This Is This

I wonder, just in the back of my mind (which I find is the best place to do wondering), if half the people who do extreme sports would still do them if there were no people watching.

A colleague of mine the other week asked how my weekend was. I think I finished grouting the bathroom, but I just said it was fine and finished making coffee.

“Yours?”

“Oh,” he said, “I went parasailing,” he said.

He added the “oh” like it he had just remembered how extreme he was.

“Wow. Is that the thing where you run with the parachute off the hill?”

“Yeah.”

“Where do you do that?” - even though I wanted to end the conversation by saying “Sugar?” and when he said yes I would have said: “Course you do man - you crazy fucker.”

“Oh, Brighton,” he said.

“Oh.”

“You get good thermals there.”

My only experience of thermals are really thick pants with legs on them, which I would probably wear if I were grouting on really cold days, but I could tell that he wanted to talk about it and maybe in the process gel the nickname he’d been trying out all weekend. “H-Dawg”, or possibly “The Howster”. No, he was Howard from advertising.

The retorts stacked up in a holding pattern in my head.
 
Unimpressed: “Oh, the thermals. Me and the wife sometimes go there just for the thermals.”
One upmanship: “You paragliders really piss me off, you know that? I can’t fly my glider anymore because you guys always bogart the thermals.”
Insulting: “I didn’t get out myself. I was having a threesome with both your mothers.”

But we spoke a bit and it was interesting, but I wonder if he would have done it if no one would ever find out.

Whenever something else is branded an extreme sport, there are people putting grouting on hold to line up and put their necks and bathrooms on the line for a good story on Monday morning and a picture on the their wall at home.

If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does the sound even matter?

For the next twelve posts, there’s going to be a comic strip for you to follow every day. Yeah, a Funnies section. I’m branching out. Look at me - watch how I’m all branching and stuff.

Also on This Is This
Redemption Songs: Shawshank meets Broadway - big numbers include “Painting the town, Red” and “Get busy living”
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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 6th, 2006 at 11:14 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or leave a comment yourself.