Aggressively Early

Last Monday, I made my first trip of the season to Kings Island. I have a routine.

Stay in the left lane. Get over as far as possible in the parking turnstiles so I can slip into the Prestige Parking lot. Find a spot that’s close — and by close I mean horizontally near the fence, not vertically away from the park. I’d rather walk sideways than backward. Keys and phone go into the camera bag. Then I walk through security and — every single time — get flagged for the metal lenses in my cameras. They try hard not to make me open the bag. But what I’m carrying isn’t glasses cases or the normal things that trip their detector, so we end up doing the more detailed search anyway. Every time. I should have a punch card.

Then over to the turnstile, physical pass in hand. They stopped printing them years ago, but I kept mine. I like having something real to hold. The attendant scans me. My photo pops up — still with a goatee — and I can finally breathe.

I’m in.

Most people would say the hard part of a theme park is the lines, the heat, the crowds. For me, the hard part is getting in. The parking lot, the security line, the not-yet-being-inside. Once I’m through, I can find a quiet place to sit and just exist for a while.

At Kings Island, the problem is the gap between arriving and having something to wait for. I don’t ride anymore and so I wait for the shows to begin. But because I like to get there early enough to get a good parking spot, that means I’ve got three or more hours to kill before the first show.

So I have yet another routine. If it’s early morning, I’ll head over to the VIP Lounge, where I can get a Coke and a cookie. I’ll open my laptop and try to write something. I wrote a majority of my first full-length play in the Starbucks at Kings Island, back before there was a VIP Lounge. Now I work on essays like this one — which means I’m sitting in a theme park, waiting for a show, writing about what it feels like to sit in a theme park waiting for a show. I do all of this so I can breathe.

When I worked third shift at the hospital, I’d rather wait down in the ED than sit up in my office knowing that eventually the track board was going to show PSYCH EVAL, which would require my attention. At a restaurant, I’d rather be at the table waiting than be worried someone is waiting on me.

When the pizza delivery guy is on his way, I’ll head down to the lobby when I think it’s about time for him to arrive, because I don’t want him to wait for me to make the long trek down the hall and down the elevator. I take my keys — because he might come to the wrong door and I might have to go find him and then not be able to get back in. I take my phone, so I have something to scroll while I wait. But I won’t watch videos, because I won’t disturb anyone else with sound. So I read Quora, usually questions about parents reading the riot act to teachers or bad behavior on airplanes or nightmare stories from servers in restaurants. There’s no place to sit, unless I plop down on the steps, and if he doesn’t come as soon as I think he should, I get angry. But no one said I needed to go down there to wait for him.

It’s not that I’m anxious about waiting. It’s that I’m anxious about being late for the wait.

By the way, I watched the show four times. It was really good. Worth waiting for, actually.

Kirk Sheppard is a therapist, author, and theater journalist (and member of the American Theatre Critics/Journalists Association). He turned 50 in March, and he’s writing about it all year. Go to kirksheppard.com for more.