Goodbye Death Valley
A movie that I want to watch--or a story that I want to read, that is--is the story of a town out west becoming a Ghost Town. I want to read the journals of men and women coming to the realization that the jig's up--pioneers moving on, reserved to the fact that they'd spent a decade of their lives settling a town that now, it seemed perfectly clear, wasn't going to succeed. And now they were without anything but those essentials they could afford to bring along with them. Moving on from the ultimate failure.
Last night, amid the caroling and the drinking and the eating, we went up to 27, and compelled to do something special, Mikey, Alec, Tom and I climbed up onto the roof above their apartment to view the Oxford skyline. There's a pipe lining some wires or something that stands in the corner of two retainer walls. The way to get up onto the roof, then, is to shimmy up along the pipe, bracing one leg on one wall and the other on the other wall. It's insanely easy to get up.
Last night, we climbed up the pipe during freezing rain. So the thought was that it would be easy to lose your grip and slip back down the pipe. That didn't happen. What happened was my right shoe came off my foot while I was stepping up the right wall, and when my shoe came off, my foot slid up the wall, and so I did a back flip, falling off the pipe about two-thirds of the way up, landing dramatically on my ass. ...But I was ok.
Once on top of the roof, we spent about fifteen minutes chucking slushy snowballs at passers-by going down High Street. They'd generally look behind them and some yelled into an alleyway they thought they'd seen someone slink back into. That was about fifteen minutes of pure bliss.
Last night, amid the caroling and the drinking and the eating, we went up to 27, and compelled to do something special, Mikey, Alec, Tom and I climbed up onto the roof above their apartment to view the Oxford skyline. There's a pipe lining some wires or something that stands in the corner of two retainer walls. The way to get up onto the roof, then, is to shimmy up along the pipe, bracing one leg on one wall and the other on the other wall. It's insanely easy to get up.
Last night, we climbed up the pipe during freezing rain. So the thought was that it would be easy to lose your grip and slip back down the pipe. That didn't happen. What happened was my right shoe came off my foot while I was stepping up the right wall, and when my shoe came off, my foot slid up the wall, and so I did a back flip, falling off the pipe about two-thirds of the way up, landing dramatically on my ass. ...But I was ok.
Once on top of the roof, we spent about fifteen minutes chucking slushy snowballs at passers-by going down High Street. They'd generally look behind them and some yelled into an alleyway they thought they'd seen someone slink back into. That was about fifteen minutes of pure bliss.