You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
Holiday World.
It exists, Hidden in the middle of a cornfield in Santa Claus, Indiana. It’s a massive complex of coasters and water slides. It’s a 2.5 hour drive from Nashville, Indianapolis, and Louisville.
Families come from all over middle America because it is a destination amusement park that is really well run.
As you pull in the images of Santa Claus fill your field of vision. Reindeer lane and Rudolph Lake to the left. Santa Claus imagery is so prevalent, you forget it’s 95 degrees outside.
Just then a Santa Claus Police car screams by. It’s not a sleigh drawn by eight reindeer, it’s actually a police officer going to what I presume is a hot call.
Holiday World is a great value for the dollar. It’s clean and the workers friendly. They even give away free drinks and suntan lotion. Who the hell gives away anything now-a-days, except Santa Claus.
The park is so popular and such a bargain, it’s packed tighter than Rosie O’Donnell in a Hot Yoga fitness leotard.
We get there at 9:30 Saturday morning. The moment we pull in you can can tell it’s going to be hot and crowded like a New York City subway car in rush hour.
License plates from Indiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois fill the parking lot.
A myriad of humans are merging as one collective bag of flesh, walking toward the front gate.
That’s when it strikes me; Middle America is hideous looking.
White people, black people, Asian people, Hispanic people. It’s a melting pot of ugly.
Cut off shorts and wife beater tank tops fill my pupils. I see mothers with crooked teeth, fathers with mullets and children who look like they were purchased from the Hell’s Angels catalogue.
As I walk with the pack, I hear the dialects of America. I hear Indiana twang and southern drawl. I hear Chicago kielbasa slur and blue grass stupid.
Conversations about what rides are the best and how hot it will be fill the air. But I also hear conversations that make me hope that the entrance has a metal detector.
We enter the park and it’s a free for all. Thousands of people who haven’t seen a treadmill in a decade run for either the amusement park or water park.
I see so much fat jiggling, I begin to get sea sick.
Our group opts for the water park. It’s a sea of humanity wearing swim wear. I inadvertently touch more flesh than a working girl in Copenhagen on a Saturday night.
On our way to the lockers, I sense the crowd, the congestion and the growing heat. The layout of the lockers is a lot like a maze. It squeezes us down a gauntlet of cement and metal. Suddenly I am chest to chest with the horde of sweating America.
My shirt is covered with perspiration, and I haven’t even begun to sweat yet.
I am looking into a societal petri dish that makes me think this is one part middle America, one part jail break.
As we move to the rides I find myself ass to elbow with a group of people out on weekend parole.
Suddenly I am a rat in a maze of bridges crossing over lazy rivers and Oasis stations offering free drinks. Just what this over weight heart attack in the making needs, free fountain drinks.
YIKES.
If only people without tattoos were allowed to recreate here, there would be plenty of oxygen and a lot claustrophobia.
Sadly, it must be tattoo Saturday at the park. Perhaps every person with a tattoo who brings another person with a tattoo gets a free pregnancy test.
I’m not sure what’s going on, but if you don’t have body art you are in the minority.
In my conservative estimate 7 of ever 10 bodies is covered with some form of ink, and this figure includes children.
Seriously, almost every adult in the park looks like the back of a High Times magazine. One woman has gone Mike Tyson with a chain link symbol growing up her neck, around her chin, and onto her cheek.
Stay Classy Holiday World!
I see the face of children on a mother’s sagging arm pit. I see Carpe Diem stenciled across a man’s chest, not once but twice. I see stars on a man’s nipples. Huh? I see tramp stamps on women who have no right to call themselves tramps. There is so much body art you would think this is a garage sale in Tijuana.
I can live with tattoos, but when they are forced upon you like butter on a muffin, it becomes sickening. I decide this while standing in a winding maze of tedium, staring at a slow motion array of fat, jiggling flesh and toothless humanity.
As we move through the peregrine line of timeless boredom, all see is sagging skin covered by dark, scraggly jail house tats.
Is this really what God wanted when he created flesh?
The over all vibe I get in line, where every random fatuous thought can be heard, is that of a NNeanderthal tupper ware party.
The IQ quotient is low on the scale of evolution. I see a lot of frontal lobes that might double for a racquetball wall.
The crowd around me would be perfect for Jay Leno’s street walking segment where contestants know more about Jay Zee than who represents them in Congress.
This group of wet, slimy humans couldn’t tell yo what the Emancipation Proclamation is, but ask them to figure out the bail bond percentage for a DUI – no problem.
At one point, standing in line, inhaling the fermenting stench of stupid, I feel embarrassed. I wonder what someone from Sweden coming here for the first time might think.
Would he or she like the park because it is so damn cool? Would they love the rides and the Wildebeest and the Raven Roller Coaster which literally dissects your colon from your internal organs.
Or would he or she say to himself in a Nordic language “Oh My God. America is a gigantic sagging bosom of jail house miscreants?”
The jury is out on that one.
The park probably saw 20,000 people push through the turnstiles. We stood in lines that were way too long for the quality of some rides.
As a group we had a blast. We looked past the sweat and tattoos and long lines and just went with the flo. We enjoyed the park and took in the day understanding that 95 degree summertime Saturdays are going to bring a horde of humanity with all their peculiar idiosyncrasies.
We explained to the kids up front that it was going to be a hurry up and wait day.
Thankfully when we got tired of waiting we went to the wave pool which had no line. We fought kung fu and wrestled and danced over man made waves. Though I must admit, the water tasted like chlorinated sweat and there was a film of something greasy floating on the surface that reminded me of the BP disaster in the gulf a few years ago.
Perhaps it was all that free suntan oil. Maybe it was one too many tattoos wearing off, pushed to the point of epidermal exhaustion by fat stretched over bone not prepared to carry such weight.
All in all, my recommendation is to go to Holiday World during the work week when more tattoos are either working in the factory, or back in jail for bad behavior.
It’s a great place, it’s just a shame that so many Americans know how to get there.
Perhaps the Santa Claus Police can take care of that for us.
And that is crazy.™