Category Archives: Things I Do

The great rock critic Lester Bangs once dreamed about having a basement with every album ever recorded in it. The thing is, Bangs’ basement now exists on the Internet. Nothing is rare and nothing is unknown. The digital world grows by the nanoseconds and milliseconds are obsolete. When I was a kid I used to try to think of the biggest number ever, but always puckered out somewhere after one hundred gajillion-billion-zillion-million. And one.

Bangs probably would have been freaked out if he knew his dream basement would become reality. The guy wrote an Elvis obituary wondering if the world could ever agree on love or Elvis or anything ever again. He spoke to an increasingly fragmenting culture back in 1977 when he wrote, “we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.”

Bangs couldn’t have foreseen that there’s something worse than no Elvis. There’s no John Lennon. There’s no Michael Jackson. There’s no record stores. And there’s nobody sitting around listening to records. We don’t sit down on the couch, have a drink with a friend, listen to side one of a record, flip it over, and listen to side two. We don’t remember the rules—that you can talk before the record and in between sides and during the crappy songs, but Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands requires full reverence.

There’s no reverence anymore. Instead, there’s earbuds and playlists and leave-me-the-hell-alone looks—which face it—you need on subways and buses.

Don’t mind me. I’m just being old and obsolete and living in the analog world. Digital music is codes. Ones and ohs. Numbers. One hundred gajillion-billion-zillion-million. It hurts my head. Analog means to use signals or information represented by a continuously variable physical quantity. See also, In a manner analogous to the variations in air pressure of the original sound. See also, Random variation.

On monoaural records, the fine print somewhere on the back cover always assures the buyer that “this is a high-fidelity recording, designed for the phonograph of today or tomorrow. Played on your present machine, it gives you the finest quality of reproduction. You can buy today, without fear of obsolescence in the future.”

I wish I came with that kind of disclaimer.

See also, A thing seen as comparable to another. Recently I found a secondhand bookstore tucked into the corner of an unsuspecting strip mall, next to a sushi place and a paint store. It was the kind of strip mall where it looks like it might be mobbed, but then you realize there’s actually tons of parking spots, and it’s just the lazy suburbanites hunting and scrapping over the first few rows. Being a competitive animal, or maybe just an asshole, I like to scan the closer spots to see if I can snipe one off. I’m not lazy, I just want to win. I have medals in getting good parking spaces, people. MEDALS.

Before even walking in, you can tell this is the perfect kind of bookstore, the kind roughly the size of a closet. At least a master bedroom closet. Old light bulbs with metal filaments give off an apricot glow. Musty wooden shelves press to the ceiling and loom over—or perhaps more accurately, hunch over, like old giants. And if you are quiet, and if you listen carefully, you’ll swear you hear those shelves breathing, the sounds of giants harrumphing over us mere mortals below.

This is the kind of place without hip kids in wool hats and lattes—but rather the kind with an inch of dust collecting on the shelves and maybe some cat hair, too. The kind of place with a girl behind the counter who could be anything between twenty-seven and forty-seven years old, reading a book, and that’s all she minds to do. If you have a question that’s not idiotic, she will be happy to answer it. But if you’re interrupting to ask where the Dean Koontz books are, you really shouldn’t be in this holy place.

And no, she also doesn’t know the name of that book by the name of that author you can’t remember.

And no, e-books. Just no.

She’s wearing a dowdy but comfy sweater and a no-fuss ponytail. I decide she’s definitely twenty-seven because the slouch neck of the sweater reveals the spaghetti strap of a tank top—and I decide she’s probably fun. A good time. Wild, in fact. You just know with those ones.

Then in the back, there’s a possible treasure hunt—the everything else section, where there are CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes, and best of all, vinyl records. I try to tip toe past the giants, skipping over their books, but I hear them sigh in disdain. I want to explain myself. You see, I just bought all these books last month that I already have no time to read. I swear, honestly, my bedside table has like six piles plus a few more on the floor. I’ve got to sleep in the same room as the books I’m currently reading, and right now, it’s an orgy. Look, honestly, I got them at a real bookstore, at the Borders before it went out of business. Thirty of ‘em, all glossy and virginal and smelling of ink and fresh pulp, sweeter than the smell of citrus.

I know, I should have gone more often. I should have bought more books before it closed. We all should have. It’s a shame, and it’s our fault, and we know it. Well, some of us do.

But it’s no use to plead with the giants. The won’t hear my case. They’re old and they’re grumpy, and they have wiser things to talk about. Theirs are conversations we cannot hear or understand, like a child playing on the floor under the table, while the adults smoke cigarettes and sip beers above, speaking in hushed and solemn tones. We long to be a part of it, to know what of it, but then we grow up and wish we could go back to not knowing. Wish we could go back to underneath the table, our secret fort, where the dog also watched guard, our trusty sidekick.

I miss my sidekick. Us mortals are too sensitive. Wound too easily. Take it all too personal. Man up now, suck it in and stand up straight. Rah rah, and all of that. Onward march then.

I make my way to the back, past the giants, past the girl, and also past an owlish man studying the rows of books in the military history section, which is labeled in handwritten scrawl on a piece of masking tape. The records sit in crates on the floor, in crates behind those crates, and in haphazardly stacked piles on top of the crates and the crates behind those. Hoo boy.

Right away I could see it wasn’t the usual thrift store fare in the crates, the stuff grandma doesn’t even listen to—the Herb Alberts, the Sing Alongs with Mitch, the banged up Christmas records. This was actual, honest-to-god rock and roll in here.

So I’m crouching and flipping through the crates, my knees starting to tingle and the lactic acid racking up in my calves. Suddenly the next LP I flip to is Sgt Pepper. As in Lonely Hearts Club Band. As in the Beatles. A nice clean, beauty of a copy, too. Usually that shit is snapped up and put eBay for a million dollars plus an additional billion dollars shipping. Or it’s placed behind some glass counter and marked up to fifty bucks, even if looks like it was ran over twice and wouldn’t be worth that much if Ringo sneezed on it.

Instead, here it was among the common and mortal records, in the $4 crate, although admittedly it was meekly marked as $10. This is the Beatles, after all. The book store owners weren’t fools. I bought it because I always buy multiple copies of Beatles records. I’m forever chasing after that one good clean copy without a speck of dust gunking the inner grooves. Gunk is reality in the analog world. But this one was pretty. There was no ringwear and the colors were vivid. The corners were sharp.

It wasn’t until I got home that I noticed the inside sleeve. Early Pepper copies came with a pink-swirl on the sleeve. It intrigued me enough to do some Googling. And make some phone calls. And have my friend pull out his “Field Guide to Beatles Records,” a book he swears he’s never “used in the field, whatever that means.” (LIES.)

I became sucked into a massive wormhole of arcane Beatles knowledge, a circle of hell in esotericism. There are differences in the copyright information printed in microprint on the back covers, which is the difference between common copies and rarer ones. If it has a MACLEN and NEMS copyright on the back, it’s a common copy.

But my copy only had the NEMS copyright.

To my horror, three hours of research passed. I began sweating at the thought of my wife walking in the door from work, and me having nothing ready for dinner because I became obsessed with the subtleties of copyright information on the back cover.

“But it doesn’t say MACLEN, honey!” is not a valid excuse.

SWEET CIRCLE OF HELL.

As it turns out my copy is one of the rarer first pressings, a copy in its condition worth $100-$200. That gives me hope, in a digital world where everyone has a computer in their pocket—that you can still stumble into a little closet of a bookstore and unsuspectingly find a rare Beatles record that someone else didn’t know about, not even yourself. Perhaps it’s something fated in the analog world: a bit of random variation, a speck of dust among the ones and ohs.

Christ, we’re back from Disney. We both survived head colds, a sinus infection that required a round of hardcore antibiotics, a serious bout with pink eye, and Space Mountain. We dodged double-wide strollers, rent-a-scooters, and at least one mental meltdown in the line of It’s A Small World. I’m pretty sure our marriage will survive anything.

The line of It’s A Small World really is a perfect place to break down. It began the day before, when we woke up at 6am to leave for the airport. We were both sick as dogs, but also completely convinced that we were totally in that “getting over it” stage. In truth, we were running on adrenaline fumes and perhaps Disney magic. Well that, and we were both literally ON DRUGS. The wife’s lymph nodes came to the party and she was swallowing Amoxicillins, and I’m a neurotic, so I was freaked out and terrified of dying in a fiery plane crash while being trapped in a claustrophobic tube. I was loaded up on Xanax.

When we landed a short while later, we hit up the car rental desk, The Polynesian check-in desk, and then went straight to Epcot. I had a five-page itinerary, a goal of visiting over fifty attractions, and spending some time in the pool, damn it. And I only had four and a half days left to do it. So after we made it through the Epcot gates, we power-walked toward That Ball Thing with fury, on a mission to begin our holy war on Walt Disney World, or in other words, our honeymoon.

After the last year of being engaged, buying a house, the whole wedding thing, and the last week of sickness, we were desperate for a vacation, even though this was not a vacation at all. It was a crusade. I sat down, careful to keep my arms and legs at all times inside the moving vehicle, and promptly coughed up a lung on Spaceship Earth.

We found out the Magic Kingdom had extended hours for resort guests that first night and that they were open until 1am. We decided it would be prudent to take full advantage of this, and we knocked out over half the attractions with no wait times. We got back to our hotel and went to bed around 2am, and then, a mere five hours later, we woke up again to be outside the Magic Kingdom gates at opening. We’d gone for nearly 19 hours straight through while coughing and dying. I don’t know how to explain it other than Disney World: one hundred times more potent than COCAINE.

11am. It was about a hundred degrees outside already, and the non-stop happy music piped in through the cleverly-hidden plastic rocks. We were on schedule to knock out the rest of the park before noon, but that’s when the mobs began pouring in with their jetliner-sized strollers. That’s when I finally hit the wall, in the line of It’s A Small World, the happiest cruise that ever sailed.

We were standing under the plaster shelter resembling a castle with ceiling fans that spun lazily, more for show than for the purpose of circulating air to the masses. The walls were sticky and glittery and laced with gold garland. The line lumbered and swayed forward a step at a time. The smell of sweat and hot dogs lingered in the thick humidity. Oh, and the tune of “It’s A Small World” played OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER.

“I can’t fucking stand this waiting anymore,” I said, suddenly very aware that I had cursed in Disney World. I wondered if the Gods of the Magic Kingdom might strike me dead for the sin of being unhappy.

“Well what did you expect? That’s what you do in Disney World, is wait,” the wife said.

“I hate it. I hate it. I hate these lines. And these people. And especially these kids. Look at this place. We’re not in some magical land. We’re in a glorified theme park. Everything is fake here. That’s all it is, plastic! All of it! We’ve all been fooled!”

I was having a Soylent Green-type revelation right as were being herded into the boat and being sent into the tunnel towards that music. And those robotic dolls. But then as we drifted through, the dolls hypnotized me. There’s a billion of ‘em twitching and dancing in there. I lost sense of time and awareness. I forgot I was soaked in sweat, sitting in a boat that smelled like gym sneakers, in front of Brazilian tourists shouting at the dolls as though they were at a soccer match. It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears…

Everyone’s entitled to hit the wall somewhere in Disney, and you certainly will. The wife’s wall came a day later, when she broke down crying at Hollywood Studios in front of a bathroom mirror, finally admitting to herself it wasn’t just an eyelash. It was pink eye.

Despite what seemed like God’s will to derail our honeymoon, we had an awesome time. We knocked out the five page itinerary, saw the firework shows, got in some quality pool time, bar time, and made it out of the park to a pharmacy to get eye drops. We crowned ourselves Disney Warriors. And so now let me review my personal top twenty list of favorite Disney things.

1. The Enchanted Tiki Room

For the last few years, the Enchanted Tiki room has been revamped and “under new management” with more contemporary Disney birds, Iago and Zazu singing songs like “A Friend Like Me” and “Hakuna Matata.” Thankfully, in what can only be described as an act of God, in January 2011, the Iago animatronic caught fire and was severely damaged. The attraction recently reopened, refurbished and returned to the original format with Pierre, Jose, Michael, and Fritz singing the original classics such as “The Tiki Tiki Tiki Room” and “Let’s All Sing Like The Birdies Sing.”

It’s awesome. There’s singing macaws, singing orchids, singing Tiki Gods, singing totem poles, and maybe fifty other things going on that I missed because I was totally absorbed in the beauty of that great old music, angry Tiki Gods, and ferocious drumming. I loved the bizarro 1960s vibe. ALSO THIS THING HAD AIR CONDITIONING. That makes this silly little bird show my number one favorite thing in Disney World.

2. Dumbo

Yes, I’m anointing the Dumbo ride as my number two favorite thing in Disney World. Yes, we rode it. Yes, we waited over half an hour in line for a ninety-second flight. It’s the most iconic ride experience in Disney World. It is the face of Disney World to every kid, and I’ve been waiting for my flight for the last twenty-something years. And it was so worth it.

So the last week September in Disney World is no thing. Attendance is at the lowest and wait times for most rides are nearly non-existent. We walked on most of the rides in all the parks, most with wait times of less than five minutes. But Dumbo always had a wait time of 30-60 minutes, and we went back to the attraction five times over the course of our trip to see if it was any less.

Finally, on the last day, I decided I just had to eat it and wait thirty minutes for the ride. And man, that is one insufferable wait with piles of sweaty, cranky five-year-olds all over the place—and their parents, who are much, much worse.

Still, I’m not backing down. DUMBO = WORTH IT.

3. Peter Pan’s Flight

This was another one with a hellish wait and six billion kids. But once inside, it’s one of the neatest rides and one of sweetest three minutes you’ll ever experience. It’s an old dark ride where you “fly over” the scenes looking down at miniature versions of London and Neverland which appear to be made of paper mache, hand-made and painted with day-glo so they can be seen vividly in the dim lighting.

The music inside is absolutely gorgeous, in the way that it makes you sigh heavily and long for something far in the past, although you know not what. This ride is stunning, pure nostalgia.

4. Captain EO

I’m a huge Michael Jackson fan, and I was lucky enough to see Captain EO as a kid during my first trip to Disney World. I consider watching Captain EO at Disney World one of the “true” fan experiences alongside seeing him perform live. It closed in Epcot in 1994 and was replaced by another 3D show, Honey I Shrunk the Audience. Then in 2009, they brought it back as a tribute to MJ. They’ll probably close it again as attendance numbers drop off, and from the looks of it, it might be pretty soon. Here is the completely deserted Captain EO lobby:

We were there to change the world…but no one else was. Whatever. I loved it. I may or may not have teared up a little during the movie. Okay, I did. IT IS SO GOOD. Everything was original to the 1986 installation, from obviously the carpeting, to the original signage, to the untouched 70mm film shown on two projectors just as it was twenty-five years ago.

I definitely hoped there would be some Captain EO swag for sale in the Imagination Pavilion where EO is located, but I didn’t get my hopes up too high. I knew this wasn’t a real attraction, but just a temporary tribute. Besides, I already owned some cool original EO merch that I’d bought off of eBay in previous years.

But folks, this is Disney World, where dreams come true. They had a whole section of EO gear! They had hats, pens, keychains, buttons, posters, and t-shirts. In truth, it all looked a bit cheaply and hastily made, but I was actually standing in the presence of Captain EO merchandise in 2011! In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been so in awe—Walt Disney will do anything for a quick buck.

Then I saw something truly amazing. Magically amazing. Something that made the entire few-thousand dollar trip more worth it than the fact that we got married. Disney made a new Captain EO plush Hooter.

5. Plush Hooter

Hooter is arguably the number two star in Captain EO—after Michael Jackson or that orange fuzzball—depending upon how you personally rank the cast of Captain EO misfits. Disney half-assed their other EO merchandise, and yet they went ALL THE WAY with this brand-new Hooter doll. At first, I even thought he was perhaps a warehouse leftover, but he is in fact, a brand new 2011 Hooter. The 1986 Hooter is slightly variant, with different color markings and marble eyes, forever cleaving eBay searches into “vintage Hooter” and “tribute Hooter.”

I still can’t believe they made a new one, even though churning out a plush elephant is nothing for Disney. Still, among the thousands of generic, overpriced dolls littering the parks, this one seems truly unique and out of time. I also bought one of the cheesy EO buttons for his shirt and saved the 3D glasses to make Hooter truly commemorate my Captain EO experience.

6. Rick Moranis

WE FOUND RICK MORANIS! MISSING SINCE 1994! He’s been in the Imagination Pavilion the whole time! But seriously, what the hell is he doing here? Do you realize Honey I Shrunk the Kids came out in 1989? Yes, of course you realize that. But what you don’t realize is that it wasn’t just a couple of years ago. It was twenty-two years ago. Yes, you are that old.

And yet for some reason, Disney is desperately clinging to this cinematic masterpiece starring Hollywood greats, Rick Moranis and Anty. The number of references throughout the four parks to the film are mind-boggling. There’s the 3D Honey I Shrunk the Audience movie in Epcot. There’s the Honey I Shrunk the Kids Movie Set Adventure in Hollywood Studios. There’s this giant framed poster of Rick Moranis inside the Imagination Pavilion. At the end of the Great Movie Ride, where you watch a montage of some of history’s most memorable movie clips, THERE IS AN INCLUDED CLIP OF HONEY I SHRUNK THE KIDS.

There’s even a poster at Hollywood Studios advertising the short-lived Honey I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show, a obscure show that even I don’t remember, which ran ALL THE WAY BACK in 1997. The poster sat under an awning, out of the brutal Florida sun, unfaded, its colors as vivid as the day it was printed. I should have taken a picture it. Jesus, it was beautiful.

7. Gigantic Super Soaker

The Honey I Shrunk the Kids Movie Set Adventure is a grubby playground, but it did have an all-redeeming gigantic Super Soaker, so it was worth the pit-stop. I remember hearing about this mythical playground being built in Disney when I was a kid. My mind equaled blown back then. I loved the movie and saw it in the theater as a kid, so I swooned at the idea of a playground being devoted to it. Playgrounds were the end-all, be-all in life.

So finally, twenty years later, I’d made my mecca to it. We walked around it and marveled at the giant can of Play Dough and Oatmeal Pie, all the things that Nick dropped in the yard before he was shrunk by the ray-gun. Unfortunately, this was one of those things where you felt stupid being there without your own children, and we had to resist the urge to slide down the giant blades of grass.

And beside that, it seemed a bit dated and shabby. It could use a paint-job. Still, I sort of appreciated its graceful fading as much as I wanted it to be the mythical thing it had once been in my mind.

Finally, we stumbled upon a giant Anty. I wanted a picture with Anty, but there were kids were all over him. ALL OVER HIM. They would just hurl themselves at the giant ant and slide all over it like wiggling worms. God, these kids are like four years old. They don’t even have a sense of who this ant is or that he nobly sacrificed himself in the movie. OUT OF THE WAY KIDS, THIS IS MY CHILDHOOD.

Me and the wife tried to wait it out, for a moment when the traffic of kids would pause so I could get up there. At some point, I knew I was just going to have to throw myself at the ant and get the wife to snap a picture quick. The picture looks less one of me and Anty, and more like one of me blocking a bunch of little kids from playing on the thing.

8. Epcot

I loved Epcot. I think it was my favorite park. Magic Kingdom was sparkly and saccharine; in contrast, Epcot was drab and awash in the feel of 1982. Sure, there are a bunch of new headliner attractions in Epcot like Mission: SPACE and Soarin’, but the place has an overall throwback feel to it with the space-age Moog music playing from the rocks. I loved the retro-future design of it, too. We’re in the future now, but it’s nothing like Epcot imagined. There’s a lost, genuine, retro idealism in Epcot.

There’s also a bunch of weird, old chestnuts of rides tucked away in Epcot. Stuff like Living with the Land, a boat ride through the history of agriculture, which was cooler than it sounds. Or Maelstrom, a boat ride through the history of Norway, which was like an unloved, depressing version of Splash Mountain, but still awesome. Or La Gran Fiesta, a boat ride through Mexican stereotypes, which was just kind of depressing, period.

I got this great “vintage” t-shirt to commemorate my love for Epcot.

9. Journey Into the Imagination with Figment

I’m not even sure what this ride was. It was a dark ride tucked into the corner of the Imagination Pavilion, a ride that we were the only people on, perhaps even that day. We walked right up to it. The ride attendants seemed thrilled and possibly relieved to see us. There were crickets chirping in that thing.

The ride seemed abandoned and forgotten and somewhat creepy. We rode through this sing-songy tunnel, and I have no idea what was going on. I partly blame ear congestion. The scenes we rode through made no sense. There was a lab, a purple dragon, and other random half-assed stuff. It’s been through three major overhauls and theme changes since it opened in 1983, and I’m pretty sure they gave up on it altogether about fifteen years ago.

It was weird and depressing. I loved it.

10. Expedition Everest

If you haven’t guessed yet from my list, I’m not really a ride person. I like boring stuff. Give me a slow-moving boat ride or walking through something. I’m also traumatized by a guilty-pleasure website called RideAccidents.com. It’s the neurotic website for when WrongDiagnosis.com just isn’t doing it for me. Nevertheless, it was Disney World, and nobody dies in Disney World, so for the ride-loving wife’s sake, I temporarily allowed myself to not be obsessive-compulsive.

Expedition Everest is a rollercoaster located in the Animal Kingdom, and it’s one of the smoothest rides in Disney. We even rode it twice. There’s no being thrown around mercilessly. That thing rides like butter. It also has the best queuing area with a walk through a Yeti “museum.” I really got into the story line of it with the Yeti supposedly wreaking havoc on the track inside the mountain. My only regret is that I didn’t see the Yeti! He’s a freaking TWENTY-TWO FOOT tall animatronic, and I missed him TWICE, both times looking at something stupid on the opposite side as we sped past.

11. The Aerosmith Rockin’ Roller Coaster…presented by Hanes

The ride was alright. Actually, I found it terrifying and patiently waited to collapse dead afterwards due to an undiagnosed heart condition, which, if you read RideAccidents.com, you’ll find is one of the most common reasons for dying on rides.

Riders actually experience 4.5g on this thing, which is more than an astronaut in a shuttle, and more than the 2.5g of Mission: SPACE in Epcot, the ride that caused two Disney guests to have heart attacks in 2005 and 2006. I’m really not sure why I’m not dead.

I loved the fact that it was a ride endorsed by Aerosmith and presented by Hanes. Hasn’t this current generation decided to take a pass on Aerosmith? Have they had a hit since the last generation, 2001′s single “Jaded?”

The story line was hilariously cheesy. I’d read about it in advance and had risked my own life to see it. You witness Aerosmith recording in their “G-Force Records” studios, and then I dunno, they’re leaving for a concert or somesuch, and then it gets decided that the riders should all recieve backstage passes. But there’s not enough time for everyone to get there before the show starts! That’s okay, Steven Tyler has a radical idea for everyone to get there in a hyperspeed stretch limo for the trip across town to the concert. The whole thing felt a bit Wayne’s World to me. It was great, except for the whole roller coaster part.

12. Dinosaur!

Yeah, yeah, so the Animal Kingdom has real animals and a safari through a realistic replica of the African savannah. However, my favorite thing there was a cheesy time-travel ride into prehistoric times to see robotic dinosaurs. Did I mention the pre-show in the queuing area is narrated by Bill Nye the Science Guy? Yeah. That’ll do it for me any day.

The ride itself is a jerky, fast-moving dark ride while looking at robot dinosaurs that don’t look all that great. In fact, I was little disappointed at the crappiness of the dinosaurs as were riding through…until we reached the Carnotaurus. He was supremely and divinely bad ass, and a nice change of pace from the ho-hum Tyrannosaurus Rex that usually stars in these sorts of things.

I kind of regret not bringing home this adorable plush Carnotaurus as a souvenir, so let us all gaze longingly upon this picture, instead.

13. The Official Indiana Jones Hat

I’ve wanted one of these forever. We didn’t even watch the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular. Maybe we should have, but I felt like I’d already seen everything there is to see during that episode of Full House when they go to Disney World.

You know, the one where DJ misses her boyfriend Steve so much that she imagines she’s seeing him everywhere in the parks. Then while they’re at the Indiana Jones show, she mistakes the actor during the stunt show for Steve. She screams when he’s about to get run over by the giant boulder, causing everyone in the audience to look at her. Oh, DJ!

We skipped the show and headed straight to the gift shop. There were a bunch of lesser hats made of other materials, but I opted only for the fanciest leather hat, thank you to our family and friends who contributed to our honeymoon gift registry account.

14. Getting Your Gear On

Speaking of the hat, I’ve reached an important part of the Disney journey—the part where you get your gear on. I wore my hat around the park the rest of the day, and the wife was wearing Minnie Mouse ears. This is otherwise known as the transformative moment where you become Those People, those Disney nutcases walking around the park in Disney paraphernalia. They were us. We were them. It was complete.

15. Free Food

Normally, free food wouldn’t make it this far down the list, but in the World of Disney, food is an afterthought. Disney has this thing called the Dining Plan, which you pay in advance for dining credits at a discounted rate. It’s their evil plan to keep money inside the parks instead of people leaving the parks to eat cheaper, and frankly, better meals. Since the week we went was the lowest attendance week of the year, Disney had a promotion where they were giving away the dining plan for free. So we ate every meal, both of us, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, FOR FREE EVERYDAY.

We didn’t love the food, though. Since we’re vegetarians, most of the time we only had one choice and one choice only at a handful of restaurants. Most of the restaurants catered to the middle-of-America meat-and-potatoes-and-chicken-fingers crowds. Everything was bland and white-flour-based and theme-parky. But I can’t complain. FREE FOOD. Also, our lunch and dinner credits each came with FREE DESSERTS.

That’s two free desserts per day. We unashamedly ate every single one. We ate ice cream, cupcakes, cheese cake, rum cake, raspberry tarts, pastries, more ice cream, and even more ice cream. I haven’t had that much sugar in a five-day span, ever. The thing is, that sugar is totally addictive, and ever since we’ve been back in the world, I’ve been jonesing for my daily lunch dessert. Disney detox sucks.

16. The Perks

Back when I made the reservations for Disney, I booked us at the Polynesian, which is one of Disney’s deluxe resorts. It’s normally ridiculously expensive, but again, during the low-attendance weeks in September, I got it for 40% off rack rate. At these rates, we could have stayed at one of the lesser resorts for practically free, but it was our honeymoon, and we never stay at nice hotels. Ask the wife. We’ve famously stayed at some real dumps. It’s kind of like, our thing. Or rather, my cheapness.

So I was looking forward to some real perks. World-class hotel perks. I even told them in advance that it was our honeymoon, figuring they’d throw in mints on the pillows. Then I decided to lie and also tell them this was each our first-time ever trip to Disney. I figured honeymoon plus first-time trip would add up to something SICK. Maybe we’d get a free room upgrade or free room service…or hell, Mickey Mouse to sleep in our bed with us. At least.

Instead, this is what we got:

Buttons. That’s crap, Disney.

Oh well. The wife is happy she got to stay in a nice hotel for once. And thank God they had a nice hair dryer available. Apparently, it was the nicest hair dryer, like ever. SERIOUSLY EVER. She even wrote down the model number. Ah, the perks of staying in a deluxe hotel.

17. And at least we had this towel in the shape of Mickey Mouse on our bed:

I’m sure they have this on every last bed in every single Disney hotel. But Jesus, don’t tell me. I want to pretend it was there because we stayed in a fancy hotel and that we are fancy people.

18. The Glorious Mickey Waffle

There’s really nothing to say about this waffle, other than it’s utterly beautiful. And that I ate the ears first, which seemed instinctive, and yet I noticed the wife cut into hers face first.

19. The Close-Up of This Gorilla

People were seriously crapping themselves trying to find the gorilla during the jungle trek in Animal Kingdom. He was behind a structure and obscured from view except from a bridge, and the bridge was mobbed by people flipping out trying to take a decent picture of him. We body-checked a few people just trying to get over the bridge and away from the crowd. We got pinned by rent-a-scooters, ran over by double-wide strollers, and walked into by children dressed like princesses. We didn’t even care if we saw the gorilla. We see ‘em all the damn time here at the goddamn National Zoo. I wouldn’t even be impressed if the thing was lit up with Christmas lights and dancing on a unicycle.

But then we found an area after the bridge where there was nobody, and by peeking through a clearing of the bushes, you could see the gorilla perfectly. The wife snapped a picture triumphantly.

“Everyone’s fighting up there just to see the stupid thing, and I got the best picture out of anyone.”

Indeed, she did.

20. Pizzafari

Phew. Finally we’ve reach the end of my top twenty, which I’m capping off with a visit to Pizzafari in the Animal Kingdom. Pizzafari had the most greasy, worse-than-elementary-school-cafeteria pizza. I’m thinking more like murky, dusty basement of the Smithsonian Museum field-trip pizza. Hell, zoo trip pizza. Hospital trip pizza. And those actually would have been better.

However, Pizzafari redeems itself and makes my top twenty list simply by being named Pizzafari, which is an awesome word. Also, in the meat-centric Animal Kingdom, we were starving and ready to drop dead, and our lunch choices were either this or the egg roll wagon. And the egg roll wagon didn’t have air conditioning.

Pizzafari, you saved us, and for that I will always be grateful.

So getting married is fun. You get to ride in limos, drink champagne, and take lots of bizarrely-posed pictures next to trees and stone mill walls. Then there’s adorable miniature foods on toothpicks, fancy cake, fancy napkins, dancing, and some bearded dude who looks like a lumberjack busting it up on the dance floor. Oh yeah, and you get to have a beautiful bride all done up and decked out in a wedding dress. And the bride, well, she only gets me. But I do come with Ninja Turtles.

Planning a wedding is a lot like preparing for a Category 5 hurricane. You run around for weeks doing all this planning and shopping and freaking-out, but eventually you just realize this thing is hurling towards you rapidly no matter how ready you aren’t. And you still have to get your shirt tailored, buy shoes, socks, a damn belt, and stamps. Then you’ve got to print sticker thingys, stick the sticker thingys on the bag thingys, type up the place settings, get a hair cut—and don’t you dare go to that Great Clips where they cut your hair like Peter Pan last time. I mean it. If you go there, I will kill you.

And that was just my chore list in the final days. The bride’s list was exponentially longer and even more grueling, with perils at every turn. There was printer drama, make-up appointment panic, and a faulty hair clip crisis. At some point, you’ve got no choice but to just hunker down and let the storm blow past.

Except, you can’t. Because you still have to practice dancing for your first dance. And this shit is literally hours away, and you’re still a wet noodle with two left feet. I had a whole choreography to remember since we were determined not to do the awkward hugging-and-waddling-around thing. Damn it, these guests were coming for dinner and a show. It only meant one thing: cram sessions to Paul McCartney’s Maybe I’m Amazed.

We got married in a civil wedding ceremony with our parents and siblings the day before our Saturday reception. Because it was to be a small, simple affair like we wanted, I had absolutely no thoughts of nerves. But when they called our names to go into the courtroom, my heart began racing and I could feel myself beginning to sweat through my first layer of clothing. Never a good sign.

The officiant took us aside and went over the vows with us. I felt light-headed. “I gotta say that whole thing?” I asked, looking down at what suddenly looked more like a lengthy and unintelligible excerpt from War and Peace. Meanwhile, I could hear my father excitedly announcing that he just figured out how to take HD video with his smart phone.

We moved over to the podium, standing under a cheesy makeshift alter with plastic flowers and leaves. The air conditioning piped in through the vents. The American flag towered and hung above us, which reminded me of being in an elementary school classroom. The smell of ink and chalk and dust.

“You’ve turned bright red,” the bride said, somewhat amused. The officiant began, “We are gathered here today…”

I started laughing, desperately trying to stifle it. The officiant paused and smiled. “Sorry, I’m nervous,” I said. But I couldn’t stop laughing. Which then made the bride laugh. Which made me laugh more.

Deep breath. Or at least something resembling breathing. But not really. I decided to focus on a zen place, like the button of my jacket. I fiddled with it gently between my thumb and forefinger, focusing. It was round and smooth. For a moment, it worked. Relief. Until the bride motioned at me with a bewildered look. “What are you doing?” she whispered, and began laughing more. Which made me laugh.

Then for some reason I looked over at my mother, who promptly threatened to kill me with a slicing-the-neck gesture, a gesture she performed slowly and very seriously. Which the bride saw, too, and it made her laugh even harder.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Somehow, the officiant, the consummate professional, trucked onward through the service, finally making it to the vows section. Oh crap. I hadn’t exactly been breathing the previous five minutes like I was supposed to remember. Suddenly I was gripped with the fear of gasping through my section of War and Peace that I was about to recite for the room. My only hope was to say it as quickly and methodically as possible. That meant no pausing, no enunciating, and no looking up.

I decided that was a brilliant plan. A genius, I am. Once, when I was a kid, we had to get up at 4am to leave for a road trip to Florida. I came up with a plan to sleep in the clothes I planned to wear the next day so that I wouldn’t have to get dressed when I was sleepy. I considered that a brilliant plan, too.

I said my vows robotically, monotonously, and swiftly, and then I took my first breath of oxygen in what felt like thirty minutes. My sister later remarked that it seemed like some sort of Will Ferrell SNL comedy sketch…and that the entire ceremony had only lasted six minutes total.

And that was only act one. For my second act, I was certain I’d step on the bride’s feet while dancing, trip, and puke during the first dance at our reception the next night. We decided to squeeze in a few more cram sessions with Paul.

The next morning was calm, the eye of the storm. The now-wife had a whole afternoon of hair and make-up and dressing, and I waited around pacing and eating strawberry Whoppers. The reception was going to be the opposite of our rinky-dink courthouse wedding—a 100+ guest affair at a historic mill with vaulted ceilings and fourteen-foot windows, decorated in dramatic black and red hues and candles.

The wife said she and her father would over to pick me up at 5:00pm, since we had to meet the photographer at 6pm. Around 4pm, I calmly began to get dressed. Two minutes later, I felt silly for dressing so early, so I took the jacket off and hung it back up. Then I paced. Then I put the jacket back on, in case they came early. I ate more candy. I watched out the window.

After a while, to switch it up, I decided to pace around outside. I chatted with the older woman next door, whom I have nothing in common except the weather, but today we talked about why I was so dressed up. Then we talked about the weather anyway. A lot of rain lately. Should hold off. Cool already. Autumn came fast. I went back in, and took the jacket off. I put it back on. I looked out the window. It was soon 5:45pm. The wife hadn’t answered her cellphone. Weren’t we supposed to meet the photographer somewhere soon?

Suddenly her father’s car peeled into our court. I walked innocently to the car, smiling at my wife and her father weakly, sensing something was deathly wrong. I opened the car door and sat down in the backseat. Her father grimly said, “there was an incident with the curling iron.”

I looked at the wife, who was bizarrely wrapped in a bed sheet, maybe so that I wouldn’t see her dress, or perhaps so that the car seat itself wouldn’t somehow taint her. She looked at me, unsmiling. “THERE WAS A CURLING IRON STUCK IN MY HAIR,” she screamed.

Her father gripped the wheel, staring forward, emotionless. “You’re lucky you weren’t there,” he said.

“It was something they put in my hair at that salon. I wanted to touch it up with the curling iron at home, and it just got stuck!” she said. “My hair was wrapped in it all the way to the top,” she added dramatically.

“All we heard were the screams,” he father added, still without emotion, like a grizzled veteran telling a war story.

“Mother couldn’t get it out! And then she started screaming, too. You think I freaked out, Daddy, but it was really mother’s reaction that was over the top,” the wife added defensively.

“You were lucky you weren’t there,” her father said again, glancing in the rear view mirror.

“Daddy took it out with the screwdriver. HE HAD TO DISASSEMBLE THE WHOLE THING. WITH. A. SCREWDRIVER. IN MY HAIR.”

But there was more. “AND MY DRESS IS A LITTLE LOOSE AND YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO BE IN CHARGE OF MAKING SURE I DON’T COME OUT OF IT ALL NIGHT.”

But there was even more. “AND WE ONLY HAVE TWELVE CENTERPIECES AND THERE ARE FIFTEEN TABLES.”

Still, more. “AND MY SHOES AREN’T THE SAME SHADE OF WHITE AS MY DRESS. MOTHER IS FREAKING OUT.”

Her father simply stared and gripped the wheel, apparently shell-shocked from making it out alive. At this point, I hadn’t even said hello to greet anyone yet. There was silence.

“Why are you wrapped up in a bed sheet?” I asked.

“MOTHER MADE ME DO THIS.”

I decided not to press further.

We made it to the mill only a few minutes late, literally jumping out of the car in the middle of the road to meet the photographer on some historical bridge, the oldest suspended iron railroad bridge in America. He was a stoic British man with little interest in fake pleasantries. “Let’s get one on these beautiful railroad tracks,” he said, cutting right to it.

The bridge had since been restored to add a spot where people could cross over the bridge on foot, and there was a security rail between the walkway and the old tracks. The tracks were dilapidated and mossy, hanging over a several foot drop looking down. “You just have to climb the guard rail,” he pointed out.

“I don’t think it’s safe…and her dress…” I began, but the dude already climbed over the railing and was standing on the tracks with the camera ready to go. The wife, too, was already proudly straddling the shaky wood railing in a seemingly Pyrrhic victory over her mother and the bed sheet. So I sighed and climbed over, too. And that’s either going to be a great picture, or a very strange one where we’re standing awkwardly and anxiously on some ancient railroad ruins for no other reason other than the fact that we’re just married and completely fucking nuts.

But that wasn’t the end. British dude had us offroading it up stony hillsides, the wife in heels, to take pictures next to neat old stone walls, leaning against old resting trees, and making all sorts of random poses and loving gazes and other things we don’t do at home. Now that I think about it, maybe this dude was just screwing with us.

Finally, this was it. All of the planning, all of the panicking, and all of the practicing led to this big party. We were introduced in the room to the Sgt. Peppers intro by the Beatles, which was really cool, and probably my favorite part. We went right into our first dance, which I pulled off without any nerves or puking. Alcohol helps.

From here, these are the wedding stories that are always the same, and yet always sweet in the same way. My sister and the wife’s brother each gave a toast, both going in for the kill shots to make try and make us cry. The wife danced with her father to Buddy Holly’s Words of Love, while people looked on smiling with a little sadness, too. She threw the bouquet, though it was really more like a sixty-yard punt that should have been called by Gruden and Jaws. My cousin, who’s the next to get married, made a sick cut for it like a running back, nabbing it. Her fiance gulped. We cut the cake together, and though we talked in advance about not doing any smashing-the-cake-in-the-face, the wife smashed it in mine anyway. Besides, everyone seemed to be waiting for it, and you can’t let the audience down.

Now, we wore wedding bands on our fingers, as naturally as if they had always been there, and as knowingly that they forever will. And then it was all over, and there was just one question left to ask. What were we going to do next? Simple. We’re going to Disney World!

Something happened to me this weekend. In fact, I quite possibly lost my mind. I bought eight-tracks. There they were, sitting in a moth-eaten shoebox at a yard sale, the seller an old man who offered them to me for a quarter a piece. I rifled through and saw a couple Beatles and Beach Boys tapes on top. One of my general rules of collecting is never leave these two groups behind in any format. And for good measure, I also bought all the Partridge Family eight-tracks in the pile, too. Partridge Family and eight-tracks? Like peanut butter and jelly. AND A BAG OF CHIPS. I’m that serious.

But I needed to be cautious. Did I really want to be flirting with eight-tracks? Was this really a relationship I wanted to get into? I thought about our possible futures together. Staying up late nights ironing—yes, ironing the crinkles out of her magnetic tape that got eaten by the player. Weary times sitting at the dining room table, drilling into the cartridge to gain access to the spindle to adjust her tension. Long hours spent kneeling by the stereo, hand-spinning the eaten tape that drooled out of the cartridge.

And they certainly ain’t pretty. Unlike a vinyl record collection that has a sheen and sexiness to it, eight-tracks are the klutzy and homely-looking girlfriend you want to forget you dated. There’s a reason there’s no one in America who wants to admit they owned one. And yet, we did own them. A lot of them. In fact, we even loved them, once.

Eight-tracks are the icon of obsolescence, but not deservedly so. They were massively popular in the United States, their reign lasting nearly two decades beginning in the mid-1960s and kept alive well into the late 1980s through mail order record clubs and truck stop gas stations.

Synonymous with American car culture, the eight-track was kind of a big deal. Championed at its 1965 inception by Ford Motors, the eight-track player was offered as an option in the complete line of 1966 model cars. It was the first time you could listen to your own music in the car. Before that, it was either the handful of radio stations your tuner picked up or the humming sounds of lonely open road.

The eight-track itself was an endless loop of standard 1/4-inch magnetic tape around a single reel. The tape was divided along its length into eight channels, or tracks (hence the name). The playback head played two tracks at a time, four programs total in stereo. The program started and stopped signaled by a one-inch-long piece of metal foil that activated the track-change sensor in the player, which caused the infamous clicking and gear-shifting noises that sometimes occurred right in the middle of songs.

If that all sounds entirely too complicated, well, that was exactly the problem that to the eight-track’s eventual downfall. In other words, everything you’ve heard about eight-tracks is true. They were clunky, cheaply-made, and prone to malfunctioning. There were a large number of moving parts in the cartridge, encouraging tangling and backups. The parts inside were of low-quality, often breaking down and deteriorating into black goop, known as the dreaded “eight-track tar.” The poor design of the players themselves also meant all of the moving parts in the cartridge were under constant pressure. Even the crappy glue they used to adhere the labels hasn’t withstood the test of time.

As far as sound quality? At best, they sounded a bit fluttery and hissy, and at worst, they sounded like a burning dumpster. What I’m saying is, they were a hot mess. Then add forty years age to the tapes. There are few brave souls out there who still collect them—and it ain’t for the dainty who like their shit mint in box, sealed and sparkling. It’s for the absolutely insane who are up for the challenge of scouring Radio Shacks in remote areas in desperate hopes of finding leftover reel-to-reel foil sensing tape in some cobwebby corner.

And all for what exactly? One lousy, sleazy evening listening to the Partridge Family on a gauzy-sounding eight-track. But perhaps that’s exactly how it was meant to be heard.

That’s how I got to be standing there holding a small stack of eight-tracks in my hand. Honest, it was nothing more. I swear. This was like sitting in a bar, and the eight-tracks had offered to buy me a drink. I knew it wasn’t going to be worth it. It wouldn’t end well. But fuck it. I was bored and the open road was the only road I ever knew. I handed the old man three bucks for twelve grimy cartridges. David Cassidy’s faded facade grinned up at me. I felt dirty.

Here’s my other excuse—we have an eight-track player at home that I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity to indulge. The girlfriend brought this one to the relationship. She grew up with it—an actual eight-track stereo, a massive beast of furniture unleashed on the world by Magnavox in the 1970s.

The eight-track player itself is small, encased in the huge cherry wood cabinet. There are hearts and tulips painted quaintly on the doors which have polished white knobs. It sat in her parents’ family room, where it also doubled as an unassuming end table to hold a lamp and magazines. In all honesty, this is the kind of stereo you’d expect somebody’s grandmother to have—but hell—both of my grandmothers had cooler stereos than this to play their Perry Como on. In fact, when the girlfriend said her parents were going to give us this thing when we moved in together, it sounded more like a threat.

“I don’t want that grandma-looking cabinet in our living room next to my entertainment center,” I said.

“It was my childhood! I’m going to listen to Annie!” she said.

Oh God no. Annie. The original cast recording. On eight-track. Pass me the gun. Better yet, just hand me that dull butterknife so I can gouge my eardrums out.

The girlfriend has been chirping about eight-tracks since I met her. She dreams of a day when I’ll give in and prance around the living room to “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile” with her. So far, the muscle of my vinyl collection and sheer determination have held back the original cast recording of Annie from playing, but I fight it every day. Every. Single. Day.

But aside from the whole Annie thing, the girlfriend might just be uber-hip and way ahead of all of us. Listening on eight-track might just be the new listening on vinyl for the hipster crowd. Or it might not. Because it’s probably just a fling. And besides, the girlfriend is already plotting a way to sneak the Grease soundtrack onto my record player.