Action

I've moved back to Melbourne Beach and I must say that I love many aspects of the area. The environment is sensational (what's left of it), the surf is nearby, the bars, although strange and introverted, have a certain charm to them. It's a nice area.

And anyone who's lived here for any amount of time knows one thing for sure: It's quiet. Not just literally quiet, but quiet intellectually and politically. It isn't that there aren't smart people here; it's just that they live in a very comfortable bubble. They're never challenged. There are never any tough questions in this area, and because of that living here becomes a slow but steady soma. Of course, I've always known this about the Space Coast. It's actually part of its charm, as well as its poison.

But one thing I didn't realize until I moved back here was just how potent the action was back in Orlando. That's right, even that back-woods mutated orange grove of a city was running at a high level. It may have been wingless, but it was still a Boeing god-damn it!

Living there, I didn't even realize that I was always in the middle of some strange socio-political experiment, or debate, and I was always swinging wildly. Ah, those unmarked letters to Rich Crotty, or Bob Allen, wondering who sold the most souls. Those passed many an hour. I was either fighting for stadiums or against coaches, ripping the infrastructure of the City Beautiful mercilessly, or convincing interns to search for the Florida Panthers that undoubtedly roamed around the old UCF stadium area late on moonless nights (and, in fact, probably still do, but that's a different story).

All that action…But it takes something pretty volatile to penetrate the 90-mile bubble that now isolates me from the big city. So when 3 members of Orlando's underground newspaper, The Orlando Weekly, were arrested by the M.B.I. (Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation, literally Orlando's secret police) at a Job Fair (which they were sponsoring), the seal was suddenly broken. It's the kind of headline and situation that holds Orlando back from even being muttered in the same breath with other legitimate cities. And it is a story that gets the brew stirring deep and heavy. I'll be tearing into it like a juicy uncooked piece of Memphis pork in tomorrows post. As of this hour, I'm still collecting names, shooting off e-mails and massaging informants for all the tension they can give me. Even miles away, I can feel the action creeping back to the fingers.