RRC Archives

I'm gonna climb out my coffin when I'm dead. That should mess up some people.

krampus wrote:don't worry dipsi, some day we will share the walls again.

I'm working on that, and I'm holding you to it!

Jesse, you can't die till after I do, or I won't get my clean ride up Foxfire!

I'll see ya soon

Remember what is was like to be a kid? The future was pure potential and the world was divided into guys wearing black hats and guys wearing white hats. The moon frames Batman's impressive musculature for a moment during a Double Gainor down the side of a Gothic building toward a band of hapless miscreants doing malice in the street below. Wow, we would have loved to be Batman. The homo erotic power play that he had going on with the boy wonder did not necessarily have to come with the deal--but Batman rocked nonetheless! We grew up, but growing up did not happen in one go. At some point we realized that Batman was not real--he was definitely more real than Superman, but he was fairly unrealistic in any case. However surely James Bond as a role model was within our grasp. Unfortunately we held the vision of James Bond for even less time than we held the vision of Batman. The life of the mind conceded to academics then to the realities of the daily job. We gave up the Bat cave for the four walls and fluorescent lights of an office and we gave up crime fighting for the heroics of trying to meet a construction deadline.

Climbing recaptures a bit of Batman or his symbolic logic/ algebraic equivalent. It really may be as simple as this . . . . for me.

I hear ya caribe, when I think of the stupid shit i did at the gorge when I was 15 I shudder. Now I get the same excitment only i have a rope attached to me.

I've been climbing for too long to pin it down to any one explanation;

Over the years it has served many different purposes for me: a way assert the fact that I was different than the assholes who played "normal" sports in high school, a way to overcome fear, to meet people, to meet people who don't think golfing is a sport, to while away grueling Illinois winters (at the gym),to find the Zen thing, to have an excuse to drink WAY too much beer at camp later that night, to get phenomenal views, and to have an excuse to travel for hours in stupendously under-equipped vehicles to reach "famous" crags, only to discover that the rock sucks and you can only buy 3.2 beer unless you want to go face-to-face with a COP with a GUN and you looking all hippie stank in Birkenstocks and knowing that he can smell the fact that you haven't had a shower in the better part of a week and don't really care...

In short, I climb because it has become intrinsically linked to the person I have come to think of as ME, and it's good damn fun besides.

Cheers,
~Jay