"Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride"

I don't easily abide by fast rides at amusement parks. I can do them and even enjoy them, but it's tough. It's easy enough to play it cool in advance of the ride. You wait in line long enough that you can about forget what you're even in line for. I was at a theme park recently, and there were indeed a couple attractions where I got in line not knowing what it was or forgot while in line. Ignorance is, as they say, bliss.

I become quietly uneasy as the ride grows closer, but ultimately resignation sets in. Once the ride starts doing what's scary, it's not so bad a lot of the time. The somewhat milder of the scary rides are not so bad, anyway. The more severe of them bring me about as close as I get to really fervent, sincere prayer. I put a death grip on the bar they have there, and I frantically beg God to protect me. So far he has done so, or the rides are perfectly safe. I prefer to hedge my beds, personally.

It's funny to look at the picture they have taken of you during the ride. I don't buy that picture of course, and I'm not typically brazen enough to take out my phone and photograph the photo. The picture is still neat. My face during the ride's most dramatic moment makes me look like a sociopath or something of the like. It's more or less a neutral look that I give off, as if I was sitting there waiting for the bus instead of on a roller coaster.

All of the anxiety and worries aside, I'm always glad to have put myself through the rides. They are always better after the fact. You then enjoy a bond with the friends who also rode it, and you are free of the shame and indignity of having been the one to wait with everyone's stuff on a bench somewhere. It is not good to be that person. That is like being a eunuch in the sheik's harem, and I doubt whether I have to get into that for you to take my meaning. It's better to ride the rides.