It was a dark and stormy late-night party.
Beer was ponged. Girls were danced. Grammatical conventions against passive voice were ignored.
At some point between tipsy o’clock and half-past wasted, my friend took a Sabbatical from his beer-chugging just long enough to articulate a highly intelligent thought: “Let’s go gorge jumping!”
There is some BAC level at which everything sounds like a good idea. And this was an awesome idea.
So, we woke early the next afternoon (about 2pm) and waddled into my car (I was the only one who hadn’t been drunk) and drove to the exotic land of Cornell University. Along the way we passed wild farm cows, naturally occurring hippies, and Ithaca College, which is apparently the second-highest ranked college in the area. Out of two.
Once we had parked, we followed the sounds of blatant disregard for local ordinances until we came across a mighty flock of twenty-yr-old toddlers, splashing and swimming. Occasionally, they finished their beer, and splashed and swam in the water as well.
“You’re not going to jump from the highest cliff, are you?” a stranger asked me. She was a Female, as you no doubt surmised from the first word of this sentence, but she also looked great in the several square inches of what comprised her bikini, reminding me of the Number One rule of overcompensatory masculinity:
“If a pretty girl says you shouldn’t do something because it seems scary, do it.” -Bro Logic
So, tightly flexing what someone with a microscope might eventually classify as my abs, I hiked up a swarm of beer cans and beer bellies to the very top of the highest cliff. Nothing but 65 feet of solid air and the Stupidity Threshold between me and the cool waters below.
(Stupidity Threshold, noun: The amount of Stupidity it takes to cross the Point of No Return)
My jaw metaphorically dropped, doing several flips before hitting the water.
“It’s too far! You could die!” the pretty girl implored me, but of course, what she really meant was, “If you don’t jump, you’ll never see me without my swimsuit.” This would probably never happen anyway (exhibit A, “Are those goosebumps or his abs?”) but nonetheless her unspoken point was as clear as the water that lay 65 feet below me.
My jaw dropped literally, mostly because the rest of me had also dropped literally, mostly because I had taken a running leap off the Stupidity Threshold.
My life flashed before my eyes, as I remembered all the other times my life had flashed before my eyes, which of course slowed down the current moment exponentially.
Several centuries of regret later, I struck the water exactly the way a feather wouldn’t.
We continued jumping and swimming for the rest of the afternoon, until I was so sore I would have used a Genie’s three wishes on a sling, a wheelchair, and a training bra. At this point, we departed and ate some delicious burgers from Jack’s (it’s not product placement if it actually happened) and some great bubble tea from KungFuTea (also, I’m pretty sure you have to be paid for it to be product placement.)
The moral is: America spends way too much on birth control. Why spend a fortune for a vasectomy when you could just fall into a lake without crossing your legs?
I’m W King Iceberg. Follow, share, and prosper.
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