News You Can't Use: Anger Rooms Are All the Rage

It's time for another story that just screams "societal health" and "Edward Gibbon didn't write about this sort of thing." It's an amazing tale about how ostensible adults (millennials, so call that one a push, to be fair) have been reduced to special smash rooms to cure the ennui that sometimes arises from having "whatever my professor told me" as a unifying belief system. Yes, it's time to wreck material objects to temporarily cure the massive void within and if we can earn a few federal reserve play-money notes in the process, well we are capitalists again now that whats-his-name went back to his native Hawaii or Indonesia or whatever.

Smashing things may not seem at first blush to be a winning idea to wrap a business around.

A demolition business? Removing decrepit buildings to make way for new and better construction. That's just, like, not a winning idea. Stick with this B-boy Crew, that's where the real money is.

Since March, however, nearly 1,500 people have shown up to break housewares, electronics and furniture at the Wrecking Club, two reinforced rooms in the basement of a building in the garment district of Manhattan.

New York don't play, sucka. My idea of weekend recreation is smashing a fudging microwave and putting the boots to a living room set. You in the garment district now, fool. Get out while you still got yo' life.

Many of this number are couples looking for something more piquant than the usual date-night fare, said Tom Daly, the Wrecking Club’s proprietor.

I've finally found a good place to take my "fatal attraction" head-case. You can just pretend you're killing my daughter's rabbit and then cooking it.

“That’s the cool thing about addressing an instinct,” he said on a recent steamy afternoon. “Everyone’s got it.”

Nihilistic and pointless destruction, the common glue that unites all of humanity. Who hasn't wanted to kick the stuff out of a love seat or whatever? If you said "no," you're a liar.

Last fall, politics drove the business at the Anger Room, which opened in Dallas in 2008. 

A city populated by costumed junkies, mole people and dangerous break-dancers and the one that shot Kennedy. These are the best sources of that highly non-decadent modern culture.

Clients showed up by the hundreds to batter human effigies of Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump.

We've said it before and we'll say it again: democracy is bad.

“We’ve helped a lot of angry couples,” said Stephen Shew, the owner. (His date-night package, $70 for two electronic devices and 20 items of crockery, from lawn gnomes to ceramic vases, is wildly popular on Valentine’s Day.)

Pleasuring yourself while openly weeping is also popular on that day, but I'm not sure how I can monetize that.

A starter session costs $30 for 30 minutes with two or three electronic devices and a bucket of dishes. 

You're paying for your time with the dishes. Whatever you mutually agree to do while together has nothing to do with the "donation" you already paid.

Die, flatware!!!

Sometimes people donate things, Mr. Daly said, adding that everything smashed at the Wrecking Club is properly recycled.
 

See, it's not wasteful idiocy from adult babies. We're saving the environment.

Mr. Daly has happy memories of demolishing a swing set in his parents’ backyard, at their request, after he and his siblings had left home, and these sparked his imagination.

I have warm fuzzy memories of busting swings.

“I wanted it to have a Brooklyn-in-the-1990s vibe. I think he crushed it.”

This is a joke. Why aren't you laughing?

Full Article.

Aaron Zehner is the author of "The Foolchild Invention" available in paperback and e-book format. Read free excerpts here and here.