My first skydiving experience
Sunday, Dec 5th, 2010So there I was, bolting down from the sky, a lightening bolt searing towards the earth at an unthinkable speed.
And the lightening bolt is a metaphor. Meaning: this is not some fancy-pants poetic narrative in which the speaker is a personified lightening bolt. I was not literally a lightning bolt, which are things that do often fall from the sky as opposed to, say, humans which do not often fall from the sky. In the rare cases that humans do fall from the sky, they are equipped with parachutes that release after the strap is pulled the first time, or second. Or fourteenth.
I don’t know. It is difficult to keep count at such high altitudes. Especially when you are a soft and doughy sack of flesh encasing a terrified human consciousness, hurtling towards the earth at terminal velocity in the strictly literal, non-metaphorical sense.
I was a literal human being, vastly differing from the personified lightning bolts sometimes found in poetic narratives. I was alive. Meaning: I was about to die. Literally. This really happened to me yesterday. No, not really.
Wha?
You my friend, have just fallen prey to a clever writer’s ploy to hook a reader with a completely fabricated personal experience. I have hooked you right?
Reader? Hello?
Are you there?
Why of course. How else could the reader still be reading this.
Good. Err. About yesterday: The truth. Because, as clever of a writer I am, I am also a very honest writer. I’m super sincere. I even have the unique habit of signing my letters and emails with the word ‘sincerely’ ™.
So let’s get to the crux of it then. If I’m not daringly jumping out of airplanes and hurtling towards the earth at terminal velocity, what am I doing with my life?
What non-fictional personal experience might I share that might rouse a reader’s interest?
That’s the question I asked myself when I sat down to write this blog post.
That’s a question I have been unable to answer, unfortunately. Which leads to this rather boring and pathetic ending to a blog post that began rather excitedly.