Jumpstart for Skratch's Parachutist Profile

When Parachutist author Brian Giboney does a profile on someone,
he first asks them for a few paragraphs so he can get a sense
of who they are so he can formulate a series of questions.

    > ...
    > Are you willing?
    > 
    > If so I need a jump-start into this.  Can you write a
    > paragraph or two about your jumping activities? - past
    > and current.  What I need to do is determine what your
    > "specialty" is.
    > 
    > ...
    > 
    > From there I will formulate a series of questions ...

One of the last questions he asks in the profile is to name
5 people you think would make a good profile.

Bryan Burke had done a profile a couple months before and had
named me. So here is my jumpstart:



Date: Sunday 2002-3-10
Subject: Profile - Skratch - Jumpstart

Bryan Burke eh?   :-) :-)

Every time I go down to Eloy we manage to get a night in,
sitting around the fire talking stuff, while he drinks some
high octane concoction from that little fruit jar he uses
for a cup.

----

But OK, my "specialty" .. A good question .. I'm coming
up on 40 years and I've covered a lot of ground.

I would say that the consistent themes over the years
have been:

    - Creating aphorisms, metaphors, viewpoints and frameworks.

    - Promoting the recognition of recreational skydiving
      as a worthwhile activity in its own right, without the
      need for measurements, records and competition.

    - Promoting the feeling of inclusion, both for people
      new to skydiving, and for countering the tendancy
      toward cliques and exclusion.

    - Innovating new forms of activity.

Many people coach for performance. So do I, but when I get
receptive students we delve into the more interesting question
of "performance of what? and why?".

I am more of an anthropologist than a technician.

----

Now I know what I meant by all that, but I think some examples
would help.

The feeling of inclusion is more of a person to person activity,
I haven't written any articles about it.

With new students I systematically try to make them feel welcome
in the hangar, packing area, beer drinking activities.

Between groups, drop zones (and regions and countries back
when I was more active) I promote connection and traveling
back and forth to jump together.

This activity is fading now because, except for a few trips
to Eloy and California and a few Quincies, I don't get out
much any more.

Also relative work used to mean freedom and art and expression
so I don't have any empathy with the assembly line imitation
of the 4 way 8 way format that relative work now seems to mean
(I understand why the freeflyers rebelled) but the freeflyers
think I'm an old fart relative worker because I don't see why
I have to stand on my head to express freedom and art, so my
credibility as a gap bridger has pretty much disappeared :-) :-)

Still, that is one of the things I have put a lot of effort
into over the years.

----

If I go into "promoting the recognition of recreational skydiving
as a worthwhile activity in its own right", I won't make it
to the end of this email so I'm going to skip over that for
now, but it's huge, and the least favorite of my major activities.

We first started using relative work as a medium for competition
at the first 10 man meet in 1967. For me that was jump numbers
1019 and 1020.

I saw what that did to the mental atmosphere and sense of
creativity in the relative work world and have tried various
ways to counter it ever since. Although, like gap bridging,
that is fading away now too.

These struggles of viewpoint have been going on in human
affairs for thousands of years and I know now that one small
pebble is not going to change the course of the avalanche.

Still, that is one reason I made up the 4 way event in 1969.
I thought the different form of activity would break us out
of the rut of assembly line skydiving that I had seen in
style and accuracy and saw developing in the relative work world.

----

OK, now for the fun stuff, aphorisms, metaphors, new forms
of activity.

I think my favorite form would be Skydance.

Skydance was both a form of activity and an intentional
effort to organize for the production of feelings and emotions
instead of just maneuvers.

This came up in 1976 and went on for a couple years before
the Pope Valley / Gulch scene dissolved into history.

The form part came from the thought that if you took what
people were doing in the sky and translated it to the dance
floor it would look like either a whole bunch of people
going to great effort to get into some configuration and then
standing there holding it, or else a small number of people
racing through a bunch of moves as fast as they could.

If you take what people do on the dance floor, waltzes,
polkas, square dances, freeform spontaneity and translate
it up into the sky you have Skydance.

*And* we had the additional freedom from gravity - swing
your partner round and round and over and under and up
and down and so on.

Sounds like fun, doesn't it?  :-) :-)

----

The emotional part came from a realization I had when I
spent the summer of 1976 in Norway, Sweden, Denmark playing
the part of "the long haired guru from California".

Eilif Ness set this up and I went over there prepared to
turn the world on to this new sequential format we had
developed.

What I realized while I was there was that maneuvers as
such are absolutely meaningless. The hottest dive in the
world is worthless if the people can't do it or don't
like it, while the sunset star, one maneuver with all
your friends, can be the best dive of the whole weekend.

The reason we jump is to feel feelings.
That's it. That's the whole story.

So if you get a thesaurus and look up all the feelings
people can have and then use skydiving as a tool to produce
feelings, you have the idea of organizing for the emotional
content of the dive.

So that was Skydance.

----

So I guess those were my specialties: aphorisms, metaphors,
viewpoints and frameworks, recreational skydiving, promoting
the feeling of inclusion, and innovating new forms.

Well, there's more, the Oreo Cookie framework and the effort
towards coaching and student training, but I'm curious how
this is going to fit into the profile framework.

Anyway, this is way more than the one or two paragraphs
you asked for, but I hope it's some kind of jump start.

Skratch
Jumpstart for Parachutist Profile
