Hold it Up

If someone knew they would get away with a bank robbery but still wouldn't do it, I would never date that person. That sort of integrity rarely leads to honesty, at least not the kind I like.

There's a guy, his name doesn't matter, and his claim to fame is that he's always flat out truthful. Blunt about it. "I'm looking at your breasts," seemed to be his most common thing to admit, or at least something physical/sexual in nature. Which is fine, it's what I'm thinking about most of the time, too, but why is it that bare honesty always seems to revolve around admitting something sexual? Are there things we lie about more than sex, or how often we're thinking about it, or how we'd really like to be having it? I'm sure there are, but at the same time I'm not so sure. I think that, to some degree, it's the easiest type of thing to admit. There are some aspects/secrets that people genuinely don't want to tell, but sex never seems to be in that category, who isn't dying for that perfect social situation where everyone is TOTALLY DISHING about how hot it was and what could've made it hotter. It's pretty fun.

Sexual taboo is, at best, a white lie. We seem to be dovetailing away from the Victorian modes of "chastity," which only served to create new, far more intense fantasies and a handful of effective putdowns (i.e. bastard). Why it is we hate our own behavior I'll just never know, there are so many other ways to be obsessed with sex, but some people can't seem to get enough of what they hate. But I suppose it makes sense. Even if people are doing something you absolutely abhor, there's still (or at least should be) a part of you that's insanely jealous that they're doing it, and noting inspires jealousy like the sex you're not having.

I'm looking at your breasts.

Afterthought

I mean, think about it, all the good and holy people out there, how could they know of their own saintliness had not every evil thought in the world at one point entered into their mind? Evil is a stranger to no one's mind. If you wonder just how cruel a human can be, look no further than yourself. You'll get there someday.

Hey, don't worry, it goes for niceness, too.

Asshole.

Really Swell

As CA looked down at the ground, he couldn't help but project what he saw in his head, and he could see it just as clearly as if it was being projected. This was a talent of his. He knew of others who had sponges for brains, whose eyes would search the landscape for any trace of filth or indecency, and they would soak it all in, saturate that little sponge they kept up there, and when their head was full with more reality than they could bear, they would wring the sponge until all the shit came flying out of their mouths. A wider arc of disbelief than there was before. How worthless to only collect the things you despise, and even more worthless still to force them on unwitting strangers.

He wasn't careful about what entered into his head at all, he wanted to think about everything. The trick is to always keep enough clean water in your body to dilute the toxins that will inevitably seep in. In his head, which served as a recycling facility for what he had seen each day, he would sort out what mattered, what was beautiful, and what fascinated. Anything that didn't suit him, he tossed aside. For those who believed in rights and wrongs, why did they bother trying to keep track of them? Wasn't there someone waiting at the end who was already doing a much better job of it? Certainly the point of the mountains was to so distract us from good and evil that we might accidentally meander into neutrality. Why have no landscapes been canonized? These things he would hold up within his head, in front of the light that shone from his eyes, and he would project it out for all to see, so that they could know there were still plenty of good films out there, so many objects just dying for a private screening. His eyes are projectors of the most whimsical matinee if you'll only sit and watch.

My Basket

Chad had a few water pistols in the balloon, a huge heap of blankets, some decent whiskey, sake, and port, some ginger ale, no tools whatsoever, thirty feet of rope, vegetarian beef jerky, fine silk thread, a few DVDs of M*A*S*H, his laptop and a few spare batteries, a pair of exceptional headphones, four speakers mounted to the steel bars connecting the basket and balloon, a lovely scarf, a picture a friend had painted him, paper, pens, glue sticks, a poncho, and a sack of Italian pastries.

Height 2

What happens when you wonder about the rest of your life every day? Those with a fairly long commute know the answer to that one. But wondering about your life while you're thousands of feet up in the air is very different from wondering about it on the ground, we're still talking about height. You can see farther. You can't see any clearer, but the distance is there and it is difficult for this not to have some effect on your mind. If you are with someone significant, it is something quite beautiful. If you are alone then you will feel even more so. Down there, there's only so much empty space you can see, and there's nothing to gauge it relative to. But up here it's not like that at all. Up here is like watching all the ribbons fall out of a girl's hair, like seeing all the second hands on every clock in the world, you can't speed up an epoch. The Stone Age, the Brass Age, the Iron Age, none of those exists up here. It is just the sky and you, and you start to wonder about the actuality of the sky, since it's just layers, no sky, just space, light bent off atoms that are somehow different during the day and night. This is why Chad kept so much alcohol in the balloon. If you're in an unknown band, it can become difficult to go to other, more successful bands' concerts because of how jealous you can become. In the sky, it's difficult to stay sober or happy because of how insignificant you become, and you figure that if you really are just some blip then why not have a drink. Blipping Around the Basket, or babsing, is what it was known as, at least among those who suffered. There was also the danger of blipping out of the basket, but that signified an idiot more than it did a drunk.

Height 1

In the sky are usually more hot air balloons than Chad can count, many of them unwittingly owing their transportation to the Doldrums we talked about before. Autumn is a season between fall and winter that never ends and is more common than both. It was from all the hot air balloons that it formed, wind currents began to determine seasons more than the calendar, and it's always cold up there, impossible not to bring a bit of autumn down with you, what's a wicker basket but a tree with no leaves. The icy flowers might be a result of the balloons, too, they confused the burners for the sun, tried to grow with just that light, it looked like the real thing from where they were. But even if you're in the basket directly beneath the flame it isn't that warm. Chad thought of warmth in terms of analog and digital. It took him a long time to accept that Graceland was a good album due to its sterile-sounding production, felt the guitar sounded too wishy-washy. But sometimes smooth 80's studio sounds work out well, like when you're proudly walking to your car, or when you learn a moral, such as when Bob Dylan's song Most of the Time played in High Fidelity. You think about these things in a balloon, when you're just in a basket, when your altimeter is broken. You catalogue things and make lists, just as you're different people at work and home, so too are you on the ground and in the air. From the air it's easy to consider the Golden Age, whatever your version of it may be. My own father once asked "What is it about height?"
I didn't know at the time, couldn't answer him specifically. But there is something about it, it's tough to rest your head on your fists and look out the window of a basement apartment, who wants to spend their life watching shoes go by. Up in the air is the closest we get to time freezes and postcards, we can suspend any notion of death (except our own) when we're high enough that we can't see life. Once when I was in the air, I saw a huge flock of birds, and geese, too, all fly out in front of me and I realized that was it. I had seen so many photos, clips of exotic locations, and there is always that flock of birds that flies indiscriminately through the frame, they are, apparently, what signifies a location as the Place to Be. This is because when we see them, we don't see a generation of birds, ones whose parents have died and whose children will outlive them. Instead we see that flock, the one in all the pictures, those very same birds that travel frame by frame across paradises the world over to let us know when we've arrived. Every day it becomes even more tempting to shoot at them, I can feel my rifle across my back right now. But hey now, I don't want to be a showboat, even though I am a crackerjack shot.