I don't think the waiting queue at the Buzz Lightyear Astro-Blasters was designed specifically to stimulate contemplation of mortality and the insignificance of humanity, but I know a lot of market data goes into presentation at a corporate level to maximize engagement, so I can't say definitively that it wasn't.
There's nothing especially dark or foreboding about any of it. If you haven't been to Disneyland (this is in California, not that bloated abomination in Florida with the Jovian gravity that holds you there for days and alligators that will eat your children), the Buzz Lightyear ride is a fairly new-ish addition for old-timers like me, even though it's got to be about 20 years on by now. It's bright, it's goofy,* it's interactive. It's an immersive ride-along arcade game you only have to pay the $140 entry fee to get a crack at.
I'm definitely not one of the Disney cultists that are so common out here (something like 85% of the visitors to Disneyland are locals, and all are prone to pushing whilst in a crowd, for some reason), but I have had family working at Disneyland in some capacity since about 1968, so we've been able to get in for free pretty regularly.
Not this time though, as I only have one cousin left working there (in one of the hotels) and it feels kind of shitty to make no effort to stay in touch only to show up and beg for something free. The good news is when your kids all have jobs, you can make them buy their own tickets. Which I did.
The (actually) new-ish Star Wars rides I hadn't seen, since it had been six years since my last visit (a record by a factor of five or so), so that was novel. The old FastPass line-wait-reduction system was gone, replaced surprisingly by the exact same thing, except now you had to pay $20 for the option. But you can get your place in line on a phone app. Technology makes everything better.
The not-new stuff was where the real head-trip was. In six years, my kids had become the type of people who have beards and W-2s. We'd spent a lot of time there when they were smaller, even before they had the capacity to make memories, as lots of misguided and bored parents do. After the initial rush of the new things (not just meaning attractions but the full-speed mobility of doing a theme park with three young adults, all of whom had the absolute freedom to wander off and get lost any time they felt like it), the rounds working through the older attractions started to feel a bit... well, they started to feel a bit.
I'm not sure why it hit all at once when the stand-by line at the Buzz Lightyear Astro-Blasters stalled out. Maybe it was the ache in the feet from standing, or the dehydration caused by the last-gasp-of-summer Orange County sun and the pace we were keeping, or just a moment of stillness in the sensory bombardment of a full 12 hour immersion; maybe it was the lime-green-hued space-and-time theming of the indoor section of the queue, but a sense of settling, congealing something crept in.
It was a kind of unromantic timelessness, the kind you can only find in sufficient amounts of molded plastic. Part of it was the repetition, having been so many times, like repeating a word over and over out loud until it becomes an audible absurdity. It wasn't nostalgia, it was a reminder it would all be here churning and churning long after you're dead and gone. There's an all-smiling, unblinking eternity to it, the kind one could usually only get from contemplating something impossibly immense or remote, like a Giza pyramid, or the ocean all at once, or a star. The existential can really sneak up on you in the prosaic-but-undying, the cold indifference of forever staring right through you, penetrating and surrounding you all at once, without anything recognizable as intent, or even acknowledgment. To intend it would have to know you, and who by themselves is really known by the great undying pillars of our society: non-biodegradable fiberglass and capitalism?
Nobody probably. Not even Walt Disney. There's a statue of him there, right in the middle of the park, holding hands with a fictional avatar of corporate intellectual property, beckoning us all (but none of us in particular) to come forward. Or go back. Or die where we stand, whatever. It's a statue, man.
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*But definitely not Goofy.
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