The Daily Booger

Note: This article was originally written in July, 2006, to amuse the readers of my Xanga blog. I also put it on my website but have re-posted it here because I think it belongs here.

People are insisting I update with something. I doubt anyone’s eager to see my computer code implementation of MD5 or SHA-1, so instead I’ll write about, um… hmm… say… the trip we had to Six Flags Marine World a week and a half ago, to celebrate my younger sister’s 13th birthday.

When we got to the park, the very first thing I did was confirm that Six Flags was still touting their most famous attraction: the orca. I would’ve gone straight to it, but the other people in my group, by which I mean my sister, wanted to go on actual rides first.

So we spent a couple hours on roller coasters, not that I minded. If you think that we’d go to Six Flags and only go on a couple roller coasters, you’re insane. In fact, Six Flags had to create a roller coaster specifically for us, called the Tall ‘N’ Scary Ride Of Fear, Terror, And Destruction, just to interest us into coming to the park at all. The ride features several 50-story drop-offs, 12 back-to-back loops, and a brief accelerated thrust that propels you straight up into the exosphere. It almost woke Syd up.

So we went on roller coasters.

Then other non-orca related stuff happened.

Then orca-related stuff happened. My orca encounter was by far, without any exaggeration, the greatest highlight of the entire history of the United States of America. Six Flags has an orca that they keep in a giant above-ground pool with windows on the side, which allows little kids to look at the orca and allows big kids to press their entire face up against the glass and make puppy-eyes at the orca. I, and I am not ashamed to admit this, fell into the latter category.

I got to stand right up against the orca tank and press my face into the window, gazing at the orca. The orca must have been aware that I was a huge fan, because it abandoned it’s other admirers and spend a solid five minutes with me. It even moved its snout right up to the window, just a couple inches from where my snout was pressed. I was seriously
-> this <-
close to the orca, through the glass, standing snout-to-snout and making direct eye contact. Any closer and we would’ve qualified to have been be married. It was B-Con heaven.

One thing about the orca that I wasn’t expecting was how small its eyes were. From pictures of orca you can tell that they don’t have large eyes, but up close I noted that the orca seriously had very small eyes.

Then we ate lunch and did other non-orca related stuff, most of which involved going on more roller coasters. Although I was a bit tired at that point (maintaining solid eye contact with an orca for 5 minutes without blinking can be a bit draining) I continued to hold my hands high up in the air. Only by now I was holding my arms up not because I was enthusiastically enjoying the ride, but rather because earlier we had enjoyed the thrill of going on a water ride that saw fit to place me, for the second year in a row, directly beneath the only waterfall in all of Northern California, so I was holding my arms up in an effort to dry off.

I also continued yelling. Only I was yelling not out of excitement, but out of fear. The roller coasters we went on traversed through enclosures, and if this is not a scary idea for you, than you are, no offense, obviously not a lanky 6′2″ guy. Allow me to explain:

1) When you are on a roller coaster you are moving at high velocity, so objects that were a far way away at one point in time are right at you about a tenth of a second later.
2) Things appear small from a distance.
Now let’s combine those two facts:
3) Thus an opening that looks small from a distance is basically on you by the time you even realize how small it looks, and it feels like you’re going through a hole barely wide enough to fit a #2 pencil.

So there I would be sitting with my hands held high over my head and all of a sudden I would spot a tunnel around the track a few hundred feet ahead of us. From such a distance the opening would look very, very tiny. I mean, very tiny. Tiny enough to make me seriously wonder whether or not the roller coaster would even fit in there at all, or if the top half of it would get severed as we plowed into it at 314 mph.

Upon spotting such a tiny opening, my knee-jerk reaction, as a person who doesn’t want their more critical limbs clipped off by the sides of the tunnel, would be to suck my arms, head, and shoulders down into my torso and cringe as we roared into tunnel’s opening, with support beams cruising inches from the top of my head and with me yelling my final will and testament to whomever was kind enough to take notes.

I’m thankful to report that I lost no important appendages in those tiny tunnels, although I am considerably lighter now that I’m no longer encumbered by my left leg.

But the day was not perfect. On the last ride of the day the roller coaster malfunctioned and I died in the accident. But such is the price one must pay for meeting an orca.