This piece title is from that opening line. The DFW connection is quite striking, as Wikipedia sums up:
> The story "Lost in the Funhouse" had an overt influence on David Foster Wallace in the final novella of Girl with Curious Hair, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way". The protagonist takes a creative writing course at a school near Johns Hopkins, taught by a Professor Ambrose, who says he "is a character in and the object of the seminal 'Lost in the Funhouse'"
Demonstrating Poe's law probably wasn't the goal, but it was an inevitable outcome of what and how he chose to write.
I'd bet there are a lot of the author's genuine thoughts and feelings in this piece. But the best comedy has at least a grain of truth if not more. There's no way an author who is able to write like this didn't intend the humor in lines like "The moment was so upsetting that I absconded and immediately purchased a funnel cake, which I ate distractedly and tried to calm down, moseying for some time on the park’s vast, labyrinthine walkways."
Eeesh. I'm honestly worried about the mental health of the author. It could just be hyperbole intended unseriously, but most of the article also tracks as clinical anxiety masquerading as humor.
Unfortunately, it is never revealed if the author enjoyed the Point Of No Return or not. :)
While I agree on the lack of empathy and understanding of simple thrill seeking and "unreasonable fun" (like sports, gambling, dancing, sex, music, movies, even reading...), the author unwittingly stands up for the few that are peer-pressured to take part in "fun" activities that might frighten or simply not entertain them.
However, the approach the author takes won't help them: it's better to recognize that you personally don't find a particular activity rewarding, and encourage everyone to find something that is. Perhaps it's not even a "few", but a lot. But just being negative does not help better understand how we are forced to do "fun" things we do not enjoy.
And it's also okay if you find fun in something that majority finds fun in (like water parks): you don't have to be absolutely different in every way to count as a smart person :)
By missing to realize this, the author seems like a disgruntled fake-intellectual guy who hates everyone for having any sort of fun and dismisses it as "intellectually useless": even though studies show that "fun" helps us perform better cognitively.
I've been this guy. When volunteering in Haiti, I was just... mad at the world. I hated everyone who didn't want to move to Haiti and help.
Then I started reading about Paul Farmer, who has arguably done more than I ever will but doesn't seem to have developed that same anger.
I met him once, and he recognized that you have to take time for you to be. To center yourself. Whether thats a theme park or watching TV and talking to your friends about it.
The key (which I didn't have a handle on early on in Haiti) is to find the balance you need to be able to accept in life what you can't change and to aggressively strive against the things you can.
> Pretty sure most everyone's got that was what he was trying for.
I really don't think that's true—we have comments "worried about the mental health of the author", we've got comments claiming he "struggles with the joys in life", we've got comments claiming the author "seems like a disgruntled fake-intellectual guy who hates everyone for having any sort of fun". These aren't comments from people who get that he's joking.
> It certainly didn't land for me though.
That's fair; there's no humor that works for everyone. But even if you don't find it funny, at least you understood what he was doing.
"The drop was so precipitous that I saw in just a few short seconds I would go abruptly vertical, vanishing briskly down a long dark well. It was the point of no return, a water park in 2019. And for reasons I struggled to explain, I desperately missed my family. Look how far the fathoms have taken us. Look how far we’ve strayed."
Sounds like a roundabout way of saying he chickened out of riding the biggest slide in the park after seeing the drop. But I have no idea what those last 2 sentences mean.
The entire thing is written in a very overwrought and dramatic style, he’s trying to be funny. The ending is probably supposed to capture an emotional climax the likes of which you’d find at the end of a Melville or Kafka story (but it’s not that funny and kinda nonsensical)
> all this forgotten Americana [...] it casually introduces to the park-goer’s mind scenes of mass genocide and global annihilation [...] Why tempt fate with a whale-watching expedition when you can scoot on over to SeaWorld? [...on and on...]
Reading the introductory paragraphs and then moving to the rest, one can understand why the author struggles with the joys of life. Overthinking, overanalyzing, and unable to empathize with the non-rich masses looking for simple, shallow fun. It then goes into politics and ivory-tower-like judgments. On the next escape the author should consider getting away from himself.
The footer says his writing appears in a bunch of places including.... "Best American Travel Writing 2018" .... I wonder if the rest of that book is like this?
Absolutely. On reading this I thought “no wonder he’s exhausted, if that were how my mind worked I’d be exhausted too.” It’s kind of startling that someone would be willing to not just write but publish this (and presumably be proud of it?). I’d be terribly embarrassed if it were me thinking, let alone writing, this stuff.
>Because who can enjoy the Congo Bongo in light of mudslides in the Pacific Northwest? Who can enjoy The Flying Gecko when you have species-wide devastation in the Amazon? The sheer insanity of a water park in the age of the Anthropecene...
This was really well written, but I couldn't help laughing at the comma splice errors in his own prose after calling out his students for it in the first paragraph.
example:
> Soon we hurdled through the turnstiles, joining the throngs of near-nude Midwesterners, our procession a timpani of aqua socks.
