I’m falling. Falling at approximately one hundred and twenty miles per hour and my mind is racing. Six seconds earlier I was sat in a nice comfortable aeroplane at four thousand feet with no door and an engine that coughs like an old smoker after their first cigarette of the day. Quite frankly I feel safer where I am, plummeting below one thousand feet towards the all-accepting, immovable mother earth. My main parachute has failed to open. I have seven seconds before impact and the clock's running. Fast. Well, actually, I have about five seconds to make any meaningful decision about whether I live or die.

I feel I should explain. I’ve been a skydiver for about three years. Douglas Adams once called it throwing yourself at the ground and missing, I call it Russian fucking roulette and I like to play. Anything for that adrenaline rush, I just want to feel something other than misery, boredom and hatred. Hell, if I were a dog they would have offed me like they offed Old Yella long ago.
I’m a depressed, alcoholic, chain smoking, habitual drug user with little respect for you or anyone else. My doctor has me on medication for the depression; it tends not to mix to kindly with the non-prescription meds, if you know what I mean. I’ll admit it, I’ve thought about killing myself in the past; I’ve just never had the nerve to end it in a ‘conventional way’. I can’t be bothered with the ‘cries for help’ bit. I hate whiners. Pathetic bastards. You want to end it then fucking do it. I deserve to be six feet under but I never thought it would happen by accelerating though two hundred feet per second.

Four seconds.

I think I might be having what some people call a ‘moment of clarity’ or ‘religious experience’. Considering that I don’t believe in anything, never mind about the existence of God, I think I’ll go with the moment of clarity. It always appalled me how two-faced people are when it came to death. It’s strange how quickly they discover religion when they think they’re going to die.
For some unexplainable reason, I feel totally calm. There’s no adrenaline rush, no misery, no nothing. I don’t feel anything; it feels like I’m wrapped in one of those fluffy white clouds I fell through. Strangely, my mind is clearer than it has been in years. This is surprising; the six-pack of beer in the back of my chevy was all but finished off before I got onto that aeroplane. Just to take the edge off, you know?
I had asked the pilot to fly me deep of the drop zone just so I could walk back and have a quiet drink on the way in. Looking around, I’m miles from anywhere and about half a mile up from anything that looks familiar.
Graham, my drinking partner and pilot for the day has let me down, again. I should have known he would, he’s a bigger alcoholic than I am. Even though Graham and I drink together, he’s not a friend. Alcoholics don’t have friends. Most people joke about putting Vodka on their breakfast cereal, Graham does that for real. He told me he’d been woken up the other night having just pissed in his bed. There was blood. He seems to think that this will clear up given time. He had to have another drink to calm his nerves; he washed down two aspirin with it to clear up the bleeding. Fucking Idiot. I didn’t even bother telling him he should go to the Doctors, why should I? I’ve got my own problems to deal with without having to deal with his too.

Three seconds.

Maybe I should think about trying the handle of my reserve parachute again. The ground is looking damn close now. I’d tried the reserve handle almost immediately after the main one failed. Typical, the thing is jammed in tight and I can’t shift it. You see the idea is that we get the reserve or backup parachute packed every two months or fifty parachute descents which ever happens first. So far, it’s been over a year for the one I’m currently wearing. I’ve always been eager to get to the bar for that first evening drink or back to my car for a Joint with Graham and John rather than spend the thirty minutes doing the repack. It’s not my fault if no one checks up to see if I’ve been repacking the fucking thing. That’s John’s job. Useless bastard.
John, my boss, is the ‘CCI’ or ‘Club Chief Instructor’ he’s the guy that runs the drop zone when the owner’s off jetting around the world with his girlfriend, Jennie. Jennie, by the way, used to be my girlfriend. I guess she prefers the smell of money to the smell of stale cigarettes and beer. Fucking picky bitch! Never did trust her, not after that half-ounce of cocaine accidentally got sucked up into the vacuum, I mean, she thinks I don’t know that she stole it for her and the, what was then, secret man in her life.
My ‘job’, if you can call it that, is to train the unsuspecting first time parachute jumpers. We call them WUFFO’S. This endearing term comes from a phrase we hear a lot around here.
“Jump out of a plane! Wuffo?”
They must learn how to jump out of an aeroplane and survive. Hell, like I’m a good example at the moment. I live at the drop zone in a mouldy old caravan, it’s got nothing in it other than a single stinking mattress and a boarded up window.
As for a girlfriend, well, they’re more trouble than they’re worth if you ask me. It’s always the same,
“You drink too much.”
“Take a shower”
“Why don’t you shave more often?”
“Pay me more attention”
You get the gist, all that nagging just makes me want to scream, like I don’t know that I drink too much.

Two seconds.

If I survive this then maybe I should think about straightening my life out. I have no real job, no girlfriend and no sensible place to live. I could quit the drinking, I mean, I’ve done it loads of times before. It’s not hard is it? Okay, so you’ve correctly guessed that I’ve started drinking again, but there’s always been a good reason. Reasons I won’t bother boring you with, suffice to say it was always because of somebody else screwing me around.
Graham suggested we enrol in one of those twelve-step recovery programmes. Well, in my opinion, twelve-step recovery is for those pathetic whiners.

One second.

They say that you’re life flashes before your eyes just before you die. I wonder what I’ll see.
DAMN!