Took a quick business trip to Orlando, yesterday. Mickeyville always raises my blood pressure. I hate the way the place treats everyone like we are all eight years old. I hate the parks and their interminable lines. I hate fighting the traffic, made all the worse by yankee tourists in rental cars. I hate the kitschy architecture; developers trying for all the world to make Central Florida look like Southern California.
I was born in Orlando, but my family luckily moved on before the Disney invasion. My parents have occasionally mentioned that they would like to move back to Central Florida and I have been quick; perhaps too dream-killing quick; to snap that nothing remains of the orange grove-robed and lake-speckled jewel that they remember. The soothing groves of citrus have given way to seething droves of citizenry drawn to the place not by its former natural beauty but by its cosmetic enhanced promise of ecstasy; like so many johns to a streetwalker.
There is bright-eyed rumoring in my current adopted hometown of the possibility of theme park invasions here. Good for Panama City. If it comes, I'm gone. I'll shake the sand of this place off my white walkers and head for the hills of North Mississippi where I belong. That's the last place anyone would want to build a tourist attraction.
They probably said that about Orlando fifty years ago.
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