, health codes or even a standing army.

The founders didn't have to contend with Rove v. Wade or the multinational corporations. The founders had never heard of global warming or embryonic research. They didn't have to battle overpopulation and they'd never heard the word 'nonproliferation.' The framers certainly knew what abortion was but they didn't make a national issue out of it. They didn't care one lick about gay rights. The founders didn't have to contend with a vocal, violent, apocalyptic death cult that actively desired to conquer and subjugate the world in the name of Jesus and that was disproportionately represented in governing bodies across the nation.

Most importantly, the founders were trying to found a new nation rather than perpetuate one that was already hundreds of years old. Thus, they were allowed, and should be understood to have made mistakes. y

While the men who founded our country had plenty of good ideas that have persisted through the intervening decades, they also had a large share of bad ideas as well. They believed that human beings could be owned like livestock. They believed that only white land-owning men should be allowed to vote or hold office. They believed that senators should be elected by their state legislatures rather than by citizens. Let me also remind everyone that the current version of government, as created by the founders, is a second draft. They had to scrap the first government and start over when the original version collapsed after less than twelve years.

The words of the founding fathers are not and should not be treated as scripture.

The history of our country is defined as much by the struggle to shrug off the founders' bad ideas as it is by the attempt to live by the good ones. With less than two decades remaining until the country's semiquincentennial, it might do us all some good to think and talk about what we want our country to be in the here and now rather than concentrating on what a gaggle of rich white elitists wanted for a fundamentally different place nearly a quarter of a millennium ago.

I should also note that, in the past fifteen years or so, my stepfather has substantially liberalized his thinking, probably as a result of spending those years with my mother.

Just Food for Thought

2009-06-26T17:42:00.003-05:00

Suppose you drive an older, but not classic, automobile. It's got some dents and dings but is in fantastic running shape for a vehicle of its age.

Now let's say that you see a late model, high dollar, luxury car about to commit a blatant traffic violation, running a yield sign, for instance. If you were to brake, they will pass on and no one would be the wiser. If you do not brake they will side swipe you and, legally speaking, it will be entirely their fault. There is little risk of injury as the speeds involved are quite low.

So, given that any serious damage to your car will lead an insurance company to total it, do you slow down and let them sail on by or do you take the opportunity to make a rich asshole that can't be bothered to read street signs buy you a new car?

Just a hypothetical question.

Mess.

2009-06-22T14:08:00.003-05:00

Clutter, filth, disarray.

It mucks up the doings of an orderly world. Common objects become impossible to find and one's own house in an embarrassment. A disheveled home is a sign of a lazy soul that screams to all the world, "I don't care," and not in an admirable way.

If only I didn't hate cleaning even more.

There's a Hole in the World Tonight

2009-06-17T11:11:00.001-05:00

Proximity is such a delicate and powerful thing. At times, all that we feel and all that we know is defined in the space between. We are conscious of the one beside us only by the gap that separates flesh from flesh and mind from mind and soul from soul. The very experience of humanity is one of opposition, of separation, of being one and not the other.

My Queen and I, in an age I thought I had forgotten, would stand apart but not so far that the remainder of the world could tell. Like universes bent upon one another in many dimensions we would hold ourselves apart by the vast gulf of millimeters. We would experience a closeness no touch can equal. She would lean to kiss, but only tease and pull away, knowing that I would follow. I would follow her scent, her breath, the tickle of her hair and the feel of her gaze. We would loose ourselves and worship one another in a fraction of an inch. We would feel one another across a cleft as narrow as a synapse as one perceives distant thunder, barely felt but shaking the very Earth. Ours was not a knowledge of touch but of electricity in Jacob's ladder, of spark and fuel.

Love is knowing difference in another as part of one's self, of bridging the galactic hair's breadth between souls without moving.

Anger is love disappointed.

I am More Angry than I Have Ever Been.

2009-06-13T14:10:00.003-05:00

I'm seething, practically foaming at the mouth. Rage saturates me as if a dragon had exhaled into my veins. I want to spit blood. I want to break something or someone. Pure, unadulterated fury.

I awoke today to find that my car had been broken into.

The window had been smashed and the back seat rifled through. This, unto itself, is troubling but not altogether unexpected. I live in a major urban center, after all. Such things are simply a question of when, not if, they will happen. I've been here for about five years so I suppose I was due.

If they'd stolen my car stereo, I would have understood. If they'd stolen the printer that was in the back seat, I could handle that. If they had stolen the cash out of the glove compartment, that would have made sense. Though, after checking everything, after having the police go over my car, after close examination of everything in the vehicle, it seems they only stole one thing.

They stole my parachute.

Of all the things that someone could have taken, they stole my fucking parachute.

Am I pissed because, unless it's recovered, I'll have to rent gear to jump until I can afford a new rig, a bit, yes. Am I angry because it's the second most expensive thing I own after the car, itself, just a touch. Am I put out because this will hugely slow down my progress in the sport, yeah, somewhat.

But, what really infuritates me is that there is no reason for a common criminal to steal a parachute! They probably don't even know what it is and, even if they do, it has no use-value to anyone but a skydiver. If the thief isn't a jumper, he or she couldn't do anything with it. While rigs are expensive bits of machinery, they're next to impossible to sell if you don't know where to go. Pawn shops won't take them. Sports consignment stores don't deal in them. This person would have to actually know or be a skydiver in order to unload it and, if that skydiver is local go Georgia, they couldn't possibly jump the rig because the first thing you do when gear is stolen is call around all the drop zones and tell them about it.

I see three possibilities:

1. It was stolen by a crackhead or some other local lowlife. They thought it was a backpack and took it thinking they would get whatever was inside. When they tried to open it and realized that it wasn't a bag, they discarded it. I've already checked all the dumpsters for a quarter mile radius on exactly this contingency. I don't like to think about this possibility too much because, in such a case, it is almost certainly gone forever.

2. It was stolen by a crackhead or some other local lowlife. Whether they know what it is or not they're going to try and sell it. I've gone into all the consignment shops and such in the neighborhood pursuing this and I'm going to start calling pawn shops in just a few minutes. The police will also check on this once a police report is generated but that won't be until tuesday.

3. It was stolen by a skydiver who knew exactly what it was. This is the possibility I find most troubling since this would be a serious offense to the skydiving community. Though, if this is the case I'm pretty likely to get it back since the USPA keeps records of stolen gear and they're going to try and jump it or sell it eventually.

So, if you find yourself in the VA Highlands or L5P part of Atlanta and you see someone wearing a black and gray Javelin skydiving rig, beat them to within an inch of their life and then call me to come get the rig. And please don't get any blood on the canopy. It never comes out.

And the worst part, my car was in the parking lot of a church.

S.P.Q.R.

2009-06-08T08:43:00.004-05:00

"Do you ever get sick of it?" she asked.

"Sick of what?" I say, peering over the lip of an over-sized beer.

"Sick of the movie thing. Sick of the fourteen hour days and all the weeks on the road and all the stress and not getting anything for it except a crappy paycheck and a line on IMDB?"

I furrow my browns, "Sick of life?"

She smiles and snickers. "Don't you ever think about getting a regular desk job, nine to five, pension plan, getting to go home before ten at night?"

I mull on this and take a hefty swig. "No," I say. "I have never contemplated suicide."

I don't think she quite understands my meaning.

Mongoose D-40 Saves a Beleagured Soul - Old Repost

2009-06-04T11:17:00.003-05:00

Traffic doesn't matter.
*pump*
Heat and humidity do not matter.
*pump*
Gravity does not matter, only rubber and pavement.
*pump*
Work and debt and rent and bills and lapsed 401's and cash in pockets and the price of petrol and financial responsibility do not matter.
*pump*
Whatareyougoingtodowhenyougraduate? and other pressing questions of life importance that normally weigh down like millions of tons of seawater on a decaying galleon, send resumes, network, find a job, entered an uncertain field, should have been a lawyer, eight years on college, never going back to a cubicle, got to schmoose and everything you thought when you finished high school turns out to be a lie. These things to not matter.
*pump*
Tomorrow does not matter.
*pump*
Destinations do not matter.
*pump* sweat matters
Boss doesn't like the haircut but they're probably going to fire him and I'll be stuck with a devil I don't know not a devil I do and I couldn't care as long as they don't make me get a new set of uniforms for the fourth time in a year, doesn't matter.
*pump*
Premature balding doesn't matter.
*pump*
HVAC in the apt never quite works right doesn't matter.
*pump*
Haven't had a full night's sleep in weeks. This doesn't matter.
*pump* Lactic acid matters
Weather doesn't matter.
*pump*
I'm a bad Pagan and I know it. Doesn't matter.
*pump*
Father was a genius that had accomplished more than me by several orders of magnitude at this age, been on the stage before the queen and performed at the Smithsonian when the best I can muster is four hundred head for a Halloween Rocky Horror, does not matter.
*pump* Aerobic breathing matters
Can't give up the past. Doesn't matter.
*pump*
Crooked teeth, no insurance, doesn't matter.
*pump*
No helmet, doesn't matter.
*pump* The next mile matters.
De Jour means something different in English than it does in French but no one seems to realize this.
*pump*
Politics do not matter
*pump*
Not quite the normal kid, never beaten up on the playground but not quite right either, mind like a glockenspiel/kaleidoscope/Henry Miller novel/bad infomercial/ brick wall/ boobytrap/ freight train/ broken toilet/ rococo sculpture/ lollipop/ and something else that escapes right now but be sure it's either pedantic or a complete non sequitur and all the little things that would eat that mind alive if not for fifty one minutes between 5600 Rswl Rd and home, five times a week. Doesn't matter.
*pump*
*pump*
*pump*

Make A Wish.

2009-06-02T08:10:00.000-05:00

"Make a wish," she says, handing me a penny, an ancient, greenly corroding thing only barely recognizable as currency.

I take it and she smiles that panoramic, toothy smile, her eyes receding as her cheeks rise. I regard it carefully as the subtle oxidations make dust on my fingertips. Lincoln is barely recognizable. The memorial is a blur. The date is a hazy guess at best. Placing it atop my fist I aim for the second tier of the fountain and send the rotting coin spinning end over end like a planet's cross section revolving in time - lapse. I miss and it bounces off the knee of a gaudy and acid eaten cherub. It drops into the first tier to join a myriad of other coins.

"What did you wish for?" she asks.

Her jaw drops as I hop over the side of the fountain and into the pool, soaking my slacks and bringing the park's passers-by to a halt. My slacks will dry and the park goers, well, I could care. I dig in the layer of coins on the pool's bottom, drowning my shirt sleeves as well as my pants.

"What on Earth are you doing?" she cries.

Still digging about the coinage, I reply, "I wished for my penny back and I'm not content to leave these things up to fate."

That single green copper disk is not making itself apparent so I nick one from the bottom at random. Money is meant to be a fluid exchange of value, after all, so I suppose one is as good as another. I climb out of the fountain and smile back back at her, crooked teeth and dull eyes but earnest, at least. "You're a clown sometimes." she says and I smile wider.

A policeman approaches and, in the most officious voice he can muster, "Looking for something, sir?"

I hold the penny up and examine it, much newer than the first, no corrosion, all the scoring perfectly distinct, shiny. I look from it to him, "No, officer, I found exactly what I was looking for."

I take her hand and we wander, damp and giggling off along the path and back into the city, a penny's laughter richer.

I Am In Pain.

2009-05-31T21:28:00.005-05:00

Before yesterday, I was in pain. Pain, because the weather had prevented me from jumping for the last month. It's been rainy and cloudy for weeks and hanging out at the drop zone all day, watching the drizzle and listening to the pilots talk shit about their aviation exploits as we waited for a half hour break in the clouds didn't appeal to me. Thus I've been grounded for a while.

Today I'm in pain because on my second jump my canopy took mere two-hundred feet to deploy rather than it's usual eight-hundred.

A lot of things can affect how a parachute opens: canopy design, packing method, body position, relative wind and dumb luck being foremost among them. Maybe the slider wasn't quartered properly. Perhaps I wasn't fully out of the track position when I pitched. It's possible I hit a thermal as the bag came out of the container and the relative wind was much faster than I realized.
Point is, going from one-hundred and twenty miles per hour to fourteen in under a second feels a touch like getting hit by a car. Not a big car mind you, but perhaps a Geo, or a 323. You also end up carrying most of that force through the leg straps. I'm now actively wondering if I'll ever father children.

So, how was your day?

And Some Days...

2009-05-29T08:15:00.003-05:00

It feels like the last week of your senior year, with so much to do that doesn't seem like it's worth the bother and all you can do is wonder what freedom is really like because it isn't just summer vacation that's coming up so quickly.

I Pissed on a Republican (not what you think)

2009-05-23T12:59:00.004-05:00

I hang out at an Irish pub. Granted, I'm about as Irish as Kim Jong Il but they have live music six nights a week and I'm friends with most of the staff.

Last week I found that someone had scrawled the words "Sinn Fein" on the wall of the men's room in double-thick black sharpie.

I'm not bothered by graffiti. I live in a major metropolis, graffiti is a fact of life. I am bothered by the fact that this particular vandal is either a major idiot or a complete asshole.

The owner of the bar is an Anglican from Belfast. He is pro-English. He forbids performers from singing revolution songs. He currently has a cousin serving in Her Majesty's Royal Marines. He is not a "we ourselves" kind of guy. Most of the patrons who bother to have an opinion on the subject are Unionists, not Republicans.

Possibility 1: This guy's an Idiot.
It's possible that the fellow with the marker didn't know the politics of the bar and was legitimately trying to manifest his ethnic pride, assuming that people who frequented an Irish pub would share the proclivities of Ireland proper. Though, really, if you've going to commit an act of vandalism pursuant to the longest and most intractable cultural conflict in western Europe, you might want to find out who's side the people around you are on.

Possibility 2: The guy's an Asshole.
It's also possible that he did know the politics of the bar and decided to tag the wall anyway, which is not cool. This is a conflict that predates the discovery of the Americas. It defines the politics of Great Britain and Ireland and impacts the daily lives of nearly everyone in that part of the world. A share of those people have emigrated to the US, far from that strife, and now frequent this bar. Some guy brought that animosity the breadth of an ocean and turned it into a doodle over a urinal. Yeah, that guy's an asshole.

Blarney & Bollocks.

And Some Days...

2009-05-17T11:34:00.003-05:00

You spend the afternoon in the rain, wandering the woods, hearing pipes, drinking beer, hobnobbing with pirates and marveling at how much bigger a part of your life this used to be.

Movies Are Like Cars

2009-05-08T15:51:00.001-05:00

Looking back, I'm often amazed at how little of what I learned in film school is applicable to the practical realities of producing motion pictures. I spent nearly five years reading Bazin, Benjamin, Mulvey and Schatz, thousands of hours hearing long-winded cult-stud types get all gooey over D.W. Griffith, John Ford and the French New Wave. Mostly, I heard ruminating blow-hards go on at great length about how the drive to turn a profit corrupts the art of film.

And they are absolutely wrong about that.

The problem with most film critics, most of whom don't even seem to like movies in the first place, is that they implicitly include movies with, as Walter Benjamin called them, the "Contemplative Arts."* They're comparing film to sculpture, painting or live opera. They're trying to judge Birth of a Nation, Chinatown and Jaws against "The Last Supper," "Oedipus Rex," and The Pietà and they always seem disappointed. This is because they have it bass-ackwards.

There's a reason we call it the "Movie Business." Going all the back to Edison, the Lumières and the Nickelodeons, movies were a profit making enterprise first and a means of expression second. That having been said, the art of film is powerful and profound. It's the defining artistic medium of the last hundred years and it is not to be dismissed. We just need to think about it a little differently.

Rather than thinking of film, as most academics do, as an art form that must operate in spite of it's profit motive, think of film as an industry that is enhanced by artistry.

Strange as it sounds, the best comparison I can make is to the automotive industry. The similarities between movies and cars are actually kind of amazing. They're both expensive and labor intensive to produce with long turnaround times and they're both consumed by nearly every person in the United States. They are both industrial-era technologies. They're both innate to the modern American experience and the US has dominated both industries for a substantial part of the last century. Most importantly, they are both an inseparable fusion of art and commerce.

Herein lies the problem; we think about Benjamin Button as if it were a painting by Van Gogh when we should be thinking about it as if it were a Ford Mustang.

Think for a minute about the Ford Mustang, or the Chevy Camaro, or the Volkswagon Beetle or any other iconic car that suits your fancy. It is rigorously engineered and contientiously crafted. It is aesthetically pleasing. It was designed to be admired, to evoke feeling, to create a specific kind of experience. It has huge cache in American culture. It is a work of art in any reasonable sense of the term.

Absolutely no one is under the illusion that Ford is in it for the art. To even suggest so would be ludicrous. The recent tribulations of the automotive industry notwithstanding, Ford is a for-profit enterprise and, though they produce emotionally evocative and culturally relevant pieces of American iconography, no one begrudges them the fact that they are distinctly a business.

We need to think about movies in similar terms. This is the film industry and our imperative is to produce a product that makes money. The fantastic thing is that, like only a handful of other industries, sometimes we produce something really special, something that turns heads, changes minds and that becomes part of history. Mind you, usually we don't. Neither does Ford. For every Mustang, every Godfather, every 2001, there are dozens of Tauruses, Rangers, Tango & Cash's, Species and formulaic sequels that get made because they are as practical and profitable as they are forgettable.

We don't expect every car to be as iconic as the Mustang. Why did my film professors expect every film to be as brilliant as Citizen Kane?

*See, I really did go to film school, in case you thought I was bullshitting.

I Shall Stay 'til the Wind Changes

2009-05-04T07:40:00.000-05:00

John and I did a connected, exterior exit and hit the 2 man star while still on the hill.

As soon as we leveled out we W tracked to the right into a closed accordion, 1 point.

We tracked out and each 180'd back into the star, 2nd point.

W track left to a closed accordion, 3rd point.

Track out and 180 back to the star, 4th point.

W Track to the right closed accordion, 5th point.

Track out and 180 back into a 2 man star, 6th point.

We're at Five thousand feet so we break to track off for deployment and here's where things get sticky.

Normally, one tracks perpendicular to the line of flight to avoid getting in the way of other jumpers. One knows the line of flight because the line of flight is parallel to the runway except, at break off time, I can't see the runway. I have no idea where the hell we are. So I turn 180 degrees from John and I track away from him. I deploy and my chute snivels for 1200 feet.

I'm full open, square, stable, steerable by 2200 feet but I have no idea where the airport is.

Oh, there it is, on the horizon, nearly three miles away. Can I make it back, downwind, in full flight all the way? I realize at a thousand feet that, no, the best I can aim for is the parking lot and that will require me flying over 300 yards of pine forest and a set of industrial power lines at low altitude.

Right beneath me is an open meadow so, fuckit, I'm landing here. I turn into the wind and, on the assumption that the grass is four to eight inches tall, I flare for landing. I then realize that the grass is actually about five feet tall. Commit, commit, commit to that landing ... and I stand it up, in neck-high grass.

I, very gingerly, gather up my canopy and then shimmy out of my jumpsuit enough to get my cell phone out of my pocket. I call for a lift. A few minutes later Don rolls through in his truck to pick me up and drive me the mile or so back to the hangar.

And it was such a good dive, too.

So, 6 point freefall on jump 61, hell fucking yeah! Landing in another municipality, not so great.

I did make another jump later that day that I stood up directly on target, so, s'allgood.

Why President Obama Should Not Prosecute for Torture

2009-05-01T11:51:00.003-05:00

So the sins of the 9/11 era are confessed. Our country not only condoned but actually engaged in the torture of human beings. After nearly a decade of hand wringing, legal maneuvering and linguistic obfuscation we've finally come to call it what it is.

Obama, by a stroke of political savvy that no one seems able to comprehend, is going to let the perpetrators walk and quite a few of my ideological brethren are up in arms. So there's no confusion, I'm going to put this plainly. Letting the senior members of the Bush administration who ordered and condoned torture go unpunished is the right thing to do for the country.

I am not apologizing for them. I am not endorsing them. Every person involved from the CIA agent with the wet towel to Donald Rumsfeld to Alberto Gonzalez to George W. Bush, himself, are reprehensible human beings who perpetrated unforgivable acts. In a perfect world, in a world where what is right and what is wrong trump all other concerns, they would all spend the rest of their lives in prison.

We don't live in that world.

The Presidency of the United States, by it's very nature, is a touchy job. Beyond the tribulations of any head of state, outside the vagaries of the election cycle, irrespective of party politics, the President must walk a very fine line. The powers of the executive are so broad sweeping, so poorly defined and so often called upon that a legally flawless presidency is functionally impossible.

Any administration in living memory, when closely scrutinized, will prove to have committed acts that are impeachable or prosecutable under some valid interpretation of the law. More simply, we can send any former president, any former cabinet member to jail if we look hard enough for a reason. I freely grant that, in the case of the last president, we don't need to look very hard but that's not the point.

We musn't set the precedent that an incoming executive be expected to prosecute the misdeeds of the one before lest that become the very business of the office, lest every change of party become a five year legal fiasco that wastes hundreds of millions of dollars and does little but distract the country from the business of nation-hood. Doing so would paralyze the office, forcing each president to consider billion-dollar, life & death decisions against the machinations of an army of partisan attorneys just waiting to pounce the last week of every fourth January. Such a precedent could bring the executive branch to a standstill.

It hurts a bit to come to this conclusion. I want these people to go to jail. I want them to pay for robbing my country of its dignity. I want them to be punished for harming their fellow humans. The more practical part of me knows that, sometimes, the the system by which we order justice is more important than a particular instance of it's application. That part of me knows that, at least on this occasion, the most moral choice is not for the greater good.

My First Skydiving Injury

2009-04-27T07:54:00.004-05:00

I come strolling into the hanger, rig over my shoulder, in the middle of the afternoon. I was planning on getting in a leisurely jump or two on my way back to south Georgia. The drop zone is between here and there so it was the only practical thing to do, really.

As I walk in I see a half dozen or so jumpers milling about in full gear. I've not gotten halfway to the manifest desk when the head packer points at me and says, "He can go on this load."

Then, over the loudspeaker comes the Booming Voice of Manifest [TM], "Thomas, we need you to make the plane go, hurry."

Understand that fuel is the single most costly element in putting jumpers in the air. In order to keep the operation profitable, each flight to altitude must take in enough money to offset the cost of petrol. That's how you get what I walked into yesterday, seven jumpers geared up and shooting shit, waiting for that critical eighth person* to tip the scales towards profitability and put the lot of them in the air.

Now, I know that a preponderance of skydiving injuries occur in precisely this situation. Someone hurries to get to the plane and misses some critical detail that later costs them a trip to the hospital. Thus, I refused to be rushed. I make a detailed gear check, by the numbers, exactly as I always do.

However, donning my jumpsuit can be a bit time consuming so I don't bother. I just throw the rig on over my regular clothes, snap my helmet on and head for the plane.

Herein lie my error.

It took me to six thousand feet to realize that I just got on a jump plane wearing a button-up shirt. I'm sure most people have ridden a bicycle while wearing a collared shirt. That same whip-whip-whip that you get against your jaw in that situation you also get in free-fall, except the wind is going 120 miles per hour.

Oh, it stings.

This morning I have a neat red triangle right up under my jawline. The sensation is something akin to the razor burn from a dirty snow shovel.

Oh, oh, it stings.

This is what Confucius meant when he talked about, "the crimson mark of life's visceral lessons."

* This depends on the type of plane in which you are flying. A Cessna 182 might only need two jumpers to make the ride worthwhile, though it maxes out around eleven thousand feet and the ride up takes half an hour. Where I go, we fly a King Air, a dual turbo-prop that climbs to 14k in under eight minutes and that needs eight brave souls to make it fly.

You'll Never Work in this Town Again

2009-04-16T07:15:00.000-05:00

We'd been dug into a suburban mega-church for the better part of the week. I don't think there was so much as a squeezer left on the G&E trucks. The main company had moved from shooting in the massive space of the sanctuary to the cramped and stuffy confines of the pastor's office.

Passing back through the atrium from base camp I observed Juicers and Hammers lugging out the metric tons of miniutae we'd spend four days hauling in one and two bits at a go. They were making good time considering the single fire door that everything had to pass through.

As I delivered paperwork to the first AD in the sweltering cocoon of the set he said, "Go out in the lobby and see how long they're going to take to finish loading out."

Nodding, I answered, "They're about eighty-five percent done. I'd give them another forty five minutes."

He stared at me as if I had just told him the moon really was made of cheese or that clouds were albatross farts.

"Really, I just came through there." I said, "They're about forty-five minutes away. Maybe an hour."

Dropped the folder to the ground and belted, "Damnit, Thomas!" With this the whole crew halted in place as our AD, normally so reserved and soft spoken, barked at me near the top of his lungs. "How dare you know the answer to a question before I can think to ask it! You're going nowhere in this business! You're fired!"

Meekly, I took of my headset and laid my radio on a lens case and started back down the hallway in search of a time card with head slung low.

I'd made it not twenty paces when the AD called out, "Alright, I need someone to go back to base and run the safety memos." He glanced around the room and found that all the other members of the department were elsewhere on production missions of one kind or another. "Damnit, Thomas! You're re-hired."

And that's kind of how this business goes, sometimes.

And Some Days...

2009-04-12T13:40:00.004-05:00

You find yourself in a familiar place that you don't recognize anymore, the sweetest spring breeze carries nothing but putrescence and only a handful of the people you know seem like good company.

When this happens to most people they call it a rut, take a long weekend and then go back to exactly the place where they began.

I, by contrast, realize that a life epoch is drawing to a close and that I must now begin the long and arduous task of outlining a new chapter. I think I'll make it a travelogue and I hope that I'm up for the trip.

A Tattoo in Berlin, and a Case of the Craps

2009-04-07T15:02:00.003-05:00

Last night the radio played "November Rain," "Eurotrash Girl" and "Bohemian Rhapsody" all in a row.

This can only mean that the DJ had diarrhea and knew that he wouldn't be back in the studio for a while.

Mom, Don't Read This

2009-04-06T09:15:00.004-05:00

First jump test-driving the new rig that I'm thinking of buying. The container fits nicely; the weight is comfortable. It has the little extras that I want like dive rings and a collapsible slider. The AAD still has four years left on its service cycle. The price is really good.

I step out at 14,500 and the container flies great. I can move cleanly on all three axes; I can invert and I can back-fly without any resistance.

It's an unfamiliar canopy so I deploy at twice my usual altitude.

I feel the container pop and I get pulled into a standing position but I do not slow down.

Oh, Shit.

Looking over my shoulder I can clearly see my lines leading up to the deployment bag, in which my canopy is still tightly tucked with only a few feet of material hanging out into the wind that do virtually nothing to slow my decent.

With hand on cutaway handle, my eyes flash back and forth from my altimeter to the mass of lines and bridle trailing behind me. I say to myself, 'This is not my parachute. I can't go back to Falconer and tell him that I cut away his main first time out.' Of course this is with the caveat that I am still speeding towards Mother Earth at over a hundred miles per hour so that thought soon shifts to, 'If I'm not open by 3500, I'll chop it.'

Two heartbeats short of me cutting away, the bag slides down, the canopy opens and I find myself sailing gracefully at three thousand feet with naught but a closed end-cell to show for the near-malfunction.

I stand up directly on target and make three more incident-free jumps on that gear that day.

I love this shit.

Holy Shit!

2009-03-31T23:19:00.003-05:00

A twelve hour turnaround! I thought I'd not live to see the day.

It's a whole twelve hours until I go back to work and I simply have no idea what do with myself. I could read or watch television or take a walk or eat a leisurely meal or do any of the myriad of other things that regular people do between the time that they get off work one day and report to work the next.

Normally I have nine hours or less. Anything more that fourteen is practically a weekend.

And with all the things I could be doing, I decide to spend my free time blogging. I should probably question the wisdom of that.

I'm Going to Die

2009-03-25T19:26:00.002-05:00

And when I do please do not honor my memory with a bumper sticker or a window decal.

I prefer that my legacy not be communicated through the same medium as SHIT HAPPENS, Naked Girl Mudflaps and TruckNutz.