i want to get off of mr bones' wild ride
relax, said the ticket man. we are programmed to receive. you can enter any time you like, but you can never leave.
Ever since the Canadian wildfire smoke hit New York City I can only think about this video.
There is something almost unbelievable about this video. First, the fact that the sky is fucking orange, but that’s a given. Second is the fact that the ferry is still running (weird! but, not shocking. shout out MTA). Third is that someone looked at the past two things and decided to take advantage and make (not a TikTok), but an Instagram reel.
There are a lot of people hating in the comments about how “gen-z has to make everything an aesthetic” and “risking your lungs for an aesthetic is lame” but gen-z brought back lung cancer just for the vibezzzz, so why do we all act shocked? When I first saw the video I was running the stairs in my building to mimic exercise and I sided with everyone in the comments that dystopia was not an aesthetic. The second wave of wildfire smoke came about a month later. This time it was less orange, which meant that I cared less about staying indoors. I did what I normally did, except I decided to do it in my designated fancy dress and the singular pair of heels I can wear without wanting to kill myself. I must say, in times of crisis doing something purely for the vibes is not a bad choice.
Admittedly, there’s a lot of guilt associated with doing nice things at the end of the world. One of my professors told me a story about going to dinner with his friend the evening of 9/11 and being heckled from the sidewalk about “not caring about America.” “It’s a tragedy,” he said to me, “but I had that reservation for a while, and I didn’t know what to do.”
Put simply, he’s winning the idgaf war.
It’s only been a little more than two weeks since I’ve been ‘on break,’ although if we’re measuring actual break time, rather than arbitrary DOE calendar dates, it’s been more than a month. I think break is giving me a meaner edge. Because I don’t have to interact with people, I find myself more or less apathetic to it all. I’ve been reading Fitzgerald’s The Side of Paradise and Amory, (the protagonist) complaining to his friend about getting married and being at college, says:
I was just wishing. I wouldn’t think of leaving college. It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them
Admittedly, Amory is a bit of a whiny bitch, so I’m not sure how much I should be identifying with him, but break is where all things slog together. Days, events, people—I keep passing the same church and thinking that the spire looks really good against the sky, so I take a picture of it. Now I have 30 pictures of the same church. I haven’t gotten around to deleting them. Am I getting all I could out of this time? No, but break is an endless attempt at winning the idgaf war, so I’ve convinced myself it doesn’t really matter.
I’m really trying not to rewrite post-break with this piece. In post-break, I talk about myself in terms of Community episodes (which my brother called “literally autistic”), but if I had to reference a Community episode, it’s season 3, episode 7 “Studies in Modern Movement,” but since I’m not doing that, I’m sorry I even brought it up.
Anyway. In the best-executed transition you’ve seen ever seen in writing: everything is mush. Actually, everything is mulch. I kind of wish my life was mush-like in consistency, I think that would be nice: a loose togetherness—barely cohesive. Mulch sucks because mulch, unlike mush, serves a very specific purpose to keep soil (the mush) under it protected and nutritious. The thing is that mulch is a) very ugly, especially compared to its dirt, flower, and grass counterparts, and b) mulch isn’t cohesive. It’s shitty, choppy woodchips that go everywhere and scrape the fuck out of your knees when you inevitably fall out of the swings it’s put under. Mulch sucks and I think I am mulch because it’s a weird protective layer that goes everywhere, makes a mess, and doesn’t look great while doing it.
In another seamlessly executed transition, I was watching this Jacob Geller essay on roller coasters, and in it, he mentions Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride, which is a roller coaster built in the game Roller Coaster Tycoon (take a shot every time I say roller coaster) and it takes 4 years in in-game playtime to ride. Also, obviously, you can’t get off. It’s slow, painstaking, and it doesn’t knock you unconscious (unlike the Euthanasia Coaster, Geller compares it to), rather it takes very deliberate steps to make sure you’re awake. It moves at a snail’s pace, and you just sit through it. Not to mention that it’s tightly wound, so you can’t treat it as a tour of the environment. No, it’s just slightly different loops, a couple of feet forward or to the right.
There’s a lot of lore surrounding Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride which we cannot get into because a) I’m not a nerd and b) that brain storage is already dedicated to the FNAF lore, but the important thing to know is that there’s a lot of creepypastas the emerged from Mr. Bones' Wild Ride. I don’t know what exactly the pastas are (see two earlier points), but, to me, the horror of Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride is one of the strange existentialism of wasting a high school diploma’s amount of time, ostensibly, going in circles. M. Night Shyamalan made the movie Old about people aging rapidly on a beach. The “horror” aspect of that film was that they don’t get to live their lives. They just play everything forward, not being able to savor, joy, pleasure, or gratitude. This is also the horror of the Adam Sandler movie Click. Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride is not that, it is the horror of living your life in a slow march toward the end, which is where its notoriety comes from. People spamming, I want to get off of Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride.
I would be pretty remiss if at this point I didn’t also bring up a Big Joel video about Iraq and Nuclear Warfare (obviously I have too much time on my hands, no need to mention it). One of the opening points of the video is that what the end of the world looks/looked like changes. In WWI, Lovecraft and the looming fear of some larger lurking other taking us all out was the hot apocalyptic mindset. During the Cold War, with the introduction of nuclear bombs, the end of the world was instantaneous. The fear was that at any given moment, everything would be gone. Now, and this is me, not him talking, the end of the world keeps popping up.
The red smoke, the record high/low temperatures, every breaking news headline on the New York Times website. They’re all there for a minute then they’re gone. The second time the wildfires hit New York, no one really cared. We all got dressed up like normal and tripped over our feet through the day. I’m not trying to pull something too nihilistic right now (because that would be lame!), but the thing with Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride is that you can forget you’re on the ride until it makes a turn, or there’s a small drop, and because it’s slow as fuck, you feel every bit of it, excruciatingly slowly and then it’s over, and you keep moving forward. But you still feel an incredible amount of eminence as the end pulls closer and in those moments you are so keenly aware that everything totally sucks.
Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride became notable off of the fact that everyone who went on it looking for the titular Wild Ride, just became stuck on it forever. There was no fun roller coaster, just a slow, slow, slow boring ride. That’s what life is feeling like right now. Very slow, very boring, and with just enough bumps to remind you that the end is constantly coming closer.
Here are some concluding points.
During break, everything is a weird, shitty mulch where nothing is distinctive, yet nothing is cohesive. It’s all just there and I got fucked up knees (unrelated)
The end of the world! I kind of feel like it’s happening! Maybe it’s because I’m less preoccupied with other stuff, but it’s starting to feel real guys!!
Because of the last two points, I feel like I’m watching everything, very slowly fall apart, and while I try to fill the void with dressing up, but then the world takes a metaphorical roller coaster turn and oh no!
Dressing up assuages the pain because it makes me feel like I have some control over how I feel. Pretty people wear pretty dresses and don’t care about the climate
Final Conclusion:
I can’t live like this: I want to get off of Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride