A Bit Mental
Jimi Hunt is an Auckland-based designer and entrepreneur. He is one half of the creative force behind Live More Awesome and the builder of the World’s Biggest Waterslide.
JIMI HUNT
All opinions contained in this book are those of the author. Before making any change to your treatment regime, please consult a medical professional.
First published in 2013
Copyright © Jimi Hunt 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Allen & Unwin
Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London
Level 3, 228 Queen Street
Auckland 1010, New Zealand
Phone: (64 9) 377 3800
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the
National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 1 74331 383 1
eISBN 978 1 74343 225 9
Set in 12.5/17 pt Bembo by Post Pre-press Group, Australia
Map by Janet Hunt
To all the people who picked me up
when I was down. Thank you.
Follow Jimi’s journey to Lilo The Waikato River.
CONTENTS
Map
Introduction
PART ONE: THIS IS JIMI
Early escapades
Madness with Mark
Across the ditch and back again
Blokes do cry
After the honeymoon
A plan is hatched
Serious planning begins for Lilo The Waikato
Overload
Dr John’s prescription
Taking the medicine
My blackest Friday and the weekend that followed
Dr John revisited
Claim that shit and ask for help
The devil is in the detail
All systems go!
PART TWO: THE JOURNEY
Day one: Taupo to Casey and Nicki’s place
Day two: Casey and Nicki’s place to Atiamuri
Day three: Atiamuri to Whakamaru
Day four: Whakamaru to Mangakino
Day five: Mangakino to Arapuni
Day six: Arapuni to Cambridge
Day seven: Cambridge to Hamilton
Day eight: Hamilton to Ngaruawahia
Day nine: Ngaruawahia to Rangiriri
Day ten: Rangiriri to Tuakau
Day eleven: Tuakau to the sea
Debrief
PART THREE: WHAT NOW?
Live More Awesome
The Perfect Life
Epilogue
Where to get help
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
I never thought that I’d be sitting here writing a book. Ever. Especially one about my life. I mean, don’t get me wrong: I’ve lived a more interesting life than most, but I live in New Zealand and I haven’t even been on Shortland Street, the TV show, like 87 per cent of the population, so I feel a little strange to be doing this. What am I supposed to write about? Do I talk right here at the start about the crazy antics I used to pull? I have to write how many words? Really? Shit, I don’t know. Shit. Can I say shit? I don’t know either but I’m sure an editor will delete this sentence if I’m overstepping my literary bounds. My point is, I’m just an ordinary man who has done some silly things. People seem to identify with my story because in this day and age we’re all ‘A Bit Mental’. So it’s actually refreshing for people to see someone acknowledge the fact that they have depression, talk about it and make it okay for others to talk about it as well. At least, that’s what people have been telling me. I just had a crazy idea . . .
My name is Jimi. You will already know this because my name is on the front of this book as the author, clever hey? I was a lucky kid, born to parents in Wellington, New Zealand, who were married and are still together today. Parents who are still together is a thing that I value in today’s strange world. I had a wonderful upbringing; I was pretty good at sport and represented North Harbour in a few of them, all with the unwavering support of my parents. I went to a private school—I didn’t like it much at all, but I appreciated the education.
Basically, I had a great childhood. No one beat me, no one abused me, and life was generally ‘all good’, but my brain always worked a little differently to other people’s. I had some odd compulsions, like getting a buzz from falling from a great height. Despite them, and the umpteen concussions they caused, my life was actually pretty damn cool. What I’m trying to say is that even with a ‘perfect’ upbringing things can go wrong. And they did, but I’ll get to that later . . .
Probably the most unusual thing about me is that I don’t drink alcohol and never have. In New Zealand this is considered strange. Very strange. We have a culture of heavy drinking and most of our social activities are based around or include alcohol. There are three main reasons I don’t drink:
I literally cannot tolerate the taste of alcohol—I find it repulsive.
I like to be in control of myself and my situation—getting drunk is not really for me.
I have a strange compulsion to be ‘different’ from everyone else.
For me, the third reason is the most important. Almost everyone in New Zealand drinks. Okay then, I won’t and, surprisingly, I’ve never needed to. As a teenager who didn’t drink, turning up to parties to watch friends getting drunk and having a good time was a challenge. I could have relented to peer pressure and started drinking or I could have got sick of it and gone home.
But I’ve always liked parties. I like having fun and I like socialising with my friends. It’s what makes me happy. So I started doing what came naturally to me—acting like an idiot. As I said, I went to a private school, and most of the kids had houses with swimming pools. We had lots of pool parties, and I took to jumping off high places into swimming pools of all shapes and sizes. It was one of the only things I could do that made me feel scared. The fear made me feel alive—I loved the thrill of it. And, best of all, no one ever bothered me about not drinking because they were too busy watching me do fancy flips and making a big splash.
So, I like to be scared, but I don’t scare easily. Organised ‘extreme’ activities like bungy jumping and skydiving always leave me feeling let down. Instead of commercial opportunities, I’ve had to turn to more spur-of-the-moment freestyle thrills. In other words, I made them up as I went along.
This is my story. All of what comes next is true. Especially the parts that I’ve made up.
Depression (and head knocks) really messes with your mind and makes it hard to process and remember things. I did write this as honestly as I could, but some of the stories I can only remember the basics of and the details are foggy. If you’re in this book and it’s not how you remember it happening, sorry—it’s how I remember it and I’ve tried my best to get it right.
—Jimi
PART ONE:
THIS IS JIMI
EARLY ESCAPADES
A while back, when I was at university and on holidays, I was on Waiheke Island with my friend Tim. We had been told of a cliff that was worth diving off. Our instructions were rather rudimentary: ‘around to the right from Little Oneroa’. So we swam, although we’re not great swimmers, for an hour. Shattered, we finally found a place that we thought might be it. We could see the cliff was slightly worn where people had beaten a light track, and there was a bar
e patch around the rock 17 metres above the water. We figured that must be the take-off point for jumping. There was a crevice about five metres wide cut out of the cliff with a blowhole about two metres across at the bottom. The waves would crash into the crevice making a loud whoosh and shooting water up into the air. With the ebb and flow of the waves, the depth of the water to jump into varied from two to four metres. So there I stood, about to jump over rocks into a small hole 17 metres below, and I had to time my jump with the incoming waves. I had no idea if this had ever been done before. It turned out I wasn’t the first to do it, but it sure as hell made me really scared. And it felt beautiful.
Jumping off that cliff was my first foray into freestyle adventures that eventually led to paddling down the Waikato River on a Lilo. I realised on that jump into the blowhole that I needed high-energy thrills to satisfy my own needs and to make me happy. I wanted to be happy and I was having a hard time figuring out what happy meant for me.
These adventures usually happened with a trusted companion. At the time, I was studying at the University of Waikato. I quickly worked out what I didn’t like—I didn’t like university. I didn’t like the structured learning environment, so it was a pretty easy decision for me to stop going to class. Luckily, though, I was smart enough to pass all my papers with minimal effort. The best thing I got from university was my friendship with Mr Mark Boyce.
Mark and I had quite a few things in common. We enjoyed talking crap about pretty much everything and anything, doing pub quizzes and going out and doing random things. My time at university was made inherently better because of our friendship. One of the outcomes of my friendship with Mark was my first lesson. Subsequently, I have learnt other lessons for life and I am going to share them with you as Jimi’s Lessons. Take them as you will, but they have helped shape my life into something pretty awesome. So here’s the first thing I learnt from my mate, Mark.
JIMI’S LESSON #1: You’re only as good as the stories you can tell.
I went to the University of Waikato. That’s right—in Hamilton, in the Waikato. You probably have a pretty accurate picture in your head—lots of Swanndris, a lot of rugby and a lot of drinking.
This is what dawned on Mark and me early on—we could get sucked up in this version of normality or we could go our own way and do some interesting things together. So, Lesson #1 is not saying that you have to tell a bunch of bullshit stories but basically that you need to get out and do more interesting things. The result of doing interesting stuff is that you have more interesting stories to tell.
And there are benefits. More people like hanging out with you at parties and, most importantly for any young man, girls think you are more interesting. They will like you more. This simple motto led Mark and me on some epic adventures, including being chased by a car full of women through the night in my trusty 1963 Ford Consul Capri 335 from Hamilton to Morrinsville and back to the Tron, where we switched to Mark’s car, did a U-turn and headed south. We managed to lose the women, who’d said they wanted to rape us . . . and Mark woke up the next morning in Bulls! Mark was a bit confused but we continued on to Wellington and spent a day down there before heading home.
This was what I loved about Mark—none of this fazed him in the slightest. All we wanted to do was go on adventures. We once went on a road trip where we flipped a coin at every destination to see which direction we should go. We ended up at a beach in Northland. We climbed a fence at midnight and had an unauthorised swim in some hot pools before lugging a six-man tent up to the top of Mount Maunganui to camp on the summit. These random adventures continue to this day. Thank you, Mr Boyce.
When I meet new people, I never ask, ‘What do you do?’ I think it’s a lazy question. Most people don’t actually like what they do a hell of a lot so why make them talk about it? What Mark and I did helped me come up with a better answer to that lazy question. I have real jobs, but I’d prefer not to talk about them. When someone asks me what I do, I simply answer, ‘I do epic shit!’ An interesting conversation always follows.
MADNESS WITH MARK
My mind works very fast. I think about a lot of things. A lot. All the time. It’s annoying. And one of the big things that this makes me do is get bored. There are a couple of great quotes about this subject:
‘Only boring people get bored.’ —Ruth Burke, author of The Bausell Home Learning Guide
‘Life is never boring, but some people choose to be bored . . . Boredom is a choice.’ —Wayne Dyer, Your Erroneous Zones
Don’t believe Ruth. No one would describe me as boring, but I get bored all the time. Getting bored is actually good. It’s a catalyst. If I never got bored I would never be forced to think up awesome things. This means I agree with Wayne—absolutely. Hell, most of my great ideas come when I’m feeling bored and decide I won’t be bored anymore. For me it’s tough to get over boredom alone, so I choose to surround myself with people who can help inspire me, and my number-one-first-pick go-to man for this is Mr Mark Boyce.
Mark and I are avid fans of nineties alternative music; growing up during its peak we spent our youth suckling at its teat. On one of our frequent days of rambling discussion we were having a fervent and heated debate about the best music videos of all time, with a bias towards the genre I just mentioned. I brought up a music video from an obscure band I like that had a small hit simply because of the coolness of their music video. The band was called Dinosaur Jr and the song was called ‘Feel the Pain’. It’s a grungy rock song with a chorus ‘pop’ enough to get some decent rotation on the music channels. If you haven’t already seen it I implore you to go and watch it. Now. You can find it on YouTube. It’s awesome and you’ll have a better understanding of what I’m about to discuss—the New Zealand Urban Golf Championships.
For those of you who can’t follow instructions and didn’t check out ‘Feel the Pain’, the video is four minutes of two men driving around New York City in a golf cart playing golf off rooftops, in city parks and downtown streets. Spike Jonze directed it so that the video is awesome is a given, but I digress . . .
It was an idea that we could appropriate for some fun. So we set about planning our own round of urban golf. We purchased old golf clubs that we didn’t mind smashing on concrete, and we collected some outstanding golf attire so we looked the part. The key was to find some golf practice balls—we didn’t want to kill anyone or break anything in downtown Auckland. Luckily we found balls that looked just like golf balls, but felt and acted like squash balls. Perfect!
Now, there was no point organising the entire championship, getting everyone along and having it shut down in five minutes, so some testing was in order. Mr Boyce, our American friend Ryan and I got all dressed up and made our way downtown to the Auckland waterfront. We had designed a hole teeing off in Quay Street and ending at the Auckland Public Library about a kilometre away. We rated it a par 27. It went through one of the busiest intersections in New Zealand and we hit a bus and a few other things along the way. I knew I was having fun when I played a shot from the gutter outside a Chinese restaurant and all the people sitting inside the window gave me a round of applause. All was going well until Mark hooked a shot that hit the wall or window—which one is still up for debate—of the Corner Bar. To this day, Mark protests it wasn’t his fault.
The manager was none too happy. He came out to reprimand us and was joined by a woman who hadn’t taken too kindly to our adventure. An argument ensued. We pointed out that the ball couldn’t do any damage. They said we were idiots. No consensus was going to be reached so we simply played on through. I played a glorious shot up High Street and was about 50 metres ahead of the other two when the police showed up and detained my two companions. Not one to leave mates in the lurch, I returned to join what became the first meeting to lobby for urban golf in downtown Auckland. It was quite comical. The officers were literally playing good cop, bad cop. One was really angry while the other thought the whole thing was quite amusing. Good Cop wanted to let u
s go with a warning. Bad Cop wanted to charge us with ‘carrying an offensive weapon in public’. Apparently a golf club is an offensive weapon when it’s not on a golf course. It seems you do learn something new every day.
A compromise was reached after about 20 minutes of heated debate. They would take our balls so that we couldn’t play anymore and we would take our clubs home that minute and never play urban golf again. Fair enough, thank you, New Zealand Police. Now, they were right, it probably wasn’t the smartest idea. We might have done some damage, we might have caused an accident, but we were young and silly and didn’t do either. We had learnt our lesson—don’t play urban golf during the hours of daylight anywhere near members of the constabulary, and those two cops in particular. Planning was on for the New Zealand Urban Golf Championships. And I had learnt another valuable lesson.
JIMI’S LESSON #2: Ask for forgiveness, not permission.
This lesson has held me in good stead ever since. I’m not saying you should go out and cause trouble, but the simple fact is that people will tell you ‘no’ throughout your life, simply out of fear, for their jobs, for their reputation or whatever. The key is not to ask for their permission, just go do it (as long as it’s legal and doesn’t harm anything or anyone), and if you get in trouble, just say, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise that you couldn’t do that, I’ll never do it again!’ Even though you probably will . . .
The first New Zealand Urban Golf Championships was held on a rainy Tuesday evening in the beautiful industrial estate of Albany, far away from the downtown police station where our friends were probably dealing with drunk teenagers. It was a one-hole par-37 course completed by a bunch of enthusiastic fellows up for a little adventure. The winner was the talented golfer Mr Mark Boyce and there were no major dramas. The biggest success for me, though, was the simple realisation that sticks with me whenever I am doing something awesome—right now this bunch of people is actually having more fun than 99 per cent of the people on the planet. Fact. And tomorrow morning, when these guys go to work at their regular jobs, they will have an amazing story to tell.