My family was never a Disneyland family.
I always resented my classmates who belonged to Disneyland families, the haughty children who walked into class halfway through October and announced that they’d be missing school for an entire week while they gallivanted down to Florida to visit Cinderella and her whore sisters. “Have fun catching syphilis from Mickey Mouse,” I’d sneer under my breath, or at least that’s what I would have sneered if I’d known what syphilis was back then. To make it worse, those kids would always come back with Mickey Mouse–shaped water bottles and a week’s worth of gaudy themed T-shirts, just to remind everybody that going to Disneyland was not a onetime luxury, but a permanent promotion in status, lest anybody should forget.
My parents always gave my brother and me a litany of excuses as to why we’d never go to Disneyland, chief among them being that my mother refused to get on an airplane (and driving together for anything longer than a couple of hours at most was out of the question). I always found this excuse insufficient, considering that my mother had flown on airplanes before—twice, in fact—most recently to Hawaii, some twenty years earlier on her and my father’s honeymoon, and before then, as a haughty child herself, to none other than Disneyland. Perhaps she’d caught syphilis from Mickey Mouse, I thought. But more than likely she was simply a hypocrite.
The real excuse, or at least the one that was supposed to keep us from rioting, was that our very own Disneyland—basically just as good, but without all those pesky lines and stifling crowds and uninhibited fun—was just a two-hour drive away in sunny, breezy, coastal southern Michigan, home of the crumbling American auto industry and boundless amusement for children of all ages.
When you live in “the greater Chicagoland area”—a bullshit name for those parts of Indiana, Wisconsin, and suburban Illinois that have absolutely no right referring to themselves as Chicago but need some semblance of an identity to cling to, God bless them—you are fed a constant onslaught of commercials on television advertising the majestic forested hills of Michigan as the one true vacation destination. This is, of course, entirely absurd. Not to shit on Michigan, but there are far better vacation spots in the Midwest alone. And sure, Michigan’s got gurgling brooks and crisp lakes full of fish bigger than grown men and miles upon miles of fresh forests, or some garbage like that. But Wisconsin’s got the Wisconsin Dells, the water-park capital of the world, according to the brochure, and no child wants to hang out around a babbling river—unless you’re a character in Bridge to Terabithia and you wanna die—especially not when that babbling river is one state away from the largest indoor water park in the United States.
But my uncle’s family owned a cottage in Michigan, a small house on a tiny lake about fifteen miles inland from Lake Michigan proper. And apart from the month’s worth of supplies my mother insisted on purchasing for a week of vacation, going to Michigan was basically free, at least compared to Disneyland. And so, every summer, instead of contracting ringworm in a communal men’s shower somewhere in the bowels of Wisconsin like a normal midwestern family, we’d pile into a sedan—my mom, dad, brother, and me, along with the dog and our turtle, Cornpop, who traveled in a damp bucket between my brother’s legs—and drove two hours to the town of Sister Lakes, where the paradise of small-town Michigan awaited.
Two hours traveling now is a virtual cakewalk, but back then, a two-hour drive in the backseat of a cramped car was my own personal hell, not only because of my family’s less-than-pleasant digestive failings, but also because of my mother’s unrelenting need to pack an entire deli’s worth of groceries into every available space. Half of those drives, I had boxes of granola bars and packaged pastries pooling at my feet. I rested my head on open bundles of blueberry muffins and twisted bags of hamburger buns, stacked atop a giant cooler that sat between my brother and me in the backseat. In my lap, if I wasn’t charged with holding the dog, who threw up on cue at least every fifteen minutes, I’d be forced to hold some other item we couldn’t have traveled without, like a case of beer or box of wine. Mobility was limited, at best.
To get to Sister Lakes, Michigan, from Chicago, there was approximately ten minutes of suburbia, followed by an hour of open highway, followed by fifty minutes of pure, concentrated countryside, which is to say, absolutely fucking nothing. I’d spend what felt like hours staring at the back of my mother’s seat in front of me, shifting slightly, as much as I could, beneath the weight of whatever box of meats was crushing my thighs.
“Look at the cows!” my mother would shout every twenty minutes, and if we turned immediately and glared out the part of the window uninhibited by stacks of frozen waffles and sliced bread, we’d catch just a blurry, passing glimpse of a pasture that quickly gave way to cornstalks or blueberry bushes or whatever boring crop infests those parts of America that most of us try not to think about.
I’d always know we were getting close to the cottage when signs of modern society began to vanish, when stoplights at intersections started giving way to rickety stop signs hanging from strings over dusty roads, and gas-station pumps started looking less like gas-station pumps and more like butter-churning barrels.
The cottage itself was at the end of a winding gravel road hidden by a dense thicket of trees and brush, and was nearly impossible to see, even in broad daylight. If ever I managed to fall asleep, I’d be jerked awake by the rattle of the car lurching along the rocky street, shaking the towers of food around my face and sending one box or another tumbling to the floor. The dog would barf one last time and finally we’d be there.
Of course, this should be obvious, but if a lake is surrounded by overgrown, almost impassable vegetation—so dense that only a gravel road suffices as an acceptable throughway—maybe it shouldn’t be colonized by tourists. There was another house along the gravel road, inhabited by lake-town natives, who I assumed had been driven insane by years spent gestating in relative obscurity. Whenever we’d drive past, without fail there was always a child in one of the windows brandishing a rifle.
Welcome to Disneyland.
The cottage was a relic of the 1970s, a modest-sized structure with all the trappings you’d expect of an old lake house: musty carpet, wood-paneled walls full of kitschy wooden ducks, and wrought-iron birds alongside framed photos of aunts and uncles and cousins holding up fish caught twenty years before. The house had the perpetual whiff of dampness, the smell of decades of wet feet walking on wooden floors, sunblock and sweat dripped onto carpet, the accumulation of dust and dirt and cobwebs settled permanently in those nine off-summer months when a vacation home goes unoccupied. It would have been a comforting smell, if not for the year someone found a dead squirrel in the closet, in the center of an old, rolled-up rug. I hesitate to think how long it was there, whether the fresh country air we had been breathing year after year was actually just airborne squirrel decay.
At least fifteen of my family members would go to the cottage at once—my grandparents, my mother and her three sisters, their husbands, all five of my cousins and me, plus the dogs and the turtle and anything else that managed to fit inside the trunk of the car. Each family unit would cram into one of the four bedrooms, which means I’d get stuck on a deflated air mattress on the floor beside my parents’ bed, my brother on a cot at the end of the bed, an arrangement that virtually guaranteed all of us would go an entire week without sleep. Every night, I’d fall asleep, and in a matter of minutes, my brother would whip a pillow forcefully at my face to stop me from snoring. (My oversized tonsils made any attempts to curb my snoring nearly impossible.) Pissed, I’d groggily whip the pillow back, but given my homosexual aim, a lamp would fall over, the dog would start barking, my dad would start grumbling, my mom would start shouting, and before long, the entire house would be listening to us screaming at one another to go to sleep.
Conflict never contained itself just to our bedroom, though. Virtually every year, by the end of the week, everyone was pissed at someone else, for one reason or another. You put fifteen people in a small house in the August heat, with a cooler of alcohol per adult, there’s bound to be some drama. After all, once the sun sets in the middle of nowhere, there isn’t much to do besides drink. This is how reality television is made, after all. At the worst of it, in the midst of an after-dinner board game sometime in 2000, some innocuous disagreement over the rules led my grandmother to throw her arms in the air and shout, “That’s it! We’re out of here!” And she promptly made my grandfather pack all their belongings in the trunk and drive back to Chicago in the middle of the night, never to return to the cottage again.
To complete the idyllic vacation ambience, the cottage plumbing was as archaic as the structure itself, and to stave off the literal shit show that fifteen people taking daily showers and bowel movements could wreak on the system, we enforced a strict “if it’s yellow, let it mellow” policy in regards to toilet flushing, giving the hallways an added air of dank stench. But, inevitably, the pumps would give way, and the grass in the back of the house would start bubbling up with thick sewage. To make it all worse, my uncle’s parents—the cottage owners—installed a toilet in the corner of the large room we used as a pantry, which, on the one hand, alleviated stress on the otherwise lone toilet upstairs, but, on the other hand, added a layer of filth to our snacks, which we kept on a table on the other side of the room, even after the toilet was consecrated. It was all, to say the very least, a less than ideal living arrangement, to be sardined into a decaying house, floating on a river of shit, delirious for lack of sleep.
Of course, the real draw of Michigan—what they talked about in those horrible commercials—was not to be confined indoors, but to experience the bounty of nature, or some bullshit like that. The cottage was simply the backdrop, a place to sleep (or not) so you’d be rested the next morning for another day spent entirely outdoors, away from television, the Internet, and the refrigerator.
The lake the cottage was on was quite beautiful, if you’re into that sort of thing. In the morning, when the sky was clear, the water still, the sun at a manageable angle, I could almost understand why businessmen faked their own deaths to escape their families for a place like this. But the beauty lasted only as long as you kept your distance. The water itself was nearly opaque with clouds of sand upset by whatever marine life dwelled at its depths. If you tossed a rock into the water, it took only a few inches before it all but disappeared, eaten by a brown fog. Over the years, we saw all manner of oversized fish, snakes, and snapping turtles, some the size of kickballs, emerging from the deep, and that was only what we spotted from the surface, through the seaweed. It amazes me still that we swam regularly in that water. One year, I found a tick crawling on the nape of my neck while I was drying off beside the lake, and spent the rest of our vacation convinced that I’d contracted Lyme disease. Even now, when I think about the fact that I was once willingly submerged in that water, it gives me that uncomfortable tingly feeling at the base of my spine. But then again, that might just be the Lyme disease.
• • •
It amazes me most that we continued to visit this place, considering everything that went wrong there. Idyllic as it was—poop puddles and decaying squirrels aside—the cottage was site to some of the more physically traumatizing moments of my childhood. It was there that I broke my first bone, after all, falling backwards from a bush in the yard, snapping my elbow and leaving me in a cast for the rest of the summer.
And that was only the beginning.
One summer, while we were swimming in a part of the lake that wasn’t yet overrun with floating branches or goopy seaweed, one of my cousins spotted a snake slithering along the grass near the water and shouted, “SNAAAAAKE!” We all scurried ashore, screaming all the way, not to escape it, but to run after it. None of us had ever caught a snake before. We’d seen everything else up close: giant fish, a soft-shelled turtle, an oversized toad. Our very own turtle, Cornpop, was a catch my brother had made years earlier, back when my parents were apparently foolish enough to let their children take wildlife home. (For the record, I’m pretty sure my mother assumed the turtle would die before she’d have to worry about it, but that motherfucker lived for almost twenty years, so take that, Debbie.) But a snake was exciting stuff. Uncharted territory.
Personally, I never understood the appeal of chasing after snakes, or any wildlife for that matter, because I’ve seen Anaconda and I know that all snakes, including the teeny ones, are capable of swallowing an entire human body and regurgitating the half-digested remains in an abandoned warehouse somewhere in the Amazon. Chasing after a snake seemed to be an easy way of asking for trouble. Even if we didn’t catch him, he would go off and tell his snake friends that a band of children were harassing him, and before you know it, he’d be back with a mob, except this time, they’d be in my air mattress and my mouth would be open because of the tonsil thing and it’s just a whole big nightmare. I wasn’t one to take that sort of risk. The closest I’d ever been to a snake was Halloween when I was eleven years old, the year I dressed as Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, a costume that amounted to short khaki shorts, a matching V-neck button-up, and a stuffed toy snake wrapped around my arm. But even the stuffed snake made me uncomfortable, and not only because I tripped over it that night and put a snag in the skin-colored tights my mother insisted I wear beneath the khaki costume to protect me from the cold. A snake is a snake.
But when everybody is running after one, you get caught up in the adventure of it all, the Steve Irwin part of your brain takes over, and before you know it, you’re chasing and screaming and whooping.
So I chased after that disgusting thing alongside everybody else, all of us barefoot, as it weaved in and out of the tall grass and under overturned paddleboats and through a pile of firewood, all the while out of our reach, until it finally went wriggling back into the water. We were city children, after all. No match for a country snake.
But amidst the excitement, amidst the running and screaming and whooping, my foot landed in a pile of dirt somewhere along the shore and I felt a stinging pain shoot up my leg. I let out a yelp and lifted my leg to see the bottom of my foot, thinking I’d stepped on a sharp rock or maybe a bit of broken glass, but what I saw instead was a bee taking his final breath, his stinger firmly in the bottom of my heel. I’d never been stung by a bee before, and it wasn’t the best feeling in the world. But, like stepping on a used meth needle, it’s really most alarming because you don’t know what happens afterward.
I cursed the bee under my breath and brushed his corpse off my heel, and that’s when I noticed the hole he’d crawled out of, in the middle of the pile of dirt upset by my feet, and the other holes around it, all teeming with other bees newly incensed by my presence.
It was their nest, I realized, and I’d crushed it with my thumping foot. I’d run right into their hive, I’d killed one of their brothers, and now they were angry.
Now, I should pause to point out that this is one of the many ways in which humanity is no match for nature: there are fucking underground beehives. As in, bees that live in the fucking ground. I’d also like to take this moment to formally accuse Winnie the Pooh of failing to prepare me for this phenomenon. Thanks to Winnie, I’d spent years going about life assuming delicious honey-producing beehives were found exclusively aboveground, and I fully blame him for my ignorance on this subject. But it took only a few moments for me to draw a few clear conclusions about underground beehives, or rather, one very important conclusion: underground beehives do not like getting stepped on. In fact, they very much dislike getting stepped on, so much so that when they are stepped on, they happen to overreact and, despite their trespasser’s loud and fervent attempts at de-escalation, attack accordingly.
The bees rose up in unison and set about swarming not just me, but all of us children, in retaliation. Sure, I was the one who had destroyed their nest, but they attacked us all without asking questions. Our parents watched from afar as we all came screaming back to the house, bringing the swarm with us, wailing like mad as the cloud of bees chased after us. The bees stung and bit any exposed limb with impunity as we ran, our arms flailing, swinging whatever objects we could to knock out as many bees as possible at once. When we reached the house, everybody scrambled indoors, yelping at the final stings, swinging away the most committed soldiers.
Inside, the house became a full-blown triage unit, like the kind you see in movies about the Civil War, with soldiers lying in filthy beds, biting into chunks of wood while nurses saw off their exploded legs. All of us children collapsed onto the ground in various states of panic and pain, cries and screams piercing the air. It was utter madness.
I’m not proud to admit that I managed, somehow, to escape with only the single initial sting, while everybody else wailed in pain around me. Naturally, of course, I was the only one to have stepped on a bee, which is a lot like accidentally shooting off your foot with a rifle. But I couldn’t let on that I’d caused this whole mess and made off with only a single wound, so I writhed alongside everybody else.
Still, I remain convinced that there were at least twelve other things to blame before me, including the snake, the cousin who spotted the snake, Winnie the Pooh, and most of all, the cottage itself, which I continue to believe is cursed.
• • •
The trips to Michigan continued year after year, my family’s enthusiasm undisturbed by mass bee attacks, poop rivers, and ongoing feuds. And the curse showed no signs of relenting either.
Two summers after the bee attack, when our wounds finally showed signs of healing, I went to the cottage with my aunt, uncle, and cousins a night early. My parents and brother were driving up the next morning, but I begged and pleaded to hitch a ride the night before, reminding my mother that without me in the car, she could fill my seat with another twenty, maybe even thirty, dinners, plus any number of extra breads, fruit platters, wrapped pies, and brownie trays, and I just couldn’t imagine us surviving the week with anything less. Of course, she relented, if only to get me to stop listing foods, and let me go.
I felt guilty that night, once we arrived, to have the entire bedroom to myself. I could sleep in the real bed instead of an air mattress, and snore as loud as I wanted without retribution, and in the morning, I could wake up and eat breakfast and be outside to swim long before my family would arrive.
There were moments when I loved going to Michigan, and this was one of them. Besides everything that was wrong with it, the cottage could still be a fun place to be. It may not have been Disneyland, but it was better than nothing, and I made the most of it when I could.
That night, my cousins and I plotted what we would do with all the extra time we’d have together in the morning. We could go fishing, which amounted to standing at the end of the long, rickety pier that jutted from the shore into the shallow water in front of the cottage and waiting for a fish the size of a baby’s shoe to decide life wasn’t worth living. (I will never understand the thrill of fishing. At its very best, it’s an activity that ends with a vicious struggle to reel in something you can easily buy at a supermarket. And then what? You take a picture with it? So you can make that picture the cover of your dating profile? Nobody is impressed with your ability to catch a fish. Turtles can catch fish. Nobody is trying to fuck a turtle.) Besides fishing, we could also go tubing, but tubing is only fun for about five minutes, until you hit a small wave and are violently catapulted into the air and come crashing down into the water like you’re diving into a plate of frozen steaks, and suddenly there is water in orifices you didn’t know existed. The only real option was to go for an early boat ride, and the only boat we could operate ourselves was the paddleboat, the water version of a bicycle, really just exercise disguised as fun. But still, we could ride it out to the middle of the lake where the water was deepest and jump in without fear of getting grabbed by anything lurking at the bottom.
So that morning, we all got up and threw on our swim trunks. After breakfast, we took the requisite two hours to slather on SPF 1000 sunblock, a ritual that always proved pointless for our pale Anglo skin.
I walked the fifty yards to the lake while I waited for my cousins to finish smearing their pasty bodies, and waded a few feet into the water around the paddleboat. It was a beautiful morning—crisp, you might say, if you used words like that to describe the air and not a potato chip. The water felt brisk and refreshing, like swimming in a cold glass of lemonade, if that’s your thing. It was the type of morning that made coming to this mess of a place worth it.
And then I took a single step into the water and the beauty of the morning came rupturing to a close. I felt a shooting pain in the bottom of my foot—once again, stepping had proven to be my greatest weakness; if only I owned a pair of shoes—and when I lifted my foot from the water to look, there was a slice, almost two inches in length, along my heel. I’d stepped directly onto a shard of glass and cut my heel almost wide open.
If I’d had the fortitude in the moment, there are plenty of people I’d like to have cursed, namely myself for daring to think going outside was ever, ever a good idea, but also whichever redneck, yahoo motherfucker decided to throw a motherfucking broken bottle of shitty beer into a fucking lake. I can imagine plenty of terrible things a person can do, like getting a tattoo of another person’s face or drinking even a single swig of milk a second after the expiration date, but throwing a shard of jagged glass into the shallow part of a lake is among the worst of them, and not just because I happened to step on it, even though that maybe had something to do with it. Seriously, fuck you, sir or madam. I hope one day you step on something even worse, like a really hot beach or one of those extra-long Legos.
I was surprisingly calm in the moment, perhaps because the water was washing away the blood, and I limped the fifty yards back up to the house, where my aunt was sitting on the deck drinking her morning coffee.
“Uhh, Auntie Bonnie,” I said. “I think I cut my foot.”
By then, my aunt Bonnie was well used to my injuries. Virtually every time I was left in her charge, I’d come limping back to her with some broken bone, sprain, burn, or open wound. It became a running joke in the family that she should refuse to look after me because I posed too much of an insurance risk. My injuries were so routine that she barely blinked when I told her I’d cut my foot.
“I’ll go get a Band-Aid,” she sighed without looking up at me.
I don’t know why I didn’t stop her and say, “Listen, lady, there’s no time for Band-Aids, we need Super Glue and maybe also a miracle,” but she was a pharmacist, which is basically a doctor, so I trusted her. Either way, she was gone before I could say anything. A few minutes later, she returned with a bandage.
By then, there was a small pool of blood forming beneath me, and her eyes widened ever so slightly as she got closer, in that way that adults’ eyes tend to widen when they realize things are more fucked than they’d originally realized, but don’t want to admit it out loud.
“Oh,” she said with a kind of forced composure. “You really cut it, huh?”
She tried to say it calmly, but I have a knack for picking up on the panic in people’s voices, especially when they’re staring at an open wound in my body, and I could tell what she really meant to say was, “We’ll be lucky if we can save the leg.”
She used a water bottle to clear the blood away, and tried to see how deep the cut was, but when she peeled back the skin for just a moment, she let out the faintest of gasps. I could see what she saw, too. A dark spot, maybe a piece of dirt—that lake was filthy, after all, hence the broken beer bottle—but it looked more like part of a vein, maybe even an artery, and even though I don’t entirely know the difference between a vein and an artery, or whether there are even arteries in your feet (who knows!), it looked bad, like what you’d imagine cutting an artery would look like. I went pale. The blood kept coming.
“Let’s just call your mom,” Aunt Bonnie said, but I knew what she really meant: “Think about what you’d like to say to your mother before you die.”
I could hear her dialing the phone. By now, my parents would be on their way to the cottage, the car bounding down the highway with bottles of beer rattling in the seat where I would’ve been uncomfortably squished otherwise.
“Hey, Deb,” she said almost calmly when my mother answered. “Are you guys close?”
“Almost,” my mother said. “Why? Is everything OK?” Debbie, always assuming the worst has happened.
“Yep, everything’s good,” Aunt Bonnie said. Even though she really meant, “You left your dainty, fragile piece-of-shit son with me, and now he’s going to die.”
I could tell she didn’t want to get my mother worried, especially not when there was nothing she could do, not from the highway at least. And to be perfectly honest, I was fine with her not knowing. My mother is a notoriously worried woman, and I knew the second she learned I’d nearly cut off my foot, she’d go on and on about how we never should have been allowed near that water without military-grade protective body suits, at least three adult supervisors, and a written permission slip from a medical professional. My mother absolutely insisted that we all wear water shoes, those disgustingly ugly mesh clogs that meld to your feet the second they get wet. I hated water shoes. I hated that they filled with dirt and sand and gave my feet a rash. I hated that they made my feet feel heavy and dull. I hated the hideous colors they were designed in. And I hated knowing that I would now almost certainly never hear the end of it.
Aunt Bonnie looked at me the way you look at a bird that’s flown into a window and broken its wing, the look that says, “You’ll be dead within the hour, you poor idiot.”
“Let’s go to the bathroom and see if we can clean it out,” she said.
And so, I hobbled to the bathroom, my cousins now crowded around me, and placed my bloody stump under the bathtub faucet. Aunt Bonnie bent down and tried spreading the wound so the water could clean inside of it. I could tell she was trying to see if the dark spot was going away, if it was only a piece of dirt, and not an open artery spilling out the last of my life force. The spot wouldn’t go away. The bleeding had somewhat abated, but it hadn’t stopped entirely. We wrapped it in paper towels.
Aunt Bonnie picked up the phone again. I could tell her concern was growing. She’d had a perfect record so far, in terms of making sure I hadn’t died, but this time was shaping up differently. I mean, all told, even if I had died (spoiler alert: I didn’t die), her record still would’ve been pretty good. One death out of mostly not dying is not too bad.
She dialed my mother again, and I could hear her answer.
“Hey, Deb,” Aunt Bonnie said, less convincingly calm this time. “Almost here?”
“We’re five minutes away,” my mother said. “Something’s wrong, I can tell.”
“Well,” Aunt Bonnie said. “There’s been an incident.”
A moment passed while my mother waited for news that I’d been decapitated, castrated, or worse.
“Well, Matthew stepped on a piece of glass, and uh . . . he might have cut an artery.”
“AN ARTERY!?” I could hear my mother scream through the phone.
“Yeah, maybe just a little bit,” Aunt Bonnie said.
But my mother was already crying. My father, you could hear, was yelling from the driver’s seat, “Goddammit! It’s always fucking something!”
“Oh, God. Why are you crying?” my brother was asking from the backseat.
“Auntie Bonnie said he cut an artery!” my mother was sobbing. “Do you want me to scream like he’s doing?”
The dog, I’m sure, vomited one last time.
This is how my family reacts to news.
A few minutes later, the car came shrieking down the gravel road. My mother leapt from the passenger seat, and before I had a chance to say hello, I’d been swept into the backseat, boxes of groceries tossed onto the pavement to make room for my failing body, and we were speeding back down the gravel road to the emergency room.
• • •
“You just need a few stitches” is what the doctor said when he’d finally had a chance to look me over.
“Are you sure, Doctor?” my mother was asking. “Are you sure he hasn’t cut an artery?”
I would make fun of her for questioning the doctor on something that would be obvious to a doctor, but then again, this was small-town Michigan. The hospital was in between a Dairy Queen and a Blockbuster Video.
“Um. Yes,” he said. “He’d be dead if he cut an artery.”
A tetanus shot, a handful of stitches, and a bagful of prescription painkillers later, we were driving back to the cottage, the open green fields of Michigan passing by the window.
I’d like to say I found a new appreciation for those views, the kind of appreciation that people who have faced death feel. I’d like to say I looked out that window and said something profound, something that someone who’s really gone through stuff says, like “You never know how much you’ve been missing until you almost lose it all.”
But I couldn’t say that.
All I could muster, before the pain drugs took over, was one simple sentence:
“This never would’ve happened if we just went to fucking Disneyland.”