I digress

I came back to my room after a long and information filled day at Articulate Live 09 and, after changing into my evening attire, I sat down to collect my thoughts about the day, review my notes, answer my email...but there was just too much. My mind was a jumble. I needed to turn off my brain for a bit. Oh hey, TV! Perfect! A vice I don't indulge at home (accept a few Hulu guilty pleasures).

It was a mistake.

I'm not pleased at Hilton's transparently cynical game of hiding regular TV, buried at the end of long menu of pay options, that you have to go through every time you want to switch the channel. What's the point of even having a remote? After much frustration, I eventually decided on the History channel. But nothing there about the Tower of London, or the reign of the emperor Ashoka, or even what I had come to think of as the History Channel stock in trade: endless and apparently unedited interviews with WWII vets over stock footage of Kamikaze planes crashing into the Pacific. No, the History Channel was showing the scourge of ultra-violent gangs sweeping across the country. Ack! No! Change the channel...3 minutes of menu shuffling later: Wolf Blitzer was droning on about the sinking global economy. O forget it.

So I went out for a walk.

March in the afternoon in Orlando feels oddly like late August in the evening in northern California, only humid. The fresh air felt better that the hotel AC, but it made me feel even more displaced and homesick. I wandered West...I guess almost instinctively. Like I was following the setting sun to the ocean, but that's wrong too here. I didn't walk far before I ended up at the gates of Downtown Disney. What the hell. When in Roman.

Just a few months ago I was at the mirror coast version of this bizarre 21 century corporate bazaar and wasn't nearly as creeped out. Why was I so completely creeped out today? It's partly because I was sans kids toady. Disney with kids gives you a clean and innocent take on it, or does so for me anyway. Seeing Disneyland through my kids eyes lets me turn off my cynical and suspicious mind. I can let go of the corporate, marketed, targeted, manipulation of experience and just enjoy the creative, designed...and yes, Goddammit, the MAGIC of the place. Also, with my wife there I was just happier, more open to the positive aspects. Love, not even new love, but comfortable old love, love that's been hanging on and hanging tough for the better part of 2 decades is willing to let a body relax and play.

But the Magic Kingdom without loved ones is a strange and inhospitable place. All the cynical aspects of Disney are in sharp relief when you are alone. The global downturn, recession, death-spiral, whatever it is, has apparently not reached the Magic Kingdom. I don't think I have ever seen so many overfeed, IPhone-toting, expensively- yet casually-shod consumers slurping down junk food in my life. And the smell! What is it with that Disney smell? I associate it with the rides, and I used to think it had something to do with the chlorine of the water rides, but I smell it just as strongly waiting in line for Peter Pan or Snow White as I do Pirates. And it is there, in spades, in Downtown Disney. It must be something in the stuff they use to fashion all the textured facades and such. Some kind of latex/fiberglass/cement stuff. And again when I'm with the family, it smells like, fun and excitement. But alone it just smells like a billion dollar smirk.

I thought that perhaps with all this consumerism around I could find a bookstore to buy a magazine or a book. But it turns out that downtown Disney has at least that much in common with the real world: Just like our town of San Rafael (which incidentally 20 years ago had no less then 6 independent bookstores downtown) Downtown Disney has no bookstore.

I return defeated, and started working my way through my notes and email.

I watched Heroes tonight. The first time I've ever watched it on TV, not on Hulu. I delighted in the silly fantasy and gritty dark edge. I moaned in frustrated disgust at the vapid and voluminous ads. I was in ecstasy when an incidental character quoted a John Hodgman bit from This American Life. Even though Heroes is not part of my family life at home, it made me feel comfortable and at home.

It's a strange, strange world.