Monday at Discovery Kingdom.

Monday I went to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom. My mom and sister have year passes, and they can bring guests, and Mom has been threatening to bring me as a guest for the longest time, so off we went. I got amusement-parked-out when I lived in Santa Cruz and went to the Boardwalk all the time, and the only parks I like anymore are the Disney parks. Six Flags tries. But I only cared to see the animal shows. Saw a few.

When I was a kid, the park was called Marine World/Africa USA, and located in Redwood City. To build it, back in the mid-1960s, the American Broadcasting Company “reclaimed” some of the San Francisco Bay’s marshy tidelands: They diked it off and filled it in. Probably killing a dozen endangered species in the process. It was a different era, you see: The way people proved they loved and celebrated nature was to build a wholly unnatural enclosure, stick some nature in it, and sell tickets and concessions. Zoos and sea parks still operate on that model, even though they’ve gone to a whole lot of trouble to pretend they don’t.

ABC built the first Marine World on that land, opening it in 1968. It went bankrupt in four years. It was bought out, had “Africa USA” added to it—named for a southern California jungle park which had been destroyed in a mudslide—and it was a popular destination for local field trips. I must’ve gone there 20 times. The rides were few and far between, but there were animal exhibits and animal shows, and waterskiiers who did stunts. Those were fun. But as I recall, Marine World always had a funny smell to it—one which we blamed on the tremendous piles of elephant dung, but were probably the acres of marshlands outside the park.

In 1982 Marine World moved to Vallejo, and my family moved to Vacaville. (Oracle now has offices where the old Marine World was located.) The park struggled for the next two decades, adding small rides in order to appeal to the masses, adding animatronic dinosaurs to capitalize on the Jurassic Park craze. But in ’96 it defaulted on its loans to Vallejo, and the city leased it to Premier Parks, which, after it bought Six Flags in 2000, renamed it Six Flags Marine World; then in ’07, Six Flags Discovery Kingdom.

Premier/Six Flags added the roller coasters, and animal rights groups complain they freak out the animals. Actually, animal rights groups object in general to any theme park or circus which includes animals and animal performances. Even if the animals are well-treated; they just object on principle. Animals, they say, shouldn’t be abused or maltreated for human entertainment. Then they turn around and convince foolish models and actresses to get naked for their anti-fur campaigns, and in so doing abuse and maltreat them for human entertainment. Go figure.

But the only thing I wanted to see at Discovery Kingdom was the animal stuff. So I went to see the shark exhibit, the tiger show, the acrobats/dolphin show, the elephant show, the stingray exhibit, the penguin exhibit, and the bird show. Well, the bird show briefly—there was no shade in their amphitheater, and all it consisted of was two parrots making funny noises. Gets old fast.

Rides? I didn’t have the patience to stand in line for any of them. I went on very few.

But the longest lines were for food. Long, I should explain, in terms of wait time. In one line we were maybe third, behind two other parties, and it still took a half hour to get to the window; and it still took five minutes for them to take and fill my order. The customer service was so slow and incompetent, you’d think Six Flags weren’t just hiring the mentally challenged; they were slipping lead into their drinking water just to slow them down further.

Seriously. While Mom and my sister and nieces were waiting in line for lunch—again, with maybe four other parties ahead of them—I went to the bathroom, then filled my water bottle, then walked across the park to the tiger show. Along the way I saw the giraffes and cougars and lions. I saw the tiger show in its entirety. I walked back. I got there just in time to see them step outside the building, their trays newly full of food.

The food prices, I should add, are stupid. I’m not paying $11 for a taco. But Mom bought one of their year passes for food, which entitles her to free lunch and dinner every time she visits the park. You could, she likes to point out, go to the park whenever it’s open and eat all your meals, free. You could, I like to point out back, also get a giant heart attack that way. It’s amusement park food, which is to say, made on the cheap, full of fat and salt and sugar. Tasty, and at least the $12 meal will give you American-size portions (i.e. big enough to feed two foreigners). But hardly healthy.

Back to the poor service: When employees, across the park, are that passive, that uninterested in getting the orders done quickly, that uncaring about getting the orders right, it’s only because management has pissed them off so much they’re deliberately sticking it to the customers. So the Six Flags bosses better beware.

“Was it everything you expected?” my sister asked me while we were leaving.

“Didn’t expect anything,” I said, “so yeah.”

They make a point of going at least once a month. I don’t see the point.

In the line to the tram to the parking lot my sister got the news Robin Williams had died, and that’s pretty much all the internet has talked about since. Including some real jerks. But I don’t feel like ranting about that. There are certain sad events where people need to just sit down, shut up, process things, and then speak. This is one of them.

Since the Discovery Kingdom trip swallowed up my Monday, it pushed all my Monday activities to Tuesday, which made Tuesday feel like a Monday, so it’s shaping up to be a weird week. How are we halfway through the week already?…