Larry Walters of Los Angeles is one of the few to contend for the Darwin Awards and live to tell the tale.

When his friends cut the cord anchoring the lawnchair to his Jeep, he did not float lazily up to 30 feet. Instead he streaked into the LA sky as if shot from a cannon. He didn’t level off at 100 feet, nor did he level off at 1000 feet. After climbing and climbing, he leveled off at 16,000 feet.

At that height he felt he couldn’t risk shooting any of the balloons. So he stayed there, drifting cold and frightened with his beer and sandwiches, for more than 14 hours. He crossed the primary approach corridor of LAX, where startled Trans World Airlines and Delta Airlines pilots radioed in reports of the strange sight.

Eventually he gathered the nerve to shoot a few balloons, and slowly descended. Larry was then arrested. Larry’s efforts won him a $1,500 FAA fine, a prize from the Bonehead Clubof Dallas, the altitude record for gas-filled clustered balloons, and a Darwin Awards At-Risk Survivor.

(Fact Source) Follow Ultrafacts for more facts

FOR LARRY WALTERS, WHO DREAMED SINCE HE WAS A CHILD OF USING BALLOONS TO FLY; WHO IN 1982 SPENT FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS OF HIS TRUCK-DRIVING DELIVERYMAN SALARY TO BUY SUPPLIES, INCLUDING ONE LAWN CHAIR, FORTY-TWO BALLOONS, AND A HELIUM TANK, WHICH HE USED TO INFLATE THE BALLOONS, ARRANGING THEM IN A RING AROUND THE LAWN CHAIR, A STURDY ALUMINUM TYPE FROM SEARS, IN WHICH HE LAUNCHED HIMSELF ALONG WITH HIS PELLET GUN AND WATER JUGS A THOUSAND FEET A MINUTE INTO THE CALIFORNIA SKY, WITH THE GOAL OF CLEARING THE SAN GABRIEL MOUNTAINS TO REACH THE MOJAVE; WHO AGAINST ALL ODDS FLEW, FROM A BACKYARD IN SAN PEDRO TO LONG BEACH, AN IMPERFECT MAN ON AN IMPERFECT FLIGHT PATH, WHO BROUGHT HIS CAMERA BUT DIDN’T USE IT; WHO, UPON HIS ARREST BY THE LONG BEACH POLICE, WAS QUOTED AS SAYING A MAN CAN’T JUST SIT AROUND…..

FUCK YES LARRY YOU DID IT BABY

Amelia Gray - FOR LARRY

(via @reptilemodernism)

i think r/BenignExistence is my favorite subreddit 🥲 i love these pleasant little glimpses into strangers' lives

— Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952), “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal.”

I have a folder called Time is a Flat Circle in which I collect evidence of humanity. Here is most of them.

Okayokayokayokaybut "My hand will wear out but the inscription will remain" is kind of a power line BEFORE you factor in that it is, in fact, over a thousand years old.

It’s always good to spend a few moments, on a quiet day, looking through the Family album.

2011-09-16

Why is fire so mesmerizing?

I was with some friends around a bon fire and we laughed and had a good time but when we sat down by the fire we all calmed down so much it almost felt like a trance. We all just sat quietly staring into the flames. It was peaceful.

Actually, people are good by nature and you’re a fool if you think otherwise.

When you sneeze in public, strangers will say “bless you”, even though they don’t know you.

When you ask for directions on the street someone will show you the way, even though they have nothing to gain from it.

People squeeze their legs against the chair so you don’t have to hop over them on your way to your seat in the theatre, and make funny faces to make babies laugh, and purposefully step on leaves to hear them scrunch, and hold the door open for someone leaving behind them, and ask what floor you’re heading to when you enter the elevator, and send others photos of things that reminded them of them, and recommend each other songs, and ask if anyone else wants a coffee because they’re getting one, and make videos teaching how to sew a button, and wish on shooting stars, and share fun facts, and listen to others rant about things they don’t even understand, and let you cross the street first, and give a bit of their food to others, and laugh at jokes they don’t find funny to make you feel good, and listen to kids talk for hours about nonsense, and let you know your keys fell from your pocket, and they may be strangers, but with every little gesture they’re saying “I love you, I love you, I love you”.

God, I needed to read this today. Humanity is overwhelmingly full of hope and kindness and it’s very easy to forget that these days.

the man who owns and runs the thai restaurant in my town knows me by name. he is one of the kindest and most thoughtful men i know. i started ordering from his place back in january, which was when i got my fibromyalgia diagnosis. back then i was using a walker, had limited mobility in my entire body but especially my hands, and was very visibly in pain. i always ordered the same thing: yellow curry with no meat, potatoes and carrots only (i have texture and other dietary issues). he always made it a point to make sure i could get out the door and carry the food safely. he had his workers package the food so that it was easier for me to open. as i kept coming back and i told him a little bit about my health status, he would always encourage me to keep going. he told me about how the spices he used were good for inflammation and began to edit the recipe just for me so that spices that were even better for fighting inflammation were used. he’d give me extra portions and despite the fact that i would tip every time, i realized later that he never charged my card for them. as time went on and my condition began to get better, he would make encouraging remarks and tell me how happy he was for me. the day i came in without my walker, he practically jumped for joy, and despite my insistence, he gave me my meal for free that day. i continue to make progress with my conditions and i continue to go to the thai place. this man who does not know me personally and who i hardly know anything about is one of my favorite people. it’s interactions with humans like these that make loving life easier. and his curry really does help my chronic condition. it’s comfort food taken to the next level.

still thinking about this youtube comment i screenshotted ages ago

Im.. Soft 🥺🥺🥺

cr. 

here's hoping people never stop asking

fun fact! when you say jokes or laugh with someone, your heartbeats synchronise! and it happens even if you're not physically close to one another!!

source: Lackner, H.K. et al. (2019) 'Impact of humor-related communication elements in natural dyadic interactions on interpersonal physiological synchrony’, Psychophysiology, 56(4), p. e13320–n/a. doi:10.1111/psyp.13320

40,000 years ago, early humans painted hands on the wall of a cave. This morning, my baby cousin began finger painting. All of recorded history happened between these two paintings of human hands. The Nazca Lines and the Mona Lisa. The first TransAtlantic flight and the first voyage to the Moon. Humanity invented the wheel, the telescope, and the nuclear bomb. We eradicated wild poliovirus types 2 and 3. We discovered radio waves, dinosaurs, and the laws of thermodynamics. Freedom Riders crossed the South. Hippies burned their draft cards. Countless genocides, scientific advancements, migrations, and rebellions. More than a hundred billion humans lived and died between these two paintings—one on a sheet of paper, and one on the inside of a cave. At the dawn of time, ancient humans stretched out their hands. And this morning, a child reached back. 

A Timeline of Humanity:

The notes on a recent post got me thinking

By nature, I’m a fan of having 2 beers and meeting strangers at a bar somewhere you’ve never been, which is a thing that we don’t do in 2023 between COVID and being afraid of one another because of the prevalence of gun violence and regular violence and misdirected road rage and the million other little deadly social erosions of the past 10 years or so.

You have got to let go of this idea that any place is a complete nothing-burger full of nothing-people.

You have to.

Its vitally important that you navigate that airport with a stranger in Denver and realize he’s got a tattoo of lyrics from your favorite song. To sing House of the Rising Sun with four people you’ve known for 2 hours (and somehow managed to get into the DNCs private bar with) in the back of an Uber in DC when it’s pissing rain and entirely too cold for your southern blood. It’s important to cooperate and solve problems together and go about it laughing and singing. We are silly little creatures that love a puzzle and a story.

It’s also important to flee a tornado in the back of a shitty red pickup at pride in Oklahoma City and feel the sky break wide-open against the lazy /tick-lok/ /tick-lok/ of the windshield wipers while racing down what once was Rte 66. Its important to know that in the face of creeping fascism that place, of all places, has entire gay neighborhoods. It’s important to wake up in an apartment high, high up in NYC and watch the sun through the buildings and boulevards and watch the glorious great goddamn of that impossible number of people all cooperating and all not. To say Hyoo-stun, that way, on purpose just to get a rise of your born and bred NY friend who does NOT think you’re funny but will make coffee for you.

You need to see a beach full of people cautiously approaching and flinching away from a floating, dead horseshoe crab on Tybee Island, Georgia the way any troupe of wild animals approaches an unknown alien thing. Cows in a field, fish in the ocean flinching from a diver. Little children squealing and wide eyed behind their parents legs. You need to be the person that walks out and picks it up and watches the rest of the crowd creep in to investigate.

I don’t get to travel a lot in the way that most people do, when I go to a place it’s usually because something bad has happened there, but I have found it universally true that most people just want to tell you a story or show you a picture on their phone of the craziest thing they’ve ever seen and they don’t particularly care who you are or what your accent is. Sometimes they do, and those people suck, but those people are not the majority.

Sometimes if you let an old redneck talk he’ll tell you everything you never wanted to know about forensic accounting. Sometimes you’ll meet someone in the middle of the biggest city in the US who knows everything about show pigs. I’ve been to the smallest Kansas towns and the biggest cities in the US and I’ve found none of them were full of nothing.

That's one of the things I love about my bus trips. Stressful and occasionally bordering on traumatizing though they are, I was on a bus home from two months in Pennsylvania and met a girl my age with a service dog who was going to a different part of Oklahoma and she immediately trusted me and we spent 95% of that trip together and then with another girl who was in the early months of pregnancy. We talked and sat and moved together until we had to split. I watched her dog for her while she went to the bathroom and he trusted me too.

I was crying on the bus another time because my headphones broke and I had no cash and an older woman started talking to me because of my punisher hat. She gave me a handful of crumpled ones to buy food before she left on her next bus because I had sat crying in Arkansas thinking I'd be stuck there for a full day.

My first bus trip, a handful of us became layover family after being stuck at the same layover cities for hours. In Philadelphia a black girl got on the bus and called someone saying 'Hey, are you X's mom? I just called to let you know I gave your son some sweats because the security guard was harassing him and I didn't want him to get in trouble' before she went to sleep. There was a guy in the seat behind me who was talking to his girlfriend about how much he loved her and wanted to start a family and how he and his sister were starting a restaurant that would donate food to the homeless and how his sister was the soul of it.

And beyond all of these people being from nowhere and going nowhere else, people get it into their heads that the place they live in doesn't have that camaraderie. My mom helped an old man who fell on the curb. I stayed by a car crash that happened in front of me to try and help. A cashier at Waffle House said to not worry about it when we were a few dollars short (that same WH had a waitress named Miss Purple who sang to everyone). A woman gave me a ride home after a day of volunteering in the hot sun and bought me a soda and gave a homeless man a care package and a prayer.

There is not one place on this planet that doesn't have love in it and that love is shown in the hands that help and the laughs you share.

I met another customer at the craft store trying to repair/remake his mom's favorite ornament and we figured it out together.

Our waitress the other day got married by accident and had the same name as me.

A stranger approached me at a gas station and said "Jesus wanted me to tell you that it will be okay. You're going to have a problem with your heart, but it will be fine." She was, uhh, she was right. It was a totally benign arrhythmia. She was also the first person I gave my new, trans, non-legal name to.

I wear queer and neurodivergent pride pins on my hat and SO MANY people have given me a "me too", whether whispered or out loud. (That is why I wear them.)

I once sat on a plane next to an elderly woman whose husband had died in a plane crash and wow her attitude was amazing and it was weirdly reassuring to have her there as I was trying not to have a panic attack because we were flying over Nevada and there was a huge thunderstorm under us with red lightning.

I had a really cool conversation with a random patron at an Egyptian burial exhibit about the artists who made the exquisite little miniature grave goods.

The white as milk Midwestern dude at the gas station spoke fluent Tagalog and was a fuckin low key philosophical genius.

I just love people. Their stories, these moments, all the stuff that makes up the web of our social relationships to each other.

Yeah the world is scary, I get spooked in public sometimes. But man, most of it really is just us sharing a wild fucking ride with absolute strangers who for the most part are pretty chill. Pets, kids, music, travel, there's just about always a way into someone's good conversational graces. I never get tired of it.

i love wrinkles i love stretchmarkes i love pockmarked skin and acne scars i love liverspots i love laugh lines i love crinkled foreheads i love grey streaked hair in your mid-twenties i love that time is so utterly ungraspable and yet here it is and we can touch it and love it in all these traces it leaves on your body like river silt brought up along the bank from far off and otherwise unreachable places building a new ecosystem & enriching EVERYTHING 💗💗💗

absolutely not letting this languish in the tags oh my god