The other day my boyfriend suggested that we go to Disneyland, since we live in L.A. and the last time I was there I wasn't as tall as the mylar dwarf who serves as dictator of admittance to most of the rides. I immediately started rummaging through old phone books for my stale drug connections, believing there was no way that my tortured adult mind could possibly withstand the onslaught of gyrating velour robot animals lip-synching sugar-drenched lyrics insidiously laced with plans for Christian world domination in five-part major harmonies, and angry Asian medical students gingerly hugging fat children with miserable families from the dark and sterilized vantage point of their full-body Duck costumes, and ubiquitous fluorescent stores filled with suckable Mouse heads and black plastic ears.

"No drugs!" my boyfriend barked, which I thought was a dangerous idea. But we went forward anyway into the city of Anaheim, with nothing for psychic prophylatics but coffee and the Ritalin the doctors had prescribed us.

Our first adventure was to enter the 3-D zillion-dollar extravaganza Captain EO, now on its very last legs and one of the most unpopular rides in the park, where you can see all 360 degrees of the late Respectable Michael Jackson. It was kind of touching and sad to sit there in the dark with the silly 3-D glasses on, watching pretty-eye-shadow-girl Michael sing freely with puppets in the days right before the plastic surgeons replaced his head with that little white triangle with the holes painted on it.

"We are gonna change the world! Hoo-hoo!" he crowed energetically, his eyes flashing swarms of laser-mites and his body doing that gangly hot-oil action it always did so well, with a tag team of leggy Solid Gold dancers behind him. There is actually one point in EO that is truly astonishing, and it comes at the very beginning. A perfect Disney 3-D rock comes at you and floats in front of your face, so close you swear you could hug it. My head exploded with liquid baby-like glee -- Wow! Look! Science! Art! Technology! They do this thing where they make this rock float in front of your head and if you touch it, it isn't there! It was wonderful and safe and benevolent, in a way that unknown things in the real world aren't.

Throughout the show, though, you can hear people snickering about Jackson the Pederast, which casts a whole new shadow on his harmless falsetto and rainbow T-shirt and shiny buckles, like he's an ice cream van with mirrored windows playing a toy-xylophone version of the theme from "The Exorcist." All of Jackson's childish posturing now seems like a handful of Kandy Korn offered by a playground creep. Even Disney, the last outpost of whitewashed American denial, is about to abandon EO's ship: the man who sold us our tickets told us that the Anaheim Disneyland is the only Disney institution left that still has any Jackson in it, and they're going to quietly get rid of it, too. Mickey Rat.

One can walk through Disneyland and observe how popular culture rubbed off on the artists who created the rides through the decades. The Alice in Wonderland section is clearly LSD-informed psychedelia, with its swirling pink and orange Laugh-In aesthetic and paisley teardrops and luminous two-story mushrooms. In the '70s, space was clearly the place, and everything was stars and white plastic and more robots and control panels. The '80s gave us that nostalgia-for-the-'30s and '40s thing, with all of the Indiana Jones old brass safari-and-Egypt kitsch. And the late '50s-early '60s are there in the Camelot look -- all of the castles and kings. Man's home is his big pink castle. Change your baby at the convenient Mom-port shaped like a big white tube of health. Baby blue robins will quickly dispose of any waste articles, and we've made sure Dad can't drink alcoholic beverages of any kind on the park premises. Safe. Clean. Happy. Hopeful. Kennedy is alive and all marriages last happily ever after.

Disneyland is a "rouster" of family spirit. It just rousts you all up to wanna go home and light a presto log and turn on the TV and watch Tinkerbell dive bomb the castle on a Sunday night at seven like you used to, with Mom and Sis and Dad and Mr. French and Mrs. Beasley. It fills you with that warm-choky sentimental sense that Life Could Actually Deliver on the things it promises but can't actually deliver.

What surprised me the most was how much fun I had. We giggled and skipped around and screamed on the rollercoasters and were impressed by the infinite attention to detail in the ride settings. I was actually having fun for the right reasons, which was shocking. My cynicism was penetrated by the world that Walt Disney succeeded in creating. Disneyland is damn good art, after all, and some of the rides have just the right amount of whippy torque and not-unpleasant G-force to make you feel really excited and spazzy. In the future, if the cloud of prevailing evil ever lifts, I hope the world will be more like Disneyland. It's already just as weird and surreal. It just needs to be happy.