Florida
is like junk food. It’s okay in small doses, but overlong exposure to
its artificial preservatives will eventually kill you.
Color-wise
it even has a candy-coated veneer. Every time I go back I’m reminded of
this. Traveling to Orlando for work a couple of weeks ago,
I took a shuttle from the airport to the hotel and got a pretty
comprehensive tour of the area as various parties were dropped off in
town. Pastels and sudden bold splashes of pink bombarded my eyeballs, to
the point that I was unsure whether I should check
into my room or start hunting for Easter eggs.
That’s
what folks in medicine call a symptom. The disease is tackiness. I need
to be measured in my criticism here, because it’s easy to hawk
spitballs at a place that’s not your own. Beyond the Mickey Mouse ears
I’m sure the state has its own unique and worthy culture, traditions
that would ignite in anyone a very human spark of recognition. But it
also has Hulk Hogan and a five-story animatronic
King Kong. So it’s kind of asking for it a bit.
Since
work was my reason for being there, there’s a possibility this trip
brought some bitterness to the fore that didn’t exist in the past.
It’s hard to appreciate the good things about a place when you’re
slogging away on your laptop in a hotel room while pool sounds and
laughing families are right outside your window. If I’d had more money I
would have paid to swap places with someone for a
day or two, with them covering a stuffy suit-and-tie convention and me
doing tequila shots in steakhouses and eating shrimp with butter. Come
to think of it, that would make a good premise for one of those cute
Disney “swap” movies. Guess it’s time to get
my agent on the phone.
I’ve
got a long history with Florida though, and in my memory it’s always
has that Crayola sheen. My introduction came courtesy of a trip to
Disney World my family took when I was 6. At that point in my life I
only had eyes for Pinocchio, so anything potentially unsavory about
Florida -- the cloying humidity, the neon green fanny packs -- never
even registered. I was eating ice cream and hanging
out with Donald Duck, which to a child that age is the equivalent of
sipping fine Chardonnay while getting a foot rub by Scarlett Johansson.
It never mattered that I was surrounded by a forest of legs with tube
socks pulled up to the knees. It’s possible to
have a genuinely magical time on that odd little sandbar, assuming
you’re in kindergarten and severely nearsighted.
Later
in life you start to develop a more discerning eye. My aunt, uncle and
cousin moved to Florida when I was in my early teens, and at 14
I flew down to spend time with them. I had just come back from a
transcendent experience as a student ambassador touring Australia, so I
was feeling especially worldly that summer, toting around my hand-carved
boomerang like I was Crocodile freakin’ Dundee.
We did the customary tours of various theme parks, which my cousin and I
were still young enough to enjoy, but the rest of the time we just sort
of hung out -- getting up late, running around outdoors, playing video
games until our eyes fell out of our sockets.
It was during these moments, the slice-of-life moments, when I really
started to take in my surroundings. And, perhaps unfairly, I was able to
compare it to some very fresh mental images of the land down under.
That
was when I first noticed that almost everything in Florida hurts to
look at. Combining the overbright aesthetic of Las Vegas with the
sun-bleached weariness of a desert shantytown, the landscape and
architecture is by turns piercing and dull -- it’s like a pair of hot
pink boots that have been coated in sand and left outside to dry for
about 2,000 years. Even the vegetation is all sharp
angles and jagged edges. Palm trees have a weapon-esque quality to
them, as though you could rip them from the ground and stab a dragon
with them. This might be cool if dragons actually existed, but alas,
they do not, and so palms have somehow missed their
true calling slashing the breasts of mythical beasts.
Flat,
unvarying terrain does little to help the situation, especially since
said terrain has been developed by businesses to the point of
saturation.
When my cousin got married in 2010 I traveled to Florida yet again, and
my uncle gave me the nickel tour of a 45-minute stretch of highway in
and around the Port Charlotte area. He pointed out various towns as we
passed through them -- “This is Punta Gorda,
this is Englewood Beach” -- but there was nothing distinctive to
discern one municipality from the next. Strip malls gave way to strip
malls, pink gave way to pink. Flat remained flat. Finding a shoe store
or a place to buy a TV would have been a cinch, but
anything resembling local character had been washed away by commerce.
It reminded me of old computer games from the 1980s where you move to
the left side of the screen and then your character reappears on the
right, caught in an endless loop. At least those
ancient games are still fun to play. The only downside is that they
never programmed a Target into King’s Quest, so the hero Roland can
never find a decent place to buy a pacifier and a DVD of “Get Shorty.”
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