You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
How repulsive America has become.
One trip to Holiday World and you wonder if America is sharing a single chromozone.
It only takes one trip to Santa Claus, Indiana to realize that America needs to collectively wear more condoms.
Santa Claus, Indiana. The name of the town is truly insipid, but really the name of the town. It is located almost in the middle of a crazy triangle marked by Nashville, Louisville and St. Louis.
It’s a water park and amusement park in the middle of, well in the middle of nowhere.
And it is here, that denizens of dumpsters and lab experiments that have gone awry, that thousands of over weight, tatooed miscreants flock to.
The hideousness that is Santa Claus Indiana has burned a hole in my frontal lobe. I see the memory and it makes me go blind, like the time you saw your grandma coming out of the shower.
YIKES!
The day starts grey and cold. It is spitting rain and the wind is enough to bring goose bumps to even the hardened Nordic Viking.
It should be 90 plus degrees, instead it’s polar bear cool.
We saunter in with a pack of primal beasts. They are from Indiana trailer parks, Kentucky coal mines, Tennessee swamps and Illinois bogs.
Bellies hang over spandex. Tattoos are mandatory. Straight teeth are optional.
This is a petri dish with Nikes.
We waddle in with a pack of gluttonous swamp creatures who have just eaten, are still eating, and talking about where they can get a snack.
“Wait till we get in the park,” some Jabba The Hut Momma spews.
She is wearing cowgirl boots and short shorts.
This woman is a visual death row.
There is a collective fog around this group of disgusting Americans.
Is the fog stink? Is the fog stupid? It’s something that seems to have its own gravitational force.
We enter the water park with a pack of other laboratory beasts. I accidentally touch shoulders with a man who is on a day pass from prison.
He looks at me with a sneer. I look at the home made tatoo on his arm and smile sheepishly.
We go to the lockers where proper English is obviously optional.
The sun is lurking behind a layer of icy darkness.
It feels like a fall day, and someone should hand me a rake and point me to a leaf pile.
I pull off my shirt. “We’re gonna have to man up,” I say to myself.
My buddy and the three 14 year old boys with me are not so sure.
The good news: cold rainy day means lines are almost non existent.
The bad news: Maximum shrinkage. I don’t even know what that means.
We climb the first tower, racing up 800 steps. I am winded, my heart pounding.
“This is pretty good,” I say. “cold, but no lines.”
The boys jump in a four man yellow tube and disappear into the mouth of the tunnel.
So much for togetherness.
They disappear with a shriek. “later old men.”
My buddy and I are next.
We slowly sit our old aching backsides into the yellow indentation that serves as a seat. It’s filled with water.
It’s like lowering your ass into a stew pot of crushed ice. The water saturates my dry swim suit with a painful bite.
My groin becomes angry, revolting like a Patriot dumping tea into the Boston Harbor.
“No taxation without representation” I hear the boys shout from their submerged position.
I grimace.
“I’m going to scream like a little girl,” my friend says.
And he does.
As the attendant pushes our tube toward the tunnel, water from the ceiling and wall sprays us. The tube envelopes us with Antarctica like cold and we yell like school girls in the darkness.
We turn backward and ride high on the walls of the icy wave of water.
We explode into a pond at the other end laughing uncontrollably. We are frozen and saturated.
“Did you have fun?” the attendant says.
“Hell yes,” my buddy screams.
We get out and both of us immediately feel the wind rush against our skin. It’s like shaving your chest with brillo pads and rubbing alcohol.
“Where are the boys?” I mutter.
And like that, in an almost empty water park, we are separated.
I scan the walk way. I see child mastodons of blubbery white and neon colored jiggle. It shouldn’t be hard to find the only lean teenagers in a water park, but they are gone, like self control at an all you can eat french fry dispenser.
Of they’re gone, I think. Our boys are looking for short lines and cute girls in bikinis. Isn’t this what America is all about?
“We’ll find them,” my buddy says.
We walk to a ride called the Mammoth. It’s a water coaster where up to 5 people sit in a gigantic tube.
We are shivering, wondering why so many stupid Americans, like ourselves, have dared to come on such a terrible day.
The line shuffles forward steadily. And one word is mentioned over and over. “It’s cold.”
It’s so cold, the line is sparse. The wait a fraction of its normal self.
That’s when I see a sign that says “Wait from this point: 2 hours”
I smile as I zoom by this check point.
A moment later, We pass a line that says “Wait from this point: 1 hour”
I’m cold, but this is why we came.
We walk through the serpentine series of bars that wind toward the ride.
The line is composed of a few ugly Americans willing to brave frost bite to get a few quick rides in.
Normally this line is a sweaty sausage grinder that is stuck. That’s because the line is stuffed with an onslaught of disgusting humanity that has spilled into a deep fryer of fat.
Though we are moving, we are still in a line. There must be a 1000 people. It’s easily 30 minutes. We trudge slowly forward listening to conversations full of bad grammar and crazy thoughts of how to fix a carbureator with a shot gun.
The line is filled with people who can only be described as genetically altered.
“I saw a story recently on Live with Jimmy Kimmel,” I tell my friend. “A scientist theorized that mankind began when a Male Pig mated with a female monkey.”
My friend smiles.
“That would explain this,” He says. “It’s like mongoloid nation.”
It certainly explains the high foreheads, the knuckles dragging, the hairy, stinky, tattoo covered mystery before me.
We both laugh and move inch by inch closer to a ride that neither of us is even sure we want to ride.
Suddenly, I spot the head of my son. He is dashing at full gait past row after row of waiting sloth humans.
My son and his three friends have all ready hard wired the park. They have determined the fastest route to the front of any line is the singles pathway.
They run uncontrolled, fluidly, like the bowels of a cruise ship with Montezuma’s revenge.
They are suddenly at the head of the line, standing to the side, waiting on the rider platform. It’s as if they have received a pardon from the president, a free pass, and they are waiting to board the next yellow floatation device.
“Oh my God. Did you see that?,” I say.
I am happy for them, and upset at myself. Are we so old and stupid that waiting in a line of saggy skinned heathens is acceptable strategy?
I watch over the top of a hundred heads as a yellow tube arrives and a group of people load. If there is a need for a single rider the attendants pull from the single’s line.
One after another, our boys get in a tube with complete strangers and go up the conveyor belt.
5 minutes pass and we see the boys race into the single’s line again. They are all smiles. Within 10 minutes all three have ridden a 2nd time. My buddy and I have moved about a 100 feet.
“You watch. They will end up in the tube with us,” he says jokingly.
He’s almost right. As we finally get in a tube with 3 people from fat knuckle Arkansas, I see the boys getting to the loading dock for a 3rd time.
I can only smile as the massive load of white people around me squishes into my tube. The durable rubber screams under tension that only a tractor tire in an Iowa corn field can know.
The day turns into a running joke about two old guys wondering where three 14 year old boys are.
I don’t know, my friend jokes. All these white kids look the same.
“Look for cute 14 year old girls,” i quip.
If my white son was a 14 year old girl, I’d have all ready found him I retort. He’s be right there in that bright pink bikini.
We laugh out loud. We sit at the wave pool and stare at the unbelievable array of disgust.
Watching people at the airport is one thing. At least they are clothed. This water park is like that if the airport was also a zoo, a jail, and a water treatment facility.
So much skin, jiggling. So many stomachs flopping. So many people who don’t own a mirror and wouldn’t know any better if they did.
“Are we the fattest nation on Earth?” I ask my friend.
“It’s all the fried food,” he replies.
“This is more than fried food. This is stupidity coupled with lack of self control. If aliens from another world landed at this water park, they would leave and find another world to conquer. Even people from planet X who thrive on the skulls of humanity would push this away from the intergallactic table.
Closed by the Health Department it should say.
I would argue, based on visual evidence at this water park, we are a nation of saggy flesh mastodons. We stand in lines to eat ice cream and pizza.
We have more tattoos than teeth. The language we speak publicly is so foreign, half of these people should be required to have a work visa to be here.
The boys will ultimately turn the day into a quest to hug young girls from other states.
My friend and I come to the conclusion this is a good thing.
“There are only 5 good looking people in this water park,” I will tell the boys on the ride home. “And you hugged 40% of them.”
The boys will laugh.
Why not. It’s not their fault that America doesn’t care.
Life’s Crazy™