Postcards from The DW

This is a Business - The Dodos (mp3)
Johnny Quest/Stop That Pigeon - The Reverend Horton Heat (mp3)

My family spent last week at DisneyWorld in Orland -- er, Kissimmee, Florida. We stranded my not-quite 2-year-old son with my in-laws and headed for warmer climes equipped with passes to all of the Disney parks as well as a day for SeaWorld. It was my third experience and the second for both of my daughters, and the entire trip was fantastic. This was true mostly because I don't handle our day-to-day finances, so I have no remote clue how much the trip cost us.

Were I to even try and guess how much money was involved, I would begin to ratchet down my concept of a "fantastic" trip and start nickel-and-diming every minute. Was that dinner really worth $200 for four fucking people? Why did we buy a 7-day pass and only use five days, and how much money did we throw away? Each day at a park cost us HOW much?? Why the hell are we buying all of these $10 pins? This luau cost us how much?!

But I don't do that. Not really. And even if I started to add the numbers in my head, I have no idea how the cost of that trip relates to our current financial situation. It's possible the trip crippled us for years and will force my children to go to trucking school instead of college, or it's possible we had saved up so much vacation money that we could go again in the spring if we really wanted. (And, well, if we could find someone else foolish enough to watch our whirling dervish of a toddler for a week.)

Still, in the hopes of squeezing out a few more dollars' worth out of the trip, I thought I'd share a few observations I made over the course of the week:

The Woman Who Talked to Her Stuffed Fox


Last day of the trip. We've just entered the Magic Kingdom as a part of Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party, which is just an excuse for Disney to close the park early and charge an entirely new group of a bajillion people for the "exclusive" rights to the park for six hours. We totally fell for it. Because we're gullible.

Anyway, we're walking down Main Street -- they brilliantly force you to enter and exit past a quarter-mile of commerce options -- towards our first destination of TomorrowLand, and I hear this woman's voice right behind me.

"They're waiting for us!" she says excitedly. I look around at her. She's a forgettable bespectacled lass clad in all black and sporting heavily dyed maroonish-colored hair. She's got one of those long-strap bookbag-type thingies hanging around her neck and dangling to her side, and this smallish reddish stuffed fox has its head and front paws sticking out of the front. She is otherwise alone and walking not two paces behind my younger daughter.

I turn back around, and she immediately says, "Ohh look! Isn't that adorable?!?" Being a moron, I turn back around, and she's stroking this stuffed fox's head and pointing towards a mascot cat -- I think it was that white cat from The Aristocats, but I'm not too familiar with that one, so I could be wrong. Pulling my daughter to my other side, I slide over and just make sure she doesn't have one of those damned BlueTooth devices crammed in her other ear.

Nope. She was talking to the fucking fox.

She's alone. In her late 20s. Talking to her stuffed fox.

God bless the U.S.A.

No One Cusses!


Maybe it's just me, but the absence of foul language is not something that you immediately notice. I mean, in my daily life, it's not like I hear people dropping F-bombs left and right. I'm more vulgar when I'm writing these BOTG posts than I am in 97% of my everyday life. When it comes to the complete absence of cussing, I think you only notice it when that streak is broken.

We'd been in the Land of Disney for five days, including an adult night out on "the town" (Universal's CityWalk, which on a Sunday night ain't all dat). We were in Epcot on a Wednesday night, and there was this couple arguing in Norway, and one of them dropped the F-bomb. And then the girl dropped it right back on his nasty arse. And then a few more words went flying left and right.

Jenni and I actually found ourselves looking around, waiting for Disney mascots dressed as UN Peacekeepers to come and escort the couple off the premises. I'm totally not kidding. I figured they have microphones and cameras covering every damn inch of that property, and I figured they have the mikes trained to pick up foul language, with cameras trained to hone in on the human origin of such trash talk, with security detail on hand to beat those fucking bastards into a greater respect for G-rated communication.

But no security came. The couple argued for a few more minutes and then commenced making out like some bad scene from Top Gun. Maybe the Disney powers that be knew how this particular story would end. Point is, everyone in our group left the scene commenting on the fact that this couple had spewed out the first and only cuss words we'd heard in five consecutive days of Disney life. That must have been how Eve felt when she realized she was nekkid.

Families that Disney Together, Scream Together


While Living In The DW apparently enforces this mysterious censorship over the foul language of its adult guests, no power in the universe can prevent marital spats, and we saw more inter-spousal warfare while on Disney property than I've every witnessed in such a short time in my whole life. While they almost always did with some attempt at maintaining dignity -- you'd be amazed at how mostly civil spouses can be in serious spats when they don't want to cuss a blue streak at each other -- anyone with eyeballs could see couples in the midst of warfare. The glares, the raised language, the hands coming down on the stroller or the bench or the knee, the hands through the hair or pulling down on the ballcap, the turning and huffing.

I think it's in the very nature of a Disney vacation. You've got the types who plan out every minute of a trip like that, hoping to squeeze out every penny of value and, accidentally, also squeezing out any chance of spontaneity or enjoyment. Then you've got the dolt of a spouse who hates to even plan where to sleep that night. And they might hold these opposing philosophies in check for a day or two, but eventually, when also battling the whiny and ungrateful nature of small children who are supposed to be incapable of wiping that ohmyGodI'minDisneyfuckingWorld! grin off their faces, these forces collide and ill will and conflict ensue.

This isn't to say these weren't normal or happy couples. It just seems to be the nature of a vacation where the very point of going is to be moving non-stop. Families who go to the beach don't argue half as much. (Yes, they argue, because couples argue unless one of them is dead, but they don't argue as much at the beach.)

Epcot Is No New Orleans, and CityWalk Ain't The French Quarter

Getting a 5'10", 170 lb. male sufficiently intoxicated in Epcot costs roughly $100, which is roughly $80 more than it costs in almost any other place on the planet.

Oh yeah, and when you're eating the buffet in Germany, no matter how completely intoxicated you are, and no matter how soon it is after encountering the cussing couple from my No One Cusses! section, it is incredibly insulting to ask your German exchange student-slash-waitress whether you spell it "feck" or "fech." Asking that question makes young German ladies in DisneyWorld cry. There's a special place in hell for me for that particular act. And I thought I was being cute.

I blame the fechen Spaten.

*^#$@?!

Theme from Deadwood - David Schwarz (mp3)
Cowboy Romance - Natalie Merchant (mp3)

"Why do you watch that awful show?" my wife asked me as I was enjoying yet another trip through HBO's deceased show Deadwood.

"Because it's the best show ever made is why. It's the closest thing to Shakespearean drama I think I've ever seen."

"But people don't talk like that," she said, referring to the non-stop string of foul language emerging from the TV speakers. "Especially back then."

I shook my head and rolled my eyes. As if people were more noble in the Wild West. "They sure as f*#k did," I said. Except I only said the F-word in my head.

"No. No way. Real people don't talk like that. Not then, and not now."

Deadwood was a town of, like, 95% men. And prolly half of the few women there were prostitutes. There's a reason they coined the phrase "cuss like a sailor." Cowboys, sailors, no matter. Any environments overrun by testosterone can't be anything but vulgar places. Still, I said nothing. I finished my IBC Black Cherry soda and stuffed my mouth with a big bite of STFU. Sometimes it's better to forfeit an argument than win it.

Last Saturday I returned from a road trip with three co-workers. The four of us, all regular participants in our neighborly monthly poker tournament, hopped in a Honda and headed for Tunica, Mississippi, and stayed at the Wal-Mart of casinos for two nights. We were each prepared to gamble away an amount hovering around $300. In other words, we could only afford lose, in 48 hours of gambling, 3/4 of what John Edwards pays for a haircut. Yup, we must be in education.

Three of us are heavily involved in our churches -- each a member of significantly varied Protestant denominations -- while the fourth is a semi-practicing Catholic. Yet not even God or our belief in Him could protect that car from six hours of the foulest, filthiest, most disgusting kinds of words pouring out of our mouths. You would have thought we actually cooked and ate Linda Blair from The Exorcist before entering that car. When we finally got home and and went our separate ways, that poor Honda prolly drove itself to the nearest car wash and idled in pelting hot sudsy water for hours trying to erase the offensive stuff we said. It probably wept battery acid.

It's dangerous and foolish for me to say that all men do this, but the exceptions prove the rule. If you place a handful of men who are on similar levels socially and economically into a semi-private environment, 95 times out of 100 those men will cuss their brains out with no reservations. They'll say stuff so vile their grandmothers up in heaven would wail (although the grandfathers would chuckle and think about those times with their platoon overseas and think our generation had lost the ability to cuss good 'n' proper. We'd lost an artful flair for cussin' and traded it in for ostentatiousness, dammit!).

The topic of conversation has no bearing on this. Sex, work, religion, love, hate, war, pretty flowers, beautiful and innocent small children. Anything can be garnished with foul language like ketchup on meatloaf.

If we're talking about how much we love our mothers, we confess how damn much we a-f*#kin'-DORE our f*#kin' mothers. Holy s&#t we owe those women every f*#kin' ounce of success or joy we've ever f*#kin' had! And then someone else has to make a comment about how many ounces of successful lovin' they'd give our mother. And then someone inevitably digresses with a comment about the value of length versus weight versus thickness. And then one of us says something about having to stand outside of a bathroom stall in order to take a piss without getting their d*#ks wet from the toilet water.

And downward into the hellish spiral of mantalk we descend. Even in our most tender and sincere f*#kin' moments, men can't help but be vagrant, uncouth cowboys out on the plain. I only censored most of these 'cuz there's womenfolk around.

"Cowboy Romance" came off Natalie's biggest-selling and solo debut, Tigerlily. That album and the Deadwood soundtrack can be purchased through iTunes and Amazon.com's mp3 site.