It's Not the Way You Look, It's Not the Way That You Smile
Last night we went to the King's Island amusement park in Mason, Ohio. It's 50 years old this year. We didn't go into the park itself though: there's an amphitheater on the grounds called Timber Wolf. We went in a side entrance to see A Flock of Seagulls and Berlin there. But still the experience was all drenched in this creepy stomach-ache nostalgia about the 70s and 80s and King's Island and people who go to King's Island. The vast parking lot, the skyscraping rides and screams, smells of suntan lotion and cigarette smoke and fried food. Walking up to the front of the place I got weirded out, time-traveling back to when going here was like entering the Kingdom of Heaven. Just thinking about it back then was hypnotic. Now of course it is something else. Nostalgia is something that unplugs you from your surroundings in a mostly beautiful way. It isolates your feelings around the past, gives those feelings back to you in one scary-sweet package. And we