For Whom Is the Water Park Fun?
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
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'"
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
This guy must be so fun at parties.
example:
> Soon we hurdled through the turnstiles, joining the throngs of near-nude Midwesterners, our procession a timpani of aqua socks.