Does anybody know a good free web hosting service that doesn't have pop-up windows that obstruct my content? Last week was wholesale disaster for my site. I couldn't get ftp access much of Wednesday, and it was completely out on Thursday and Friday. I went away for the weekend, and now that I'm back things seem to be OK. For now. I don't exactly trust Xoom very much. For now, however, let's set aside my misgivings and get on with what's been floating around my mind for the last ten days.

Today is Brent's 27th birthday! Yay Brent! To celebrate the occasion, I took him to Six Flags Magic Mountain in LA over the weekend. We also invited my friend Aric and his boyfriend Frank to meet us at the park Saturday and spend the day with us. It's a five hour drive to Magic Mountain, which Brent and I made Friday evening after my work ended. We didn't stay up too late when we got to the hotel because we wanted it to be easy to wake up in the morning for breakfast before visiting the park.

I'm a Disney fan. I love the wunnerful feeling the animated features give me, and I love the experience of being immersed in Disney culture when I visit the Disney parks. The Disney parks are not a cut above the rest; they're in a different league. Disney parks are all about quality and all about the completeness of the experience. Disney park designers, managers, and hourly employees are fanatical about details. If you've never been to a Disney park, you simply can't imagine the care Disney takes to make sure everything is just right. A Disney park is nothing like an amusement park and should never be described as such.

Six Flags Magic Mountain is an amusement park. It is all about thrill rides. We're talking giant roller coasters, lots of 'em, with equally giant lines of people waiting their turn for excitement. I offered to take Brent on a fun trip for his birthday and he said he wanted to go somewhere with roller coasters. As much as I love Disneyland, I knew only Magic Mountain would provide what Brent wanted. Disney doesn't have big, fast, scary coasters. Since the trip was for Brent, I made a mental note to avoid constantly comparing the way Six Flags did things to the Disney way. It was difficult, but I didn't break down until the end of the day when it was just plain impossible not to bitch at how badly Six Flags was doing by then.

We actually had an enjoyable day at the park. Aric and Frank were a little late so Brent and I got in two rides early, before the lines really got big, then met them at 11:00 am. I'm not a very experienced roller coaster rider (Mom forbid us to go on them when I was little, and since then I've been a Disneyland freak and haven't been to parks with big coasters) so we went on a little one with only a few loops for the first ride. In the late 70's, when upside-down coasters were the new thing, this ride was the signature ride of the park. Twenty years later, it's a warm up. Our next ride was an enormous coaster called the Viper - high speeds, loops more than a hundred feet in the air, steep twisting dives, it had the works. It was the park's main attraction only three years ago. I was a bit trepidatious before the ride started. It would easily be the biggest, fastest, steepest ride I'd ever been on. Halfway down the initial (and biggest) plunge, I realized it was easy and fun. I liked it. The sensations were not unlike those produced in airplanes and racecars I'd been in. If anything, the G forces were tamer on the big coaster than on the track. Certainly the risk of crashing was far less. Being a small guy, I couldn't see well because of the high headrest on the seat in front of me. Brent said that there's a separate, but slower, line for the front seats on every coaster and we could do that next time if we wanted the view to be better.

We met Aric and Frank in the line for an interesting roller coaster that we rode suspended from overhead with no sidewalls or floor. It was very smooth and seemed to specialize in creating thrills with a twisting motion. It was most fun when it went through a corkscrewing section of track, similar to a series of barrel rolls, which emphasized the exciting twisting sensation. After almost a full minute of unbridled excitement, we walked across the hot bare concrete of the park for ten minutes to arrive at our next ride. We stood in line for an hour, talking and boy-watching to pass the time. When our turn came, I discovered it was a big coaster, almost as tall as the Viper, and its claim to fame was that we rode it in a standing position. More loops and curves. Another walk across hot pavement. Another long, hot line, full of cute, hot boys with shorts and no shirts, another one minute ride, suspended again, but this time with enclosed cars. More loops and curves. They day went by. It was dinnertime.

We left the park by cab to eat good food at a restaurant for the same price we would have paid for greaseburgers and Coke in the park. The evening was still pleasantly warm when we returned to get in line yet again. Now, with the sun safely set, we figured it was time to get in the longest line of the day for the biggest roller coaster of the day. Its name was Goliath. The ride had only been open for a month or two and was very popular. The words in park pamphlet describing it ended in '-est' a lot. I hoped it would live up to the description. So far, since getting past my initial fears, every ride was fun, but not thrilling and if anyone had thought to ask me, I would have told them that none of them were really worth the wait. Brent, however, was having a great time on his birthday trip, and I wanted to make sure it stayed top notch for him, so I didn't volunteer my opinion. It was actually a lot of fun just seeing him so excited and happy!

While waiting for Goliath we watched train after train go by. It was visibly much higher and much, much, steeper on its initial drop than any roller coaster I'd ever seen. We noticed that although many people rode the first drop in the traditional, arms up position, no one in the front seats ever did. The park boasted 85 mph speeds were attained on the ride. The high speeds appeared to be conserved through much of the ride's later curves and spirals as well. Goliath's cars resembled the cars you might see on an old-fashioned wooden roller coaster. They were brightly colored, they sported lines and curves from the pallet of 1940's era design, and they had none of the heavily padded steel shoulder restraints I'd worn on every other ride that day.

For this, the pinnacle of our day at the park, Brent suggested that we wait the extra time to ride in the very front row. An extra fifteen minutes on top of nearly two hours didn't seem like too much to ask and Brent assured me it would be worth it. Aric and Frank agreed, and so we waited a little more, watching car after car load and unload at the station. We saw the riders unloading were really excited after their ride, much more than after the other attractions we'd visited. There were huge grins, whoops of joy, high fives, and a lot of loud, excited superlatives. We wondered together could this ride be that much better than the rest?

Finally, it was our turn. There was a mechanical problem with one of the seats in the middle car of our train so we had a little extra time to get comfortable. The train seated passengers only two abreast, so Brent and I had our row to ourselves. Our front car, front row, seats had a narrow footwell to accommodate the train wheels. The seats were built in the old style, as a bench, but had a molded indents to stabilize our hips. A single bar could be pulled back over our laps to help keep us in place during the ride. The 'dashboard' before us came up only about as high as my belly button, leaving our upper bodies feeling quite exposed. The problem in back was fixed, and with a lurch and wave back at Aric and Frank, we were on our way.

Goliath made a slow, 180 degree, flat corner out of the station and then started climbing for the night sky. The walking-paced climb was steep, about forty-five degrees, but the single biggest sensory input was the deafening sound of the chain ratcheting us up the slope - tink, tink, tink, tink, tink... Presently, we were getting quite high over the park and the view was expansive. The low front of the car and subsequent sense of exposure was heightened way up here above the park in the darkened sky. I really wished I had shoulder and chest restraints to clutch for security. I had to settle for the pathetic little lap-bar. Our front car reached the crest of the hill after two minutes of climbing. The nose of the car pitched over, slowly, to dead level and then, even more slowly, began to point down. The tinking sound grew quieter; its incessant rhythm of the last two minutes was slowing to a near standstill. The entire train was balanced at the top of the hill, our car slightly downhill while the last car was just at the end of its climb. The tinking petered out completely.

Our car began to move forward a little more quickly and the nose began to drop away a little faster. To my horror, I noticed that all I could see beyond the nose was the top of the next big rise in the track. Where was the track ahead?! The speed was really starting to gather, the rear car must be over the top by now. Our unobstructed exposed view was appalling, the nose kept falling away more and more, still revealing nothing but black empty air, the air was moving by more and more quickly and we still couldn't see the bottom of the slope!

The acceleration grew wild, air rushing by, blowing my hair back and tugging my cheeks, the dive was still getting worse and we were already going way too fast, my heartbeats were exploding in my chest, replacing the butterflies which had been blown away in the speeding slipstream, and then, just when I thought we were pointing so steeply down that I'd be flipped right out of the car and over its nose, I saw the track and the bottom of the plunge which turned out to be the entrance to a tunnel - an impossibly small black square still very, very far below - but rushing up at us madly, I couldn't believe this thing was still accelerating and the park was a complete blur of light and the windblast was firmly pressing me to the back of the seat despite the absurd face-down angle into the ground which was careening up at an incredible rate and now the tiny black square was a rapidly expanding black square about to hit us in the face like a wild pitch and in a brilliant flash of darkness we were immersed in the black, sensing only mind bending speed and elation and transcendence and unbound joy!!!

We shot out of the tunnel and into a new world of speed and light. Unified, as one, our trainload of riders shouted aloud in sheer ecstasy at the discovery of our own existence, like a creature just created aware. Enraptured, we flowed as one mind through a series of wide, smooth, steeply banked curves and spirals, all speed and power and grace and bliss. At the end the train swooped into the station and came to a smooth, but authoritative stop. Brent and I now understood the looks on the faces of previous riders as they disembarked Goliath. It was simple euphoria. This carefully choreographed machine was far beyond the pale of anything else in the park. If the other rides had seemed a little routine to me before, they now appeared simply pathetic. We staggered away from Goliath, giddy with delight.

There was one other ride that Brent wanted to do before we left. It involved a single car with perhaps thirty seats. It was horizontally accelerated by magnets to very high speed in a very short distance, like a jet launching from an aircraft carrier, then went vertical and climbed its track to the top of a tall tower before gravity slowed it to a complete stop and then dragged it backwards down the same path. The launch was fun, but the experience was entirely pedestrian after that. Even the backslide failed to excite. Then, it was after 9:00 p.m. and time to leave.

Our exit was cut off by the closure of the main walking route through the park for a parade of Warner Bros. characters. I've never seen such a lame parade in my life. Most of the ropes alongside the parade route were devoid of people. The parade characters and participants had no enthusiasm and seemed almost apologetic for their appearance. Up and down the parade route random people shouted abuse at the park hosts because there was no way to cross the route and get to rides on the other side. Unavoidably, I had to compare this with Disneyland where the parades are one of the best parts of the day and people line the parade routes six bodies deep hours before the parade just to get a glimpse of it. Disneyland also always leaves alternatives to get around. Brent and I shunned the mockery and the hostile vibe it generated and made for the park exit. There, the vibe was even more hostile. A huge throng was pushing for the exit gates, but bottled up. Of twenty-five exit gates there, only two were unlocked and open! It was insanity trying to get out. I couldn't help but thinking about famous rock concerts where music fans had been crushed to death in stampedes. As tempers flared, I hoped the metal detectors we had to pass through to be allowed into the park (this is LA folks!) had done a good job. The crowd started feeling more like an angry mob.

Somehow we got out OK, if you don't count the gum stuck to our shoes and the foul smells coming from the heaped and overflowing garbage cans and restrooms we passed. These sort of things *never* happen at Disneyland. The final events of the day at the park were especially disappointing because they shattered the incredible feelings that Goliath had gifted us with. It was only 10:00 p.m. when the park closed, so I took Brent out to ice cream before we returned to our hotel room. The waiter who served us was a real cute guy of Asian ancestry and was definitely on our team. He took great care to make sure we had a nice time at the restaurant. We did. The weekend turned out to be a good one, in all. Another great time shared together with Brent.

This week, it's back to work, which is another story completely. The winds of change are picking up and threaten to reach hurricane force. But, I'll save that story for another day.

Tuesday June 27th, 2000