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[March 11, 2005] Or I jumped. I don't remember. I do remember screaming "OH MY GOD!!!" at the absolute top of my lungs as I found myself abruptly falling out of an airplane.

Think about the last time you flew somewhere. Think about cruising altitude, when the clouds cleared below you, and you could see the ground. Remember it? Remember how much you could see, and how far away it looked?

It's just like that. Only it completely surrounds you, there's no tiny scratched doublepane plexiglass airplane porthole restricting your view. It's all around you everywhere you look. You're up above the clouds, and above you is sky, and below you is the ground.

It's just like looking out an airplane window. Except you're falling towards it at terminal velocity, 124 miles an hour, and the wind is worse that you've ever felt it, and it's coming up instead of sideways, and it's in your sinuses and in your throat and your cheeks won't stop flapping and your voice doesn't get any louder, yet you still can't hear yourself, and you're wishing you'd worn a hoodie instead of a tanktop, because goddamn it's cold. And it's all getting BIGGER, and more detailed, and closer.

One way or another, I stepped out of the plane, and fell. And my first thought was "I JUST JUMPED OUT OF A PLANE!! WHY! WHAT THE FUCK WAS I THINKING??"

O'ahu is a small island. From three miles up, it seems like you can see the whole thing. You can certainly see most of the North Shore, and the east side, the Windward side, of the island too, and the mountains and plains in the interior. If you can't see the whole thing, you can see enough that it seems like it. I don't know what it's like to skydive anywhere else, but skydive on O'ahu, and you can see it all, this extreme range of landscapes. Big, lush mountains to one side of me; gorgeous, blue-green ocean on the other side, and under me is forests and farmlands and a town that's rapidly resolving itself into roads and houses and swimming pools.

So my first thought got interrupted by my second thought, "Oh my god this is so incredibly cool!"

I really don't have the words for it. It was incredible. I was in freefall, I didn't have a clue what I was doing, but there was far too much to see and feel for me to actually worry about it. There was The World, and I was too engrossed in it to really be concerned with my own imminent mortality any more.

Freefall lasted a full minute.

And then, with a tremendous yanking on my extremities, the parachute opened, and the wind cut out its upward flooding, and resumed a more normal sideways motion. We weren't falling anymore, we were flying. And it was suddenly really quiet.

I said something like "Oh, we can talk now." I was a little shocked at the whole thing.

Existential Crisis at 17,000 Feet
There's something about dropping like a stone from a plane three miles in the air towards the North Shore of O'ahu that really makes one go "AHHHHHOHMYGODWHATTHEFUCKWASITHINKINGSTOPwow, this is REALLY FUCKING COOL! Why the FUCK didn't I ever DO THIS BEFORE!! ... Shit. What've I been doing with my life?"

At that moment, I felt like I'd just utterly wasted 24 years, because they really didn't hold anything that could compare to the world I was approaching.

I talked to Wisconsin about it too, because he's been on a "What am I doing with myself?" trip more intense than mine since I met him. He said he felt the same thing too.

I really want to talk about it. I want to crystalize it in memory, I want to remember every detail I can so I don't lose any of them over time, and I want to tell people bout it. I want to be able to share it, and I don't want to lose it.

But I don't have the words. I don't know if I'd say it was a religious experience for me (because that would be dumb), but I think it's the closest I've ever gotten to one.

Plus, the edges have already lost their sharpness. As soon as I landed, the Brit and I were going "Oh my god! That was awesome! Wasn't it awesome? That was awesome!" Meanwhile, Wisconsin just had this shocked look on his face. And then he fell down and lay on his stomach in the grass for a little while.

I wish I'd done that. Taken a minute, by myself, to let it sink in, to pay attention to how I felt and how I'd just gotten done feeling, to remember the way it looked and the way it felt, and just focused, instead of jumping back into company.

I think this really could've changed my life, if I'd paid attention to it. Not, like, massively overhauled my life, but adjusted its course slightly, pointed it in a more specific direction. (Actually, I think it has -- just not as much as it should have.) Because... JESUS CHRIST that was intense. And beautiful.

It made me wonder why I waste my time on the things I waste my time on, when there's intense and beautiful things to experience out there.

Anyway. I talked to Wisconsin and my coworker about it. I want to start doing stuff like that, big, adventurous stuff, on a regular basis. Shark cage adventures, skydiving, glider riding, bungie jumping if we can find it, stuff like that, once every month or two. Make it part of What We DO. Because there's so many things like that that I'd like to do, but haven't yet, and I don't have any good reasons not to.

But that's not the point, is it? The point is that I don't push myself to do the things that I get the most out of, I'm just content to keep on wasting my time. The point is to raise the bar for the rest of my life, so I don't spend it willfully doing so much mediocre bullshit and dreaming about the things I don't have the guts to actually try.

I'm working on that. Just nowhere near as hard as I should be working on it.

"...As I look back at countless crossroads, and the middle where I stay. Right up the beaten path to Boredom, where the fakest fucks get laid..." - Say Anything "Red Cat (Slash) Yellow Cat"

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My Life in Hawai'i

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blog , stories , skydiving , epiphanies , blog entries