Caught in the Zipper – An Ode to Military Humor

If you have been reading a few of my last few weekly posts, you know that I have written about my family’s departure from Hawaii on our way to Tacoma en route to North Dakota and the East Coast.  I was ultimately headed to the East Coast to Fort Lee, Virginia to attend the Logistics Executive Development Course.  The stops in Tacoma and North Dakota were to visit relatives.  Oh yeah, the stop in North Dakota was also to retrieve my red Chevy van.  You may have read my post about the really rough landing that my luggage experienced.  To be brutally honest, my luggage was beat to hell.  My luggage looked like it had been beaten by a bunch of gangbangers with chains and clubs to within an inch of its life.  Well, after I settled all of the claims for my lost, damaged, and destroyed luggage with the airline and the Army, my family and I relaxed and enjoyed some vacation time with our relatives.  The last thing on the agenda while we were in Tacoma was to celebrate my son’s birthday.  After we had celebrated my son’s birthday and visited all of our friends and relatives that would see us and visit with us, we decided it was time to head for North Dakota.  Now you may be wondering why I worded that last sentence the way I did.  Well, if you had been paying attention, I think that would be pretty obvious to you.  What’s that?  It’s not?  Oh.  Well, simply put, there were some relatives who will remain unnamed (my half sisters) that refused to answer their door, or their telephone for that matter, and visit with us. Okay.  That was fine with me too.  Of course, if you read my latest post, you probably know that my reception in North Dakota wasn’t much better.  People that guaranteed that they were going to be at the airport to pick us up didn’t bother to show.  I understand that.  Shit happens.  My folks lived about 140 miles away from the airport.  Do you know how many bars and taverns are located in between my parents’ house and the airport?  I don’t either.  But I’m willing to bet that it’s one helluva lot.  And that is way too much temptation for somebody who thinks they got all the time in the world to get to the airport.  Cuz naturally, that time gets melted away by that sweet nectar called alcohol served by the bottle at those taverns and that road warrior gets lost in his drunken reveries.  He soon forgets what his ultimate mission was – to travel to the airport to pick up his waiting relatives.  But all was not lost.  My other brother Darrell, no, his name was not really Darrell, came to my rescue.  My other brother Ron lived in Fargo and worked as a reserve Sheriff’s deputy.  He picked us up at the airport and took us over to his house.  He informed us that he had to go to work at the county fair and said we should join his family and attend the county fair.  Since my wife and kids had never been to an American county fair ever, I thought that was a great idea.  So, my brother’s wife and kids and my wife and kids and I all went to the fair.  My wife and my sister-in-law pretty much took care of my son and took him on all of the rides for small children.  Meanwhile, I took care of the older children and took them on all the rides that I sort of liked to ride like the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Ring-O-Fire, the Vertigo, the Viper, the Zero Gravity ride, the Tornado, and the Zipper to name a few.  Over the years, I had come to appreciate rides like the Zero Gravity ride after riding it a few times with my brothers.  I had always liked the Ring-O-Fire and the Tilt-a-Whirl since I was a little kid.  But there were some rides that I had religiously steered clear of.  One such ride was the Zipper.  There is a very particular reason why I steered clear of the Zipper.  You see, each compartment of the Zipper looks like a metal cage that snugly houses two people.  Those two people are locked into that cage like feral animals.  Now I’m not saying that those people turn into feral animals.  But when that machine starts spinning and rotating, all of those caged people start screaming and howling like feral animals trapped in cages.  The manufacturer describes the cage as a passenger capsule (that’s a modest joke).  Those passenger capsules travel around the perimeter of the boom of the Zipper at about 4 ½ revolutions per minute.  That’s not really fast, but those cages also flip around the end of the oblong frame and cause a sudden burst of speed that sends those compartments flipping end over end.  Those cages can flip forward or backward.  They aren’t particularly choosy.  Now the boom itself rotates at 7 ½ revolutions-per-minute in the same direction as the pulley system.  This combines with the offset rotation of the cages to provide each of the cages with what the manufacturer calls a unique and unpredictable experience.  Experienced riders know that they can shift their weight in one direction or the other to get the cage to flip even more.  Nice.  Okay.  A feral animal is trapped in a cage and wants to make its misery even worse, so it makes the cage spin even faster to compound the misery even more.  Sure.  That makes perfect sense.  At that particular fair, my youngest niece was crying her eyes out because she wanted to ride the Zipper but nobody would ride it with her.  I can’t really say that I blame them.  But she really wanted to ride it.  So I said that I would ride it with her.  Big mistake.  No sooner had we got locked into the cage and the machine took off, when the machine broke and we’re suspended in the cage upside down at the top of the goddamn machine.  We were only up there maybe five or ten minutes before they got the machine fixed, but it felt like an hour.  And let me tell you all of those feral animals in the other cages were screaming their goddamn heads off.  Like that was going to work to fix a goddamn machine.  No.  My niece looked at me and started to cry.  She was scared too.  I can understand that.  Cuz let me tell you I was scared shitless.  I didn’t want to get into the goddamn cage to start with.  But there I sat like a feral animal upside down locked in a cage.  When they finally got the machine fixed, they gave us an extra-long ride as a treat for being patient.  Hell, I would have been happy if they had taken us straight to the ground and let us off.  But no.  They gave us one helluva long ride.  Yay.  Other than that little fiasco with the Zipper, we experienced no other exercises in futility while at the county fair.

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