Posted by Al Pastor

Once, in the eighties, I remember reading in a book about Rastafrians that when the author visited Kingston in the '70s and saw the industrial and agricultural fires raging all over the city from his landing plane, he suddenly grokked why flame, cleansing and consuming, was the central metaphor and inescapable motif of reggae. If reggae had been born in Orlando, it's central metaphors and inescapable motifs would be heat, buzzards & kudzu, and I might have been able to score a bag of weed while I was down there.

I was surprised at thebuzzards. I knew it was going to be hot and overgrown, with flora fed by the rich, sweet-smelling, hormone & antidepressant-rich detritus of the indigenous and migratory two legged, ice-cream-stained-faced fauna. I haven't found a satisfactory answer to the question of whether they, the buzzards, are recent arrivals or if the predate the Disney anschluss, but they stand around like they own the place, providing a menacing edge to the overgrowth's methodical reclamation, which when compared by itself to a raging conflagrationmight lack a little to the outside observer. There is something confrontational about them, but not aggressive. There is no little sense that they will attack, but even less that they will back down; they are impassive, like stone, except that they could fly if they wanted. They are also the most interesting Florida residents that I encountered, but I was prevented from investigating the Cuban sandwich purveyors and strip bars (which are to the porn industry what the Dominican Republic is to Major League Baseball) in Cocoa Beach.

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It is like gravity is different when I step onto the jetway.. It is like the atmosphere is maple syrup or motor oil, thick, viscous, making your skin feel like there is something you need to get off of it. I was expecting it of course, but there is no way to prepare for it. Whats more, I am still wearing the hoodie I left 68 degree San Francisco in.
It is July 3, the day before the country turns 229, the summer Disneyland turns 50. My mother has decided that we should participate in the Disney celebration because we had a tradition of going to DisneyLAND when my sister and I were kids and we all have memories like faded Kodak snapshots of those sunkissed weeks when we would drive out from Texas and ride the Peter Pan Pirate ships ("OK everbody, here we gooo...") and Pirates of the Caribbean, et al. We attended the 25th Anniversary of Disneyland when I was in 9th grade, which entailed an all night pass tho a half-filled park, sort of like a post-Apocalypse Grad Nite, and the nostalgia and Disney advertising budget and need to get out of New Jersey for a while combined to convince my mother that the family needed to rendezvious in Orlando.

Being a stickler for logic and a true hater of all things related to commercial air travel, I lobbied hard that DisneyLAND was having the anniversary and that we should really go there (where I could drive and get in a little poker at the big LA clubs, as well as just generally basking in the delicious melancoly that is Los Angeles), but it was three to one, and they wanted to bring the dogs, so I got to fly to Florida. " The dogs," by the by, are a
nine year old, schizoprenic, paranoid, amnesiac German Shepard named Frosty and a spoiled, demanding Lhasa Apso named Sam, who demands to sit on your lap but is unable, because of her advanced weight and abbreviated legs to jump even as high as a couch, and who likes to be taken for walks in a pram, and is indulged in this by my mother.

So I fly down to Florida. I had been to Disneyworld once before, back in the daysbefore the terrorists stole our innocence and you could still walk through an airport with a personal-use quantity of dope in your pocket and not have to worry about being trucked off to GITMO. Spending 40 hours a week in a bookstore, though, I was able to get in a little research and learned many troubling facts. One: Walt Disney World, is a region, not a single park, but a megalopolis of parks encompassing The Magic Kingdom, Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT), Disney/MGM Studios &c ad nauseum. Two: The parks would often just shut their doors on really crowded days, leaving people who had bought tickets and three-day passes and what have you, standing at the gates waiting for people to come out so they can be let in, discoteque-style. And, Three: The Fourth of July is the second busiest day of the year, after Thanksgiving. So I fully anticipated getting shut out of the park on day one.

I could go on oand on for pages, and I might just, but it will have to be another time, because I have to go close the store in a few minutes. If I don't get to it, don't worry, you aren't midding anyhting; it's hot, there are some ok roller coasters but nothing spectacular, I remained relatively calm in th face of my family and the absence of drugs.