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Description
Island in the Sun: Diary of a Deluded Man

Prelude
30,000 feet beyond the crust of the Caribbean hovers a gentle piece of aircraft named ‘Flight UA-351’. It’s a blanche Boeing 747/400 with a dark blue stripe running across its belly, enroute from Los Angeles to Rio; the proud pilot, Jack S. Evans, known to his friends as “Seven” never fails to boast the fact that he drives the vanguard of United Airlines and a six figure salary. Unbeknownst to Seven, or the three hundred passengers aboard, a stray air pocket enters the second turbine shaft on the third engine and blows the thing into space. After the young and handsome occupant of 34H (and also the author of the following entries) swept aside some recalcitrant strands of light brown hair out of his narrowed turquoise eyes, he sighs and puts his seatbelt on. A staccato of beeping taps itself into the cockpit and an ominous red light flares up on Seven’s nearest control panel. The plane begins to limp slowly, nodding its farewell to the nimbus and sky which it had grown so accustomed to. The captain switches the loudspeaker on and says those deadly words, “We are expecting some turbulence. Please remain calm and seated,”

Day 1
They should be coming soon; they should be coming soon to rescue us, right? I know that there only two fates lying for this leather scrapped journal- victim of my despondent, dead anthologies. Either it should be me, analyzing this very sentence over a medium-rare steak and a bottle of 1969 Cabernet, reminiscing over that woman whose staunch corpse and conversation lies impaled in seat 34G; or, in a more probable manner, the journal will bask in eternal quiescence on this lone island.

I woke up with a plethora of gritty sand particles lodged and scattered on my upper lip. As I spat the peppered mixture out of my parched mouth, I winced at the sudden thrusts of violent pain echoing through my leg. There was a dagger shaped wedge of airplane shrapnel whose rusted base was swimming in my agonized blood.

But from what I was seeing around me, I must have caught His eye and fortune somewhere on that plane careening down into this forsaken island. It was in the most literal and disgusting sense: the battle’s aftermath. How could this quintessential zenith of paradise, bathing so beautifully in Apollo’s yellow shafts, simultaneously bath so disgustingly in the crimson blood and bodies of the nameless dead and dying? Apparently, I was in paradise and hell.

The airplane had crunched up like a slinky; the cockpit smashed into a quarter of its original length, the remains of captain and vice oozing out the window and into sand. UA 351 had broken into two pieces, head and thorax, the former on the beach and the latter one kilometer out from shore. One could barely make up the miniscule ‘thorax’ part of the plane buoying methodically on the horizon, of whose close inhabitants one could only imagine. I limped over whilst around me people were scurrying around, shouting and searching for companions and such, attempting to make sense of something, under the monstrous screaming pitch of a manically spinning engine turbine. I sat down on the shore, took the shrapnel out of my leg, winced once more, and poured a tiny shot of Absolut vodka courtesy of United Airlines over my leg wound. Next I took out a plastic spoon and a small cup of strawberry Yoplait from my pocket which I had meant to consume in Rio. I watched a guy in a white T-shirt and jeans, on the edge of the beach, staring at the distant horizon; in the wake of disaster his unwavering tranquility slightly frightened me.

Day 2
Lisa was in seat 34G, I was in 34H. She had a pleasantly jaded countenance and blondish brown hair that flowed over her shoulders, curling up at the bottom. Lisa told me she was some sort of a business consultant: 25 years old… I’m not sure what force compels me to write so profusely about this woman who I had known for not 6 hours; perhaps the fact that my depressed and down about attitude to life had borne me only two dates in my life, conversely perhaps it’s the fact that she’s starting to rot on that seat.

There were three hundred people on the airline. There are twenty-seven on the beach. Twenty-seven ragamuffin men, women, children who are and fear be, will continue to moan, groan, blaspheme about that which should not have theoretically happened…ever.
Today some survivors managed to recognize an important fact that even in such a supposedly technologically advanced society, rescue patrols don’t just apparate from thin air to hand NBC 5, CNN, BBC microphones into our mouths and shower us with media glory. A few days later I’m sure we’ll realize that rescuing a couple hundred missing people is not a priority, just a bonus. As a point of this recognition, we conglomerated into a circle and decided that the path to survival lay in three aspects: exploration, food, and rescue warning. Thus we divided a perfect eighteen capable men and women into three groups of sixes. The former group would explore the island, for a new source of water; the penultimate would forage for food, although I severely doubt their efficiency as every single person was born domesticated in a cement jungle; the rescue group would attempt to build a fire on the beach in the form of setting alight a pile of beach wood so that the smoke would hopefully alarm the rescue crafts. I doubted spending six valuable persons on this though I was affirmed by a flight hostess who told me the emergency transponder had probably been crushed in the cockpit. Thus it was vital that we construct a smoke alert as the last twenty four hours since the crash had provided no help whatsoever to the rescue patrols.

Day 3
Today’s the first day in which the groups would spread out and do whatever they were meant to do. I was put in the exploration group, in most contempt, as I had an apparently good build and fitness. We started off into the thicket jungle which descended from the beach. This tropical rainforest was organized into several strata of canopies; amidst the ear-piercing screeches of jungle finches, waxy leaves of exotic trees dripped dew onto the ground. You could literally taste the jungle musk in the air, invigorating all the senses, amidst an extremely humid blanket of air that contrasted the salty sea air so strangely. Under the heat some people complained; I was compelled to say something negative about how lucky they should feel and the fact that two hundred some people had died in their place. But anyway, I realized I could be spending the rest of my life with these people and first impressions mean quite a lot.

Somewhere out in the jungle, a quintessentially obese American blasted the last hours of his iPod into his Bose headphones. A young teenager shook her head of blonde wavy hair, cursing the heat and humidity amongst a rapid mastication of jaw movements as the chewing gum slid in and out of her molars.
I thought about my life. Who would really care if I died? The long list includes my family, friends, and girlfriend in Sydney. Wow. ‘That’s really appalling,’ I thought to myself, as I tripped on some gnarled roots falling face first into some cesspool of jungle larvae and mud.

When the news hits my family I think they’ll mourn for me. They’ll visit a tombstone of whose sub-inhabitants consist not of my rotting corpse but hungry worms and dirt.
My friends would wonder about why I had suddenly stopped signing on to MSN messenger. Three quarters of them wouldn’t bother, they probably thought I was too cool for them and hence blocked them; the quarter who cared would phone me and find out I’m dead.
‘I’m sorry but Brian is dead.’
‘Man, you make the most disgusting jokes ever, c’mon!’
‘Brian is dead.’
‘Seriously?’
Second time’s the charm.

I think it really doesn’t matter what we do in our lives as no one seems to care, they’ll just carry on no matter what. Even though I’m currently stuck on a forsaken desert island, what does it matter if I was some rich Russian oil magnate halfway around the world? In the end, when we reach the final moment of our lives and afterwards, what will we really care about our accomplishments? If half the world was to be debunked by an alien comet of gargantuan proportion tomorrow, the other half would dedicate the necessary mourning but they would inevitably move on as nature deems so.

Perhaps life is only as complicated as one dictates it to be.

Description
Island in the Sun: Diary of a Deluded Man

Prelude
30,000 feet beyond the crust of the Caribbean hovers a gentle piece of aircraft named ‘Flight UA-351’. It’s a blanche Boeing 747/400 with a dark blue stripe running across its belly, enroute from Los Angeles to Rio; the proud pilot, Jack S. Evans, known to his friends as “Seven” never fails to boast the fact that he drives the vanguard of United Airlines and a six figure salary. Unbeknownst to Seven, or the three hundred passengers aboard, a stray air pocket enters the second turbine shaft on the third engine and blows the thing into space. After the young and handsome occupant of 34H (and also the author of the following entries) swept aside some recalcitrant strands of light brown hair out of his narrowed turquoise eyes, he sighs and puts his seatbelt on. A staccato of beeping taps itself into the cockpit and an ominous red light flares up on Seven’s nearest control panel. The plane begins to limp slowly, nodding its farewell to the nimbus and sky which it had grown so accustomed to. The captain switches the loudspeaker on and says those deadly words, “We are expecting some turbulence. Please remain calm and seated,”

Day 1
They should be coming soon; they should be coming soon to rescue us, right? I know that there only two fates lying for this leather scrapped journal- victim of my despondent, dead anthologies. Either it should be me, analyzing this very sentence over a medium-rare steak and a bottle of 1969 Cabernet, reminiscing over that woman whose staunch corpse and conversation lies impaled in seat 34G; or, in a more probable manner, the journal will bask in eternal quiescence on this lone island.

I woke up with a plethora of gritty sand particles lodged and scattered on my upper lip. As I spat the peppered mixture out of my parched mouth, I winced at the sudden thrusts of violent pain echoing through my leg. There was a dagger shaped wedge of airplane shrapnel whose rusted base was swimming in my agonized blood.

But from what I was seeing around me, I must have caught His eye and fortune somewhere on that plane careening down into this forsaken island. It was in the most literal and disgusting sense: the battle’s aftermath. How could this quintessential zenith of paradise, bathing so beautifully in Apollo’s yellow shafts, simultaneously bath so disgustingly in the crimson blood and bodies of the nameless dead and dying? Apparently, I was in paradise and hell.

The airplane had crunched up like a slinky; the cockpit smashed into a quarter of its original length, the remains of captain and vice oozing out the window and into sand. UA 351 had broken into two pieces, head and thorax, the former on the beach and the latter one kilometer out from shore. One could barely make up the miniscule ‘thorax’ part of the plane buoying methodically on the horizon, of whose close inhabitants one could only imagine. I limped over whilst around me people were scurrying around, shouting and searching for companions and such, attempting to make sense of something, under the monstrous screaming pitch of a manically spinning engine turbine. I sat down on the shore, took the shrapnel out of my leg, winced once more, and poured a tiny shot of Absolut vodka courtesy of United Airlines over my leg wound. Next I took out a plastic spoon and a small cup of strawberry Yoplait from my pocket which I had meant to consume in Rio. I watched a guy in a white T-shirt and jeans, on the edge of the beach, staring at the distant horizon; in the wake of disaster his unwavering tranquility slightly frightened me.

Day 2
Lisa was in seat 34G, I was in 34H. She had a pleasantly jaded countenance and blondish brown hair that flowed over her shoulders, curling up at the bottom. Lisa told me she was some sort of a business consultant: 25 years old… I’m not sure what force compels me to write so profusely about this woman who I had known for not 6 hours; perhaps the fact that my depressed and down about attitude to life had borne me only two dates in my life, conversely perhaps it’s the fact that she’s starting to rot on that seat.

There were three hundred people on the airline. There are twenty-seven on the beach. Twenty-seven ragamuffin men, women, children who are and fear be, will continue to moan, groan, blaspheme about that which should not have theoretically happened…ever.
Today some survivors managed to recognize an important fact that even in such a supposedly technologically advanced society, rescue patrols don’t just apparate from thin air to hand NBC 5, CNN, BBC microphones into our mouths and shower us with media glory. A few days later I’m sure we’ll realize that rescuing a couple hundred missing people is not a priority, just a bonus. As a point of this recognition, we conglomerated into a circle and decided that the path to survival lay in three aspects: exploration, food, and rescue warning. Thus we divided a perfect eighteen capable men and women into three groups of sixes. The former group would explore the island, for a new source of water; the penultimate would forage for food, although I severely doubt their efficiency as every single person was born domesticated in a cement jungle; the rescue group would attempt to build a fire on the beach in the form of setting alight a pile of beach wood so that the smoke would hopefully alarm the rescue crafts. I doubted spending six valuable persons on this though I was affirmed by a flight hostess who told me the emergency transponder had probably been crushed in the cockpit. Thus it was vital that we construct a smoke alert as the last twenty four hours since the crash had provided no help whatsoever to the rescue patrols.

Day 3
Today’s the first day in which the groups would spread out and do whatever they were meant to do. I was put in the exploration group, in most contempt, as I had an apparently good build and fitness. We started off into the thicket jungle which descended from the beach. This tropical rainforest was organized into several strata of canopies; amidst the ear-piercing screeches of jungle finches, waxy leaves of exotic trees dripped dew onto the ground. You could literally taste the jungle musk in the air, invigorating all the senses, amidst an extremely humid blanket of air that contrasted the salty sea air so strangely. Under the heat some people complained; I was compelled to say something negative about how lucky they should feel and the fact that two hundred some people had died in their place. But anyway, I realized I could be spending the rest of my life with these people and first impressions mean quite a lot.

Somewhere out in the jungle, a quintessentially obese American blasted the last hours of his iPod into his Bose headphones. A young teenager shook her head of blonde wavy hair, cursing the heat and humidity amongst a rapid mastication of jaw movements as the chewing gum slid in and out of her molars.
I thought about my life. Who would really care if I died? The long list includes my family, friends, and girlfriend in Sydney. Wow. ‘That’s really appalling,’ I thought to myself, as I tripped on some gnarled roots falling face first into some cesspool of jungle larvae and mud.

When the news hits my family I think they’ll mourn for me. They’ll visit a tombstone of whose sub-inhabitants consist not of my rotting corpse but hungry worms and dirt.
My friends would wonder about why I had suddenly stopped signing on to MSN messenger. Three quarters of them wouldn’t bother, they probably thought I was too cool for them and hence blocked them; the quarter who cared would phone me and find out I’m dead.
‘I’m sorry but Brian is dead.’
‘Man, you make the most disgusting jokes ever, c’mon!’
‘Brian is dead.’
‘Seriously?’
Second time’s the charm.

I think it really doesn’t matter what we do in our lives as no one seems to care, they’ll just carry on no matter what. Even though I’m currently stuck on a forsaken desert island, what does it matter if I was some rich Russian oil magnate halfway around the world? In the end, when we reach the final moment of our lives and afterwards, what will we really care about our accomplishments? If half the world was to be debunked by an alien comet of gargantuan proportion tomorrow, the other half would dedicate the necessary mourning but they would inevitably move on as nature deems so.

Perhaps life is only as complicated as one dictates it to be.