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Not much happened to humanity between emerging from the primordial ooze and the creation of the Internet. It’s hard to imagine a time when people were forced to write what is known to antiquity as a “letter” when corresponding over great distances, or make guttural noises with the diaphragm, larynx, mouth and tongue to engage in the primitive human ritual of “conversation.”

Shortly around the time that we developed the opposing thumbs necessary to hit the space bar with, the BBS was all the rage. (So was the jitterbug. It just doesn’t seem right to use the phrase “all the rage” without it somehow referring to the jitterbug.)

Pop Quiz: BBS is an acronym for which of the following?

A) ball busting slut

B) busty brown suga’

C) Barbecue Bacon Sandwich (add a soft drink and fries for just 99 cents)

D) bulletin board system

If you answered D, you are a mirthless son of a bitch, although I acquiesce, you are correct, good sir. The BBS system had many parallels with today’s Internet, but also some notable differences. This helpful table will highlight the differences.

Figure 1.1: Hehehehe… beaver.

Despite these obvious drawbacks, the BBS did enjoy a certain popularity among a minority of PC users in the late eighties and early nineties. And when I say minority, I mean a tiny group of sexless young men constantly screaming at their mothers to hang up the phone because they were in the middle of a round of Solar Realms Elite. One of the mainstays of BBS culture was the text file.

You know the vast wasteland of crappy jokes, sentimental schlock and idiotic rants that it seems only your mother-in-law forwards to you? It wasn’t always like that. It’s just the rules of economy, really. Demand increases for a product, more and more companies manufacture said product, and soon the market is flooded. And it’s never flooded with good product. No, it’s always flooded with absolute shit. As more and more people got Web access, demand for lawyer and blond jokes skyrocketed, more witless douchebags started churning them out, and now you could compile a compendium of boring American humor that would make Webster’s 1913 look like a pamphlet on genital warts.

Yes, online humor used to actually be funny. There was a particular text file that I stumbled across back in the day that I found particularly riotous, and a cursory search lead me to an unaltered version of the original. It’s called “50 Ways to Confuse Your Roomate (sic)” and is credited only to “Brian and Andy.” I present it to you here in its entirety, and its hilarity.

1. Smoke jimson weed. Do whatever comes naturally.

2. Switch the sheets on your beds while he/she is at class.

3. Twitch a lot.

4. Pretend to talk while pretending to be asleep.

5. Steal a fishtank. Fill it with beer and dump sardines in it. Talk to them.

6. Become a subgenius.

7. Inject his/her twinkies with a mixture of Dexatrim and MSG.

8. Learn to levitate. While your roommate is looking away, float up out of your seat. When he/she turns to look, fall back down and grin.

9. Speak in tongues.

10. Move you roommate’s personal effects around. Start subtly. Gradually work up to big things, and eventually glue everything s/he owns to the ceiling.

11. Walk and talk backwards.

12. Spend all your money on Jolt Cola. Drink it all. Stack the cans in the middle of your room. Number them.

13. Spend all your money on Transformers. Play with them at night. If your roommate says anything, tell him/her with a straight face, “They’re more than meets the eye.”

14. Recite entire movie scripts (e.g. “The Road Warrior,” “Repo Man,” Casablanca,”) almost inaudibly.

15. Kill roaches with a monkey wrench while playing Wagnerian arias on a kazoo. If your roommate complains, expla that it is for your performance art class (or hit him/her with the wrench).

16. Collect all your urine in a small jug.

17. Chain yourself to your roommate’s bed. Get him/her to bring you food.

18. Get a computer. Leave it on when you are not using it. Turn it off when you are.

19. Ask your roommate if your family can move in “just for a couple of weeks.”

20. Buy as many back issues of Field and Stream as you can. Pretend to masturbate while reading them.

21. Fake a heart attack. When your roommate gets the paramedics to come, pretend nothing happened.

22. Eat glass.

23. Smoke ballpoint pens.

24. Smile. All the time.

25. Collect dog shit in baby food jars. Sort them according to what you think the dog ate.

26. Burn all your waste paper while eying your roommate suspiciously.

27. Hide a bunch of potato chips and Ho Hos in the bottom of a trash can. When you get hungry, root around in the trash. Find the food, and eat it. If your roommate empties the trash before you get hungry, demand that s/he reimburse you.

28. Leave a declaration of war on your roommate’s desk. Include a list of grievances.

29. Paste boogers on the windows in occult patterns.

30. Shoot rubber bands at your roommate while his/her back is turned, and then look away quickly.

31. Dye all your underwear lime green.

32. Spill a lot of beer on his/her bed. Swim.

33. Bye three loaves of stale bread. Grow mold in the closet.

34. Hide your underwear and socks in your roommate’s closet. Accuse him/her of stealing it.

35. Remove your door. Ship it to your roommate’s parents (postage due).

36. Pray to Azazoth or Zoroaster. Sacrifice something nasty.

37. Whenever your roommate walks in, wait one minute and then stand up. Announce that you are going to take a shower. Do so. Keep this up for three weeks.

38. Array thirteen toothbrushes of different colors on your dresser. Refuse to discuss them.

39. Paint your half of the room black. Or paisley.

40. Whenever he/she is about to fall asleep, ask questions that start with “Didja ever wonder why….” Be creative.

41. Shave one eyebrow.

42. Put your mattress underneath your bed. Sleep down under there.

43. Put horseradish in your shoes.

44. Shelve all your books with the spines facing the wall. Complain loudly that you can never find the book that you want.

45. Always flush the toilet three times.

46. Subsist entirely on pickles for a week. Vomit often.

47. Buy a copy of Frankie Yankovic’s “Pennsylvania Polka,” and play it at least 6 hours a day. If your roommate complains, explain that it’s an assignment for your primitive cultures class.

48. Give him/her an allowance.

49. Listen to radio static.

50. Open your window shades before you go to sleep each night. Close them as soon as you wake up.

And so, Brian and Andy, I say unto thee: rise, good and savvy humorists, and claim your legacy among the pantheon of great BBS text file humor writers! Your contributions in this realm, although ultimately meaningless, will at least be eternal.

This and many other hilarious text files of the era can be found at textfiles.com.

A few weeks or months ago – hell, it might have been in another life now, I can’t keep track anymore – hurlinginvective.com author and professional adult diaper tester Kevin Beane wrote a funny bit on, well, nothing at all, as a follow up to my funny bit on Centralia. (Disclaimer: Entries may not actually be funny.)

Anyway, his bit ended with a nod to Action Park, a now defunct amusement park in New Jersey. And when I say nod, I mean a link to a Wikipedia article. And I’m thinking: what the fuck, Kev? A link? What do you think this is, MySpace? Can’t you do better than that? Then I realized: no, he can’t do better. He wears fucking adult diapers. So I decided to cut him a little slack and tell you about Action Park myself.

Whoop-dee-fucking-doo, you’re thinking. An amusement park. Roller coasters. Overpriced food. Elephant ears. Hot sun. Hot blacktop. Saharan parking lots. Tilt-a-Whirls. Whirl-a-Tilts. Tilt-a-Spins. Kids spitting off the sky ride. Sunburn. Silly hats. $40 shot glasses.

Here’s what makes Action Park that makes the story worth telling: it was a diabolical maze of treachery and death. Every day of its existence, the park’s owners were basically giving two things away: a big middle finger to nearly every public safety law on the book, and a de facto raffle ticket to everyone who came in the gate.

The grand prize was death. In 18 years, there were six winners.

Second prize was traction.

Third prize was a free elephant ear with the purchase of a large RC Cola.

The idea for this hell on earth came about in the mid-1970s when the park’s owners wanted to find something to do with their ski resort areas during the off-season. (Everyone who knew there even was skiing in New Jersey, raise your hand. I thought so.) Ya can’t ski down a dirt hill (or so I thought) but you can give someone a real motherfucker of a wedgie on a water slide that goes down said hill – and the kicker is, they’ll pay you for it – thus, Waterworld, the world’s first water park, starring Kevin Costner, was born.

Waterworld was improved with the addition of Motoworld, where patrons could drive around in motorized cars, boats, rickshaw, hovercraft, wheelbarrows, funny cars, tanks, and bulldozers, which led to Gitmoworld, where patrons were held without charge as enemy combatants, which led to Slomoworld, where everything was really slooooooowwwww, which led to Nomoworld, was like Left Behind brought to life, which led to Action Park. Action Park was basically a combination of Waterworld, Motoworld, and a handful of other attractions at which you and your friends could brush up against the icy cloak of Death.

I could go into a lengthy history of the park, but it’s rather boring, so here are the broad strokes: it opened, killed a bunch of people, became a legendary rite of passage for area youth, got sued like a motherfucker, then folded. The far more interesting exercise is to highlight some of the park’s bloodthirsty attractions.

The Alpine Slide was essentially an enormous slab of concrete that ran parallel (that is, underneath) the park’s ski lift. (This is where the true marriage of amusement park and water park became realized, as you were usually being spit on by those riding the ski lift as you made your descent.) You made your descent on a wobbly sled-like contraption that consisted of four wheels, a yoke-like device that created the cruel illusion that you could steer the thing, and a brake pedal that created the cruel illusion that you could slow the thing down. Charioteers who did not unwittingly transmogrify into a crimson skid mark on the pavement were cruelly cloven in twain by the scimitar-wielding “Alpine Warriors” who waited at the bottom. Their half-corpses were mixed and matched for comical effect and hung from the ski-lift wires as a warning to those who would foolishly dare to challenge its cruel, sun-scorched slopes.

I may have gotten a little carried away there. You should be able to reasonably discern which among those statements are true and which are the twisted fantasies of a mood- and mind-altering drug-crazed fiend who plays too many first-person shooters.

When I first read that Action Park offered Grass Skiing – presumably for the more suicidal patrons who didn’t think the Alpine Slide was, you know, catastrophically lethal enough – I was, as you might imagine, a little confused. I know next to nothing about sports. While I have a cursory understanding of how your standard American fare sports work (touchdowns = football, home runs = baseball, being an insufferable prick = basketball) I’m fairly oblivious to the finer details. The first time someone mentioned Yao Ming to me, I thought he was part of Mao Zedong’s ruling party. I couldn’t figure out why it was such a big deal that the Chinese interior minister broke his ankle.

But, even in my ignorance, I am reasonably sure that a) snow is a necessary component of skiing, and b) snow is a desired component of skiing. The corollary, which will become increasingly obvious as we continue this exercise: New Jerseyans can be convinced that anything is fun.

As a fan of the aforementioned first-person shooter, I must say that the Tank Ride sounded like monstrous fun. Imagine a go-kart outfitted with a tennis ball cannon – that’s the Tank Ride’s “tank”. Each was outfitted with a target that opposing tank commanders aimed for. A tank that took a hit became temporarily incapacitated, unable to move or fire. This inevitably led to fellow tank commanders to disengage from their existing skirmishes and turn towards the crippled vehicle and unload a volley of tennis balls. To add another element of treachery to the proceedings – the pit where the Tank Ride took place was encircled by stationary tennis cannons (ala American Gladiators) which were manned by other parkgoers.

If you get a little tingle in your bottom reading about the Tank Ride, then you and I are kindred spirits. I worked at a go-kart track in high school. It turned my skin to leather, baked to a crisp under the harsh sun. I subsisted entirely from fried food from the nearby bowling alley. I got to bowl and ride go-karts for free whenever I wanted. My workday started at 1pm. And I smelled like gasoline all the time. I even used to have a recurring dream of myself driving into the desert sunset in a double-seater go-kart with a beat-up suitcase in the seat next to me and The Muppets’ “Movin’ Right Along” playing in the background. If you remove salary from the equation, it was the best job I ever had. This is where my love of the go-kart stems. So, in my mind, marrying a go-kart with any kind of cannon at all is just pure fucking boss.

But I digress. (As I often do.) Surprisingly, the Tank Ride posed nearly no danger to parkgoers – it was the employees whose heads were on the chopping block for a change. Frequent breakdowns, cannon jams and the like frequently forced the battle to pause while an employee dashed onto the battlefield to remedy the problem. At this point, everyone with a cannon took to firing upon the helpless employee, despite the prohibition on such a barbaric practice. I envision their bodies crumpling under the barrage of big yellow bullets, going down in an exceedingly dramatic fashion, like Sgt. Elias in Platoon.

Public pools in general are just plain foul, and we all know it. And we all know why. People pee in public pools. Most of us are willing to put up with the threat because swimming is such a novelty – and most pools are just so darn big, you feel reasonably confident that if you keep your distance from the troglodyte that you suspect capable of such a heinous act, you run a minimal risk of coming in contact with it. Pool water just doesn’t get around that much.

But Tidal Wave Pool water does. We’ve all seen these things – a large pool, shallow at one end and deep at another, packed with what appears to be the entire refugee population of a third world country, with waves that go back and forth from end to end, causing the body parts of the stinking carcasses contained therein to collide with much frequency and with great comical effect to those watching safely from poolside.

So what makes the Tidal Wave Pool so bad? The isolated pockets of human foulness become violently blended together by the waves, creating a thin soup of pee, butt juice, sweat, dead skin, grease, hair product, skin product, makeup, mucus, menstrual blood, pubic hair, and dirt. That, and it claimed two lives and was the site of literally thousands of rescues by the twelve lifeguards on duty at all times. I may be a bit biased, but I’d rather work the Tank Ride, thank you kindly.

The Tarzan Swing imitated so many 8mm home movies from the 60’s – patrons swung from rope from a height of 20 feet and dropped into the water below. What a lot of people didn’t realize is that the lagoon-like pool below them was spring-fed, which meant the water was really cold. It delivered a righteous chill to many an adventurer who wasn’t expecting it, which meant lifeguards were constantly rescuing shivering patrons who were too shocked to swim out.

Meanwhile, amid the clamor of the endless dismemberments, head traumas, drownings, electrocutions and war crimes, the Miniature Golf Course was relatively safe. Upon landing a putt, players would have to clamber down into the 10-meter deep hole to retrieve their ball and fend off waves of knife-throwing lepers and rabid bears armed with chainsaws. Patrons were encouraged to bring their own weaponry, as the rusted clubs given to them by the park staff often crumbled in their hands mid-swing and were nearly useless in fighting off the snarling, feral hordes. A snack bar and an ammunition depot graced the 9th hole, for players who made it that far. Hot dogs, Royal Crown cola products, absinthe, morphine, soft pretzels, rocket-propelled grenades and collectible proximity mines with the Action Park logo were available. I understand there was also a windmill.

There are a good dozen or more other deathtraps I’d love to tell you about, but I can tell by the look on your face (that’s right – I can see you) that you’re getting bored of my tomfoolery, so I’ll close by telling you about the infamous Looping Water Slide.

Figure 1.1: What kind of sadistic fuckwit thought this was a good idea?

According to various claims:

• park employees were offered hundred dollar bills to test the slide
• test dummies sent down the slide emerged dismembered
• the ride was only opened for a handful of days during its lifetime at the park
• one rider got stuck at the top of the loop, and a hatch had to be built into it
• this was the stupidest idea in the history of the universe

Action Park: We’re not really trying to kill you.
We just don’t care if you die. ®

I feel compelled to make a small follow up to my deliriously inspiring post immediately previous this one. While you, I am certain, felt as though you were soaring above the clouds while getting orally serviced and eating cheesecake, others found my allegory of Tetris-as-Life to be, well, very me. Which scares them.

It occurred to me today, however, that I didst indeed prevaricate while describing the “accidental line in crisis mode” scenario. To quote:

All you cling to is the vain hope that something will go right. That you will accidentally complete some line and watch it disappear, get your bearings and get things under control.

But you never will.

I do often feel like things will never be quite right in my life, but that’s just because the chemicals in my brain are mostly the kind used to preserve Twinkies rather than dopamine, serotonin, alcohol – you know, the good stuff. But in spite of that, I have an occasional moment of clarity where I realize that it’s quite possible I’m wrong about all that.

When the Tetris pieces are falling faster than you can process and orient them, and you’re nearing the top, and you’re about to stare down the striped screen of death, somehow – against all odds and all possibility of comprehension – you nail a line and watch it disappear. It’s a small victory that you hurtle past on your way down the otherwise unswerving path to sweet oblivion, heaping failure upon failure to reach your climb to the top of the bottom. The distraction is as brief as it is sweet.

In a dim haze wrought of anti-depressants and depressants fighting for control of my shattered psyche, it occurred to me that I once used to focus on the small victories rather than the oblivion. Somehow I had lost that focus.

My son just turned four months old. He doesn’t know it yet, but he led me back to this way of living. It’s easy to spot those small victories in life when they take the form of a smile on his face, or a look of awe at a new discovery in his world. Thanks, kid.