Oompah Boompah

The malls here near where I work are places of general insanity and strangeness, particularly on the weekends when the droning throngs escalate up and down. But the strangeness can be delightful.

The Grandview Mall, which is next to my office, has the rather ramshackle and scary looking “Indiana Jones Adventure” place, which I am sure lacks the approval of the bearded wonder twins, but has twice the death potential of the mining ride in “Temple of Doom” (and I imagine that somewhere in town you could find monkey’s brains if you wanted). This is on the seventh and ultimate floor of the mall. There is also a log ride that extends outside onto the roof of the mall, it’s blue track sadly caked in the dusty crud of GZ and uselessness. On the fifth floor there is a ¾ NHL sized skating rink.

This seems like the most pointless of things here, but also the most wankiest, like when computer animated movies exaggerate flowing hairs, multitudinous reflections, or lava walls, in an attempt to one upgeekship another company in digital stroking.

Our mall is not quite so lavish and the sixth floor has an arcade. It also has…bumper cars. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the little rectangle filled with colorful egg shaped cars one day coming down after lunch.

I can’t say how much I love bumper cars. I would, in the words of Tracy Jordan, take them behind the school and get them pregnant, I love them so much. There is just something so satisfying in cackling like a maniac while smashing headlong into strangers – or tubby general managers of a company you hate working for and wish that the vice-president was strapped down in such a way that either his head or his crotch were your bumpers.

The last time I had been on bumper cars was in some park on an island in Toronto with the staff of the movie theatre I was managing. Unfortunately, the general manager was pretty good at the bumper cars because he could somehow use his penguinish shape to absorb momentum and unleash it at precisely the moment he struck you, acting as some kind of super Scrabble 3x energy collision. Brutal.

Well, these cars were spiffier. They didn’t have that sparking grid overhead which is a shame, but the whole place had artificial fog and green lasers. If only they were placing some early AC/DC it would have been perfect.

Watching people I learned that the Chinese seem to think of bumper cars as a road test, meaning they drive like idiots as they do on the roads, but generally avoid striking each other somehow. I saw people about to T-Bone someone beautifully veer away at the last second while I screamed “Noooo!!!!” and would have been removed had I not been an old white guy.

So after waiting for a few people to gather, we hit the cars to show them how it was done. I am generally a quiet kinda guy, but once strapped into those little metal pods of destruction, I become a trash talking madman hellbent on wreaking as much rubber bounded havoc as possible.

My greatest moment of the night was reverse ramming a man and his little daughter, and causing her to nearly burst out in tears. I apologized but inside the good, white-angel me and the bad, red-devil me were giving each other high-fives.

It’s okay, because the man jammed me up good later on, driving my knees into the wonderfully unpadded metal of the front of the cockpit, leaving me reminders of the stunningly good fun for nearly a week.