Surely we’re all on the same page by now that carnivals and mobile amusement parks are ground zero for the apocalypse? The vague blend of sewage and sugar constantly penetrating your olfactory nerve, the rhythmic sequence of children vomiting after the sickly combination of popcorn and carousels, the middle-aged dads grumbling about how much this headache-inducing outing is going to cost him… This is everything that Nostradamus warned us about, probably.
Moreover, with the possible exception of Las Vegas, there’s no place you’re more likely to run into the actual devil than a carnival, and the only thing more dangerous than the devil are the people who are willing to pay him for his services (of which there are obviously plenty at a carnival, because it’s a godforsaken carnival). Observe:
Indeed, TikTok‘s @waitbutwhytho sifted through the carnival’s sickly scents to find a much more potent sort of trouble in the form of a ride operator who was fluent in five-dollar bills, so to speak. So when our TikToker in question bestowed him with the goods, the ride operator did as they requested by manually spinning the pod that the TikToker’s friends were in to induce maximum stomachaches and panic.
It got to a point where their friends were flipping around completely, and were still rocking relatively severely as the ride lifted them up. We never did get to see the look on the friends’ faces after they got off the ride – a tragic oversight on the TikToker’s part.
For those of you not up to speed on your carnival lore, the ride that the TikToker paid the operator to torture their friends in is called the Zipper, which has a fairly significant history of accidents, most notably a string of four deaths in the 1970s that resulted in the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to urge carnival-goers against riding it.
Knowing humans, however, this pushed some people towards the Zipper even more. Per VeryWellMind, thrill-seeking behavior isn’t just rooted in the adrenaline rush of an activity, but also in the emotional relief that comes with coming out the other side of it. In this context, it would mean getting on the Zipper knowing that it could fall apart at the seams with you still inside, and then basking in the soothing relief when that doesn’t happen.
That was back in the 1970s, of course, although if carnivals are as godless as they are in the present day, one shudders to imagine what such an essence would have been like 50 years ago when the act of simply thinking about the carnival was risky behavior.
Published: Aug 22, 2024 09:29 am