Above: Why? Because I hate you
Roy already gave this one the hit-and-run, but it deserves so much more. Everyone’s favorite humorless humorist, the Man From Fuddles, has taken his annual pilgrimage to the land where the fun never ends. While a trip to Disney World, for some people, is cause for joy and celebration, for our Jimbo, it is cause to complain about anything and everything that isn’t him. Let’s watch!
Every year I buy a new pair of Chuck Taylor’s. It’s the first sign of spring. I prefer a 7 1/2, but not all stores carry half sizes. (“You could get them online,” the clerk usually says. To the customer. With money in his hand. Standing In the store. It’s an odd world.)
Lileks pulls this bit a lot when he wants to complain about what he calls ‘bad service’ and what other people would call ‘the inability of retail stores to act as magic wish-granting machines.’ For such a devotee of the free market, he doesn’t seem to understand how it works: The reason that most shoe stores don’t carry a lot of half-sizes is because there is not a great deal of demand for them, leading to a smaller supply. The clerk, by suggesting that Jimbo buy his shoes online, is actually being helpful, suggesting a way for the customer to get what he wants — rather than going back to the storeroom and selling him a pair of size-eights with a new number written on the box in Sharpie. Jimbo’s understanding of capitalism seems to be that if he goes into a pet store and wants to buy some luggage, and the clerk tells him they don’t have any, that he is being ill-served.
Since the eights stretch and get too loose, I shift down to size sevens and spend a few weeks wincing as I train them. This year I bought three different pairs, in different styles. (The extent of my annual shoe expenditure is about $160.) All three pinched my soles in different places. I didn’t stretch any of them out sufficiently, and I would even switch to last year’s pair for comfort. And so I came to pass that I stood in my closet at 4:55 AM, wondering which pair of shoes would be less painful.
And here Jimbo, who spends pretty much every hour that God sends on the Internet, confesses that he buys shoes that are too small and suffers through the subsequent agonizing foot pain, rather than simply buying the right size online.
I’d be doing some walking in the next few days, after all. That’s why we were up before five: the plane to Disneyworld left at seven. And that’s how it came to pass that I began a trip to Disneyland with blisters already on my feet.
Somehow he avoids blaming his blisters on al-Q’aeda, or speculating that electing Barack Obama would lead to Orlando getting hit by a suitcase nuke, but he’s still swole on a role. After complaining that planes have turbulence, Florida is hot, and bugs live on Earth, he gets down to excoriating cartoon rats for engaging in extramarital sex:
The video screens on the bus show all the characters having a wonderful time, even though you wonder why Donald and Daisy and Mickey and Minnie are taking a trip to Disney World – don’t they live there? They’re not married, are they?
No, James, the imaginary rodents are not married. What else you got for us?
It makes for a different mix; among the families, most of which are pasty and mid-thirties with jouncy-belly kids, there’s a big contingent of pasty people in their mid-forties lugging gimme-sacks full of incredibly important material from very important conferences.
James Lileks is complaining about middle-aged white people toting around tons of useless ephemera. Oh, the irony! But, you see, they have fat kids, so it’s okay to mock them. His own daughter is thin via the inherent virtue of conservative parental values.
The women look like managers and the men give the impression of someone who wants to golf, but cannot.
Women, mannish; men; harried; grammar, erroneous. Check, check, and re-check! Now let’s make fun of some liberals.
While checking in I was in front of a woman who had a T-shirt with a picture of a dead pig, and the words AUSCHWITZ BEGINS. I peered at the shirt to divine the full text: “Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals – Theodor Adorno” I suspected that if an actual Auschwitz survivor had approached the woman in the shirt and upbraided her, the woman would have shrugged it off: well, she’s a little too close to the matter to see the deeper meaning.
And, of course, what would Adorno, a Marxist who fled Nazi Germany along with his Jewish wife, know about Auschwitz, anyway? The Holocaust does not belong to him. It belongs to James Lileks and his strawman friends.
Who the *$(#% wears a picture with a slaughtered pig and a specious Auschwitz equivalence to a Disney resort check-in line, anyway?
People with variant political and cultural attitudes to James Lileks’s are being allowed to attend conferences at the same resort as him! Where is the government to intervene in such dire times?
There’s something a big sad about seeing childless adult Disney fans, lanyards spattered with pins, eating slabs of prime rib thick as a Tolstoi novel, the chairs about to splinter from their enormous fundaments.
Like Lileks, these people are gorging themselves during annual trips to Disney World. But unlike him, they deserve our scorn and/or pity, because they are fat and childless.
Off to Downtown Disney, which we hadn’t visited before. Sheer marketing genius: an open-air shopping center designed to extract the last possible penny from every molecule of the Disneyverse.
Wow, a big shopping mall in an overpriced resort hotel! What a BRILLIANT idea! Whoever thought of that was a GENIUS!
Tomorrow: Epcot, or, the Long March, or What Happened to the Enormous Wizard Wand?
Wearing a t-shirt to a Disney World Hotel that makes reference to Auschwitz? Totally inappropriate! Comparing an amusement park to the Long March, on which hundreds of thousands of people died? Hilarious! See you tomorrow, everybody!
