Kingda Ka

Beware when tigers try to sell you anything.
Sometimes they sell you cereal.

Other times they sell oil.

And on rare occasions they even sell you overpriced colleges.


We were at the NJ Six Flags for Du's birthday and a tiger sold me a ride on the Kingda Ka, the world's tallest and fastest rollercoaster. It stands at 456 feet (45 stories -- tall enough to be an aviation safety concern) and accelerates from 0-128 miles per hour in less than four seconds. Du and I were at the front row seat. Here's what it looks like:





Amusement parks and rollercoasters are pretty bizarre ideas when you think about them. They package our fear of injury/death and sell it back to us as happyfunptime joy rides. You know we as a species have evolved to be a pretty fucked up breed of monkeys when we build huge town-sized settlements in New Jersey devoted to making the fear of dying a fun experience.

No exaggeration. It was like simulated death. I opened my mouth during the coaster and swallowed gallons of air, couldn't even hear myself scream. My heart considered abandoning my ribcage and eloping with my lungs. At one point over the ride's peak, the view was just me, the curved horizon and the dirt below. Then the whole giant angry apparatus slammed us towards the ground.

There were stages of recovery from the ride. We played it cool immediately after the ride (1st Stage: Denial), but I think at some point later in the afternoon we all gradually acknowledged that it was what we'd categorize as a traumatic experience (2nd Stage: Recognition). We were violated and I will have nightmares about rollercoasters forever. And then of course the whole experience gets recuperated as a funny story the next day (3rd Stage: Denial again). But serious, I'd actually recommend an hour-long repeated ride session as a sort of lite alternative to Guantanamo.

Afterward I was pretty much depleted of a week's worth of adrenaline, so we moved on to gentler slopes. Namely Du's favorite rollercoaster -- Nitro, which (when viewed in profile) resembles the hospitable curves of the A/C/E subway map. I think I was too drained to enjoy it properly.