It's cooler today than it has been these past couple of days

in the vicinity of Orlando, Florida. I've been all over this city, from

the northern sections to Ocoee to the Disney Resort to the tourist trap

of Kissimmee. And in Kissimmee I stay my nights until I leave here with

mom a few days from now.

While getting my haircut two days ago, the hairstylist said that when
she moved to Kisshee 15 years ago, the place was a small little town
with only a couple of stoplights. She said that hse remembered the days
when the insanely busy intersection of US 192 (Main Street) and Michigan
Avenue ( ! I was a four way stop. It now has six lights: two facing east,
two cfacing west, and two left turn lights in each of those directions.
Kissimmee is the living example (or perhaps dead) of a land, and town

raped. At night it is hard to see driving down US 192 because of the glare

of all the light boards perched atop

signposts, blinking, flashing, vying
for the tourists' attention. There is more neon here on this one street
than I have ever seen before in my life (and that includes my tenure at
Video Watch, the Candylaand of video stores ) . It is seconded in its
garish decadence only my International Drive, west (Ithink) of here, at

one time a quiet city street, now so overcrowded with Hispanic-owned curio

and souvenir shops and so illuminated with neon and lightboards and signs

everywhere that it looks like a tropical Blade Runner. But only a few

miles away is a different place, the quiet, placid Florida country side

where I will be living.

I shall reside in a complex called Pine Club I, in the residential c

m-
unity of MetroWest, a collection of apartment complexes and office buildings

owned my Arnold Palmer. Yes, that one. It's a nice area, far away from

the tourists, and working at Disney, I'm sure

I'll want to be far away.

The contrast between City and Tourist Area and Countyside here is so
often and so sudden that it quite frequently jarrs the mind. The statement
made by the cashier at Alobar, a music and bookstore in the nortern part
of Orlando, sums it up perfectly: when I told him my perceptions of Inter-
national Drive, he looked at me quizzically and said, "International Drive?
God, that's like an entirely different province."
The capitalist rape of the land surrounding the Walt Disney World Resort

is precisely the reason that

01' Uncle Walt bought twenty-six square miles

 o f l a n d t o surround h i s Vacation Kingdom, having l e a r n e d h i s l e s s o n w i t h

i
second- rate g i f t shops k i s s i n g the d o o r s t e p of Disneyland i n C a l i f o r n i a .
When t h e q u e s t s came, h e wanted them t o be a b l e t o escape, and n o t b e bombar-
ded by Vegas- style t a c k t h e moment t h e y opened t h e i r h o t e l c u r t a i n s .
F o r t u n a t e l y , t h i s Motel 6 i s set back from t h e street, s o I am s p a r e d t h e
s i g h t as ell, d e s p i t e t h e f a c t t h a t I ingnore it when I do see it.

More later.

6/11/93 6:51 PM
K i s s k n e e , Florida