Like a lot of kids her age, my daughter spends just as much of her free time browsing through You-Tube videos as she does watching television. A lot of it is nonsensical garbage but to be fair, there is a lot of nonsensical garbage on television as well. I’ve never seen an episode of The Kardashians but that’s easy to brag about when nobody can go back and search my viewing history. I watched too many episodes of Rock of Love, The Osbornes and Jackass to be able to judge anybody. Back in the day Sunday nights were spent watching Bob Saget show us America’s Funniest Home Videos and a lot of what she watches really isn’t very different.
Every once in a while she’ll even be watching something interesting enough that it will catch my attention and I’ll ask her to start it over or she’ll call me over to see something that she thinks I may find entertaining. This happened recently as she was watching a roller coaster enthusiast rank his Top 10 Scariest Rides In The World. Most of these lists include Kingda Ka, a coaster at Six Flags Great Adventure that she likes to pretend she would have gone on if I had agreed. It’s the tallest in the world, at 456 feet and only in the past few years has it lost it’s status as the fastest, launching at 128 miles per hour in 3.5 seconds. I think she was hoping to tease me about the fact that before we even walked in I had told her no.
We were both surprised that it didn’t make this list. I was surprised when I realized that I had actually been on three of the ten that did, including the number one. She didn’t use these exact words but thought I was completely full of shit when I informed her of this fact.
I don’t claim to be a brave person and I’m far removed from any need to prove my manliness, but will admit that I found her reaction a bit annoying, if understandable. The older I get the less I’m able to tolerate anything that spins and I find heights more and more disagreeable but I’ve been on an adventure or two. In this particular case, I even had the pics to prove it.
If you watched the video you probably noticed already that three of the ten rides are all in the same place, atop the Strat in Las Vegas. Located on top of a high rise hotel it’s the highest observation tower in the United States and the second tallest in the western hemisphere. Way up there in the clouds some maniac built three thrill rides and once upon a time a young buck and a few of his buddies were all fortified with enough alcohol to not chicken out.
We talked about it though, right up until the last minute. It was pretty frigging scary up there.
A blurry pic pointed up at the top of a building doesn’t prove anything of course but when I pulled out the old ticket stubs she was forced to admit that maybe her old man really had once been in that little car you can almost see coming over the edge.
Looking for these led to a few minutes of flipping through old albums and some thoughts about how it’s kind of a shame that this wouldn’t have been possible if the trip had been more recent. Most of my pictures now end up in the Google cloud but there are still times when I’m charging old phones to try and find stuff. There’s a pile of minor league baseball tickets on my desk and our Comic-Con lanyards are hanging on the back of the office door knob but for the most part everything is digital now. Disney, concert and airline tickets are now downloaded and scanned from my phone.
I’ve seen Michael Jordan play basketball, Dale Earnhardt Jr drive a car, and David Ortiz hit a home run off of Mariano Rivera. I’ve seen everyone from Pat Benatar to Garth Brooks to Snoop Dogg to Taylor Swift to Metallica in concert. I was at Woodstock in 99 and the Monday Night Miracle football game at the Meadowlands in 2000 and I can prove it all. I’ve got the pics and the tickets.
I don’t do anything that cool very often nowadays but I might. If somewhere down the line I need to prove to some kid that their grampy was cooler than they think he is I hope that I’m able to back it up.
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Previously Published on thirstydaddy.com and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock