Checking In

Wednesday, October 9

My trips to Florida are not of general interest.  I go to see my college friend, who lives alone in Avon Park, which is an hour and a bit south of Orlando.  I had got an airbnb room in Fort Lauderdale because I’m old, and it wouldn’t be safe for me to drive three hours to Avon Park after a flight I wouldn’t have slept on.  The airbnb was actually an off-season beach area motel.  It had been fitted with keying technology that would obviate the necessity of having anyone on site.  Why is “necessity” the only thing that gets “obviated”?  Anyway, I went in, slept, and left.  I bought food for the drive to Avon Park.  Some time after noon, I arrived at the Jacaranda Hotel, another of the Grande Dames of the central Florida vacation circuit of one hundred years ago.  It opened in 1926, ten years after the Kenilworth Lodge in Sebring, which was closed after a fire in 2016, and has not reopened because it can’t be brought up to code economically.  I always used to stay at the Kenilworth.

Another example of generation-skipping:  The Hotel Jacaranda plays Swing music.  You’d have to be a centenarian for that to be your music.  Maybe there are some centenarians; but most of the guests seem only a little older than me, maybe from the Elvis and Beatles eras.  Perhaps they have made peace with their parents’ music.  It seems to be an ongoing thing among supercentenarians, to have merged your identity with that of your forbears, and nobody around and Retronaut not having been invented yet, to call you on it.  Maybe subcentenarians do it, too.

(I do hope that Jeanne Louise Calment is the real deal.  122 years is not that horrible an outlier when there are nearly a dozen around 117 and even one 119.  The recently reported unlikelihood of the 1913 record of 134 degrees Fahrenheit, 56.7° C, at Furnace Creek was a studious bit of computer modeling.  I guess you could call it “research”.  Remember always to call it please…)

It rained off and on, in a tropical way.

I went to Mike’s house.  We went shopping.  Sebring has an Aldi’s now.  It is good to have an alternative to Walmart.  Mike shops as he always has, a true Floridian.  Lots of canned goods for those moments of civilized breakdown.  He has also got a new generator.  Hurricane season goes until November 30.

Thursday, October 10

There is a wing in the Jacaranda hotel called “dorm wing” with some rules I can’t make out through the locked glass door across from the laundry room.  I thought based on the community that it would be a bunch of old guys who couldn’t even pony up for Single Room Occupancy hotels, but I have seen three people going into that glass door, and they have all been fit twenty-year-olds.  The first one I saw, yesterday, was in a baseball uniform.  My thought then was he was the grandson of a geezer, or a hired Gerasim, but that isn’t true. Now I figure it’s a Christian fellowship that houses its acolytes in pairs on the theory they can talk each other out of masturbating unless the scoutaster’s around…hmm…I meant to type “scoutmaster” but “scoutaster” sounds like a fail of interest, the lost Sherpa….By “fit” I mean they aren’t obvious meth addicts.  Not fit like gym bunnies.

(that is a nearly unedited note from my vade mecum for the date mentioned.)

Mike told me later, that the dorm belongs to a school sharing the Jacaranda, and it is a culinary school.  Being a fit school athlete in a culinary school must be transitory and an exercise in willpower.  Bright College Days.  I hope they’re still friends in five decades.

We began at a nominally Greek restaurant in Avon Park for old people’s dinner, scheduled for people who go to bed at sundown and wake up at 3 AM to tweet.  The Olympic was having its 40th anniversary party.  There was a raffle of sorts; they handed out tickets.  It seems as though everyone won something.  Mike got a coupon for a dessert and I won a steak.  The waiter told me they accidentally served the steak to customers, so he gave me a coupon for one.  I gave that coupon to Mike.

There are not a lot of places to eat in that conurbation.  The most authentic, probably, is Homer’s Smorgasbord.  Homer is nearly centenarian himself, and walks around and greets the customers.

Olympic is the other place to go.  There is a Cuban diner south of Sebring, but the Indian restaurant moved to Broward County.

Afterwards we spent another couple of hours at Walmart, where Mike finished restocking after a month of empty refrigerator because his car is broken.  He says that people don’t deliver here, except Pizza Hut.  There was a tower of pizza boxes, to the ceiling, in his living room, but Boo (the cat) knocked it over.

Then back to his house to watch the last part of The Black Cat, followed by Night of the Demon.  The director has said in interviews that the studio insisted on showing the demon.  I am on the side of the director — the demon should have been left to the imagination.  Like all horror movies of the time, it was heavy with the symbolism of anti-Communism.  The liberals defy the reality of the Communist threat, and so the demon must be shown as unequivocally real.  Socialist Realism demands it.

Friday, October 11

The breakfast at the Jacaranda is not from the culinary school.  I ate a pop tart and some instant grits.  The pop tart is as bad as I had imagined.

I drove back to Fort Lauderdale and got on a plane to Texas, the next stop on my American voyage.  Amarillo is where I visit my friend from the 1970’s, who is in prison there fairly indefinitely.  The Southwest flight attendants are still comedians:

“They haven’t taught us how to deflate the vests: if you want to learn how to deflate, talk to Tom Brady.”

I saw a big meteor descend into the Gulf of Mexico, near Houston.

Again, a hotel near the airport in Dallas, to drive out in the morning.  The trio checking in before me were large and Fear Of A Black Planet but when they spoke they were like, Oh, Mary! so that brought up the next prejudice in the filmstrip.  It doesn’t matter who you are, snap racial judgment enters into it.  I was all ready to deal with Bull Connor when I got pulled over at a speed trap in Florida a few years back, forgetting that I wasn’t a hippie any more, but Duck Dynasty!  The officer was all “have a nice day, sir”.  You cannot seriously argue that that would have been the outcome if I were young and brown, and the only people making that argument are mendacious slitherers who approve of institutional racism.

Saturday, October 12

I drove to Amarillo and had a four-hour visit through glass.  Then I went to Motel 6 where my reservation had been lost.  I wrote a review on TripAdvisor:

“There was nothing wrong with the property, but Expedia did not successfully transmit the reservation. Anyway, the staff figured it out, my presence in the office wasn’t even required.”

I tried to place the above sentences on the Expedia website. Expedia wrote back to me just now:

“Your review has not been approved.”

Hahahahaha. Which of their terms and conditions do you suppose triggered this warning? Profanity? Personal Information? Inappropriate photos?

This is a perfectly decent Motel 6. There’s a nice Mexican restaurant across the street. When I was staying there, some major construction was happening on the street, making access difficult sometimes, but the room was not noisy. The highway department must be done by now.”

The Mexican restaurant is El Charro and it’s decent, too.  Pork and nopales, up from pork nipples.  A young man came in selling beef jerky table to table.

Sunday, October 13

Another prison visit, and the five-hour drive back to Dallas Love Field for the flight home.  For some reason, they wanted to see everything in my carry-on.  If it made any sense, it could be gamed.  The man who was stacking the trays at the inspection place thought he had inconvenienced me somehow.  Where most people would say “excuse me,” he introduced himself and shook my hand.  Some psychological trick, I assume.  My friend in Clements Unit says he’s afraid of airplanes.  He lives in a prison with the highest percent of life without paroles in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice system.

The safety announcement was played straight on this Southwest flight.  The last one, the flight attendant said, “if you haven’t been in a car since the 1940’s, your seat belt…” It is interesting the level of experience in flying that the airlines can assume.  I wonder how many flights carry anyone who hasn’t been on a plane before?  Maybe the flights to Orlando have more: first trip to Disney World.

Isn’t it nice to be home again.