Anarchyland

 

When I first arrived at Orange County's most infamous deviant travel destination, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. If Disneyland is billed as the happiest place on earth, then Anarchyland should get credit for being the most dangerous dystopian amusement park known to man. Conceived as a vacation for the Id, Anarchyland is like Sturgis, Burning Man, the Hunger Games, Mad Max's Thunderdome and Westworld all rolled into one. The first rule of Anarchyland is that there are no rules. 

One thing I noticed right off the bat was that people liked to break a lot of shit. Little shit, big shit, it didn't matter. People were setting things on fire, using earth moving equipment to knock buildings off their foundations, picking up random objects and hurling anything at anything else to see what would break. 

This included other humans. A girl my age that I knew from somewhere saw me and grabbed me by the arms. Whirling me around in a merry-go-round kind of dance, where I was the volleyball and she was the pole, she lifted me off the ground with centrifugal force and flung me into the lake. 

I didn't land directly in the water but along an embankment of loose crumbling earth that was too steep and slippery to climb. Once you landed there, you were going in the drink for sure. Another guy that she'd just hurled landed next to me, and as we tried to scramble back up the slope, both of us slid into the water at the same time. 

Half dog paddling and half crawling, I clawed at the side of the mountainous embankment, trying not to sink any deeper into the water. There was nothing to grab onto to pull myself out of the water, and bits of loose soil kept coming off in my hands. The best I could do was to try to keep moving sideways until I might eventually reach a spot where the shoreline was more level.

The other guy she'd thrown in followed this course of action and managed to get out. In a few minutes, I had done the same, and the both of us were panting on a sandy beach with the girl staring down at us from atop the cliff.

"See?" she yelled down jovially, "I left you an easy escape! How nice of me! Want to go again?"

I did not want to go again, so I turned away and looked for another place to be. All I could see were things on fire, groups of people chasing other groups of people, cars being ghostridden into walls and exploding, and everywhere broken and dead things. The bodies of horses and humans lay dissected and decaying on the scorched and bloodstained grass. It was ghastly.

The next day, God knows why, I found myself at the gate, presenting my pass for day two of the event. Security was tight, and a diminutive black security guard, who looked suspiciously like Gary Coleman, was shaking me down for any contraband items.

"We're going to need you to turn over your umbrella, sir," he said. "Nothing from the outside that might be used as a weapon can be brought in."

I didn't know why he was being so nit-picky, considering the park's "no rules" policy, but he was adamant that I surrender my cheap, rickety old black umbrella, or I wasn't getting in.

"Can I get it back after the event?" I asked.

"Sure," he said. "It'll be in the lost and found." 

He looked at his fellow officers and smirked, then threw my umbrella on a pile of other confiscated items. Somehow, I knew I wasn't going to get it back. Oh well, I thought, I hated that umbrella anyway, always turning inside out in the wind. Let them keep it.