Poor Mojo's Newswire

But do you think Disney is going to hire a cripple to be Mickey Mouse? Ha! Mickey Mouse in a wheelchair or tapping around with a white cane? Are you insane? It wouldn’t matter whether a cripple could do the job or not. How hard can it be to be Mickey Mouse? All you have to do is wave and hug and pose for photos. Anybody can do that. But if Mickey Mouse is crippled, children will ask questions like, “Mommy, what happened to Mickey Mouse? Why does he have a seeing-eye dog?” And Mommy will have to answer, “Well, Susie, Mickey Mouse has a genetic disorder known as retinitis pigmentosa, which means…” And then you’ve ruined their whole fucking vacation! So there’s no way in hell Disney will take that kind of leap. They’ll say children come to Disneyland to have fun, not to be plunged into an existential crisis. But that’s just a bullshit excuse because every kid is going to have an existential crisis sooner or later. What better creature is there to break it to them softly than Mickey Mouse?

I have a good poker face because I am half-dead inside. My particular combo of slack features, negligible affect, and soulless gaze had helped my game ever since I started playing 20 years ago, when I was ignorant of pot odds and M-Theory and three-betting, and it gave me a boost as I collected my trove of lore, game by game, hand by hand. It had not helped me human relationships-wise over the years, but surely I am not alone here — anyone whose peculiar mix of genetic material and formative experiences had resulted in a near-expressionless mask could relate. Nature giveth, taketh, etc. You make the best of the hand you're dealt. This thing draped over my skull and fastened by muscle is also a not-too-bad public transportation face, a kind of wretched camouflage, which would come in handy on my trip to Atlantic City. Flash this mug and people didn't mess with you on buses, and this day I was heading to training camp. I was being staked to play in the World Series of Poker for a magazine, and my regular game was a five dollar buy-in where catching up with friends took precedence over pulverizing your opponents. I had to get in shape. There was no question about taking a bus. I'm of that subset of native New Yorkers who can't drive. Every spring, I made noises about getting my license, and I checked out the websites of local driving schools, which as a species embodied the most retrograde web design on the internet, real Galapagos stuff replete with frenetic logos and fonts they didn't make any more, the HTML flourishes of the previous century. How could I give my money to a business with so incompetent a portal? My wife and I owned a car, and she drove us everywhere, which came to be hassle. I used to joke that I was afraid of getting my license — that I was at a point in my life that the first time I got behind the wheel, I'd just keep driving. The first couple of times I made this joke, people laughed. Then maybe my delivery began to falter, there was a change in tone, and they'd look around nervously, peek over my shoulder for another person to talk to. My wife had the car now. We got divorced four days before. . . .

“Children need to encounter risks and overcome fears on the playground,” said Ellen Sandseter, a professor of psychology at Queen Maud University in Norway. “I think monkey bars and tall slides are great. As playgrounds become more and more boring, these are some of the few features that still can give children thrilling experiences with heights and high speed.” After observing children on playgrounds in Norway, England and Australia, Dr. Sandseter identified six categories of risky play: exploring heights, experiencing high speed, handling dangerous tools, being near dangerous elements (like water or fire), rough-and-tumble play (like wrestling), and wandering alone away from adult supervision. The most common is climbing heights. “Climbing equipment needs to be high enough, or else it will be too boring in the long run,” Dr. Sandseter said. “Children approach thrills and risks in a progressive manner, and very few children would try to climb to the highest point for the first time they climb. The best thing is to let children encounter these challenges from an early age, and they will then progressively learn to master them through their play over the years.” Sometimes, of course, their mastery fails, and falls are the common form of playground injury. But these rarely cause permanent damage, either physically or emotionally. While some psychologists — and many parents — have worried that a child who suffered a bad fall would develop a fear of heights, studies have shown the opposite pattern: A child who’s hurt in a fall before the age of 9 is less likely as a teenager to have a fear of heights. . . .