BEYOND PARKOUR

(My WP buddy, BlueInThisLight, posted a “parkour'” experience recently, and)

We all, all of us,

have, haven’t we? traveled REALLYfast THROUGHtime &SPACE, perhaps instantaneously, at least once.

I read “Mitch the Singing Cowboy”s remembrance of performing parkour as he was chased by a 2700-pound bull when he was 10 or so years old.  A spark (or, if you don’t think my clouded mind has the necessary ingredients for combustion, perhaps something akin to even a primitive form of pre-ignition) went off in my head.  There was an occurrence in my life where I, and a friend, translocated instantaneously several dozen yards when we felt our lives were in danger.

“Allow me to explain.”

I used to study paranormal and psychic phenomena, and the term “translocation” meant the ability to move one’s body instantaneously from one location to another.  That sort of thing …. could have …. happened to me, and a friend, once.*

Kevin and I and the rest of the high school track (and field) team had just finished a workout and, like cows back to the barn, went to shower in the locker-room.  There were more athletes than shower spigots available, and Kevin and I wandered out into the hall to go to the girl’s locker-room.  Now, this was usually a ‘safe’ thing to do, as the girls did not (as far as we knew) use the locker room at this time.  There would be plenty of room, hot water and soap, and we’d saunter back to our lockers, dripping clean and wet, without having to wait our turn.

If memory serves, I don’t think we brought towells, so cavalier were we in our sense of security and mastery of our corner of the universe.  Showering complete, we went to open the door from this locker-room into the hallway …

We heard laughing chattering happy girl’s voices, lots of them.  The locker-rooms were across the hallway from each other, down a corridor accessible either from outside or down from an interior stairway.  To make matters even more scary, the boys locker-room door was ten or so yards closer to the stairs than the girls door.  The chattering and laughing intensified.  We saw the first pairs of feet appear at the end of the hall, coming down from where the hallway framed the descending stairs.  Kevin and I froze, giving each other brief piercing stares of sheer terror as our immobile and electro-shocked brains went into hyperdrive in an attempt to assess the situation.

The next thing we knew, we had instantaneously zipped flippulated willed ourselves back to OUR locker-room, panting and out of breath.  The shock of our experience must have been etched deeply in our faces.  Fred “Smokey” Barnes, the team’s affable genial giant state-ranked shotputter, wrapped a towell around his bounteous middle and sauntered out into the hall.

He came back later, laughing, and said that the dozen or so girls had “seen something” out in the hall.  They claimed that they heard two sets of doors slamming loudly, with a flesh-colored streak connecting the audible dots.

I don’t know about you, but if you were a geeky pale skinny guy with low self-esteem, this was as close to outright humiliation, setting the stage for many weeks of school-wide ridicule, which we had, apparently, narrowly escaped.

*I will attempt to contact the other party involved.  We were bestest of friends for many years, and for reasons (or no reasons at all) unknown to me, are not, anymore.  Never-the-less, “in the interest of science” I shall endeavor to send THIS STORY to him, whose name is Kevin, though we all called him the affectionate nick-name of “Slum” back in those halcyon daze — to ascertain if he remembers this, and, if so, is his memory congruent with mine.

Please log on to blueinthislight.wordpress.com and read a recent essay about bulls not liking children.  Mr. Blue, IMHO, describes an experience in which he utilizes “parkour” even though he did what he did at the time without a label as to what he was doing.