(no subject)

I was tired when I got home at six-thirty yesterday evening so I went to bed around seven. I figured I'd get up at four o' clock or so with a little over eight hours of sleep. Instead, I woke up at eleven and felt too awake to easily get back to sleep. I slept again at twelve and woke up at five after snoozing the alarm clock a few times. I still feel tired. No fair.

Also, I dropped stuff three times during my morning routine, including a full cup of water on the bathroom floor. Today is going to be a winner!

Getting high (up).

I got out for lunch and ate another Subway sandwich today. Ham and turkey, cheese, lettuce, pickles, and olives. Mustard and vinegar. I could do worse as far as healthy, and I'm eating less in general lately anyway. Gotta be in shape for climbing up to the heights of abandoned buildings.

Or, for that matter, parking garages. Like the two I found wandering around the nortwhest Loop today. I haven't worked my way up to active building infiltration yet (though I plan to eventually). To be honest, I was a little nervous about walking around inside a parking garage I wasn't patronizing. Keeping in mind my grandfather's "screw it!" philosophy, I decided to go for it.

The first one I entered was seven stories tall. I walked into the elevator alcove behind a door off the street and hit the button. Soon enough, I was wandering around on the roof, looking down into the theatre district to the south, and onto the L tracks to the east and north. I watched a few trains traverse the junction fifty feet below and was giddy with the excitement of the open air. Then I noticed a taller garage just across the street to the east. Of course I decided that was my next destination.

The same process got me to the top, where I looked out over the edge with mixed elation and anxiety at the people seeming to crawl along the sidewalks below. The L tracks and rolling stock looked like a model railroad. I had an excellent viewpoint on some neat bits of architecture from up there, and I spent a few minutes trying to decide if the building to the north was Art Deco or not.

The feeling of looking out over a cavernous gap is like nothing else I experience. Rationally, I know I'm perfectly safe. Emotionally, I have an irrational fear that I'm going to suddenly go careening over the edge. That somehow my legs will just flip up and around from under me and I'll be falling.

I have a little bit of that fear when I'm sitting on the balustrade over the Chicago river eating lunch, as I've done the last couple weeks. Looking at my foot hanging over a drop of a couple stories to the water's surface is a touch dizzying. Even though I'm sitting down with my back against the bridgehouse that anchors one end of the barrier, in as stable a position as I could hope for, I still find myself reaching out to touch the wall behind me from time to time. Just as a gesture of reassurance that I won't suddenly pitch down onto the wooden pilings.

At the top of the garages, though, the height is much greater. As I lean up against the waist-high concrete at the edge of the deck, I can rarely keep my head out over the street for more than a few seconds as my head fills with visions of the barrier tipping over off of the structure, carrying me down to death. Sometimes I even have fleeting thoughts of jumping down to land somewhere on the ground, or on the roof of a nearby building.

It's a strange sensation, and one that I've always had. Working on the catwalks and weight bridge sixty feet over the stage at the theatre in Kenosha brought up the same feelings. It was less so as I got used to the space; at first I couldn't even bring myself to walk out over there. After a while, I was climbing portable ladders up to the headblocks and stringing new lines for curtains.

I once read a Star Trek novel where there was a mention of something called 'rapture of the deeps' that would affect new crewman. A feeling of wanting to throw yourself from great heights that had lead to cadets running into the viewscreen on the bridge. Google searches for that term only bring up info about nitrogen narcosis in divers. But doing more Googling brought to me to things like a woman's account of being fearful that, for no reason at all, she'd jump from the Golden Gate Bridge.

I suspect the author of the novel may have been mixing terms up, and though I can't seem to find a term more in line with what I'm describing and what others experience, it's clearly not unheard of. I've found people on forums linking it to both obsessive compulsive disorder and general anxiety disorder. I'm not sure I understand the link to OCD, but I do have hints of that, so maybe there's something to it.

Anyway, the fact that I can get up above the streets like that is another reason I need to get a replacement camera. I was mentally framing things through a 50mm lens and wishing I could get some shots of the trains going by over the streets. I think acclimatizing myself to heights would be a good thing too. It's not a typical fear of heights. In fact, I'm not afraid at all when I'm up there. Rather, I'm excited by being so high up. I've been drawn to heights and climbing things since I was little, as far back as I can remember. Maybe the strong positive feelings are actually what makes my brain loopy. Any thoughts?