I love it when my friends are viral...

My friend Brian wrote and stars in the sketch below.  Please enjoy.  Please share.  Please make him famous because he deserves it.

To the believers and the non-believers

Regardless of your faith or lack of it, I would really appreciate it if you took a moment upon reading this to send a good thought/wish/prayer out for my friend Kim who is having to eat one of the world's biggest shit sandwiches right now and does not deserve it.  

And send a really, really bad thought/wish/prayer out for whomever thought up cancer.  Thanks.

Improv Monologue Project

Costa Rica

As with any cruise, I suppose, the ports cam

e fast and furious for some time and it barely seemed like I had time to breathe before we were in another city in another country.  It’s kind of miraculous to go to sleep on the wide open ocean and wake up to 

find that the engines have stopped grinding and there’s a brand spanking new country just off the side of the boat.  It’s odd.  Beautiful, but odd.

Our transit through the Panama Canal took all day, the day after we left Cartagena.  The captain narrated our transit, so my plans of sleeping in and catching the tail end of the canal were thwarted by loudspeaker.  After walking up to the aft deck and watching the Queen Victoria enter the canal behind us, though, I was glad to have been awake that early.  W

e beat you, Q.V.  Suck it!  Off and on throughout the day, I’d sneak up to the top decks to watch our progress and made it back out on deck to see the last lock open to let us through.  I must have stayed out too long, though, because as we passed under the Bridge of the Americas, I was a very deep pink. 

We had big plans for Costa Rica…  A group tour into the rainforest for an entire day of zip lining through the rainforest canopy.  We arrived in Punta Arenas and hopped aboard a bus to travel about 40 minutes out of the city.  When I was talking to friends about this particular trip, I had mentioned that the only way th

e day could be more exciting was if we were able to ride horses.  Immediately upon getting to the start point of our tour, we noticed a paddock full of horses and were told that our zip line tour would also include a 20 minute horseback ride.  I was stupid happy.  Like stupid toddler happy.  I clapped and hollered “YAY!” an awful lot.  Moreover, my irrational tendency towards magical thinking was unfortunately reinforced.

My horse, Blanco, was ill-tempered and rather keen on appearing to work hard while actually slacking off pretty hard core.  While others’ 

horses were surging ahead and getting into petty biting fights, I was in the back of the horseback pack for the entirety of the ride, where I was privy to our guides’ scintillating conversation about cell phone plans.  My rudimentary Spanish helped me to understand that one of our guides really wanted to buy a new phone, but his old one had more memory and a better camera.  Um, yeah.  Glad I overheard THAT.  Blanco responded to none of my encouragements, in either Spanish or English, and was perfectly content to do whatever the hell he wanted to do.

The zip lines, all 25 of them, were incredible and took us through the rainforest canopy.  Halfway through our nerve-wracking downward flight through the rainforest, we stopped at a waterfall with an idyllic pool beneath the falls.  Walter, our deceptively boyish and clean-cut guide (he was a screaming maniac on the zip lines, despite his affable smile and jug ears) asked us if we wanted to swim.  Before he had finished his sentence, half of us were stripped down and cannon balling into the gorgeous water. 

By the end of our journey, we were tired, hungry and dehydrated.  We took desultory photos on the side of a road, waiting for the bus.  We had zip lined through the rainforest, we had swum in a waterfall, and we couldn’t even smile for the camera because we had a deep case of the crabbies.  Sometimes, when your life is an embarrassment of riches, the tendency to behave embarrassingly emerges.  We sighed like privileged brats when the bus showed up to take us back to the zip line base camp (or perhaps it was just me) and rode in silence back up a mountain.

Back at the top of the hill, we sat down to a simple, gorgeous meal of fish (or, chicken or the ambiguously described “meat”) and watched the big birds of prey swoop down from the tall trees into the valley below.  Like avian yo-yos, they rose and fell, soaring on the air currents, and I was very, very content. 

So it happened that this day, amongst a group of genial folks that had been almost strangers to me prior to our excursion, was one of the best that I’ve ever had.  Adventure and peace and beauty and travel and fun and horsies…  I am a lucky, lucky woman.

A quote from Melville:

“And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.”  

Now, I don't have the hubris to say that I have a Catskill eagle in my soul, but I do acknowledge that the little brown sparrow of my soul has been given the chance to soar like one at times, and for that I am grateful.