Savage Nights

Fat girls, trespassing, high-powered speed boats and savage animal attacks. Bad craziness. The summer comes slow and quiet for Orlando. It's a stealth plague that creeps in on the inhabitants of this doomed city as the brain fry of the deep summer is soon to set its fangs. Everyone can feel it. An awful mix of concrete, drywall, low-grade animal tranquilizers and warm tequila. No water, either. Scary. And Jesus, the NBA playoffs are so one-sided that finding a good bet in this town is impossible. Everyone's burrowing in deep and fast. Distractions are far and few between. It's going to hard to find any good cover.

There is a reason that no one lived in the spine of this state for the first few millennia of its existence. The Indians knew it. They stuck mercifully to the cool breeze of the coast and the restive muck of the deep everglades swamps. Far better than cooking in the middle of a terrible savannah of thunderstorms and rabid panthers. Even the old people that used to grow from this soil like mutated sunflowers stayed far away from this center of depravity. And then the outsiders came in droves. They started building around The Mouse and they leaked in from the pesticide fueled Space Coast. They didn't know what they were getting themselves into. How bad could it be, they figured. Certainly no worse than a January in Cleveland. Ah those poor fools, it can be worse. And now we pay for their greed and unconsciousness with sprawl and brutality.

This place keeps growing. Soon it will sprout out into the warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean as some sadistic peninsula. The orange groves have been flattened and the room to grow is increasingly sparse. Orlando has an interesting take on urban growth; renovate an old decaying shopping center? Ah fuck it, just stomp down some more forest and build a new one. Money for me, money for you. But it creates chaos and ugliness for this poor city. And we only begin to see its true strength when the humidity begins its chokehold. But I'll investigate it to the very end.