Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Time to stop vomitting...Ch.1

It ain't easy living here. Up above the trees and all. There's not a single woman to look at, for one thing. And the only TV station I get is the hardware store channel--that's 24 hours of documentaries and news programs about plywood and allen wrenches.

I live in a hammock. In a hammock village that hangs 400 feet above Reston, Virginia. No one's sure how the hammocks stay up--we're all still trying to figure that out. We're still trying to figure a lot of things out. Like how the fuck we got up here, how we might eventually get down (if we ever want to), and what we can do to get another TV station.

It's not as scary as you might think. For a couple days I was afraid to look at the earth. I tucked myself into the center of my hammock, clutched the sides with my hands, and stared into the sky without blinking or thinking. But eventually I stopped worrying about the hardness of the ground below me. I started talking to Talbot, who had a hammock ten feet away from mine, and I learned everybody fears the ground when they first find themselves up here. But everyone inevitably adapts. "You's gonna miss the women," Talbot told me. "But you's sure as hell ain't gonna miss yo fear uh heights."

After our first conversation, Talbot flipped me a cigarette--the tobacco was bright orange. Then he jumped off the back off his hammock, grabbed onto the netting along the bottom, and with a quick flip of his wrists he sent himself flying through the air. A few seconds later he landed safely on a giant pair of scissors floating a hundred feet away.

"Yep, sure gonna miss the women!" he yelled back at me, laughing. "Dat's about all, though!"