Downtown business wants you to break its stuff

Read: More from Jason Owens

I am not an angry man — most of the time.

But I do have my moments. And when those moments arise, I want to throw things. And break things. And smash things.

Occasionally, I do (ask my pitching wedge), but basic tenants of our civilized society prevent me from living out my wildest rage-filled fantasies.

So when the idea to do a feature on Sarah’s Smash Shack came up in an editorial meeting, I naturally jumped all over it.

What is Sarah’s Smash Shack, you ask?

Well,  it’s a place where you break things. And pay good money to do it. And feel good about it in the end — or at least that’s the idea.

So I called Sara Lavely and set up an appointment at her Sixth Avenue haven for aggression and shattered ceramics. Video guru Steven Bartholow jumped on board and we made plans to spend an afternoon breaking things downtown.

The morning of, I realized I was struggling for inspiration. It had been a relatively calm week — I was in a good place. Not so much in a destructive mood.

Wanting to make the most of my experience, I sought out sources of anger, hoping for an inopportune computer crash or someone to cut me off on the way to work. No such luck. Then it hit me.

I had parking tickets. Unjust parking tickets that I hadn’t yet dealt with. Twice, my car got tagged in front of my office for an expired registration. A registration that I paid for, but waited several weeks to receive from the DMV.

I decided to call the parking offices downtown and try to resolve my tickets in a fair manner.

Surely, they’d give me an unsatisfactory and expensive answer. Alas — they didn’t disappoint. After spending several minutes navigating an unruly automated system, I got a live operator who basically told me I was out of luck.

Bingo! I was not happy. Having decided to make it a pre-Smash Shack beer lunch with Steven, I had a pair of key cogs in place to get in a destructive mood.

The only thing left to decide on was the music. The Smash Shack Web site encourages patrons to bring an MP3 player and turn it up. After a long debate with myself between the Queens of the Stone Age and Tool, I settled on Tool’s “Jambi” as my song of choice. Lots of aggression going on there.

So off to the Smash Shack we went. The entrance was welcoming, warm — friendly even. Bright orange walls and neon signs greeted us at the front door. My agitation from the parking ticket conversation subsided.

In steps co-owner Ed King, who gave us a quick tour and sat down to tell us a little about the business. He was not an aggressive man. In fact, he couldn’t have been any more serene and demure.

The picture he painted of the Smash Shack’s clientele was even more surprising.

“I can’t say that we have a typical client,” King said. “Moms and dads bring their kids on a Sunday afternoon. Who doesn’t want to break something, regardless of the mood you’re in? It’s always fun to break stuff.”

Well, you can’t argue with that logic. Having completely lost my anger mojo, I took a new approach. The completely rational conclusion that breaking stuff is always fun, regardless of mood, is infallible.

So we went back to the front desk. I chose my package, a choice of 10 items from their varied menu of plates, vases and piggy banks. I mixed and matched a little bit of everything.

Ed set Steven and me up with what amounted to paintballing gear — a face mask and full body jumpsuit. I opted out of wearing the jet-black work boots, feeling that donning a full-on 80s slasher-movie serial killer uniform wasn’t necessary for the experience.

Steven set up his camera in the back smash room (one of two), fully equipped with a viewing window and silver-and-black checkered sheet metal smashing target.

We cranked up the Tool and started smashing things. The plates were fun — I alternated between Frisbee tosses and overhand throws, both of which resulted in satisfying shattering. With a little added weight and a size and shape more conducive to a full-force baseball throw, the piggy banks upped the ante.

But the real coup de grace came with the long blue vases. About the length of your forearm and as heavy as a bottle of water, those suckers flew. And shattered all over the place. The need for facemasks became evident.

In the end the smashing was gratifying. But it was a little awkward. Having completely lost my angry edge, the process of standing in a room and throwing things while people watched on wasn’t exactly organic.

But the satisfaction of breaking things in the middle of the day for no good reason trumped any discomfort.

After stripping our smashing gear and having our remnants packed up in a display to-go box, we had a chance to chat with Sarah, the brain-child and head of the operation. Her cute smile and curly blond locks said sweetheart. But her arms full of intricate tats screamed “hey — let’s break stuff.”

It turns out, she’s a little of both.

A former veterinarian who plans to continue practicing, she came up with the idea during a dark period in life that followed a divorce.

“It was a moment in my life when I was feeling very down and powerless going through a rough situation in my life,” Lavely said. “In that blur of emotion and white noise that was going on in my head at that time, I had a vision of going into a room and just tear stuff up.

“We meet all these incredibly cool people that come in and are just very fun and laid-back and open-minded. It’s a cool sublimation of where I was at that point in my life.”

So an idea born out of anger has turned into a shelter of satisfaction for Lavely. And that pretty much sums up the user experience. Like King told us earlier, people don’t just get outraged and walk straight into the Smash Shack ready to break things. They go to have fun.

The sign on the front window reads: “Come in. Break stuff. Smile.”

In the end, that’s exactly what we did.

Sarah’s Smash Shack is at 1353 Sixth Avenue, San Diego. Phone (619) 702-8488.

Jason Owens is the SDNN sports editor and is willing to step out of his comfort zone for the chance to break stuff. Email: jason.owens@sdnn.com

Tags: anger, angry, break, destroy, downtown, frustration, mad, Sarah's Smash Shack, SDNN, smash, smash shack, Uncategorized

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 9:44 pm and is filed under Arts & Entertainment, Business, Lifestyle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.