They've all come to look for America

Hi everyone who still reads the monstroblog (there are people right?), I know I have not blogged in awhile but I have been fairly away from the technology. However, I am here, sitting at a computer on a keyboard that is not ergonomically correct and my hands hurt already because I am conditioned for my squishy turquoise/blue gooey pad that I had at school but I do not have here, in the Stanislaus National Forest. Anyways, I had a day off from camp on the fourth of july so I decided the best way to celebrate the 230th birthday of my country was to get 13,000 feet above it in a rickety-ass airplane and then jump out of it to try to see from sea to shining sea and fall towards the earth to envelope myself in the lands. So yeah, I went skydiving which was really tight. Me and two of my friends from camp drove for a little over two hours to Lodi (creedence clearwater anyone???) and pulled up to a large hangar with no windows that said "Parachute Center" on it. Inside was a scene totally identical to that terrible skydiving movie "cut-back" or something with Stephen Baldwin. A bunch of really macho guys in jumpsuits hanging out on couches in a totally self-sustainable hangar with fridges, microwaves, tv's, etc. I paid my 100 bucks (which seemed scarily cheap) and then the only not buff, 30-something guy in the place creaked out and said he'd be my tandem-jump guide. The old fart looked like he might die mid-jump but I went with it and also paid an extra 55 bucks for a guy to jump next to me and film me and take pictures. We went up in a teeny rickety plane and I was pretty calm because I knew that all I had to do was let gramps take me for a wild ride and then pull the chute and there wasn't much I could do about it except have fun. However, when the door opened something more primal took over, the urge from the body and soul that says, "you are only 22, why are you killing yourself" but I had no choice because gramps put my head against his shoulder and pushed us headfirst out of the plane. The first two seconds were the scariest of my life, the air was cold and I could not breathe and we were tumbling headfirst under the plane and then into a free fall and I have never been so utterly convinced that my end was near. Then we got our legs into position and put my arms into superman flying position and it became amazing. Here I was, one man, one body, plummeting at hundreds of miles per hour down through the atmosphere among the birds and planes, as close to flying as I might ever get (although i hear hangliding is tight). The cameraman linked hands with me and spun me around, I gave a thumbs up, it was really cool. Then the ground started getting closer and closer and we were going fast, my skin was pealed back against my face so gramps yanked the chute open and let me control us in for a landing on a lawn somehow magically right back where I left from. I landed and it had only been about 6 minutes but I felt special and new, I had become a meteor, an asteroid a piece of something only physics controlled. Then I felt a little nauseous, ate a combo meal at wienershnitzel and drove to Stockton (a true American shithole) for fireworks and a single-a baseball game between the modesto nuts and the stockton ports. They had a lot of beer specials and I sat on "home run hill" and overheard a conversation between two fellas about whether "Nacho Libre" had unseated "The Benchwarmers" as an American cinematic classic. All in all it was a good day. I'm off to Israel in less than two weeks for a month but having a wonderful time here so far, I hope everyone else's summers are rockin hard. go skydiving.