garbage bags make fine parachutes… – 10/20/2000

My name is Ben. I am a boy. Being a boy, I am subject to boy things. Most of those are dependent on “Boy Logic”.
Boy Logic is a tricky little line one must cross on a daily basis in order to survive the experience.
this is the first and best example of BOY LOGIC:
when i was all of six years old, my father bought me a plastic paratrooper. it was a poorly molded little thing, with a parachute made of a piece of plastic, about the size of a sandwich bag. i would wad the chute into a ball and with all my might toss it into the air.
nine out of ten times it would crash headlong into the ground, like a stone. but there was that one glorious event when it would fall gracefully to the earth, and that meant there was HOPE!
for boys, hope is the fuel for the imagination. the imagination is food for the mind, and the mind is a terrible thing to waste!
in a furry if creative genius, i sat in my back yard for seven hours trying to puzzle out the way i might be able to do this.
his parachute is plastic, mine needs to be plastic.
a sandwich bag! i then noticed that his strings were….
string. i needed string. shoe strings!
after three hours of painstaking labor, i leapt from my second floor window with a sandwich bag strapped to my back!
i awoke two hours later trying to figure out why mine didn’t work as well as his did.
once again i sat in the back yard, holding a rag to the open hole in my brain, to stop the bleeding trying to figure it out, then it hit me! he was able to wrap himself in his parachute. mine needed to be much bigger, about the size of a…garbage…bag? could it be i had discovered the true secret of controlled decent?
out the window i went again! i marveled as the garbage bag billowed with air! i then screamed in horror as i say it rip in two, letting in the sun light which thankfully blinded me, so i couldn’t watch the ground hurtling towards me a mach 9.
when i awoke again, my father was standing over me, frowning. “Before i beat what little bit of your brains are still IN your head out, i have to say one thing.
next time try two hefty garbage bags and some duct tape, it worked for me..”
that’s when i discovered that failed experiments carry a heavy price. but i also realized that i was not the only slave to genetics in the world.

Log in to write a note