On being thrown from a great height

There's an sci-fi movie from 2012 called Dredd, and in the future world people huff a drug that slows your perception of time to 1 percent of your everyday experience.

It's set in a giant apartment skyscraper, and every floor is lined with an open air walkway that looks out into a huge atrium. And if you pissed off the bad guys, they would pump you full of the time slowing drug then throw you off the tallest floor's balcony so that you feel and know you're falling for all that extra time before you die. It's pretty horrible, which is why the people who do it are the bad guys. Until the hero does it at the very end to the boss bad lady. But the boss bad lady was a bad guy, so it's supposed to be kind of fine. but also the movie is based on a comic book set within a caricatured dystopian fascist 'law and order' state, so you never exactly root for Judge Dredd in the sense of him being one of the good guys. Because he's not.

Anyway. Sometimes it all feels like someone forced the time drug on me and threw me over the balcony railing. And now we're all falling down toward the atrium floor so slowly but inevitably

even though we're actually falling in real time. But that doesn't matter because it all feels so incremental and we still can see the floor beneath us—ahead of us—getting bigger. Like the floor itself has a life of its own, one in which it grows out in every direction without ever stopping. Like a two-dimensional tumor. And gravity will eventually try to merge us with the floor until the physical boundaries that constitute us rupture and spread across the immutable boundaries of the ground.

You get it. Painfully watching the momentum of the world build beyond our control, forcing us all towards an end that is almost assuredly unavoidable. But it's not always the end. You don't always die from falling so far, from falling so long.

it's true i just googled it.

A Serbian flight attendant named Vesna Vulović survived falling 33,330 feet. In 1972, a briefcase bomb exploded in the plane the was on, and everyone plummeted to the earth. She landed near Srbská Kamenice in what was then Czechoslovakia. Vulović broke three vertebrae, both legs, some ribs, her pelvis, and fractured her skull. Was in a coma for a few days, then spent months recovering in the hospital. Temporarily paralyzed, but she eventually made almost a complete recovery except for walking with a limp.

You know the wildest part? She couldn't ever remember falling,

and she wanted to go back to her job as a flight attendant but the airline company thought everyone would be weirded out if she was on their plane. So they stuck her behind a desk for the rest of her career there. Which is odd, when you think about it,

since any plane with her on it should statistically be one of the least likely planes to crash, right? If anything, people should have paid extra to be on the same plane as Vesna Vulović.

But she worked at that same airline company until the early 1990s, and then she was fired for taking part in anti-government protests against Slobodan Milošević. But the government never arrested her, because of the bad publicity it would bring them—you can't arrest the world record holder for cheating death, right?

So instead they ran a smear campaign against her. Tabloids said the plane was shot down by a Czechoslovak missile, and they said she actually didn't fall as far as people claimed.

Anyway, she continued her political advocacy work until she died in 2016 at the age of 66. She said she didn't necessarily think about the crash every day of her life, but whenever she did she felt survivor's guilt.

Guilt over something so miraculous, over something she couldn't even remember in the first place. and i wonder how that must feel. Would it be worse than the sensation of falling in slow-motion,

of being pulled down by the universe and knowing it all the long while? i wouldn't dare to presume. all i know is it's all a descent—not necessarily in the sense of steadily worsening. but it's all trajectories guided by the physics of motion.

Sometimes you are painfully aware of it. And sometimes you won't even know it happened until they inform you of your improbable survival.

(((EC)))