My Hawaiian Adventure
I was playing at my spot on Bourbon Street on Friday night.
It was after midnight and a man came along and asked me “How do you play chords?”
He said that he had just started to learn the guitar, and was having trouble with playing chords.
I gave him a quick tutorial, the essence of which was to play scales in every conceivable order and pattern; and to play arpeggios; and this would train the same muscles required to play chords and help him to position his hand and wrist to facilitate them…
He dropped 20 dollars in my case and we continued to converse…
He said his name was Archibald Meriwether,* CEO of Meriwether Global Enterprises*, and that he was in a predicament.
He had just purchased a small private jet from someone in town, expanding his fleet to 3 of them; and had made arrangements for a pilot friend of his to fly it back to his home in Hawaii, as he returned on the one that he had flown in on.
The friend had not been in contact with him; and Archibald had to be back in Hawaii for an important conference the next morning. The plane also had to be out of the hanger and off the private airstrip by the end of the day; or he would have to pay an exorbitant fee to lease the hanger for another entire year; a hanger that the plane would never be docked in… It would save Archibald more than a million dollars if he could get the plane back to Hawaii that night.
“It doesn’t even require a trained pilot…the thing literally flies itself…” mused “Archibald out loud. “All you do is punch the coordinates into the computer and the laser assisted guidance (LAG) takes over as soon as you are within 200 miles of your destination…” “You could fly the thing, given a few simple instructions!” he said to me. “You seem intelligent enough…”
Then, like the proverbial light bulb coming on above his head, he had an idea.
“I’ll give you a grand when we get to Hawaii, if you’ll just sit in the cockpit and babysit the thing. AA regulations stipulate that there has to be a human aboard; unless you have registered it as (a drone, basically) and that requires all kinds of red tape…”
Well, I figured that Archibald was just drunk on whatever he was sipping out of his plastic cup, and talking nonsense.
Archibald was drunk; but we were soon at the private airstrip which took about 2 hours to drive to in his rented SUV.
I was soon 40,000 feet in the air, moving 8 miles a minute, like in the Bob Seger song, and the plane was flying itself.
I poured myself some of the Glenlivet 18 year old scotch which was in the bar and just sat back and enjoyed the flight.
I saved a couple hours by crossing through several time zones, and it was about 9 in the morning when the autopilot actually informed me in a sonorous recorded female voice; that “we” were beginning our descent to the island.
Suddenly, I heard a strange screeching noise coming from one of the wings.
The plane started to vibrate like a washing machine spinning an off-balance load. An acrid smell filled the air along with smoke which began to thicken in the cabin as I felt the temperature climbing to an uncomfortable level.
I downed the rest of my scotch and made a run for the parachute pack which Archibald had shown me to be located in an overhead rack (“You won’t be needing this but…Just in case!” he had said with a hearty chuckle and then patted me on the back).
The plane felt like it could come apart at any second.
I opened the hatch and was just getting one of my arms under a strap on the parachute pack when something exploded and I was blown out of the plane.
The parachute and I became separated; and I found myself watching helplessly as it floated, but I tumbled downward.
I could see the coastline; almost under me and thought how unfortunate it had been that the plane couldn’t have made it just a few more miles… “I guess I couldn’t ask for a more beautiful place to die,”
I was sure that I was a goner.
Well, just as they say that life holds no guarantees and that tomorrow is not promised to you, I guess the converse is true that having no tomorrow is never guaranteed either, because…
I landed right on the crest of a wave, which was breaking on the shore.
It was one of those big “pipeline” type of waves which attract professional surfers worldwide.
A strong gale had altered my angle of decent so that I was traveling in the same direction as the wave.
A lone coed from the University of Hawaii who was surfing was the only witness and later described what she saw as: “He just fell out of the sky!”
I hit the crest of the wave, crashing through it and breaking my fall to a degree.
My body went through about 4 feet of the water and then through the pipeline and made a second impact against the underlying water which was angled just right to further slow me; and then the roiling motion of the surf was enough to put me into a spinning motion, much like the martial artist who is taught to break a fall to the ground in a similar fashion.
The impacts knocked the wind out of me.
I was underwater and being spun around so that I lost all sense of which was up or down.
Holding my breath was not an issue because I had had all the air knocked out of my lungs. All I could do was hope that my buoyancy would bring me to the surface; or that the wave would wash me onto shore.
I felt something grab my right arm and pull on it.
My head broke the surface and I was staring at the most beautiful woman that I have ever seen in my life. She was sitting on a surf board.
She helped me to drape my body across her board and then started paddling toward shore. That is when I lost consciousness.
I came to sometime later to find that I was lying on my back in the soft sand and the young lady had her lips locked to mine, apparently attempting to give me CPR.
When she felt me stir, she pulled her mouth off of me and I took a deep breath. “Thank you,” I said.
She helped me to my feet.
I looked around and saw not another soul on the beach.
It was just myself and this beautiful coed with blonde hair and sky-blue eyes, an amazing figure, and a surf board, which had yellow and green stripes and the initials: “B. R” monogrammed upon it; and nothing else for as far as I could see in either direction, except sand and surf.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
“Well, better than I would be if you hadn’t come along,” I said, with my best boyish grin.
I was about to ask her what the initials B and R stood for. I was thinking that her name was probably something like Bridgette Remington (she kind of looked like one).
Then, as if the life and death drama which we had just lived through together had awakened a primal passion in each of us; without exchanging a word our lips met again.
Only, unlike her attempt to give me C.P.R., there was a hunger in the way she kissed me.
I felt a response rising up in me like the swell of an incoming wave…
“We need to get you out of these wet clothes,” she said in between panting breaths; and started unbuttoning my shirt, which clung to my sinewy body. There was urgency to the way she almost tore the shirt off of me.
She pushed me down upon her surfboard, preparing to mount me..
I landed right upon that fin thing that surfboards have. Hard.
It felt like it split me in two along my butt crack...
As I writhed around clutching my groin; Bridgette asked for the second time "Are you alright?"
The mood having been spoiled; we shook hands and parted as friends, after adding each other as contacts in our phones and promising to friend each other on Facebook.
What was left of the plane had careened off the top of a Synagogue, sideswiped a Mosque; miraculously cartwheeled over a Baptist church (where the King James Version of the bible is used); and came to rest with its nose through the wall of a Catholic Church.
No injuries were reported in the local morning paper, The Pineapple.
Archibald apologized to me about the plane, handed me the thousand dollars and a ticket back to New Orleans on a commercial airline.
And that was my weekend...
I'm a little bit jet lagged, but, will be back playing on Bourbon Street tonight; business as usual....
I'll use the money to get a Micro SD card for my Android, so I can post pictures on this blog from it; amongst other things...
 |
| First Picture Off Of Android Phone |
I was playing at my spot on Bourbon Street on Friday night.
It was after midnight and a man came along and asked me “How do you play chords?”
He said that he had just started to learn the guitar, and was having trouble with playing chords.
I gave him a quick tutorial, the essence of which was to play scales in every conceivable order and pattern; and to play arpeggios; and this would train the same muscles required to play chords and help him to position his hand and wrist to facilitate them…
He dropped 20 dollars in my case and we continued to converse…
He said his name was Archibald Meriwether,* CEO of Meriwether Global Enterprises*, and that he was in a predicament.
He had just purchased a small private jet from someone in town, expanding his fleet to 3 of them; and had made arrangements for a pilot friend of his to fly it back to his home in Hawaii, as he returned on the one that he had flown in on.
The friend had not been in contact with him; and Archibald had to be back in Hawaii for an important conference the next morning. The plane also had to be out of the hanger and off the private airstrip by the end of the day; or he would have to pay an exorbitant fee to lease the hanger for another entire year; a hanger that the plane would never be docked in… It would save Archibald more than a million dollars if he could get the plane back to Hawaii that night.
“It doesn’t even require a trained pilot…the thing literally flies itself…” mused “Archibald out loud. “All you do is punch the coordinates into the computer and the laser assisted guidance (LAG) takes over as soon as you are within 200 miles of your destination…” “You could fly the thing, given a few simple instructions!” he said to me. “You seem intelligent enough…”
Then, like the proverbial light bulb coming on above his head, he had an idea.
“I’ll give you a grand when we get to Hawaii, if you’ll just sit in the cockpit and babysit the thing. AA regulations stipulate that there has to be a human aboard; unless you have registered it as (a drone, basically) and that requires all kinds of red tape…”
Well, I figured that Archibald was just drunk on whatever he was sipping out of his plastic cup, and talking nonsense.
Archibald was drunk; but we were soon at the private airstrip which took about 2 hours to drive to in his rented SUV.
I was soon 40,000 feet in the air, moving 8 miles a minute, like in the Bob Seger song, and the plane was flying itself.
I poured myself some of the Glenlivet 18 year old scotch which was in the bar and just sat back and enjoyed the flight.
I saved a couple hours by crossing through several time zones, and it was about 9 in the morning when the autopilot actually informed me in a sonorous recorded female voice; that “we” were beginning our descent to the island.
Suddenly, I heard a strange screeching noise coming from one of the wings.
The plane started to vibrate like a washing machine spinning an off-balance load. An acrid smell filled the air along with smoke which began to thicken in the cabin as I felt the temperature climbing to an uncomfortable level.
I downed the rest of my scotch and made a run for the parachute pack which Archibald had shown me to be located in an overhead rack (“You won’t be needing this but…Just in case!” he had said with a hearty chuckle and then patted me on the back).
The plane felt like it could come apart at any second.
I opened the hatch and was just getting one of my arms under a strap on the parachute pack when something exploded and I was blown out of the plane.
The parachute and I became separated; and I found myself watching helplessly as it floated, but I tumbled downward.
I could see the coastline; almost under me and thought how unfortunate it had been that the plane couldn’t have made it just a few more miles… “I guess I couldn’t ask for a more beautiful place to die,”
I was sure that I was a goner.
Well, just as they say that life holds no guarantees and that tomorrow is not promised to you, I guess the converse is true that having no tomorrow is never guaranteed either, because…
I landed right on the crest of a wave, which was breaking on the shore.
It was one of those big “pipeline” type of waves which attract professional surfers worldwide.
A strong gale had altered my angle of decent so that I was traveling in the same direction as the wave.
A lone coed from the University of Hawaii who was surfing was the only witness and later described what she saw as: “He just fell out of the sky!”
I hit the crest of the wave, crashing through it and breaking my fall to a degree.
My body went through about 4 feet of the water and then through the pipeline and made a second impact against the underlying water which was angled just right to further slow me; and then the roiling motion of the surf was enough to put me into a spinning motion, much like the martial artist who is taught to break a fall to the ground in a similar fashion.
The impacts knocked the wind out of me.
I was underwater and being spun around so that I lost all sense of which was up or down.
Holding my breath was not an issue because I had had all the air knocked out of my lungs. All I could do was hope that my buoyancy would bring me to the surface; or that the wave would wash me onto shore.
I felt something grab my right arm and pull on it.
My head broke the surface and I was staring at the most beautiful woman that I have ever seen in my life. She was sitting on a surf board.
She helped me to drape my body across her board and then started paddling toward shore. That is when I lost consciousness.
I came to sometime later to find that I was lying on my back in the soft sand and the young lady had her lips locked to mine, apparently attempting to give me CPR.
When she felt me stir, she pulled her mouth off of me and I took a deep breath. “Thank you,” I said.
She helped me to my feet.
I looked around and saw not another soul on the beach.
It was just myself and this beautiful coed with blonde hair and sky-blue eyes, an amazing figure, and a surf board, which had yellow and green stripes and the initials: “B. R” monogrammed upon it; and nothing else for as far as I could see in either direction, except sand and surf.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
“Well, better than I would be if you hadn’t come along,” I said, with my best boyish grin.
I was about to ask her what the initials B and R stood for. I was thinking that her name was probably something like Bridgette Remington (she kind of looked like one).
Then, as if the life and death drama which we had just lived through together had awakened a primal passion in each of us; without exchanging a word our lips met again.
Only, unlike her attempt to give me C.P.R., there was a hunger in the way she kissed me.
I felt a response rising up in me like the swell of an incoming wave…
“We need to get you out of these wet clothes,” she said in between panting breaths; and started unbuttoning my shirt, which clung to my sinewy body. There was urgency to the way she almost tore the shirt off of me.
She pushed me down upon her surfboard, preparing to mount me..
I landed right upon that fin thing that surfboards have. Hard.
It felt like it split me in two along my butt crack...
As I writhed around clutching my groin; Bridgette asked for the second time "Are you alright?"
The mood having been spoiled; we shook hands and parted as friends, after adding each other as contacts in our phones and promising to friend each other on Facebook.
What was left of the plane had careened off the top of a Synagogue, sideswiped a Mosque; miraculously cartwheeled over a Baptist church (where the King James Version of the bible is used); and came to rest with its nose through the wall of a Catholic Church.
No injuries were reported in the local morning paper, The Pineapple.
Archibald apologized to me about the plane, handed me the thousand dollars and a ticket back to New Orleans on a commercial airline.
And that was my weekend...
I'm a little bit jet lagged, but, will be back playing on Bourbon Street tonight; business as usual....
I'll use the money to get a Micro SD card for my Android, so I can post pictures on this blog from it; amongst other things...
This post is dumb and so is the "read more" thing. For the longest time I was just assuming you were writing really short posts. I'm sure it chases potential donors away.
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