Wheeeeee!

As I’m writing this, my back is incredibly itchy. When you’re sitting alone in your basement office/hide-from-responsibility room, your back is the absolute worst place to develop an inch. This is sort of ironic because it’s actually the best location to develop an inch that if you were anywhere else would be a major problem - your crotch.

But that’s neither here nor there.

The reason I would currently trade my map to the secret Lost City of Gold for the ability to scratch the middle third of my back is I’m recovering from a sun burn. Nothing too bad, just red enough to make everyone I meet want to slap me on the back as a greeting.

But as a pasty-white-guy, after the mandatory three days of pain as punishment for leaving my home, I now get to spend the next 48 hours as a micro-leper, scared of people, constantly scratching and pulling off dead parts of my body.

It was worth it though. My own flesh is the currency I gladly pay to enjoy the world outside of my home and office.

The part of the world that I dared to enjoy without the protective covering of a Hawaiian shirt was Seven Peaks Water Park in Salt Lake City, formerly (and currently by me and my family to lazy to accept the name change) known as Raging Waters.

My family and I spent last Friday chilling by the pool, chilling down the lazy river and chilling down some great water slides. It’s hard to chill while plummeting 5 stories, 20 feet in the air down a man made river held up by 2 inches of plastic, but that just how chillax we are.

It wasn’t all chill and cool though.

Places like this always have lines just long enough to be stupid. It is impossible to surrounded by that much water and not have to constantly pee. And despite great advances in all other forms of technology, we still build the steps to our water slides out of wood that can only do three things:

1) get really hot under bare feet
2) put splinters into bare feet
3) look unsafe

That being said, I had a great time. There’s something about revisiting important places from your youth that awakens your inner child in ways that watching the schlock they call Saturday morning cartoons these days never could.

For example, I am convinced that there is an age at which I will be able to go down a water slide on a tube and not pretend that I’m flying a TIE fighter from Star Wars.

However, that age is not 29.

On the other hand, I am hoping there is an age where I can see a woman in a tiny bikini and I don’t spend the whole time looking 15 degrees to the left of her so I can ogle safely from behind my sunglasses.

That age is also not 29.

I do know for a fact that there is an age where you can watch a ten-year-old run to get in line for a water slide that you just don’t dare and not feel like less of a man because you know in you heart of hearts that he’s not braver than you, he’s just got less to live for.

And that age, my friends, is 29.

Geek on.