Monday brought with it a new update. Van is, apparently, on the road. The last stop is the best, I think.
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Subject: My Trip to Disney World
Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2005 22:46:30 -0400
I am writing you from the Ritz-Carlton Pooh Corner in the Walt Disney World Resorts, where it is claimed, their Tiggers are the bounciest, their Pooh Bears the most deferential and their Eeyores the saddest. In fact, there goes one now, dragging a some Ralph Lauren luggage and insuperable burden of unanswerable woe, looking like a lugubrious blue burro. It’s really best not to get an Eeyore as your bellhop as they invariably drag your pieces and if your cart or luggage loses a wheel, they’ll never notice: the halls are full of blue slouching Eeyores in misbuttoned bellhop uniforms looking like piles of depressed sloppy laundry from a bipolar marching band, while steamer trunks and valises fall off their wounded carts to thump down the red carpeted toboggan of the grand central staircase. It does no good to complain -they already know they are the worst and need no prompting to discuss it. And you still have to tip. Otherwise, believe me, you’ll feel even worse, waking in the dead of night to the slow crypt-like sounds of your unremunerated Eeyore scraping a pile of scuffed Samsonite down the lonely hall past your room. This sound will haunt your dreams and destroy your soul.
The rooms themselves are entertaining, the furniture and moveables loosely patterned after the Hundred Acre Wood, though I swear that the badger that hold the seltzer has me a little on edge: every time a fix a drink I cannot tell if the hissing is just the bottle or not. Same with the owl night light. One thing I’m sure is not just me is the cute but difficult decorative leitmotif of having everything stored in little containers labeled “huny”, some of which actually contain honey and all of which are sticky. I lost a good pair of socks this way, and besides, as you know, I have no real patience with things that are cute and difficult.
Poe’s Annabel Lee Water Park
Our first stop is Disney’s Annabel Lee Water Park, based loosely on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe:
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee
And so, all the night tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling -my darling-my life and my bride,
In the sepulcher there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea
The park is famous for being the coldest, darkest water park ever built outside of W_______ in Poland (a former salt mine) and Ragnarok Water Park in Norway (currently closed). The park is based around a magnificent 19th century crystal palace bath house (based on the Cliff House in San Francisco), now ruined, its panes split, streaked and occluded, a violated pleasure dome, half-eaten, weedily slipping into the sea, where the sky is strangely perpetually overcast for Orlando and the air is filled with a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull sluggish, faintly discernable, and leaden -hued -probably the chlorine.
Most of the park consists of a lot of shallow chilly grottos full of skinny childlike girls, their damp hair slicked to their heads, who splash about as listless sirens or bob about face down. Visitors looking for a more vigorous adventure may try the various water slides, though, be forewarned, the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, though thrilling, is unique among water slides in that it has no clear ending and is chillier than most. The centerpiece of the park is The Descent into the Maelstrom (which is really based on “MS. Found in a Bottle” , a water slide described less as a pulse-pounding exhilarating thrill ride than as “an unbearable final confrontation with absolute mortal terror and terror from which you will never return.” The ride is an enormous, crashing whirlpool the size of a football stadium. Once your ship breaks up among the insane violence of the cataract, visitors are advised to make for the ancient wreck crewed by silent weary titans that seems to have somehow survived on the edge of the abyss by eternally tacking against annihilation since some age for which the even the oldest gods have no words. Falling this, the visitor can simply fall into the gaping nothingness of the abyss itself to some unimaginable unknown fate where the abyss breathes out. Rumor has it that this is Disneyland Paris, but as no traveler has ever gone there, this remains speculation.
I myself am simply stopping at this park to enjoy Poe’s Roe Bar which has excellent caviar service, cold vodka and it is okay to swap clothes with people.
Mission to Mars
Our next stop is to dry out somewhere and this turns out to be EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of the Tomorrow, where I have dual citizenship as a Man of the Future. There is no better way to sober up that joining the Space Program (trust me) and so were off to “Mission to Mars” presented by Hewlett-Packard. The rocket launch itself is quite thrilling, the sensation of g-forces created by actual rockets driving you to escape velocity. As you penetrate the ionosphere it is customary to yell: “So long, suckers!” at first stage separation.
As thrilling as this moment of initial impulse is, there are even more exciting thing to do on Mars when you arrive there six months later. The polar ice cap where the Mars colonies are based features a world class ski resort with Swiss hotel staff. The colonies are currently divided into four zones: Mars Paris, Mars Venice, Mars Berlin, and Mars Dollywood (Mars Vegas opening Summer 2009). Mars Paris is really something of a disappointment; the bistro food is fine, but unexceptional. The Martian Arc de Triomphe is a bit of a bore, depicting the magnificent victorious Martian overlords in their tripods sweeping aside a soon to be exterminated humanity in screaming bas-relief : the human faces, twisted in terror and pain, lack any real individuality and the beams of the death rays, though lovingly rendered, aren’t anything you haven’t seen else where. Mars Venice, however, is a strong delight: the beautiful blue-green waters of the Martian canals splash and slip over one another in the enchanting hypnotic slow motion of``` low gravity. It is a thoroughly dreamlike sensation to be buoyed in a Martian gondola, just watching the somnambulant wake of the boats, where one could drift off into wholly unearth-bound dreams to the songs of the Martian gondolier, if the latter were not a ear shattering caterwaul that sounds like a cat and an elephant fighting with an outboard motor and a jackhammer.
Note: Martian Pizza is what we call a stromboli. Be sure to order yours without pumice. The less said about Mars Berlin and Dollywood, the better. Along with Mars Paris, these seem like poor tributes to those destroyed and radioactive cities, comparing unfavorably with their exhibits in The Museum of Vanquished Humanity. On to Walt Disney World.
Hall of the Evil Presidents
A slip of the tongue at the Hall of the Presidents... No, you want the Hall of the Evil Presidents ...connected by a tunnel to the Haunted Mansion ...and to Tomorrowland ...like the Haunted Mansion, you are ushered into a room with presidential portraits, which slowly change as they are worked over by revisionist historians... then, you are in boat like Pirates of the Carribean ...a ghoulish George Washington intones in a spectral echo: I cannot tell a lie by chopped down cherry tree, then lighting flashes and he pulls out his wooden teeth which laugh maniacally.. the boat plummets... The ride has the layout of a Masonic Temple ...Taft gorges himself in his evil wet grotto of his White House bathtub, the Jabba the Hut of the ride, Teddy Bears arrive on a Navy Battleship with shovels in Latin America... the spicy Latin beat will come back later, as unmarked planes pull into Ronald Reagan International Airport, dripping dusty white powder... but the ruler of the ride is, of course, RMN... the sound of his reels are everywhere, if only the hiss of the tapes... the mood changes a little as we slide into the Jefferson/JFK/Clinton Memorial Tunnel of Love... ominously it ends with a sign saying, “Love Field Ahead”...then we are in a motorcade in assassination alley, shots ring out, the vehicle speeds up... “But wait,” asks a little child’s prerecorded voice, “why is Lincoln here?”; “He suspended habeas corpus”; “and FDR?”; “He created Japanese-American Internment Camps”; “Aren’t all presidents a little bit evil?”... this is the message of the ride ... the ride exits into a presidential playland... you can sit in the Oval office, activate secret tapes and traps, get drunk or choke on a pretzel and, of course, press the button...
Well, it seems the line is moving. I’ll write again when I get the chance.
your man in Disneyland,
Van |
