Skydiving

Somewhere in the dim, dusty reaches of the back of your mind is this thing called “common sense.” Common sense is one of those virtues — like Prudence or Chastity or Obeying the Fire Code — that has very little to do with the way you act but a great deal to do with the way you feel about it afterward. Common sense is what crawls out the next morning and asks “Why did you do it?” or “Why didn’t you do it?” or “Why did you all do it at the same time?”

That is, it does if you’re lucky. If Fate cancels your next morning, though, then you can’t even feel about it afterward.

Jumping out of airplanes is a great way to get yourself cancelled real quickly. If something bad happens there is no opportunity to feel common-sensical about it except in those thrilling few seconds between you and the ground when you realize that you’ve checked out of life’s motel and left fifty years back in the room.

And so the cautious souls — those of us whose minds consist mostly of dim, dusty reaches — have to write things like this that you can study beforehand. As a Public Service, therefore, we present another installment in the Things Not To Do While series.

Do Not, While Skydiving:

Walk the Dog

Except for poodles, dogs do not like to skydive. Their limited doggie intelligences fail to perceive that it is a proper and joyful thing to jump needlessly out of airplanes and fall terrifying distances to a seemingly inevitable, and somewhat gooey, death. (Poodles, as is well known, are insane. Pitching poodles out of planes is a joy for both them and their owners.)

In addition, there is in the course of a skydive no place to stop, let them do their business, and leave it behind. The result is that their business, after they do it, tenders to linger about them — and you — until you reach the ground, whereupon it splatters most alarmingly onto more or less everything.

Enjoy the View

Skydiving places (a.k.a. Merchants of Death) and aerial photographers have spread many myths about the sport. One of them is that skydiving is a way to get a magnificent view of all the pretty trees, or pretty mountains, or pretty Indian reservations, or whatever. This is misleading and dangerous. The only things you should look at during a skydive are: your equipment, to make sure it is in order; the door of the plane, to make sure you don’t hit your head on the doorframe and knock yourself unconscious; the air straight ahead of you, to make sure you don’t move your head or arms and start tumbling, from which you probably won’t recover; your altimeter, to make sure the parachute opens when it should; the handle that opens the parachute, to make damn sure it opens when it should; and your feet, to make sure that you land properly. Looking at the scenery is not on the agenda.

Gargle

Cf. the discussion of dogs. The problem is not the gargling; you can manage that. The problem is what happens when you spit.

Make a Will

At first glance this seems a perfectly logical and reasonable thing for a skydiver to do. A quick holograph could solve a lot of problems 1400 feet later. But there are too many drawbacks.

After you’ve hit the ground the will may not be entirely easy to decipher. You wouldn’t want the pieces to be put together wrong and leave your money to the animal hospital and your collection of designer pooper-scoopers to your spouse (or vice versa).

There is also the problem of “testamentary capacity.” Proving that you didn’t have it is normally hard. A history of airplane-leaping, especially accompanied by other evidence of deviant behavior (and with this group that generally goes without saying), would make it much easier. In that event the rules of intestate succession could apply and your estate would pass as follows:

1) your estate’s lawyer

2) your creditors

3) [there is no 3]

XXX

You know what we mean. Sure you do: male and female skydivers, nature takes its course. . . get it? Well, don’t try it. First, except for ASU graduates, it takes too long. Next, there are a lot of other reasons but we’re not sure what they are and at any rate this publication has standards, you know.

Think

This is the secret of skydiving. The less you do of this, the better. Good skydivers are so well disciplined that they hardly ever do it at all.