Jerm’s Insanity

You’d be wise to watch out for air traffic. Really. I mean, you’re talking about the busiest airspace in the world, and it may be a big sky, but it’s not THAT big.

No shit, there i was, deftly piloting a small aircraft down the Hudson at midnight on a mission to buzz Lady Liberty. I swear we made the night watchman spill his coffee on the flyby. And to think my Dad used to give me shit about ‘wasting’ money playing Afterburner.

NYC really is quite breathtaking to see at night from 1500 ft, especailly in a small cessna where one can take their time and actually take an extrended gander at the glittey brilliance beneath. We tried to make a full circle around Manhattan but La Guardia ATC wasn’t having it, so twice around The Statue and back up the Hudson we flew.

And yes, i really did fly the plane for 95% of the trip. I even managed not to hit any mountains on the way home, thus avoiding the need for cannibalism.

“One day suddenly,you receive 12 UCHU- guided bombs. What do you do?
‘Suicidal explodion’ game with new feelings. Blow up self to involve enemies! ”

Sound like engrish? You win! Or at least, you can play. Every extend is this truly silly, easy to pick, and maddeningly addictive game that Ravage turned me on to. It’s quite simple, really.. you use the arrow keys and the ‘z’ key….. that’s it, and the openling line pretty much sums it up, it’s all about involving enemies.

The site is in Japanese, and the archive is in lzh…. to save y’all the trouble, i’ve repackaged it as a zip file here. I dunno if it’s the new snood, but it’s sure tough to put down… the games are short, but that makes it easier to justify “just one more……”

hence my consciousness at this hour.

hence the damning

g’night

shiiit. it like dis, yo. see, i be gettin’ one o dem g-mail accounts from my homey, dig? So now it sayin i gots like fo (4) o dese things ta distribute amongst my peeps. fo shizzo?

anybody down?

peace.

I’ve grown accustomed to your face

I have not recently become single, one of my dearest friends has. After a mere 3/4 of a year she ended what was otherwise a great relationship except for the large lack of attraction to the other person. These things had been discussed along the way, resolutions had been attempted, but in the end, you just can’t make yourself want someone. I’m happy and sad for her. He was a nice guy and treated her really well, but as these things often happen, he’s just not for her.

Breaking up is hard to do

I say was a nice guy onaccounta the raving, near-stalking maniac he’s seem to become ever since she dropped the axe. Scathing emails, voicemails, phone calls have been salvoed. Allegations of infidelity and betrayal have been slung, and general venting of spleen has been performed. All aimed at my dear friend who, bless her heart, really tried to make things work and, when they didn’t, attempted to make the break as amicable as possible. I say this rather confidently as, although i don’t know any of the exact details, having not actually been there for any of the parting of ways, i was once privy to her swingblade and was quite mercifully done in (see above about “one of my dearest friends”).

Most relationships of a romantic nature lend to giving of oneself, hopefully from both parties. We share our time, our money, our feelings and a certain amount of accountability with the other person. Your milage may vary, as all relationships are not created equal, but this seems to be the general formula i’ve often been witness to. This is all well and good and has given rise to ideas of “give and take”, “share and share alike”, and “What’s mine is hers, what’s hers is hers”. The problems i’m on about, or will be by then end of this run-on, come about when one person takes all that sharing for granted and fails to see the boundaries therein. To wit, when the average relationship comes to a close, all of that sharing goes out the window, especially the mutual accountabiity. Questions like, “where the hell were you?” and, “oh, were you with so-and-so?” are rarely acceptable in an unbroken relationship, and certainly have no place kicking around in the ashes of one. Yet some people seem to take their hurt and anger from the breaking of bonds and impose an even greater expectation of the other’s responsability to them.

My friend, unfortunately, has fallen victim to this as well. The phases mentioned above are but a few of the more tame she’s had to endure as of late. And yet this buffon insists that she is the one in need of counseling for not knowing how to handle a relationship. *sigh*

Climbs up on the soapbox

Now, i’ll admit that in the past i’ve failed to take some breakups very well, but even in my darkest mewling moments i’ve never had the audacity to bludgeon my former partner with such utter bullshit and disrespect. It pisses me off it does, gets my panies right in a bunch.

If you take anything from tonight’s ramblings, let’s remember that when our loved ones hurt us, it’s generally not intentional, and that they’re probably hurting as well. And if you ever really did love this person, you should have the decency to let them go peacefully. Begging to be taken back is one thing, making demands upon them is another…. it’s no longer any of your business if they don’t make it so.

So i bought the bus. $1000..er… i mean $1 Mr tax man…. bought me a 1986 NYC bluebird schoolbus. It had already been rennovated once by the previous owner. All of the seats save the driver’s were gone. Most of the windows had been covered-over. The interior wallks had been wired with 120AC outlets, insulated, covered with luon and painted. The floors were covered with lenolium, and a kitchen counter and bookshelves had been built.

Oh yeah, and it ran. It made it to florida and back, but i’m getting ahead of myself.

So i got this great bus and started making my own modifications to it. I ripped out the bed frame that was there cause, well, it sucked, and built my own. I used my patented “elevate the bed” building technique to add storage space underneath, while still leaving enough headroom for recreational activities. I built storage cubbys, an entertainment center, hung shelves and put down carpet. I put a 27″ tv, a 13″ tv, wireless internet, 2 computers, UPS, stereo, dvd/vcr, a couch, full-size mattress, microwave, toaster oven, refrigerator, and a playstaion2 into the bus and lemme tell you, the thing was cozy. People would hesitate to come visit, then be flabbergasted by the hominess and comfort within. I even put a frikkin DSS dish on the back.

Truly, when not in driving mode, it really felt like a tiny apartment rather than , well, a bus.

By the time i got all of this done, it was getting rather cold in NY, so we moved down to Florida for the winter.

Elaboration: Remember that nifty new girlfriend i mentioned in an earlier post? Yeah, well, i had no job when we met. I then started living in a bus. She then quit her job, gave up her apartment, moved into the bus with me, and ran off to florida with no particular prospects for employment. For future reference, consider how her family must be feeling about me at this point, and keep it in the back of your mind for a while.

You’re probably thinking, “wow, what a stud-muffin he must be!” but please, let’s keep those thoughts restricted to private emails

Anyway, we took it to florida, needing only a change of tire and alternator belt, and had a rather nice winter there.

The cookie crubmles

After looking around my site a bit, one would probably muse something like, “Gee, this site is so magnificantly hoopy that this jerm guy must be quite the techno-weenie. ”
Well my loyal listener, that’s a kind thought, but allow me to tell you what a lame-assines i’m capable of. I took a couple of pictures of the bus when i forst got it, still with stuff that needed to be cleaned out. And i have a picture of the outside of the bus from when we were in florida. This would-be techno-weenie, however, despite plenty of access to various digital cameras and owning at least 2 film cameras, completely neglected to get any photos of the bus’s exquisite internal comfiness before we ripped everything out to move into the new place.

Please, feel free to join in the flogging.

sweating, woozy, dizzy, ready to pass out — maybe puke….. my friend had me sit down and splash some water on my face and the back of my neck. Mere moments earlier i’d been standing above a fallen brother, holding his parachute over him to block the heat from the sun while the paramedics cared for him. No one on the scene saw how it started, only how it had ended — a friend tumbling end over end. The end of it didn’t look that bad, people land poorly all the time and often the tublesault. No one thought anything was wrong until they saw him not getting up. It was at this point that i heard a commotion and looked up from packing my parachute to see the what was up. I knew immediately who it was and that things weren’t good. There were alreay people on their way out to help him — people much more knowledgeable than i — so i held back, what could i possibly do but get in the way? Fuck that… that’s my buddy out there… i ran out, if only to be there for him, afraid of what i’d find when i got there. He didn’t look so bad, really. At least, not as bad as i knew he could have looked. Even so, there lay my friend, disoriented and in pain, baking in ths sun with people surrounding him. I picked up his parachute and held it over him so he wouldn’t roast — at least i could do something.

So he was in pain. Pain is good though… means he still has feeling. His back hurt, his arm hurt, his leg and foot hurt. That’s top to bottom, a good sign in a sick way. He could remember his name, but not his birthday, ir anything that had just happened — probable concussion — not so good. We have some medically trained staff on the DZ… a couple of EMTs at least, maybe a paramedic. They were there, tending to him as best they could. They got him out of his gear an onto a back-board, and soon the town medics showed up with the ambulance to take over and take him to the trauma center.

About this time is when my vision started to blur and i felt sick. I’m sure a large part of it was from overheating, parachute fabric doesn’t breathe, you see, and i’d been wrapped in it out in the prime-hours sun for 25 mins. I’m equally sure the rest was from seeing my friend like that. We’ve been jumping together for a couple of years now, we had made a jump that morning.

i started to walk away with another friend and that’s when i had to sit down…. i took a break after that…. had a gatoraide and a muffin, trying to mellow a bit. The ambulance had gone, and his (long time) girlfriend was with him. He was well taken care of. I finished my snack, walked back to the school, and continued packing my parachute. 40 min later i was back in the air with a student, flinging myself out of a plane and back onto the horse.

Mark has a long list of injuries. Fractured neck, back, broken hip, pelvis and ankle, plus a concussion. He’s got a long road to recovery ahead of him, but he’ll heal.

Later on that day I personally witnessed 3 more really close calls within a 20 minute time-span, all of this was enough to frazzle me into stopping jumping for the day and find a beer.

Now, Mark made a mistake, a couple of mistakes really, and ones that i don’t think i’d have made even before this happened. That’s comforting to an extent, and i’ve had friends hurt themselves far worse due to their own fuckups before. Even so, it’s always been when i wasn’t around, so it was kindof abstract, even in their hospital rooms. There’s something much more real about it when you’re there, standing over your broken buddy, doing your damnest to keep the sun off him cause it’s all you can do. Gives one a bit more pause. Even so, it’s still easy to file those into “i won’t make that mistake” categories, cause i try my hardest to learn from other people’s mistakes.

The near-incidents later on are almost more disturbing…. cause they’re not an individual fuckup. They would have been someone taking someone else out. I can keep myself from making those mistakes, but i can’t keep those around me from making them, and that’s the scary thing.

It also scares me that i do all of this w/o any sort of health insurance. Getting hurt would suck, sure, but chances are i’d heal. The issue, beyond the obvious huge financial burden, is the quality of care one is like to receive. Oh sure, they’d fix me up, but maybe if i had insurance they’d put a plate on the break instead of just a cast….. a cast doesn’t cost as much, and should heal it well enough, right? ……

Still, given all of that, it’s stupid amounts of fun, and i’ll continue to do it. Plki has his donor-cycles, Nate rides down rocky trails and mind-bending speeds, and i have this.

We’ll all get hurt, and we’ll all die eventually, i know that. Still sucks to see it, and i’m glad i saw the lesser of the two this weekend. Maybe that’s a sucky closing, but i’m done now.

Today i’m making good on my promise to inform and sedate my failthful fanbase (hey, it’s MY little section of the net, and i’ll imagine it however i want to… if that means insisting that the hit counters are broken/aligned against me, so be it… i’m a bloggod, damnit!!) with details, blurry as they may get presented, of my pre-communal-living existance.

It all started out when i wan born a poor black child on the bayous of easten Pennsylvania. I ate my collard greens and grew up to be an unemployed IT professional in up-state NY. As i’d jsut paid off my car and my credit cards and arranged to half my rent, i was in pretty good shape. My elligabiltiy for the 405 club made this situation exceedingly less grim, and i proceeded to enjoy the summer as a fine upstanding drain on society. About 2 months after i moved into my friend’s loft, we had to move out onnacounta his having pissed his landlady off. I put all of my stuff into storage set up a tent at the local dropzone, slept on friends’ couches during inclemant weather, and became a nearly-full-time dropzone bum. This was all well and good for the summer, but as the weather started to get colder i decided it was time for a less fragile dwelling. PLUS i’d just gotten a new girlfriend, and though chicks dig the tent, there’s nothing like a fly ride to chill in.

Thus began the era of the bus

It was a lovely day, i had done 3 tandems, i was packing my rig in preparation for whatever Joe threw at me next… and then he threw it, “Jerm, you’re on a 10 min call.” I looked down at my only-half-packed rig and considered the fact that not only did i need to finish packing and get my gear back on, i also had to meet, train and suit-up my student on that amount of time, a daunting list of tasks to say the least.

So i grabbed another rig, turned on the CYPRES, checked all the pins and handles and trotted over to meet my student.
Turns out (my student) Joe had jumped a few times before. “GREAT” i’m thinking to myself, this’ll be easy. So I get his harness fitting properly, get myself geared up and head out to the plane with the rig that i’ve never jumped before.

Joe wants to do backflips out of the plane. Now, i’ve done backflips out of the plane on numerous occasions, sometimes even intentionally, and i’ve seen tandem guys do tons of them. Problem is, i’m still a relatively young tandem guy, and am not feeling entirely comfortable about doing an exit that isn’t completely stable. See, although i have a decent number of jumps and am quite good at keeping myself stable, and getting unstable and back again, it’s a lot tougher when you have 200 pounds of stupid strapped to the front of you. Nothing against joe, mind you, but even with a couple of tandems under his belt he has no clue about stable body flight and how to recover from nasty situations. “BUT”, i think to myself, “he HAS done this before, and knows how to arch, and will surely do so when i tell him to, so… as students go, he’s probably the ideal non-skydiver person to try this with.” I’m not entirely sure how i talked myself into it, i guess i wanted to please the customer. Really though, i was nervous, i just didn’t feel right about this jump. I briefed him several times on the plane ride up to altitude as to what we were going to do. We got to the door, exited, flip, flip, ARCH, came out of it, kinda sideways, still spinning a bit… kinda tough to control, ahh.. fuck. I got relatively under control and tossed the drogue. Probably wasn’t as stable as i should have been, but we weren’t flippy or anything, and i was worried about the torque and the momentum that we already had. Everything went fine for the rest of the freefall.. his body position was so-so, but it didn’t matter at that point.

So, pulltime came. He was heads-up on the altitude, but a little slow on the pull so i pulled for us… *WHACK* the canopy slammed open and i looked up to check that everything was ok. Except that everything wasn’t ok. I looked up to see a bow-tie shaped canopy above my head that was beginning to spin. Seems one of the brake lines of the canopy had gotten around front of the parachute and, well, that’s bad. I tried to fix it but ended up getting us into even more violent of a spin. Nearly 1600 jumps i’ve gone without a canopy malfunction, and there i was, reaching for my emergency handles. Everything went as it should, i released the main parachute, and almost immediately the reserve came out perfectly. We landed w/o further incident.

I’ve been told by tandem masters more experience than myself that students are almost never aware that anything odd even happened when they have malfunctions, but my student, having done jumps previously, know something was up. I told him what had happened, and once we landed, he rolled over — still attached to me — and embraced me as much as he could, thanking me profusely.

A profound experience it was on many levels… scary, exhilarating, reassuring, gratifying.. a weird mix of emotions. There was certainly a lot of adrenaline.

Once i got to the packing area i was quickly questioned about what had happened, and told i was scheduled to be on another plane in 20 mins. I finished packing for myself, and went about my business.

This, dear friends, is why i pack for myself. For all the goofy stuff that i do when i pack that scares experienced onlookers, it all works. I’m in no hurry to jump someone else’s packjobs any time soon.