The Reel Rock movie show made it into Perth tonight. Kindly organised and presented by Rockface, for once we had a movie festival unpolluted by mountain biking and kayaking. Yay! The main theme seemed to be "crazy dudes". CRAZY DUDE #1 found a Canadian cave covered with ice stalactites, bolted it one year, then came back next year to find the bolts with a metal detector, clean out all the free hanging death ice and tool it to the top doing figure fours in fruit boots. CRAZY DUDE #2 buddied up with some two frozen brained buddies and climbed Gasherbrum II in the middle of winter, in -40C temperatures and high winds. CRAZY DUDE #3 wobbled his way across a 100metre slackline above a 300metre abyss, without a security rope, naked, and then base jumped off. CRAZY DUDES #4 and 5 speed climbed The Nose in 2 hours and 45 minutes, shaving a whole 20 seconds off the previous record. CRAZY DUDE #6 makes a living teaching a 9 year old child how to climb bouldering comps and V12 in Hueco Tanks...she just needs to stop crying when her fingers hurt.
Hey, there just could be a common thread there. Like, someone is trying us to get all motivated to rush out and kill ourselves, and others, which is actually not very commercially astute as the only good customer is a live customer! What happenned to the olden days of mags pumping out reams of pages about clipping bolts on ultra safe 5.14s? Or toproping gritstone to death and then soloing it? (called "headpointing")
Or maybe this was just about expanding our horizons...or to make us feel inadequate....or to motivate...or to destroy...or to whatever, take whatever the fuck you want out of it. Life does not need to have a deeper meaning. Just do it. You may die a bit sooner, but you know what? You'll die anyway. Crazy, no?
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