Many moons ago, in high school Psychology, I remember learning about “flooding” to conquer fears.
I half thought it was a bunch of bullshit, but I was slightly more open minded then, so I gave it a try.
If you slept through that class, “flooding” is basically this thing you’re meant to do when you have a fear you want to get over – just inundate yourself with the terrifying stimulus until the concept of or exposure to it has no effect on you. Or if you have more money than fortitude, pay a shrink to make you do it. From snakes to escalators (cuzza that one time the it ate your shoelace and your whole foot almost got filleted by moveable stairs), you’re meant to “flood” yourself with the object of your horror until you get desensitized enough to tolerate seeing or being around it. Seeing as I was too much of a pussy to self-experiment with my true nightmare fuel that was and still is Satan’s eight legged henchmen army, I opted to go with something last-level (that’s my new word for the opposite of “next-level”, btw. Not quite as snide a phrase as “so last season”. More like “held back a year for truancy and failure to complete assignments”). That last-level venture was: heights. And I figured, what better time to tackle this fear than when my too-old-for-me boyfriend was going to take me to King’s Dominion? My mom had told me not to ride the rollercoasters, so I figured it’d be a double win if I both defied this senseless rule and rode every single one in the park in one day.
In retrospect, I tend to think her suggestion had less to do with safety and more to do with the fact that she knew I’d be waiting in line forever. Because although I rode every effing loop, dip, and swirl in that park, I had a new reason to hate roller coasters by the end of that day. The wait. Even the really good rides are a brief, overpriced thrill that you over-prepare for in the most monotonous way (by standing around and shifting weight from one leg to the other). It’s like spending two hours getting pretty for a date when you know the dude’s just gonna end up ripping off your ensemble like Christmas paper and smearing your makeup until you look like Batman’s clown enemy. And then when the womp-womp punchline’s that the ride’s 99 percent shorter than the prep for said ride, I wonder how much money I wasted looking forward to this anti-climactic moment – on primping in one case and on tickets in the other.
Similarly, the end of every epic ride that day – however thrilling – still felt unmemorable after.
Still, when I see version point new-and-improved pop up in the news – like this new one in Orlando – I’d be lying if I said my curiosity wasn’t piqued by something like a cloud kissing column encircled by a 570-foot-tall track of shrieking masochists. Here’s a simulated POV for “The Skyscraper” (which they say will be the tallest in the world), depicted as they imagine it’ll be when it finally comes out in 2017:
1.) I just like how it’s so tall, they put this report on the weather channel website.
2.) They forgot to Sim in the raining chunks of upchuck.
Eh… I dunno, man. While it sounds kinda cray, on a self-scare level, I’ve got worse theme park fears that are so dumb they aren’t worth flooding. For instance, I’d rather do this new DNA looking death plummet than one of those Rebel Yell backward rides. Even if it was going a grand total speed of point one miles per hour. Not a fan of reverse roller coasters. All the time, I’m wondering, “Where am I going? And why? Whose idea was this? Mooo-oom!” (“What do you want? I told you not to ride those rides, you little shit!”)
Sure, it’s nice to know that my flooding technique ultimately took me from fear to intrigue, but I’ll politely decline on this one and all the other ones probably from here on out. Because if my old age didn’t turn me into a carrying member of the Self Soiling Society, the week long wait in line for that effing ride when it finally opens definitely would.