When it comes to the practice of urban rock climbing, there are really only two methods to go about it. There is a distinct right and wrong way. Have you ever seen one of those tall artificial rock walls with all the colorful handholds and the ropes to save you if you fall? These are often located at trendy gyms and can provide a wonderful way to exercise, make friends, and practice your climbing skills in a controlled environment.

This is clearly the wrong way. I am a constant practitioner of what I consider the correct way, the dirty way. By using my methods, you can open an entire new dimension of the big city to yourself, a new level where you are just about 50 feet above everyone else, where you can hang from the rusty yellow I-beams beneath bridges and elevated train tracks and watch cars beneath you and people watching, where you can save yourself 5 minutes and give some people a spectacle by running and kicking off a telephone pole, grabbing onto an electric box on the side of a parking garage and shimmying up the conduit leading up two floors from it into the 3rd floor window of the parking garage, where you can jump off of a dumpster, step briefly on a window sill and then the sloped edge of a chimney before grabbing a metal framework on a phone pole and pulling yourself up as your hands go numb in the cold and you spit to watch it freeze on the way down.

This is my way of urban rock climbing. I encourage all of you young and old to try it, if you do, you will no longer fantasize about flight, you know you can do better. You can save money on your daily commute by learning to climb an I-beam up to the train platform. You can win countless bets. You can wear your suit and read your newspaper hanging upside down from a tree. You can do chin-ups every morning from a light pole near your home. The possibilities are endless, and unless you explore them you are missing an entire aspect of life as a primate. The monkeys know the score.

There will be follow-ups to this write-up by myself and I dearly hope by others. I implore you to try this fine activity/lifestyle, and post your experiences. Tell what you've found, what?s on top of the buildings that nobody has seen the roof of in years, tell people in your community and in this community about it, and encourage them to try it, even just once. Carry a twenty-foot coil of climbing rope in your backpack or briefcase with your geek tools, form a culture with outrageous jargon and ridiculous pants, spread the cause! It matters not what you do with your urban rock climbing powers, but do it well, do it often, and then boast until it hurts.

I will leave the node at this for now, but please, further it, make it a hobby, today, tomorrow, all the time, use it to break the ice at parties, anything. Happy climbing, and say hi to the guys at the rock wall at the gym, unless they have gone to starbucks already, poor lost souls.

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