Fun Faired Badly

There is nothing sadder than the sight of happiness gone wrong…but by now I’m sure you know that I enjoy my melancholy haunts.

I think I have perhaps found the ultimate playground for such thoughts.

Since gliding through these featured photos which I came across at flavorwire.com I have become slightly obsessed with dilapidated and abandoned theme parks.

When the silence falls how mournful and piteous these crumbling places must seem.  Naturally I would love to walk the once thronged avenues of these ghostly, skeletal structure infested waste grounds and take in the feelings of memories shared and gone, discarded like the remains of a hot dog before the next ride.

Reading books set in amusement parks at night are always ominous but there is always that feeling of excitement, of life merely put on hold until the morning.  That feeling of the echoing laughter that fades will be renewed in the morning.  This seems more….terminal.

I suppose it is a variation on what the priests of the ancient world would have felt in relation to the sun but now we have the terrible evidence of what happens when the Gods of Fun are unhappy with us…okay I romanticise but does capitalism have to get its claws into everything?

The theme park in that classic 80’s film Supergirl gave me the creeps and was there one in a Batman film?  I forget now, I’m sure there are numerous others that have slipped my mind but they remain an effective tool in the armoury of writers and directors.

There is something about the emptiness, the loneliness, the coldness of the place…perhaps it is the slight spookiness these places of colour and light hold during the opening times that are even more terrifying when the idea of their being no tomorrow is put squarely in the forefront of our minds.  There is something to be said for a reprieve of noise but it is an entirely different carousel when there is no tomorrow and no more life.

Perhaps I should say that it is not just the parks with rides that I mourn the loss of, it is also the older fun fairs and carnival style places.  It feels like a bit of history dies when some of these older parks go down and we are left with the bigger and therefore more blander theme parks of the modern era.

Perhaps it’s a debilitating seasonal shutting down of my happy circuits, bring back summer and all that!  Or maybe it’s an underlying affliction that a lick of paint over the rust just can’t hide…the human soul is much like a theme park, it’s a fascinating beast and usually unreadable (unrideable) to other people no matter what they will have you believe.

Perhaps it is mortality that is at the crux of it, like so much in life or perhaps I just analyse things way to much…