The Driving Vacation

We recently went to Florida. We drove. Plane fares were high. You know so let's take the family vacation and drive. This goes all the way back to when I was a kid and we took driving vacations across the country. Fond memories of being in the back of a station wagon with dad driving and mom navigating What fun! So we begin. The drive immediately asserts itself as an exercise of interminable boredom. That is what you forget. That there is absolutely nothing to do for twenty three hours. Except to eat.

And we ate. McDonalds. Panera. Burger King. Every gas station under the sun where we bought just about every thing they had to offer. And then you sit in your electric chair and don't move. I drive and drive and drive. The landscape is interesting for a while and then it is not. It is just scenery to the brain thudding exercise of driving a car down a road with trucks and cars and people honking and cutting you off. What fun!

And the car becomes a rolling garbage truck. Amazing the amount of garbage such a trip can produce. But we start to fill up and have to unload at every stop and fill fifty five gallon drums with  our fast food detritus. And then we get close and push through and by now you are bleary eyed and bloated from sitting and eating for two days. You have come to hate the capsule you have been stuck in for two days and swear never ever to do this again.

And when you arrive you feel like a voyager who has reached a distant planet. You will never do this again. NO more Wallyworld. No more Chevy Chase in Vacation. You are done. Sure you are.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Disney has changed

Some would call it a horror. Some would call it a Mecca. Some would call it a hell of a good time. But lurking under that vision of Mickey Mouse child-dom is an amusement park. And every amusement park has a bit of the carney lurking in the corners. The guy with no teeth running the rides or the trucks blasting diesel smoke from a generator in the back. And Disney is no exception except everyone does have teeth and there are no diesel generators. What there is is thousands of people and millions upon million in infrastructure to keep the illusion in place

And it is all about buying ultimately. You buy to get in there and once inside you continue buying everything. It is the Mecca of American consumerism...the manna of all the pitches you heard as a kid now attached to every product under the sun. And the middle class is buried somewhere under all this branding as they trudge from one ride to another eating pretty bad overpriced food and buying Mickey Mouse ears for themselves, their kids, grandmothers. And yet this is what everyone came for.

And Disney world is for kids and there is magic. Maybe not in the over run cafeteria style foodaramas where things get a little disgusting or in the hip hop music where kids are doing the Harlem Slide or singing lyrics that are really all about sex. But Disney has had to morph to popular culture because Disney's blood is popular culture and so the thump thump thump of gangsta rap rewritten into something more palatable for families chases you as you run from one mile long line to another and wait for hours for ten minutes of pleasure.

And as the fireworks break over Magic Kingdom you think maybe it was always this way. Maybe Disney World has not changed at all.
Maybe we have.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man...the American dream upside down