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.

I love flying, primarily because there is little about the current air travel process that is not thoroughly comical. This fact is made especially juicy when combined with the fact that I’ve already realized, about a day or two into this blog, that I’m desperate for writing material. Thus my recent visit to my out-of-state girlfriend had the added benefit of providing me with blog material. Although, for my readers that happen to be said girlfriend, I would like to stress that this was a totally secondary, side-wise, minuscule benefit to my trip.

At the airport I shared the shuttle from long-term parking to the Sacramento International terminal (it was an exciting day in the city when the Sacramento airport went international, with one flight to Mexico every other week — take that Los Angeles!) with a lady whose dog loves to run and kill things. I know this because she talked about her dog to the other lady next to her non-stop for the entire duration of the shuttle ride. Her dog also likes to travel, eat, poop, and bark loudly at night for no apparent reason, thus setting him sharply apart from, I don’t know, the genre of dogs who don’t like to eat, poop, and bark.

After I made it to the terminal I printed my e-ticket from the e-ticket booth provided, for my convenience, at the end of a long complicated maze of elastic rope which was keeping an disorderly line of approximately one passenger in line, counting myself. The concept of an e-ticket is that, if your life is structured such that the one thing computers have the inability to screw up is your travel schedule, you can amend that by purchasing a plane ticket on a computer, from another computer, and then print it out from separate computer just in case neither of the previous two messed anything up. Not that it really matters whether or not you ever manage to print your ticket because your flight will be delayed and eventually canceled. The last time I flew I departed from San Fransisco on the only flight to successfully leave the airport during that week, and even that was delayed. Sitting in the San Fransisco lounge before my flight I spoke with a man who had been in the terminal since the Carter administration, surviving on complimentary peanut donations made to him by arriving travelers. His latest travel goal was to catch a flight home in time for his daughter’s wedding, whom he had last seen as a three-year-old.

But the people who run the airlines do not care. They’re out of touch with the real world, remember, these are the same people who have seen to it that the airport overhead speakers continually broadcast useful information to you, the traveler, such as that you are not accept packages or luggage donations from strangers, or to let them carry your luggage for you unattended. I’m not sure what these people are thinking because it’s obvious, if you just look around the San Fransisco airport, any stranger who attempted to assist a random passenger with their luggage would probably get shot before they could even touch a suitcase.

As I sat in the lounge for my current flight, the pattern of loud speaking women broadcasting interesting details of their lives to the world at large continued with a southern woman talking on her cell phone. She was talking to someone at our destination (Salt Lake, Utah) where I was to lay over, and at one point was desperately trying to figure out the time difference between here and there. After listening to her make numerous comments such as “so wuz the tam difference in Sat Lake?” and “Aye don’t mean to be dumb… but… ha’d aye check dat?”, I piped up and confirmed for her that, yes, it was a one hour difference, naively hoping that this was the last question the lady needed to before she could hang up, or at least lower her voice. But I was wrong and she proceeded to discuss, at length, the intimate details of her business job, which apparently has to do with both dead turkeys and the stock market.

But thankfully everything went well on my flight and I made it to Texas in time to share dinner with my girlfriend. Because I love to eat. And bark.