For my forty-third birthday last November my two-legged wife, Eileen - it grew back; we're all very excited - bought me an appearance on the news. The package involved being stranded in the green and pleasant danger of a tropical chine for a couple of weeks with nine other people who had paid for the privilege of fame, camping out under the stars, eating some food, telling a few raucous stories, getting a little dishevelled, getting rescued, having a shower, and then the finale: the appearance on the news, shaved save for my face and heroic (don't shave your heroic, cos when the hair grows back it itches like mad).
Regular defecators will know heights petrify me; I don't like spinny stuff either - I won't jump off a cliff or play with a dreidel, although hard disks are a necessary evil. Enter stage right, el nemesiso: the mighty helicopter. Cue actors screaming "Argh, it's a helicopter. Get it off my stage this instant." Well, sometimes you've just gotta keep the little wifey happy, so I sat it out, singing my happy little song to take my mind off all my fears and anxieties, and whaddya know (nothing) it worked.
The news is just one big war film; one of us would need to be injured. As we shake up a can amongst many of some fizzy sugar during holidays, so must one parachute be rigged to fail. As one person says "Oh fuck," and takes off a t-shirt, so must one person say "Oh fuck," and explode on impact. I am graced with a form of natural cowardice that when faced with a one in ten chance of falling to my instantaneous or prolonged death, I do everything within my power to make sure it happens to someone else instead. Don't ask me how I did it because I'm not quite sure myself - in these situations doctors say we can call on immense reserves of strength and guile hitherto untapped unless there's the prospect of sex. We jumped, they fell, I glided down. Eight innocents painted the chine red, the ninth lay there in a lot of pain until I gracefully landed on his heart and put him out of her misery.
With all the others dead, or at least sufficiently fragmented that the presumption of death wouldn't be folly, food was not to be a problem - we'd had our food parachuted in too, they were dead, I could eat like a fat king. Sleep might be a problem, with all the moss sullied by their cellulitey detritus. Heat, again, might be a problem with no dry twigs around and no-one warm or whole to huddle with. Water I had coming out of my arse, what with the waterfall, the fountain, the stream and the brook. Lifting up one of the shredded parachutes in the hope that there might be somewhere to sit underneath, I found the hot tub, and my temperature worries were quelled.
Just when everything seemed to be going well for me, there was a sneeze of an earthquake and the chine closed thusly: ( ) to () (I don't know how your font works, so imagine the latter one connects, ok?) Everything went dark, and I'm not afraid to admit, I couldn't see anything. Quick recap for the retards: I'm trapped in a sealed chine with nine dead bodies and can't see a damn thing. I thought I saw the light at the end of the tunnel, but it turned out to be the glowing face of a digital watch.
As one doesn't explain how one sabotaged the parachutes, one also doesn't tell how one survived for ten weeks in the dark (minus the watch factor) with bloody moss. You've seen the news, you've read the stories, anything I said would just be going over old ground. As my food ran out in the twentieth week (they would have died if I hadn't killed them), there was another hint of a tectonic shuffle and the tenth rescue helicopter (the others had been circling looking for us, and had run out of fuel, crashing) was able to pick me up. I appeared on the news, but after the events of the previous three months, my heart wasn't really in it: it was in my ribcage