The tote bags are the welcome package you get whenever you buy points in the Disney Vacation Club. There are goodies inside, but mostly it was that first tote bag that really told me I’d bought into something special when I bought my first set of points a decade ago.
This time around…not so much.
When I retired I sold my DVC points because I thought the entire Disney World experience was going downhill and I probably wouldn’t go back. Bob Chapek, the previous CEO of Disney seemed to just want to trash everything people loved about the parks. The Disney message boards were full of heartbroken complaints about his disrespect for park theming and guest experience. All the little perks of staying in a park hotel were going away and the annual pass system was being changed out from under us. I never got a notice to renew my old annual pass and assumed they just didn’t want us having them because it was costing them money. For a while nobody could buy a new one.
And then there was the new park reservation system. They’d implemented that during COVID, but then it became a permanent fixture. So even if you had an annual pass, you still had to make park reservations and if you might not be able to if they’d all been taken for the days you wanted. So to my mind that made the annual pass worthless, and staying at Boardwalk pointless.
Then it began to look like single diners could not make dining reservations at the nicer sit down restaurants.
So I sold my DVC points and let the annual pass lapse. But then they fired Chapek and brought back Iger and it seemed things were turning around. Some of the perks came back (I’m still waiting for the bar stools and food menus to come back to the Tune-In Lounge…). I went back a few times and renewed my love of the parks, especially after the Florida republicans went on a warpath against Disney for treating its LGBT guests and employees decently. I bought tickets for the first time in over a decade (because no annual pass) and navigated the park reservation system. I still hate it, but with the new “go-to” days looks like Disney World is trying to move away from it.
What happened was I was checking out the guest laundry at one of the hotel towers, which as it turned out was their DVC tower. My next trip to Disneyland I’m going to try to arrange a ride on the California Zephyr…a trip I’ve fantasied about since childhood. The plan would be to take the Zephyr to California, and pick up the Coast Starlight from Emeryville to San Luis Obispo where my brother could pick me up. I’d stay with him for a few weeks, then take the train to Anaheim again and Disneyland, spend five or six days there at the Disneyland Hotel, then take the train back to LA Union Station and pick up the Southwest Chief, which I’d taken before, back to Chicago and a train from there to Baltimore.
If I do it that way I will need to be able to do a laundry before the train ride back home because I won’t be able to carry a lot of luggage with me. Just enough stuff for the train. I’ll need to do a laundry before heading back. So I asked a security guard where the guest laundry was. He offered to lead me to it because it was down an odd hallway. Afterward we talked about our mutual love of the Disney Parks (I told him about the classmate, that Certain Someone who coaxed me into coming to Disney in the first place, showed him a picture of the guy, and he said he actually remembered him(!))
When we parted ways, a DVC sales lady came over to talk to me. She said she’d heard me talking about selling my DVC points and she asked me why. I told here basically what I wrote at the beginning of this post and she suggested (of course) that I might want to look into becoming a DVC member again. There were specials going on and she could get me back in for not so much money.
I thought it over, and later via email asked her about Saratoga Springs, which I used to use my Grand Floridian points for to have a nice warm weather vacation in February, at a DVC hotel that gives me walking access to Disney Springs. Saratoga Springs was the original DVC hotel, and it’s the least expensive one point wise. Walking access is super important to me. The reason I had points at Boardwalk, besides liking the theming of it, was it gave me walking access to my two favorite parks, Epcot and Hollywood Studios. But with the park reservation system that isn’t nearly as convenient as before. You don’t need reservations to walk over to Disney Springs.
Over the next couple days we talked it over…I had budgetary considerations…and I eventually agreed to buy in again. I got 100 points in Saratoga Springs.
What you see at the top up there is one of the two tote bags I got when I first joined DVC, first for 75 points at Grand Floridian, and then for 100 at Boardwalk. The tote bag below that is what I got after rejoining.
This came inside the new tote…
That’s one of the little goodies in the tote you get joining now. I’m sure the saleslady saw the look on my face when she handed that new tote bag to me. All I can think is Disney is still sweating blood over all the money they lost during the COVID lock downs and now they’re cutting corners everywhere they can that doesn’t piss off the guests.
But I’m fine being back in. Not as many points as before, but for now anyway I’m splitting my time between Disney World and Disneyland, so I don’t need as many points. There is a DVC section of the Disneyland Hotel, but even if I got points in that one it is so high in demand that I’d still have trouble getting in, so I’ll just pay the money for a stay there. My annual pass gets me a discount on a room there anyway.
Weirdly Ill, And My First Use Of My New Disneyland Annual Pass
Week before last I was feeling extremely bad. So fatigued I barely got out of bed. No energy at all. It began to scare me enough that I went to the emergency room here (after checking that it was in my network). But they couldn’t find anything wrong…at least in the tests they gave me. So I was discharged with advise to get with my GP back home, drink more water, eat healthier food (good luck with that) and take a multivitamin.
That afternoon, as I tried to give my car an oil change, I felt so badly out of balance that I fell over twice, and felt like I was about to fall over every time I leaned over the engine compartment of my Mercedes. I was tempted to go right back to the ER and tell them something was still wrong, you need to give me some better tests. But as usual with me, I decided to wait it out and see if it got any worse.
I’d bought some Boost Oxygen cans for a possible trip back home via I-70, to get me though that 11k plus altitude at the Eisenhower Tunnel. The next morning I tried huffing one to see if it helped any. Probably, in retrospect, it was just coincidence, but I began immediately to feel better. I think now that I might have had some food poisoning from that popcorn shrimp I had at the Dairy Queen in Santa Rosa NM. But I don’t know.
I am feeling much Much better now, but I still have this disturbing feeling that I’m about to lose my balance every time I have to suddenly change direction…like when I’m trying to avoid stepping on Henry, my brother’s Maine Coon cat, while he’s darting in front of me to get my attention. I really need to talk with my GP and see if someone can figure out why I’m still having balance trouble.
Last week I took my second ever trip to Disneyland. In a previous post I wrote about my good luck in getting a Disneyland annual pass. I got a chance to use it then. As before, I took the train down to Anaheim, which is a snap since the train station here is just a couple miles from my brother’s house. But I made a mistake I’ll never make again with the hotel reservations.
Because I saw myself spending so much money with the new Annual Pass and the road trip to California, I decided to see if staying at a nearby hotel instead of at the Disneyland Hotel would work. There was a Holiday Inn close enough I could walk to the park, and I am a Holiday Inn One member so staying there would get me membership points I could use later. And I favor the Holiday Inn Express hotels while on the road. So I made a reservation for that one close to Disneyland. It was about one-third the cost of staying at the Disneyland Hotel. But you get what you pay for.
It was a bad choice. The room was the worst I ever had at any Holiday Inn. Way too tiny for the two single beds in it, next to the elevator machine room, and the doors to get in and out of the pool so there was a Lot of noise from the other guests and the elevator. I couldn’t open the window without everyone at the pool being able to look in as the room was slightly below ground level. The bathroom was barely larger than a closet. I’d rate it as no better than a two star hotel. So I decided to see if I could get a room at the Disneyland Hotel and just accept the cost. I had an unexpectedly good tax refund this year, so the money was there. And I really needed this trip to Disneyland to get me out of the depressed funk I was in since February.
But there was a problem. The Disneyland Hotel website would not let me make a reservation before the Friday I was set to go back to Oceano. I tried the hotel apps and it looked like they were sold out for the week. So the morning of my second day in Anaheim, I walked to the hotel and went to the front desk and asked if they had any rooms I could reserve. The clerk said they didn’t make future reservations for walk-ins, only same day. That was fine I told her, I want to check in today and check out Friday.
They had a room! No annual pass discounts for same day, but I was desperate to get out of that Holiday Inn room. I went back, repacked my things, and rolled my luggage a quarter mile to the better hotel.
There were other complications…I could not link my hotel reservation to my Disneyland app for some reason because it was a walk-in, so they made a new reservation that would link to the app, but then the key cards I had wouldn’t let me in the room so they had to fix that, and then I got billed twice for the reservation because they hadn’t cancelled the walk-in one. But it all got fixed.
The Holiday Inn refunded me the money for the days I didn’t stay. Then billed me for them again, so I had to go back and find out why. Turned out the clerk that checked me out early and gave me the refund, didn’t actually note that was wasn’t using the room anymore. So I got that fixed.
And I was able, finally, to have a nice Disney vacation. Mostly at California Adventure because that’s my favorite theme park now, even over Epcot. First thing I did after getting into the Disneyland Hotel room was walk over to California Adventure and use my new annual pass to get in. I had to use the Disneyland app to show the cast member at the gate my pass, because I hadn’t just then linked it to my Disneyland Magic Band+. Things are different there versus Disney World, where the Magic Band does it all. More about that later.
So I’m back in Oceano now, and my mindset is much, Much better. Apart from the occasional feeling of losing my balance. Which happened to me lots while trying to navigate the crowds in the Disney parks, and Downtown Disney.
Oh…and I’m back in the Disney Vacation Club. More on all that later…
Many years ago a girl that a friend of mine was dating told me, approvingly, that I was a discreet homosexual. I replied that I was single and it is easy to be discrete about your love life when you don’t have one.
I blogged about my relationship with that family previously, and about when I finally realized that all the time I thought I was teaching them that gay guys were just another thread in the American quilt, and that liberty and justice for all thing applies to us too, they thought they were encouraging me to stifle myself and be discreet. It’s easier for some heterosexuals (not all) to accept a gay friend or family member provided they don’t have to ever see any specific evidence of their sexual orientation. Such as a boyfriend. Or the way a beautiful guy can jerk your eyes around and make you look, stunned. As long as they don’t have to see that, they’re fine with you.
One of my straight friends, from way, Way back, friended me on Facebook, and then promptly de-friended me. When I asked why he said he didn’t want all that gay stuff I was writing about on his Facebook page. Of course I wasn’t putting it on his page, but mine. The thing was that he saw it, because he’d friended me which meant he could see all the posts I marked as friends only, and he didn’t want to.
It was like that whenever we spent time together. He could talk about his love life, but when I talked about mine, or rather my struggle just to simply have one, he would change the subject. I was okay for me to be his gay friend, so long as I wasn’t…you know…gay.
Especially when all you can see about your LGBT neighbors in this life, is sex.
It is an old stereotype, that homosexuality has to do only with sex while heterosexuality is multifaceted and embraces love and romance. -Vito Russo
It’s on this website, in my artwork and on this blog, that you really see the shameless homosexual that I am. Which is not to say I am given to a lot of overt displays of sexuality here. My art gallery is full of sexy guys, but there is no pornography, which I consider just pushing buttons. I am not given to graphic descriptions of sex, even in my fiction. But there is no doubt that I like beautiful guys and that that same sex couples in my fiction are lovers. What makes me shameless is I really don’t think there is anything wrong with being homosexual. I am fine with this. I am not ashamed.
Because once upon a time I fell in love with a classmate, a stunningly beautiful guy, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ve written before it really was like something out of a Disney movie. I walked with a lighter step, the birds sang a little more sweetly, the skies were a little more blue, the stars shined a little more brightly. I was twitterpated. It was wonderful. There is no reason for me to be ashamed of that.
I can see how your average heterosexual might have some trouble grokking this. Sex is a basic drive inside of us, older than the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates, let alone us, and our libidos are what they are. It either turns you on, or it turns you off. Fine. I get that. But you don’t have to obsess about the sex I might be having to appreciate that apart from that detail of sexual orientation my desires are not that different from anyone else’s.
All my life I have searched for that significant other, to have and hold, to share a life together, body and soul. And all my life I keep getting told that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Which is not to say that there is anything wrong with being homosexual, and having homosexual sex. But being reduced to a sex drive you can miss how the sight of a beautiful guy arouses more than my libido, but also every higher emotion of wonder and joy within me, that make life worth living. That’s the part that keeps getting missed when all you can see about your LGBT neighbors is the sex you think they’re having.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments; love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand’ring bark Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come. Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom: If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
-William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
That sonnet speaks to something deep within us, gay and straight alike.
I never found that significant other. I’m 70 years old now and looking back at having walked my entire adult life basically single and alone in my heart. I blame the world I came of age in, that kept telling me and everyone else that homosexuals don’t love they just have sex. In a better world I might have found someone to have and hold. A nice guy I might have met at a church social or in high school or at some social event for the gay kids arranged by caring adults. Someone I could have brought home to mom and told her this is my boyfriend and she’d have made a place at the table for him. Someone I could have made a life together with, body and soul.
So if you ever see me gawking at some drop dead beautiful guy, just let me have my moment. Beautiful guys are still a good reason to keep on living, and I’m probably not just drinking in his beauty, but also seeing what might have been if only the gay kid I once was had lived in a better world.
This is a big strawberry field less than a mile from my brother’s house. This shot is maybe one-forth of the area of the field. When I arrived last month the strawberries weren’t ready to harvest. They’ve a little shack on the street corner where you can buy fresh from the field strawberries. When they’re open they’re always busy.
This vacation spot where my brother lives…the Five Cities…has a surprising amount of agriculture going on. This is just one of several large and productive fields growing things in the area. It’s maybe a mile south of Pismo Beach. To our north it’s wine country. The grape fields are everywhere as far as the eye can see. To our south it’s all fields of various kinds of fruits and veggies. I pass through orange groves driving here from Barstow.
Driving from Baltimore I pass through vast fields of wheat and corn. Then there is cattle country. It seems like the rest of the dinner table is here in California.
I was reminded the other day, while in the ER, that there is a non-trivial likeness in the experience of being gay and of being atheist. I’m in the ER because I’d become so weak and unable to balance myself it was getting scary, but I am visiting my brother in Oceano California and I don’t have a local healthcare provider here. So I checked with my insurance to see who was in my network and it turned out the local hospital is.
Long story short, they found nothing that could be causing my problem. All the tests they ran not only came back good, but excellent for my age. So I will need to go over all this further with my cardiologist and my new GP (the previous one retired) when I get back to Charm City. That said, I am feeling much better now so maybe it was just a passing infection of some kind.
While in the ER, a technician came to do some paperwork on me. I say “paperwork” but it’s all in digital form these days, and then you get a paper printout when you are discharged. One of the questions she asked me was did I have a religious affiliation.
I said no, and for the briefest of moments, hesitated. I could have left it at that but it felt like I was closeting some part of myself. It didn’t feel right. It felt like I was ducking. So I added “I’m an atheist.”
No problem. She simply nodded and took it down. And that was that. But I took note of how much it felt like one of those little sudden moments a gay guy gets periodically when you are asked some innocuous question but it pertains to your relationship status and out of the blue you have to make this snap decision, do I duck or do I come out.
I am proud to say whenever this has happened I’ve dug in my heels and come out. But it’s always a bit nerve wracking. You never know what to expect. I blogged about a particularly bad outcome Here. Karma there was the guy who fired me and insisted it wasn’t because I am gay, was later arrested for not being able to keep his hands off young girls.
There’s a scene in Howard Cruse’ magnum opus Stuck Rubber Baby where the main character Toland Polk, describes his coming out during the memorial services of an openly gay friend who was lynched, and his lover in present day New York City avers “Say it once in public and the grapevine’ll take it from there.” Yes. But no. Probably within your own community and family that’s true, but you will find yourself coming out of the closet again and again all throughout your life in these little unexpected sudden out of the blue moments of truth.
You come out not simply to assert your own personal truth, and not just simply to stand up for yourself and your right to live an honest life, but also to be living testimony to the stereotypical falsehoods of who people like yourself are supposed to be. Yes I am a gay man. Yes I am an atheist. Whatever you thought that makes someone I’m a living example of one such and you have now been gifted with a small slice of truth, a living fact.
I have been called “a piece of work.” Perhaps. But there’s another word for it. It’s a word that feels really pretentious to call myself. But I am an artist. Given what Stephan Fry said even so…
Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it. That is your punishment. But if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.
— Stephen Fry
This is truth. So maybe artist is just one of the verbs I go by. But notice all the verbs he goes by are arts. I am an artist, and not simply because I create art…
art·ist / noun
a person who produces paintings or drawings as a profession or hobby.
a person who practices any of the various creative arts, such as a sculptor, novelist, poet, or filmmaker.
I would add something to this. Something about you produce art so you don’t go crazy. Something about you do it because you have that inner compulsion to do it and you can’t not do it. Vincent van Gogh so I’m told, once said he painted so he wouldn’t go mad. I know that feeling even if not to the degree he felt it. And to that I would also add that you have that need to get it out of you, whether or not you have an audience. You would do it if you were alone on a desert island. You would do it alone on a desert island if you did not have any of your artist’s tools, because you would make tools out of whatever you found on that island.
This is me. There was a time when I became so depressed at seeing what was coming out of me…my second attempt at finding love failed miserably because I’d crushed on a straight guy…that I stopped completely because I just didn’t want to deal with my feelings anymore. But it’s not so easy. You can’t stop yourself…
One way or another it comes out. I was doing volunteer work for a gay BBS and while creating login scripts and programs to help out with some of the work I’d signed up for, I discovered there was beauty in the relentless machine logic of computer code, and it was a kind of beauty that didn’t get into my broken heart feelings. It was mostly a left brain enchantment, all logic and elegance of form. I dove into it. And that led to a well paying career as a software engineer that I worked for just over thirty years before retiring. Then, part way through that I stumbled onto the Hopkins student fair grounds while they were setting up the rides and something inside me reawakened, and I got out my camera again after nearly a decade. I rediscovered my other art media…painting, drawing, cartooning. I am a graphic artist, mostly. For a while I felt whole again.
Maybe being a bit older by then allowed me to work with my feelings and make art again. Also, I was part way into strike three and it had not yet come undone, so there was a new allotment of hope there. Now I’m 70 and at a crossroads feeling hopeless again and not wanting to do art anymore because I hurt so much inside. But I know I will eventually.
So this is the essential thing to know about me, noun or verb: I am an artist.
And the thing about that is, if you have a thin skin, we really can’t be friends.
Because I’ll either piss you off or weird you out. I won’t mean to, I won’t want to, but it’s like that scene in the movie The Adam Project, where Big Adam played by Ryan Reynolds asks his younger self (it’s a time travel movie) played to perfection by Walter Scobell, “Do you ever have a thought and not let it come out your mouth?” I’m 70 years old now and I’m only just getting the hang of that. It mostly goes into my artwork, but sometimes it does just come out of my mouth or it’s something I do or something I’m wearing or something I’ve done with my hair that you just think is weird.
I am an artist. I will occasionally say and do some very weird shit. I’m pretty solidly Chaotic Good on the chart, but that’s my tribe.
I am not the sort of person who provokes for the sake of provoking. To make me deliberately insult someone they have to really Really get on my nerves and even then I’m more likely to just walk away. I was raised by a single divorced Baptist mother and there is a lot of morality baggage that comes with that, some of which I still very much appreciate and live by, some of which I still struggle with (I really should have learned to dance). But though I might initially appear to you as some sort of middle class quiet kind of guy, not very adventurous, not given to extremes (except for that long hair), I am an artist. I will occasionally say and do some very weird shit. Not that I think it was weird when I said or did it. If anything I might have thought you would appreciate it.
If that is going to bother or offend you then maybe just keep your distance. Even if I am sending signals that I’d like to get closer. No…especially if.
We tend to wear our hearts on our sleeves (if you’re any sort of regular reader of this life blog you know what I’m talking about here), and that makes them easy targets, even if you don’t really mean to stab. And the thing about that is we also wear the scars on our sleeves (have you been reading my blog?). Hell, we take them out and make art with them. Some of my best art is stuff I made from the scars. Nearly all of my art photography is off of some bleeding part of my heart. This is how we deal with the weight of our lives. Normal people just drink. Well…we do that too actually.
The fact is a thin skin does not pair well with an artist.
(This post is mostly for a certain lieber Deutscher. Yes I was talking to you. Mostly.)
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