i manage to get no sleep, pretty much, and slither out of bed at 5.15. i get to work around 6. matt is going to drive him, joe britt, joey, shimazu and myself. in his rolls royce. yes! we hit the road. after a while, shimazu pulls out a tape of japanese music he brought along for us to check out. it strikes me that i've just gotten like 2 hours of sleep after a whackey cool geek bachelor party and i'm in a rolls royce cruising down the highway in the morning california sun at 6.30am on a saturday with some crazy japanese pop music pouring out of the tape deck. it's COOL. we start talking about japanese tv game shows. my favorige is "pie man," which is this guy who goes around throwing pies at animals. like, joe britt saw one with like an alligator - the dood snuck up on the alligator at like the zoo, then pegged it with a pie. it wasn't so hard. it didn't move a lot. when he went to try and hit the ostrich, that wasn't so easy. shimazu said he saw him peg a monkey once, and the monkey just let him do it, then proceeded to start eating the pie stuff. :) that's COOL.

we get to the airport/dropzone and get all ready to do the crazy tandem drop. we elect to go for the 60 seconds of free fall rather than the lame-o 30 seconds. our instructor dood is cool and it's cool, and then he puts on a video made by the guy who makes the tandem parachute get-up. it's a sort of disclaimer video. the guy looks like something out of zztop. my mind explodes slightly again. this is WHACKED.

we do the drop. it's COOL.

we're heading back and i say something like, "wow, i'm just looking forward to the rest of the day because it's been pretty COOL and surreal so far." so joey relates this story about how as he was going up in the plane he was talking with his tandem partner and she was asking him about his nose ring and stuff. there were some other folkz in the plane with them besides the tandem folkz who were going to jump first. one guy says something like, "yeah, and once you start doing that (meaning the piercings) you don't know where it stops." or something like that. then he points to his toes which are in sandals. his toenails are painted bright red. the guy is getting ready to hop out of the plane and joey asks him why he painted his toenails. the guy sais it was like a bet or something and he ended up liking it and so just kept doing it. a bit of time passes as the plane is getting lined up. just as the guy is about to jump he turns and says to joey, "actually, it's because i'm a big fag" and disappears out the door.

we go to the great mall. at some point matt brings up one of the all time best tv commercials ever made. "Folks, I don't want to get rich. I just love to sell guns."

-Jon.