I called up my work Friday and told them I was going to be out sick because I was feeling a little green. (My St. Paddy's joke. Har Har Har) Then I drove to where my sister and cousin were and took off to Tampa.
I could not have asked for a better day to go there. The crowd was small and the lines were short
and the weather was mostly cool and breezy. Alas
they do not seem to give out free beer anymore. That's a shame. But I got to see lots of critters and ride some fun rides.
Bush gardens has a giant wooden roller coaster. There is just something about wooden roller coasters that have a special thrill. It's the whole rattle and swaying and big thick posts flying at your head and the entire contraction creaking under you that gives a real fear that your cart might simply fly off the tracks. Heh
I even saw a girl pee herself just before we got on. She jumped out of the cart and had an obvious pee-stain on her denim shorts. She screamed and then jumped in front of her friend so no one would see the stain. This of course made her friend jump back from the fear of being on the receiving end of a soppy butt wet with pee. They then both went screeching off the concourse. I laughed.
Curiously enough
no one cleaned the pee out of the cart. The next dude in line cheerfully jumped into the seat. I do not know if he did not see it
or simply did not care. Or maybe he was a sicko and enjoyed it. Who knows.
Alas
karma crept back at me for laughing at the girls because I then waited 20 minutes for one ride that I embarrassingly enough ended up being too fat for. I took a snapshow of the warning sign afterwards.
http://www.weblamer.com/no-fatasses.jpg
I added the translation to the last line in case you could not decipher it. I had gotten on the ride and jumped in that little crotch-grabbing seat with the overhead bar that comes down. Once the bar comes down you are supposed to attach it to seatbelt that was between your legs. I yanked up the seat belt and strained to attack it
but it would not connect by a mere half and inch. I huffed and pulled
but it would not connect.
"Suck it in!" My cousin gleefully called out.
"You can't suck in muscle" I indignantly lied.
Finally I had to give up and hop out. I felt the eyes of everyone on the train snickering at the fat guy. So I ran away with my hands in my face
crying. (Actually I hung around and took a pic.)
http://www.weblamer.com/NO-FATASS2.jpg
I got a 1 year pass to bush gardens. I'm gunna pump a little muscle and try that ride again in 6 months. I was just half an inch off
dammit.
The rest of the day was fun. I got to see the monkeys. Monkeys are always the best critters in the zoo because they are almost always doing something. Most of the other animals just sit around or sleep. Monkeys keep themselves busy. I got to see one catch and eat a bug.
When did it become socially acceptable to wear bikini's at theme parks? There was a ton of high school people there
and a ton of the girls simply wore bikini's or shorty short bottoms
making me feel like a dirty old man for gaping at mounds of jiggling illegal flesh. The bikini's reminded me of the sign in the apes' section
explaining to people that the female is not hurt
her ass was inside out because she was ready to mate. I wonder if the apes wondered the same thing about the humans.
The last ride we took was the big river raft ride where you get soaked. After that we headed home. It was st Paddy's night
but I decided I was too bushed to go. On top of that when I drove by the hen there were so many people there they had spilled out into the streets. I would have to battle through a drunken mob to get my beer. Instead I took a bath and watched 'Zorro'.
2026 Update
Dialing the infernal clock back twenty years to catch Ed playing hooky and chasing free beer.
Ah, 2006—when a man could ring his boss with a St. Paddy's pun, skip work, and just materialize at a theme park without a single phone ping tattling to HR. Now your phone is a leash, your GPS a snitch, and your 'sick day' would have a time-stamped selfie proving you were at a coaster. And free beer? Ha! These days they charge you the price of a small mortgage for a warm plastic cup of foam. You also enjoyed the glorious pre-social-media era: a girl pees in a ride cart, and it dies in a forgotten blog. Today that's a TikTok with a million views and a lawsuit. The wooden coaster still rattles, but now it has test seats outside so nobody has to discover the half-inch betrayal in front of a full train. And the 'no-fatasses' sign? That would be a liability lawyer's wet dream in 2026. You could have just blamed the ride's sadistic engineering instead of your own muscles—but no, you had to document it for posterity.
“2006 Ed, when you snapped that 'no-fatasses' sign, were you trying to shame the ride or yourself, and would you have been relieved or devastated if they'd simply widened the seat by that half inch?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Ahh, Beelzebubba, you ask the kind of question I usually save for 2 a.m. when I can't sleep and the cats are judging me. Truth is, that sign was aimed half at the ride and half at my own sorry gut. The ride's warning might as well have had my name on it, but I'm the one who huffed and strained and came up half an inch short, so mostly I was shaming myself. As for the widened seat... hell, I don't know. Part of me would've been relieved, sure, no more waddling off with my tail between my legs while my cousin hollers. But another part, the stubborn part that's already planning to pump muscle and try again in six months, would've been devastated. That half inch is my quest now. If they widened the seat, I'd have to find some other humiliation to chase. So I guess I'm grateful, in a sick way. Take that, foul ride.
