beauty, here and there

I spent a week in California (mostly San Diego) earlier this month. we did lots of beautiful and silly and fun things.

twenty years later, Disneyland remains impressively thorough and dedicated to the task of using plastic fakery (and other material/media) to evoke entire worlds of stories. I will confess that walking through the Galaxy's Edge sections was pretty amazing. the novelty of it. the heat and dust and droids and alien-ness, not to mention the actual model of the Millennium Falcon. I'm not even that much of a Star Wars nerd, am I? 

then I came home again. things here are no less beautiful and silly and fun, in their turns.

remember this gollum jade? he is expanded into a family of 5 separate plants now. the main one is doing so well, and hopefully the others will survive one way or another. 

 

 

the rhetoric of disneyland

i wanted to write a post about the rhetoric of disneyland. i spent three days there last week. i became almost sick of the pirates of the caribbean ride. my feet ached and my head rang with all those jumbled up theme songs.

dreams coming true. that's their shtick. how they hold to that when their whole park is full of plastic fakery is strange. i suppose they get away with it because they cater primarily to those too young to know any better. no child will think to ask how much do they pay this grinning actress to wear that curly red wig and that fake green tail? hm?

it makes me wonder about the things the rest of us believe in. are we just too young to know better? to small to see the wires holding up our flying pirate ship? what if the whole world is one of those lies-to-children? what if there is more truth in the universe than we can handle?

most of me says so what if it is? i don't plan on joining the lost boys in neverland, and that means that someday i'll uncover all the lies-to-children. someday i'll see as far as can be seen.

maybe.

i guess until then we get to tell ourselves stories and play with our dressed up fairy tale princesses. ignorance is bliss.

there are a host of other small ways in which life is like an amusement park. long periods of waiting. annoying little gates you have to hop through. hundreds of other people getting in your way. pointless journeys that nevertheless are exhilaratingly fun. yeah. philosophy and aching feet.

and fireworks every single night.

[after thought]
i wanted to write about the rhetoric of disneyland, but i didn't get past the inherent pathos offered by their 'dreams coming true' slogan. there's also the ethos of the name Disney. various topoi that go along with imagination, magic, childhood, innocence, excitement, or just being able to match your kid's childhood up with all the other kids' who got to go to disneyland last summer. and there are the many threads of narrative that begin with once upon a time and never really stop leading us through our lives. yeah. rhetoric.