Ben Paddon

Category: How my Head Works

  • Life is a Roller Coaster

    It’s difficult for me to express exactly what happened to me today in words.

    I went to Magic Mountain with some friends. This isn’t a particularly groundbreaking event in itself. It’s a theme park. That’s the sort of things friends do, is go to theme parks together. In particular we went to celebrate Ben Sweaney’s birthday. 27 years old. He drove down from Phoenix, AZ last night, crashed on my couch, and we drove to the park together this morning.

    One of the observations I’d made during the day was that while California does have some rather impressive mountains in it, there’s a lot of flat land – particularly around Magic Mountain. Having been to a theme park in England relatively recently, where the rollercoasters were surrounded by waterfalls and rockfaces and the like, riding the rollercoasters at Magic Mountain seemed a very different experience. Imagine a flat, desolate desert. Now imagine a rollercoaster in the middle of it.

    This didn’t really bother me much during the day – I overcaqme my fear of rollercoasters at this very park some ten years ago. But something very strange happened on the last ride we went on.

    In the ten years since I last went to the park, various new rides have popped up. Amongst them is Tatsu, a dragon-themed rollercoaster that, like Air at Alton Towers in England, rotates the seats 90 degrees before the ride begins, meaning that you face downwards as it takes off.

    Unlike some of the other roller coasters I went on that day, I jumped onto Tatsu with ease and excitement. I’ve done this before, I reasoned. This is a doddle. But as the ride began its ascent, my tune began to change.

    The thing about Magic Mountain is that it’s not just a fanciful name. Despite the vast amount of flat space surrounding the park, much of it is located at the foot of an actual mountain, meaning that some roller coasters begin at a high point and overlook large areas of the park. As we climbed up the ramp for that first drop, I became very aware of this fact.

    Fuck, I thought. This is pretty high.

    The ascent seemed to take forever, and we seemed to be moving further and further away from the ground. I started to seize up, my mind overrun with panic, fear, anxiety.

    What if the support on my seat breaks? I asked myself. What if I fall? Oh, fuck.

    The ascent began to slow, the angle of the cart began to level out. We were approaching that first big drop. Not wanting to close my eyes, I decided to fix my gaze at the shoes of the person in the seats in front of me.

    And then we dropped.

    The scenery, so much of it so very far away, whizzed below me as we rushed downwards. it whizzed around me as we looped, and flipped, and dived. It spun, and shook, and twisted, and wound, and after what felt like a millenia of my heart stopping, freezing, hoping that the ride would be over, I suddenly came over with a feeling of remarkably tranquility.

    If I fall, I will die, I thought. But if I’m going to die, I might as well enjoy the view.

    Suddenly my eyes wanted to be everywhere but locked on those shoes, and I looked. No, I didn’t just look. I’d looked while I was on other rides. On Tatsu, I saw. Mountains, trees, an artificial but otherwise impressive river. Nature. All of it below me. What a spectacle it was! What an incredible world we live in!

    Now, I know that experts design roller coasters, and more experts test them to death before they’ll even let people so much as look at the inside of the station. But if the worst should have happened, if the safety gear had failed and I’d fallen from my seat tonight, I would have been content knowing that this was the last thing I saw, that this was the last thing I felt. I mean, obviously the last thing I would have really felt would be the concrete as my body slammed full-force into the ground, but even still. Seeing what I saw, and feeling what I felt… I reckon I would’ve been content.

    All too soon the ride was over. I stepped onto the platform a little relieved but mostly disappointed – I wish I could have seen from the start. I wish I could have taken it all in. We should go on it again, my brain conspired, but it wasn’t to be – our group moved away from the ride, ultimately leaving the park entirely.

    It was a very bizarre feeling, and a strange way to experience it. I’m sure that there are people out there who would say it was God, but I don’t believe that. I believe it was something else. Something more. Something human.

    I’m broke, I’m unemployed, and I’m alone. But I’m alive, and I’m alive in this world of all palces. Of all the unlikely things to happen, this is me and this is where I am. Call me corny, call me soft-hearted, call me whatever you like, but I absolutely love this.

  • The Written Word, Written Down

    I don’t write about my personal life much anymore.

    I have an anonymous blog. It’s elsewhere on the Internet, far from any servers or accounts with my name or email address attached to it. But I haven’t posted there in some time. I keep getting the urge, but it feels so… weightless. So inconsequential. It’s the same reason I don’t buy books for the Amazon Kindle – I don’t feel like I really have anything. I like the way books feel in my hands, the way the paper feels as I turn from one page to the next.

    With that in mind, I’ve decided that as soon as I’m able to do so I shall be popping out and getting a nice leatherbound Journal in which to write things down. Something swanky, like my own Journal of Impossible Things. I like the idea of being able to pick up these weighty books at some point in my future and reading through my exploits. What did 23 year-old Ben do in his spare time? What did he really think about that girl he met on the set of “Greek” all those years ago? Where did he go to eat, besides Jack in the Box?

    It’s a romantic thought. It’s probably also very, very silly, especially when you consider that my handwriting is so absolutely terrible that there are chickens out there who get all offended and uppity whenever anyone compares it to their scratchings. But it’s something I want to do. Something I’ve wanted to do for a while now. Considering I’ve already scratched off two of my lifelong ambitions in the past month, I figure it doesn’t hurt to go for a third, relatively minor ambition.

  • The Lifeboat

    There are a number of events which stick out in my mind from my High School days. I remember leaving Karen Sutton an “anonymous” valentine’s card in Year 8 that she very quickly figured it was from me (probably because I, y’know, gave it to her myself). I remember my friend Jason tackling me against a fence because I’d moved his bag from somewhere it could’ve been kicked during a lunchtime game of soccer to somewhere it wouldn’t get kicked… by kicking it against a fence. I vaguely recall someone hitting me over the head with a chair, and I vividly recall hitting someone else over the head with a science lab stool.

    Don’t worry, I’m not a violent person anymore. My Parole Officer said so.

    One thing from my High School days that has been fluttering back to the surface area of my brain, besides the fact that I still have a crush on Karen Sutton, is a debate exercise from my GCSE English class. Our class was divided into groups of between six and eight students, and we were given a hypothetical question – a ship is sinking. There’s one lifeboat left with a finite capacity, and too many people to fit on the boat. I forget the exact figures here, so for the sake of discussion we’ll say that there are eight survivors but only room for four on the boat.

    We were given rough backgrounds for each of the characters. There were a smattering of pretty generic characters all with their own strengths and weaknesses but the one character I latched onto, the one character I was adamant had to be saved, was a former criminal. He was involved with organised crime up until he was arrested, tried and sentenced. He served his time and was released from prison where he went straight and tried to forge a new life for himself. Now circumstances had led this fictional character to this fictional situation where he may wind up dying. Well, I wasn’t going to have that.

    I argued this man’s case for the entirety of our alloted time. Yes, he had a criminal past. But he’d served his time and he’d gone straight – surely he deserved a second chance?

    Nobody else agreed with me. In fact one girl in our group tried to argue that “going straight” didn’t mean he’d given up a life of crime but that instead he’d turned to drugs. This was a Bad Man, everybody else agreed, and he deserved to die.

    Once the time was over our group was supposed to present our final decision to the teacher, the Mr Duffy – a brilliant man with a very wry sense of humour and deadpan delivery, like if Jack Dee were a Vulcan. Only we didn’t actually get to give him our final responses – we sat down in the library, which is where he was seeing each of the groups away from the classroom, and proceeded to continue our debate about whether or not My Friend The Convict deserved to sail off into the imaginary sunset.

    I believe that we collectively failed that particular exercise (I received an overall C grade for GCSE English, with a B for “English Speaking & Listening”), but the discussion continues to rattle on in my head. I was contemplating the scenario only earlier today, deciding briefly that the ex-con should have to decide for himself and then remembering that, in this hypothetical scenario, it probably wouldn’t be some vague, overseeing third-party but instead it would be the group of eight deciding amongst themselves. It’d be tough as Hell for them to be even remotely rational about the entire thing, depending on their own character and ability to cope in stressful circumstances. Most likely most or all of them would have their decision process tarred by fear, or anger, or anxiety. They could try to decide who among them deserves to live under these circumstances and, if my experience with my former classmates has taught me anything, it’s that people do not think a former conman deserves a second chance. He’d likely die.

    Still, in reality I imagine they’d all drown trying to rush the lifeboat so it balances out, really.