You haven’t heard from me for a while because, until recently, I have been in the Happiest Place on Earth.

Well, no, not the East Side. The place that’s trademarked “The Happiest Place on Earth.” Walt’s place.

If I had to go to Disneyworld for every vacation until I died, I don’t think I’d have any problem with that. Which is good, because I do have to. Give my wife or her siblings a blank piece of paper and say, “Draw me a map of the United States,” and they would draw an inaccurately large blob labeled “Cape Girardeau,” a blob labeled “DISNEY,” and a narrow Gaza-like line connecting them. (On the edge of the Cape blob, there would be an area marked “St. Louis,” but it would be like the unknown, New World parts of those maps from the 16th century. There would be a picture of a dragon on St. Louis, or a sea monster eating a minivan.)

Disneyworld seems like it ought to be the kind of thing I would hate, all artificial smiles and cheerful authoritarianism, but once you’ve been acclimated after a few hours it’s easy to fall for a place where everything is always clean and everywhere you go people have to be nice to you. Those are some promises your trip to Europe is not prepared to keep. (Even strangers on the street are friendly; after all, they’re all on vacation.) I would occasionally be taking a leisurely stroll by a lovely beach that had been put there by bulldozers, alone in the middle of the night but completely safe and comfortable, thinking, “Sure, there are probably three cameras fixed on me right now, but this is lovely! There isn’t even any trash on the sidewalk, and the monorails are running on time. Fascism might just work if we put Goofy in charge. The Disney Goofy, I mean.”

So for a week, thousands of people were paid to make sure I was having a good time, and I gladly obliged them. The missus and I drove to Orlando with all of my in-laws and a couple of our friends. The next sentence should read “three people were killed, four injured,” but in fact everyone had a good time together for more or less the entire trip. We were surrounded by pirates and six foot chipmunks, and I think that was the most astonishing thing I saw all week. I took it as a good sign that, as the trip wound down, we were trying to schedule opportunities to see more of the people we came with, as opposed to saying things like, “If she pops her gum one more time, I’m pushing her out of Dumbo to her death.”

If you find yourself headed to Walt Country, I strongly advise you to take my wife and her family with you as sherpas. One advantage to taking the same vacation over and over and over and over and over and over again is that, by the tenth time, you have honed your primal instincts like some sort of prehistoric mammoth hunter to ensure that you will never wait in a line again. “Okay! We get a FastPass for the Tower of Terror, check the line for the Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster, and make our way over to the MGM Movie Ride. By the time we get out, the parade should be starting, and after that our reservations at the Sci-Fi Diner should be ready. Then it’s on to the Tower of Terror, after which the roller coaster line should be down due to the 2:35 Brat Siesta, and then funnel cakes to celebrate our seventh consecutive hour of constant uninterrupted motion. Then it’s off to the First Aid station.” My vacation was more efficient than my office.

I don’t know quite what to make of the Aerosmith Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster. I guess I’m supposed to take the sight of them all over a Disney theme park ride as a definitive sign that Aerosmith has given up even the pretense of being “hard core”? Or should I have gleaned that from that Armageddon song and, I guess, everything after that Armageddon song? At the same time, I’m not really sure where Disney’s head was at, either. [easy cryogenically-frozen Walt head joke here] There’s more to being family-friendly than just sort of getting old and deciding you are. As you stand in line for the ride, and as you ride it, speakers blast Aerosmith songs nonstop. A recovering high school classic rocker like me cannot help looking at the kids in the line with their mouse-eared balloons and mouse-eared hats and mouse-eared mouse dolls and think, “Has anyone running this park ever listened to these lyrics? Because I’m almost positive this song is about cunnilingus. It truly is a magic kingdom.”

Of course, Disneyworld is completely wasted on children anyway, but that doesn’t seem to stop people from bringing them. It’s always fascinating to observe the human child in this, its natural habitat. I learned a lot from watching how kids behave at Disneyworld, but my wife and I have decided we’re probably going to go ahead and have some anyway.
In Walt Disney World, you have a place that has been designed from water fountain to Space Mountain for the sole, overriding, sacred purpose of making all children’s dreams come true. After careful observation, it is my conclusion that having all their dreams come true makes children miserable and obnoxious. Obviously the only way I can make my children truly happy is to frustrate them at every turn. At least if they’re anything like me.

At about 10:30 one morning at Disney/MGM Studios, I heard a young boy no older than seven sneer at his mother, “Mooooom, I’m starving! What are you gonna get me, nothing?!” I’m not sure text does the quote justice; I only hope I did when I repeated it in a whiny falsetto three times a day for the rest of the trip.

I think Disney is missing out on a real revenue stream from disgruntled adults who, as responsible parents, can’t react to that kind of behavior in public the way they’d like to. Every street corner in Disneyworld should have a villain or some other sour character standing on it under a sign: GRUMPY THE DWARF KICKS YOUR CHILD TWICE IN THE SHINS, $5. You don’t even have to take your child over for the kicking; they just have to believe you could. Tantrums would go way down.

“What are you gonna get me, nothin‘?!” was my favorite quote of the trip. My mother-in-law’s, something you could only hear in Epcot: a little girl crying, “But I don’t wanna go to China!” My wife’s was predictably something cuter, the precocious little girl overheard on the way back to the shuttle, “When we get back to the room, I know what I’m gonna do: take off my shoes and sit down.”

My second favorite quote of the week can’t really be counted since it was indecipherable gibberish. My only disappointment on the trip was getting close, so tantalizingly close, to riding on Splash Mountain, only to have it shut down for half an hour due to some technical difficulty/horrible, disfiguring accident on the tracks. (They were vague.) The signs along the route of the line said we had a 25-minute wait; we blew through the line in 8 minutes, only to grind to a halt at the final turnstile. The cheerful “cast member” told us there would be a slight delay as they worked on the problem, but her cheer was undercut by the announcements from the technicians, which we could hear coming from some combination middle school PA system/Jack in the Box drive-thru clown somewhere. “Splash Mountain, releasing log echo niner, mimsy mopsy mumble, stand clear.” Every two minutes, “Splash Mountain, something something, stand clear.” Then they’d release a handful of car/log things onto the tracks, and away they would go… never to return. In half an hour, we saw a lot of logs leave, but none ever came back. Later, we saw people leaving the ride looking as though Brer Fox had tried to drown them.

In case you’re unfamiliar, Splash Mountain is a log flume/roller coaster which has a Brer Rabbit, Song of the South theme. Disney has made 497 movies they could use as a ride theme, but in the 1990s they chose the one about the happy slave that is too offensive to mention by name. God forbid they retire that one and make it a Rescuers ride or something. I wonder if that was designed by the same guy who approved the Aerosmith ride.

I have one unanswered question from the trip. We finished our week with the Hall of Presidents, where robot Commanders in Chief abruptly stand up and begin gesticulating and talking about America. The thing is, at the end of the show the current President gives a long robot speech that was recorded by the flesh president himself. I have to know: where on the president’s inauguration schedule is this task? “After the swearing in, you’ll go back to the residence and get the nuclear launch codes. Your briefing on the truth behind Area 51 is at 2:00. Oh, and at 3:30 Mickey Mouse will be here to record your robot speech.” What do they do if the president says, “**** my robot speech”? I guess we’ll find out if McCain wins.