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Orlando

florida from plane

It’s smells that hit you the hardest sometimes. I find this particularly true of nostalgia. Orlando, was close enough to smell like Fort Lauderdale. It looked like it too. I think it has something to do with the palm trees, or the heat. Perhaps it is the heat. The way it extracts a bit of life from things it touches. Heat inspires sweat, then absorbs it for itself, and partly for you. The black top responds to the sun by boiling up, and the palm trees, well I don’t know how they smell, but I am sure they have their own. I noticed that Orlando smelled like four months ago, and I relished it.

It chose me like a bug bite. The kind that might itch, and you know you’re not supposed to scratch it, but you do, because that lends you a new feeling altogether. And it lingers, for as long as it might like, present and not present, conscious and unconscious, day by day. So, at night, after my work was done, beer scratched my nostalgia.

We’d made many trips to this part of the state, this square in the midst of the world. It was a bar on the main drag, not far from Orange County Convention Center. It was a bar that was in the middle and stood out. You could see/hear two bands at once while hiding to the side of the action. Robert, Derek and I always went to a Mexican restaurant/bar on International drive during our trade shows in Orlando. Slightly homelier, in a sea of tourist bars. This was the place that had regulars, like the Chef. I always saw him at the end of the bar, still dressed in a white smock, smoking cigarettes and unwinding. The local bar, in the tourist section.

“I’ll have a dos equis on draft,” I said to the blonde bartender that I’d seen here every time. I hoped she’d recognize me. I wasn’t sure that she did. “Sad that the Dos Equis spokesman resigned,” I thought, “I wonder if he was sad too.”

The brain pours thought like draught beer, fizzy at first and smooth after a while. So I sipped. Things change like poorly written chapters sometimes. Ones, that are too abrupt, and interrupt the book. Then you don’t know where the story is taking you. Characters don’t retire like they should, they reappear later and out of context. Some should stay longer. Some show promise of developing with the story, and they don’t. That’s hard.

Setting, I think it’s called setting, in a narrative. The setting has so much influence on the characters, I never got that. “I should pay more attention to place,” I thought, and I looked around.

Amongst the drunks were the locals and the wanderers. This bar attracted the type of tourist I was, wanting to believe they belonged. Some did more than I did, and I wondered how long that lasts. Some seemed steeped in more permanence than I knew I had ever achieved. After three years in south Florida, I was only a tourist too. Especially, in Orlando.

I scratched my arm, it was just dry. Everyone knows that there’s no mosquitos in Florida this time of year.

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