Not a Dry Eye Patch in the House

Did anyone watch the premiere of Pirate Master last night? I'd like to pretend I'm above that sort of thing, but I admit to you freely, I watched almost half of it. It was so terrifyingly poor that I don't know if I could stomach another episode. It's even less interesting than Survivor...on Pirate Master, a bunch of tools in eyeliner sit around with nothing to do in between curiously uninvolving challenges wherein they have to do things like row boats around papier-mache skeletons. At the end of the season, one person will be left and will get his or her hand chopped off and replaced by a hook or something. I don't know. The show's producers are obviously aware it's a little tedious, and so put in some stringent rules about the women on the show needing to wear very revealing tops at all times. Good thinking, there.

One of the eyeliner-wearing would-be pirates gets voted as captain of the ship, and immediately sets about being super-annoying by talking in a pirate voice, and taking things seriously despite the fact that everyone is clearly just this side of giggling. In the voting at the end, the pirate crew can vote off one of the captain's nominees, or declare a mutiny, in which case the captain is kicked off. It all seems needlessly complicated.

Not to spoil it for you, but the most enjoyable contestant was kicked off in the first episode. I only caught the second half, but every time they showed him, his tagline was Scientist/Exotic Dancer, which I guess is kind of like Fighter/Magic-User without the magic missiles.

I picture him straining over a microscope, struggling to isolate that elusive strain of euglena that explains everything. Enraged, he sweeps the microscope aside and shakes his fist at the uncaring nature of the universe: "If only I could prove to these fools that their methods are unsound! I ... I.... I gotta dance!"

"Strokin'" starts up on the tinny speakers of the lab as scientist/exotic dancer gyrates in a revolving petri dish, pulling off his chemical-spattered smock. Middle aged women rush at him, but he holds them at bay, in awe of his equations.

If only I could have Scientist/Exotic Dancer on my business card!

PS if you must, check out his ridiculous website, where you can learn annoying things like the fact that his dog is named Machiavelli.

Turkey Time

Internet reprobates subject themselves to torment for your potential pleasure, screening the IMDB worst-100 reviewed movies and reviewing them for you. Thrill to the majesty of "3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain", starring Hulk Hogan, amongst others.

Passive-Aggressive Notes from roommates, neighbors, coworkers and strangers.

Particularly enjoyable are the desperate pleas for bathroom decency and the plaintive "You Must Wear the Unitard Provided".

Note: Some swears may lurk within. If you are of the type who flee from the swears, flee now. Away, into the night, swear-free. The little swears may be caught in your hair, or clinging to your linty sweater like cat hair.

Goodbye Blue Monday

Kurt Vonnegut is dead.

He gave up writing novels a few years back, when it seemed he had said what he wanted to say. But he left us beautiful books like Cat's Cradle and Breakfast of Champions. When I was a completist teenager (as opposed to the obsessive completist thirties person I am now), I would obsessively eye my Vonnegut collection and think to myself "I only need Happy Birthday, Wanda June. Why don't I own that?" Thinking that I had to own every little word, even if it meant there would be no more books to discover, no new words.

I read his work slavishly, and I hope some of the wisdom within those pages sunk in somehow.

Vonnegut's writing was morose and melancholy but, like Twain, he seemed to believe in the secret goodness of people. There were always transcendent moments of beauty in his short, blurby style, like the moment that Circe Berman sees Rabo Karabekian's secret for the first time in Bluebeard. I won't ruin it for you.

And there was a large sense of our own ridiculousness. His often glib, "Go take a flying f*ck at the moon" philosophy betrayed a conscience that was deeply concerned with man, and especially with America. His outrage at the path of America these last years was a much-needed voice. While he seemed to say that all men are just animals, just living out lives alone, he was warning us against the greedy and dangerous men who are harming America so greatly, and the apathy with which the country is letting it happen.

Hopefully, old Kurt hasn't come unstuck in time, and isn't being bothered reliving the past.

Let's remember him with the Tralfamadorian greeting from Slaughterhouse Five:

"Hello. Farewell.

Hello. Farewell."

So it goes.

Fear of Skeletors

Deep down, in my heart of hearts, I'm afraid I'm starting to look a little like Rumsfeld.

What a Country

Yesterday, we spent a few hours wandering around San Francisco, on a quest for Japanese snack food. You see, we went to Japan on vacation a few weeks back, and now we miss being in a country whose obsession with soft drinks and snack foods borders on the insane.

San Francisco's Japantown, in case you're wondering, is pretty much exactly like being in Japan. There are a couple of big buildings there that house large indoor malls that are chockablock with noodle shops, bookstores, video stores, and craft stores where you can buy the ever-important tiny glass animals. And I don't use the word chockablock lightly, so you know this is true. Just like in Shinjuku in Tokyo, the big stores are Kintetsu and Kinokuniya.

Anyway, Japan was a crazy good time. I ate fried crickets, raw horsemeat, grated mountain yam which is frankly hideous and Lovecraftian in its snottiness, and (accidentally) whale. I hiked the old Nakasendo Road (which, in the 16th century, nobles would travel yearly from Kyoto to Tokyo at the behest of the Emperor) between two towns restored to their Edo period appearance. I went to a Yomiuri Giants vs. Yakult Swallows baseball game in the Tokyo Dome, where the singing and dancing fans put our own baseball audience to shame.

In Kyoto, I saw the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kinkakuji, the subject of Yukio Mishima's novel about a deranged Zen acolyte; the Zen rock gardens at Ryoan-ji and Daitoku-ji, which are so austere and beautiful I couldn't believe I was seeing them; the eighty-foot giant Buddha at Nara, where sacred deer roam the temple complex grounds and surround you if you show the slightest inclination to feed them; and the Rashomon Gate at Tijo (it rained just like in the story and movie.)

Anyway, I'm trying to write a travelogue about the vacation, but we miss it already, and we were in Japantown trying to recapture some of the tastes and feel of the country.

We ended up finding a good place stocked with rice crackers, cold green tea, Pocky, and shrimp chips. The best moment of the day by far, though, came when we were walking by a tea shop next to a Japanese video stall. An elderly Japanese man was proudly brandishing a new VCD to show to his family, and as we passed I glanced down to see what his prize could be:

Yakov Smirnoff on Broadway.

Talk Like a Pirate Day

Honestly, I'm a little tired of Talk Like a Pirate Day. Pirates have overstayed their welcome. I don't mean my pirate houseguest who's been staying with us since early June, infecting us all with beardmites and eating all our limes. No, you're fine, Blind Pete. I mean conceptually.

Every once in a while we must, as a culture, reexamine the hierarchy of these core comedy concepts, presented here in random order, and judge which will reign supreme for the coming year:

Pirates
Zombies
Monkeys
Aliens
Robots
Salad

The top three are the comedy premiership, if you will. The lowest three are relegated to the conceptual second division, where they must fight it out with newcomers, or risk falling forever into comedy limbo, where it is only a matter of time until they are referenced on a family sitcom.

Pirates, as I said, are pretty much crapped out. As enjoyable as The Pirate Movie was, let's put away the shiny pants for a while. Monkeys, much as I hate to say it, are too easy. Even when they're smoking cigars. And aliens. Well, how many times can you make probe jokes?

I propose the comedy trifecta for the coming year:

Zombies, Robots, and Salad.

These three concepts grow all the more impressive when combined. Thus: "Jesus Christ, get a load of that robotic salad zombie!"

Sorry, pirates.

OH! THE FISH HITS! FIGHT!

If you're anything like me (and I hope for your sake that you're not), you spent a large portion of your formative years playing Nintendo. Not Super Nintendo or your Wii. No. Nintendo, with ROB your Robotic buddy and Duck Hunt and Gyromite and Oktoroks. That Nintendo.

We didn't have eighteen buttons and a magic wand. We had two miserable buttons, one of which didn't always do anything.

To tell you what a hep cat I was in high school, I would get together with my friends, go to Blockbuster video, and rent a Nintendo game that we would play slavishly for hours, with only a twelve pack of hyper-sugary soda to sustain us.

And what was the game that ate so much of our time? Black Bass. That's right. A fishing game. Black Bass was great because everyone could sit around and root on the person holding the tiny, uncomfortable, non-ergonomic Nintendo controller as they tried to land a video fish, fighting with both the A and B buttons...OK, just the B button...to bring that baby in. You'd hold that B button for all you were worth, until the pleasing reeling sound changed to the hated, grating your line is going to break! sound (the two sounds were, in fact challengingly similar.) Then, you'd have to hold off on the reeling for a while and wait, while that beautiful pile of pixels sat there in the video water, mocking you.

And then, if you were lucky, you had that pile of pixels in the net, and the moment of truth would arrive--TOO BAD! IT'S SMALL! Words that the video fisherman (and most other kinds of video men, obviously) spend their lives hoping not to hear.

Perhaps the best part about Black Bass was that you would play for hours and hours and, well, hours, and finally get to the highest level of the game. At this level, the fish were huge. Half the size of our 19" portable screen. And from what we could tell--and I want to emphasize here that my friends and I played this game probably more than anyone else on the planet...possibly more than the developers--there was no way to land them.

You'd get them so, so close to your video net, and those bastards would jump, and they'd fight, and OH! THE FISH GETS AWAY! I tell you, it brings tears to my eyes.

And now, I pass this gift on to you.

Black Bass on everyvideogame.com

The Lion Content

I just saw a headline on CNN that said Mountain Lion Bursts Into Man's Home. Besides the obvious "well, we probably have been bursting into that mountain lion's home for years now," I kind of hope the guy was sitting around watching teevee in his underwear and the lion came crashing through the window.

"Hotcha!" it would say. "Get me! I'm a mountain lion! Raar!"

Cheetos would be spilled.

Also, I heard NPR babbling away today about lions. I don't remember in exactly what context, but I know they mentioned lions. Lions are on the rise. They're bursting into people's homes! There could be one under your desk right now! A small one!

The Poo Brew Review

I found out a few weeks ago that a coffee shop near my work sometimes stocks the rare and expensive Kopi Luwak. Kopi Luwak, in case you've never heard of it, is sometimes known as Civet Coffee. What makes this coffee different?

It's pooped out by a small mammal. Here's a picture of the pooper now:



Luwaks eat coffee berries at Indonesian coffee plantations, selectively choosing only the ripest berries. The coffee berries pass through the luwak, where they are partially digested. The luwak then excretes the berries, as small mammals are wont to do, wherever he feels like. Then, some fortunate soul harvests the nuggets of luwak feces. Through some esoteric process, the beans are (hopefully) cleaned, and ready to be roasted and brewed.

I convinced a few coworkers that it was essential that we try this coffee, so we cruised down to the cafe and shared a fifteen dollar cup between four of us.

The ordering process was less grandiose than I had anticipated. I was hoping there'd be a luwak hanging out on the counter and, when he heard you place your order he'd sigh, grab a newspaper, and trudge off to the toilet. Instead, the owner made a nice drip cup for us.

The coffee is very good. Maybe not fifteen dollars a cup good, but good. The (erk!) digestion process removes much of the acidity of the beans, so it's very smooth. I am in recent years a wimpy milk-in-the-coffee type of guy, but I drank this black with no ill effects on my stomach. It was rich and aromatic and, I have to say, not terribly reminiscent of jungle animal poo.

I did have a moment's doubt. I mean, there was no certificate of authenticity presented to us before we took a sip. I mean, anything could have digested the beans. A cat, a dog? The owner's infant child? But what can you do? Something ate and partially digested that stuff, and I say more power to it.

As one of my coworkers pointed out, it seems OK to eat the excreta of a cute and unfamiliar Indonesian animal. "Dog shit coffee," on the other hand, doesn't sound nearly so appealing.

Half a Decade of This?

Yes, it's true. My Life As An American Gladiator, the site that capitalizes everything, even the small words, has been around for five years. True, the last couple of years have been no great shakes, but let us not reflect on that.

Let us think, instead, of all the good brought into the world through the possibly tireless efforts of this blog. Did you know that this blog has, of its own accord, been saving clams from linguini in the long stretches between posts? It's true.

OK, that's not true.

But still, five years, that's pretty good.

The blog's old and cranky now, at five. It's the dog that's not a puppy anymore, and passes gas unexpectedly when company's over. It's the can of potatoes that you're pretty sure has botulism since it technically expired three years ago, but you're reluctant to throw it out since you've never seen something burst from a botulized can before and are watching it in the interest of science.

And yes, things have been lean here at the blog for the past, oh, eighteen or twenty months. The blog is busy, what with the clam saving and the staying out all night drinking with Steven Seagal and Anthony Michael Hall. But this blog promises to try harder in the next five years. It promises to deliver more Jurgen Prochnow content, more three-quarter-screen diatribes about trivial and unimportant things, and of course, carefully hidden typographical errors that you can note in your journal.

Salut!

The World Cup Report

So, we're into the second round of the World Cup, and I'm enjoying it with a gravity that makes people really regret talking to me at work.

I've watched all but about two of the games. I even made it through Tunisia v. Ukraine, a match in which two guys were carded for slipping into comas on the pitch, such was the blistering pace of the contest.

The USA is, of course, out. And frankly, they deserve to be. Bruce Arena, the coach, is soon to become the only man ever fired for not knowing how to use his Johnson. In fact, I'd say the USA played like eleven guys without a Johnson between them.

OK. Five people got that joke.

Also, the US commentators need to be killed slowly, with the possible exception of Tommy Smythe, who says "Arr! There's the boolge in the ool' onion bahg!" which is really cool and weird. Number one on the hit list is Marcelo Balboa, an ex US defender who now commentates on the games and says one of the following phrases every three seconds:

• I'm a fan/not a fan of...
• Phenomenal!
• I'm going to have to go back to...

Marcelo, you are awful. Please be quiet or at least less whiny. If I hear you complaining about the refereeing one more time, I'm going to put gum in your flowing locks.

One of the other ESPN commentators kept referring to a "row" in the England side, by which he of course meant a fight or disagreement. But he was pronouncing it like "roe", and therefore sounding like a complete turd.

My heart is really with England to win it all, but I don't see how they can beat any of the really good teams like Argentina or Germany. And god forbid, an England game should come down to penalty kicks. It's a well-known fact that English players cannot score penalties. So, they'll slog onward, in quiet desperation, and almost...almost win.

I must return to my TiVo now.

Watching
Tonight, our filthy television addiction will end. That's because The Amazing Race ended last week and 24 ends tonight. 24 is problematic, because it's frankly kind of Red Dawn-ish and implies that the entire fate of the country is dependent on one guy who likes to torture people maybe a little more than is strictly necessary, and on one sys admin who seems to be the only person with government clearance who actually knows how to do anything worth doing. But I am hooked on that show. They kill off major characters glibly, which keeps you on your toes. And get this: not only is the guy from Warlock in it this season, but Robocop and/or Buckaroo Banzai too!

This non-television-viewing will only last a couple of weeks, until the World Cup starts. Then, of course, I will be a permanent fixture on the couch, and will only rise for beer trips.

Speaking of watching, we went to the movies for the first time in what seems like months (because it actually was months) this weekend. And what did we see? What modern masterwork could coax us from the comfort of home? Why, Poseidon, of course.

We saw Poseidon because the other two movies we kind of wanted to see, The DaVinci Code* and Over the Hedge, were sold out. I suspect most people in the theater were there for the same reason, and were as a result marginally annoyed when no crazed Opus Dei members were hiding out on the Lido Deck, waiting to spring out and stab someone, and no huggable Garry Shandling-voiced turtles went ambling down the blood-drenched floors of the cruise ship's ballroom, which had so recently been the scene of New year's revels and was now turned into a hideous pile of limbs and sorrow.

Poseidon was not entirely unenjoyable as vacuous entertainment goes, though it is curious to note that Wolfgang Peterson, director of Das Boot, is now making remakes of campy 70s disaster movies. Here's a brief summary of the movie, for those of you who might actually get in to see a movie that you kind of wanted to see in the first place: a big cruise ship get hits by a big wave and flips over. Then, everyone dies but about seven people, and those people either die or don't die, depending on how much you want them to die. I will say that I didn't mind so much when most of the people didn't, in fact, die. This would have really bothered me in, say, The Perfect Storm, where I was definitely rooting for the storm five minutes into the movie. You get about five minutes of character development at the beginning of Poseidon, which is almost enough to make you really regret settilng for this movie, and then the wave hits, and people die. Kurt Russell is in it, too, and is surprisingly unannoying.

So, in summary, Poseidon is a movie.


*And yes, I hear your fevered cries: The DaVinci Code sucks! I'm sure it probably does. But I have to see it--it's got Jurgen Prochnow in it. And that guy from Bosom Buddies everyone likes so much.

Misanthropy in Small Doses

There's this show on TLC or Discovery or Home Surgery Channel or whatever called "Honey, We're Killing the Kids!" Being a supporter of well thought-out homicide in all its myriad guises, I was crestfallen to learn that this show is not actually about airlifting your children to a deserted desert island where you get to hunt them, Most Dangerous Game style. No, what's really happens on the show is that parents who let their kids eat big macs three times a day are given a frightening glimpse of how their children will look when they're forty if they continue down the road to gustatory perdition.

An elfin woman who looks like the kind of person who enjoys holding ding-dongs just out of reach tells them awful things until they cry, and then she sets about making their children eat cous-cous and wheat grass.

I think there are a couple of things that need to be discussed about this program:

one: These kids are horrific hellbeasts who really could benefit from a little killing, pimply little jerks who could be redeemed by the sorts of lessons that only the occasional cold-blooded murder can provide. They curse at their parents, cry when forced to drink milk instead of soda, and generally make a really good argument for sterilization.

two: The commercial for the show features a woman in line at the grocery store. She's complaining because her child won't eat anything but butter and gin. And hey, presto! the kid morphs into the forty-year old version of himself as he will appear if he keeps on eating and not exercising. The mother recoils from this hideous vision, this nightmarish visage before her, flabby and bald. Very effective for scaring parents, I'm sure, but what about the actor who's playing Cautionary Hideous Man in the commercial? How would you like to be that guy, whose very appearance can reform the eating habits of a generation, lest they swell and sweat into just such a shmoo-like atrocity?

I wonder what the audition was like?

Those Who Can't

When you're not updating your blog with japery and bonhomie of your own, remember always to link to the japery of others.

Case in Point: Tremble on balls

The mirror was an unnecessary extravagance, in my opinion, because I sincerely doubt I would need (or want) to see myself in a full-length mirror, wearing nothing but a hooded sweatshirt, t-shirt, and brown socks. It is not a good look. In fact, it's probably the second-worst look; add a wizard hat and it's officially the worst look. You should never be in a position where you're a wizard hat away from the worst possible look a man can ever present.

Words of Wisdom

When you're eating baby carrots, under no circumstances should you think about toes.

In fact, as a general rule, just don't think about toes ever.

*shudder*

Half and Half Nastiness

Is it so much to ask? I mean, I can overlook the fact that these half and half tubs mysteriously don't need to be refrigerated, and don't seem to go bad, well, ever. And the fact that they're called "Mini-Moos", while disturbing in the sense that it calls to mind liquefied baby cow, can be glossed over. But...I ask you,

Can we make a Mini-Moo that doesn't ejaculate all over my leg every time I open one?! For the love of God!

The Leprechaun Ladder

I know, I know. I've been gone a long time. A really long time. Like maybe so long that you were searching around for me, and you almost went so far as to look in the freezer and in the sock drawer, but you drew the line, because that would be a little silly. But I wanted to wait until I had something really trivial to discuss before I broke my silence.

And the thing is The Leprechaun Ladder.

Now, I'm not big into St. Patrick's Day, though I can get behind any holiday whose general thrust involves drinking lots of Guinness and Shamrock Shakes. The whole pinching thing seems a little gratuitous, but who am I to judge?

One of my neighbors has taken St. Patrick's Day to a weird new level: he's installed a ladder from his lawn to the roof of his front porch...and it's got little leprechauns climbing it. At least I assume they're leprechauns. They could be little green-clad James Brolins for all I know. And the ladder is one of those rope ladder deals like you see in pirate movies. So maybe they're pirate James Brolin homunculi?

But there are several two foot tall bearded effigy persons scaling the ladder. One of them may or may not have a knife in his teeth. And the one at the top of the ladder is just cresting the gutter. Would that not scare the crap out of you if you were a kid living in that house? Totally leaving aside any association with the fine Leprechaun series of films, just knowing that several unheimlich little green freaks are climbing onto your roof could really do a number on you. Like every day you pull up to the house and from the back seat of dad's Volvo you steal a glance at the one at the top of the ladder, and you can swear that he's higher than yesterday.

But your dad allays your fears, possibly by telling you that they are tiny roofers, wanting only to shingle and dance, with a tiny hydraulic nail gun.

It's odd is what I'm saying.

I can't wait to see what he'll have out for Easter. Maybe an Easter Bunny drum circle or animatronic stone-rolling-away-from-the-cave-mouth display.

Clockwork Dentistry

In my continuing quest to plumb the very depths of dental anguish, I visited my dentist to get three more fillings this weekend. Somewhere between novocaine shot 7 and 12, I noticed that the dentist was chatting with the dental assistant about music.

Apparently, the receptionist at the office had made some musical choices that were driving the dentist to distraction. He was telling the assistant how music these days is just noise, but he was quick to add that when he was a kid, his parents hated his music too. I thought that was well and good. After all, you want a rather staid, unhip dentist, don't you? I mean, you don't want a dentist who's going to be rocking out while he's repeatedly jabbing high-speed rotational devices into your gumline.

"Yes," he said. "The surest way to drive someone crazy is to play music they can't stand."

The assistant laughed.

"There was even a movie where they drove this kid crazy with music. He was a hoodlum. In a gang. And they drove him crazy by strapping him into this chair and playing music he hated. Beethoven. It's called conditioning. This gang kid would just freak out every time he heard Beethoven."

The dentist chuckled.

I was about to correct him, in spite of the fact that the right side of my jaw, my entire tongue, and pretty much all of my nose were completely numb. But, again, who wants a hip dentist? I don't want a dentist who understands Kubrick movies, or calls me his droog. I just want a dentist who's absolutely, and with no questions asked, going to stop drilling when I make a piglet sound.

That's the sum total of my requisites for the dentist-patient paradigm. Just stop drilling when I make the piglet sound.

Then, he dropped a drill on my head, and we all had a good laugh.

Falling

Some days have passed since my last post. The more perceptive among you might even call it a month. The Christmas season is almost upon us. I can tell because people in my neighborhood are trying to signal passing space aliens with their yard decorations. There are a lot of lights. I think I saw Mothra circling one particularly impressive display featuring some glowing Jesi. That's understandable, since Mothra has always been known to favor glowing messiahs.

So what has been happening in this long month of radio silence? I turned 34 in November, that's one thing. While it's true that birthday wishes may be a little late, it's never wrong to try to get in my good books.

The birthday was a memorable one. The wifely friend and I had a great dinner, drove to the not-terribly scenic Altamont area. Oh, and we fell two miles in one minute.

How that happened was that the night before my birthday, feeling fine and glowing like a million candle-power Jesus from birthday scotch, the wifely friend informed me that we were going skydiving. Now, this wasn't entirely unexpected, as I had mentioned in a sort of vague way that I had always wanted to try it. I'm not known for my EXTREMEosity in general, but I just felt like I should do something that involved being harnessed to another man and pushed from an airplane.

So we woke up early the next day, after a mostly restful slumber, and drove out into the boondocks. We checked in at the hangar, where a smiling woman told us we should go sit on the nagahide sofas and watch a terribly important video which would tell us why we were basically fools for doing this, and not to come limping back to them when we ended up, broken and bleeding, in the fields of Altamont. Really, if something goes wrong when you're skydiving, you're not going to be doing a lot of suing, or a lot of anything, so I don't know why you sign all those waivers. Unless one of the myriad forms they gave us was a solemn oath not to return to the hangar in an amorphous, non-corporeal state, and haunt the bejeezus out of the place.

The video was a guy who resembled a young Uncle Jesse from the Dukes of Hazzard sitting behind a desk and mumbling for half an hour. It was pretty noisy in the hangar, and I couldn't hear a word of what the guy was saying. But I figured it's pretty straightforward: This is really dangerous, what with the jumping out of a plane and all, but you probably knew that.

The day was quite foggy, so we ended up sitting around in the hangar for about an hour and a half. The hangar was full of skydiving guys. I don't know where these guys came from, but it was pretty clear that they were into skydiving in a big way. They were all standing around, watching Revenge of the Sith on a projection teevee, and every once in a while wandering to the doors of the hangar and grumbling. They couldn't wait to get up there.

I think a lot of them got into it for the clothes.

I thought parachute pants was just a term for ugly pants, but there really are skydiving pants. Kind of baggy nylon pants. One guy had en-fuego flamejob pants and a matching hat. Another guy had a jumpsuit with little batwings that unfurled when he raised his arms. They didn't mix much with us, as we lounged on a sofa, asking each other every two minutes "So, are you scared?"

I'm not going to tell you I wasn't scared. Mostly, though, I just wanted to get up there and jump.

And after an hour and a half, Anakin had turned into a Sith Lord, and the sky cleared. We shuffled out to the plane with our instructors, to whom we would soon be strapped, and boarded the very, very little plane. In a skydiving plane, there are two benches, lengthwise, in the cabin of the plane. You sit basically on the lap of your tandem jump instructor (hence the witty No Farting sticker on the wall of the plane). On the way up, something suddenly occurred to me: I'm in a plane, 10,000 feet off the ground, and the door is open.

The door is open!

When I'm on a normal flight, I often get thoughts like "I wonder what would happen if the door opened right now?" I always figured all the passengers would be sucked out to their certain demise. But no, it's just cold. And rather unnerving, of course. But we weren't stopping at 10,000 feet. No, we were going up to 14,000 feet.

And soon we were there.

I was first to go out the door...or rather, I went before the wifely friend. A bunch of the skydiving devotees who had come up for a dive went barelling out before us. These guys just can't wait to get out that door. I imagine when they fly on commuter flights, it's all they can do to keep themselves from running to the emergency door and launching themselves out.

The guy strapped to my back was a little shorter than me, which made the waddling dynamic probably very humorous as we wobbled to the door, which I will again remind you, was open. I had been given instructions when we were on the ground, along the lines of "lean your head back on my shoulder after we jump. Then we'll freefall for a minute or so. Make sure you wave to the camera." We had opted to get a DVD of our jump, to ensure that if we survived, we'd be able not only to bore people with the story aurally, but visually as well.

Then I was at the door, my toes outside the plane, wondering in a distracted sort of way why the instructor gets a helmet and I don't. It turns out, incidentally, that it's so, if he hits his head on the wing of the plane on the way out, he doesn't get knocked out and pull you 14,000 feet to certain death. There is no way for the jumper to release the chute, you see. That suddenly occurred to me as I felt the thin air buffeting me.

The instructor pulled my head back, so the video guy could capture my expression, which , in retrospect, was one full of despair and second thoughts. Then, I stuck my tongue out to say "Hey. No big deal, man. I'm extreme! ...Can we just go back in the nice plane and shut the door and--"

And my instructor began to rock me back and forth. One...Two...

Three! He pushed me out of the plane, and we were falling.

At least, I think we were falling. There's about zero sensation of falling, when you are free falling from almost three miles up. You're so high up, you could be rising, falling, going sideways. It's hard to tell. There's a few seconds there where you're accelerating exceedingly fast. Then, you reach "terminal velocity" and just stay at that speed.

My head was not on my instructor's shoulder. It was craned forward, looking down at the brown fields miles below. My mouth was open, in an expression that can only be described as AAAAAAA! Looking at the video now, I can see my face doing that great flapping thing that you see in astronaut movies, my open mouth filling with air.

It's hard to breathe in free fall. Well, maybe that's not the best way to describe it. there are two factors: One, your brain is totally overloaded by the fact that you are not standing on anything, that the ground is just unbelievably not there, and is in fact way, way down there, and you're seeing a pretty incredible view beginning to get larger, but slower than you'd think. Two, air is pushing into your mouth and nose very rapidly, so you're really inhaling the whole time. Exhaling is the hard bit. You have to work a little bit, and push the air out.

And I found myself going Woooooo! as we spun circles and continued our fall. Just like those turds you see on extreme sports shows. It's inevitable. The wifely friend, in the video, gives the double-peace sign, Nixon-style, for a good three thousand feet. She has no idea why.

I opted for the secret devil signs so popular at early eighties Motley Crue shows. Again, I have no idea why.

And then, after nine thousand feet of free fall, my instructor tapped my shoulders and released the chute, taking us from 125 miles per hour to 10 miles an hour in about a second. I was a rag doll. And we drifted down, looking at what view we could see on this somewhat cloudy day. I could see Oakland in the far distance, and the San Francisco Bay.

My instructor said "OK, I'm just going to loosen the harness a little bit here."

I froze. For just a fleeting second, the thought crossed my mind: "He's going to kill me. He probably does this all the time. He's going to kill me and kidnap my wife and live in Buenos Aires." And he loosened the harness, and I dropped just a little bit, and he didn't kill me. My testicles were very grateful for the loosening of the harness, by the way. That thing was tight.

He said "Now this is how you steer the chute. You pull on this strap to go to the right." He pulled the strap and we lurched sickeningly down in a spiral to the right.

My stomach quailed.

"And this strap to go to the left." Another spiral.

"Woooaaggggg!" I said, profoundly. this spiralling was making me very nauseated, which is kind of funny, since jumping out of the plane didn't bother me much. But it's the change from wafting gently down, to spiralling and picking up speed as you spin.

I've always had a problem with the spinning. I have gotten ill on the Teacups at Disneyland. Anything that spins you and makes you aware of a migration spineward in the internal organ region is not, well, my cup of tea.

"Can we not do that please?" I said, but I don't think he heard me.

"You try it now!" he said. And I did, spiralling and almost, but not quite, vomiting on him.

And then we were down. The ground came rushing up, and I grabbed my instructor and hugged him. A hug that expressed these things: thanks for not killing me there, you know with the harness thing; and that was the coolest damn thing ever.

And it was the coolest thing ever. If you've thought about jumping from a plane, preferably with a parachute and a sensible and non-suicidal individual strapped to your back, I am here to tell you that you should do it.

Unless you die. Then, you probably shouldn't have.