My friend Tom, who I'm visiting in Seattle before and after the judging, works at KOMO 4, the ABC affiliate. We just pulled up to his building across from the space needle, and he couldn't understand what all the fire trucks were for. Or all the people staring. "They're probably just staring because the other people are," he said.

Nope. The security guard was midly ecstatic. "Did you see the jumper?"

"Really, a jumper?"

Tom has been here three years, this would be his first. Mine too. I've only been here 18 hours. First the sun came out, now this. Did you know moss grows right on the rooftops here? Tom's house is only five years old, and I think I spotted lichen, too. Sprouting right up out of the shingles.

They've got the jumper on channel 86, closed circuit TV, though they still haven't broken in to General Hospital. "They would never break in," a woman calls from the cube next door. "If he goes, they don't want to be live."

They could use a tighter shot on the guy. Kind of hard to tell what he's doing, exactly. The floor is split on whether he's seated or standing. He's moving around quite a bit, but what the hell is he doing?

OK, we've got to get out of here. I've got a lot of Seattle to see, and more work to do for my horrible boss. (One horrilbe boss, one nice one.) Tom has seven hours of activities planned out from 5 p.m. to midnight, and it's 2:30 already. And I can't stay out any later--I promised myself to be tucked in no later than midnight and sober, so I can be alert for my judging tomorrow.

Goodbye Mr. Jumper. I couldn't figure out what to feel about you anyway. It disturbed me just a little, that I couldn't make myself feel anything. Aside from mildly excited. Only when I confirmed jumpers weren't an everyday occurence. My only significant reaction was annoyance. Attempted suicides tend to make my eyes roll. Top of my list of oxymorons. It's really not that hard to kill yourself. "If he's been up there more than ten minutes he's not serious," I said.

I regretted it immediately. Of course they're not serious attempts, they're serious cries for help. Does that make them any less tragic? Of course the guy is more interested in attention than killing himself. He's obvious staggered right off the cliff of desperation already. Why must I begrudge him that?

OK I won't, but I have a hard time respecting him. Surely there was a better approach to this problem.

Here's the reason it gets to me. My reaction would reverse 180 if I met him. Most jumpers, anyway. This I cannot be certain of, but the biggest thing I've learned from reporting is how completely different all these large and small tragedies feel once you meet the participants. He's a unique individual up there with a crazy twisted story that could have taken a hundred billion different turns and if not for the oddest unexpected developments with less predictable consequences, he never would have ended on that needle.

He never planned it this way, he never expected to find himself in whatever private hell he woke up inside this morning, so he hopped in the car and drove himself straight to the tallest escape hatch he could imagine.

I wasn't a big liar when I started this. I'm not actually across from the space needle at this moment, though I was when I started writing, just not when I started typing. I wrote it in my head initially, waiting for that last damn post to post, ready to start typing, but Tom popped his head back in unexpectedly and said we had to go. I wrote a little more in the car when I wasn't talking. He dropped me off in a cool little neighborhood called Alki, on the western side of the sound, across from the city, that suddenly feels like Venice Beach or Daytona. Sandy beach on one side of the road, beach buildings on the other. I like it.

I'm supposed to be doing that work right now, but I just sat down to type in all the stuff I'd already written, but that's where the trouble started. I typed it all in the present tense, because I was merely transcribing what I wrote as it happened. But these new thoughts filtered in as it happened. I didn't know why I felt so conflicted at the time, it was all still confused and frustrating. Lots of little threads, I could feel everyone of them already, but just the little whispers twitching at my cheeks. So this should have been in two parts: as I watched him and an hour later. Two different takes on it, but they all blended into one. But I don't want to go back and rewrite it that way and I told you I have to work.

Saturday night update:

They talked him down. This, of course, did not take 28 hours. That was merely the time it took the news to reach me.

I have not yet learned what got him up there, nor the consequences. I am curious.