5.) The Haunted Mansion

Last I checked, Amoeba Music is not selling any of these, no matter how much I pester management that there is a ready market for it.

I don’t know what it says about me, but as a child growing up on the sunny island of Oahu, I dreamed incessantly of once again returning to the Haunted Mansion, located on the edge of New Orleans Square in the Magic Kingdom of Disneyland in Anaheim in California on the Mainland…

…Earth.


Something about the temperature, the hues of dark greens, blues and violet, set a-glow by thousands of volts of black light; a soundtrack of pipe organ and church bells… It made a young Job feel at home. I can’t account for it, but that’s how it felt and, infantile as it may seem (maybe even perverse) it still does.

Once inside, I would never want to leave. At age five, I stood at the base of the escalator that took people from the end of the ride to the outside world, and cried. I’m sure people who passed me assumed I was crying because the ride had scared me, when in actuality, I wanted to move in.

I was a deeply unpopular child.


Every once in a while, a copy of the Haunted Mansion soundtrack will pop up in my section of Amoeba. It was only sold at the Park, and even then in limited edition batches (though they re-release them). Most anything Disney on c.d. goes out of print and instantly becomes a collector’s item; there’s always a market for the stuff. There’s people out there right now, who have left their babies alone in cribs, as they hunt for anything with that recognizable Disney logo stamped on it.
(Confession time: When a c.d. simply will not sell in my section, I just hand-draw this emblem on it, then stand back and wait for the bidding war between customers who suddenly must own this “rare release by Disney of the ‘Inside Deep Throat’ soundtrack”.)*

Job is busy making me dinner right now, so the least I can do is blog for him. I have also had one of his vodka-pomegranate cocktails, so I may be more lucid than usual.

At any rate, what is so hard about blogging? I do it all the time for The Advocate. Of course, it is usually at a film festival or something, so I have something interesting to talk about. But in the absence of such obvious content, what does one say?

I will tell you this: Job spends far too much time on these blogs. Time, I might add, not spent with me. I don’t think he got the memo that these should be short and pithy. The reader doesn’t have that much of an attention span anyway, and no patience for rambling and self-indulgence. What is more self-indulgent than a blog about someone’s life, never met, and their friends and experiences, never met, nor experienced. Does anyone really want to read any of that? Does anyone really want to see pictures of me in a red, satin tuxedo jacket perched atop a rock in the middle of Joshua tree? (Besides myself and Job of course).

It is only right that I tell you a few things about Job that perhaps he would never tell you. Only I can’t think of anything he doesn’t cop to. I just waxed his back this afternoon, but that isn’t very salacious. Let’s think… He barks a UPS trucks whenever he sees them. Yes, he barks, like a dog. No matter who is in the car. He acts like a real baby at about 11:30 pm every night. I ask him if he is tired (knowing, of course, that he is) and he responds “no” with pouted lower lip, and eyes droopy and childlike. The voice also is dismissive, blurted and vaguely resembling a grunt. Then he makes me pull him off the couch and pretends to be too tired to get up of his own will. He then pretends to be too tired to undress himself, get under sheets, or get on his own side. There is even fake crying and the rubbing of eyes. It is of course incredibly cute to me, but to the outside witness it would appear vaguely retarded and co-dependent. 

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