59 in June... hard to believe I even made it this far.
Perhaps being born in 'The Year of the Tiger' gave me nine lives. I recall an incident in my 'high school daze' where some rich kid in the Coronado Shores invited a bunch of us to party at the family flat, which was on the 9th floor of that particular building. His parents were out of town, of course. I didn't like the guy very much, but I figured WTF, unlimited free alcohol. We went down there and drank a truckload of booze, and several of us weren't satisfied with the view from the balcony, so we climbed out on the unprotected ledge and roamed around. The ledge was 3' to 4' wide, slick concrete with a beveled edge, nothing to grab if one slipped & fell...
The following day, a good friend of mine told me I had been running on that ledge while hammered. I think back to that night, and it would've been so easy for my life to end right there... one slip, a 9-story fall, and yours truly splattered like a melon all over the terrace below. Learning about that incident scared me: I had no recollection of running on the ledge because I was wasted, but I knew how dangerous it could be, so I never went to that flat again. I'm not scared of heights either, I'm actually pretty comfortable, but that sort of drunken behavior is SO dangerous... I'm pretty sure I used up one of my nine lives on that night.
On a similar note, we lost one of our classmates when he fell from the Bay Bridge... all of us used to climb around the chain-link fence collar on the service catwalk underneath the bridge, and make our way out to the center of the span to party and check out the views. One crazy fool even rode his motorcycle on the catwalk before bridge workers started locking the gate, a dirt bike small enough to fit between the railings. That was some crazy $h!t. But that dude who died, he fell from the chain-link collar, which wasn't even over water yet, so he fell onto some rip-rap boulders near the base of the 2nd pier. It was only a drop of 40' or so, but that's all it takes when you're falling onto jagged rock. Nowadays, there's greater security on the bridge... post-9/11.