After spending a day at Six Flags with friends, I have decided I am not too old for roller coasters, but I am definitely too old for amusement parks. I mean, duh, but I used to love going so much. Six Flags was a source of genuine pleasure and excitement as a kid, a place I could romp unsupervised as an adolescent, and something I could still enjoy wholeheartedly into my 20s so long as I relied heavily on irony and skin-deep sociological scrutiny as an excuse.
Now I just find the whole place kind of yucky. But goddamn, you tell me how else I'm supposed to be able to spend just $30 to get that great sensation that my stomach is still hovering about a foot above my head as we all plummet down the track and get caught by the brakes just in time, over and over. It's really fun to have that sensation every once in a while, cathartic even. I'm just not sure it's worth it to spend the day wandering amidst incoherent themes, sticky walkways, and puffy, hyperactive larval-stage humans to get it.