I lived in Florida for five and a half years. Part of it was spent finishing high school in Daytona Beach; the other half was spent rushing through a four-year degree at what was then called Florida Technological University (now the University of Central Florida) in Orlando. Being a northeastern boy, spending the latter half of my teen and early adult years in Florida was a big change. Overall, Florida did not agree with me. After graduation, I migrated back north to the Washington D.C. area where I have been happily but expensively abiding ever since.
Florida was too weird for my tastes: too hot, too humid, too old, too flat and too much weird nature including giant armor-plated rats (armadillos), pervasive monster-sized cockroaches and conjugating bugs. During mating season, “love bugs” would smear your windshields and gunk up your radiator grills. It was also too conservative: Baptist churches overwhelmed the religious landscape. Anita Bryant got tired of selling orange juice while I was there and found it convenient to attack gays and liberals instead. While Orlando seemed a much more happening place than Daytona Beach, not enough of the right stuff (like jobs) was happening there to make me hang around.
The Florida panhandle remained unexplored territory until business took me to Tallahassee last week. I wondered, would it be more of the Florida I remembered or much different culturally and climatologically?
Four nights in Tallahassee in October are not long enough to say for sure. One thing surprised me: Tallahassee has hills. Granted, they would hardly qualify as hills in most other states but they are enough to be noticeable. Perhaps that is why Florida put its capitol building on a Tallahassee hill. From there you can look down on the state, such as it is.
Yet what of the rest of Tallahassee? The trip from the very laid back Tallahassee airport to my hotel was not encouraging. It tells you something when you routinely pass by business establishments with iron bars in front of their windows and doors. Happily, the neighborhoods improved as we moved toward the center of the city. Our hotel just east of the capitol on Apalachee Parkway seemed situated in a more prosperous and growing area of the city. It came complete with an Applebees and a mall.
The Washington area is hardly known for its low humidity. Nonetheless, the humidity in Tallahassee, which hit us from the moment we disembarked our plane, was pervasive. During our five days and four nights, it never abated. The Courtyard Inn where we stayed was reasonably upscale. Even so, the effects of living in a humid climate were impossible to mask. The cold air coming from my air conditioner unit was cold enough, but it also smelled of mildew.
I have returned to Central Florida a number of times since I left in 1978. In many ways, particularly around the Orlando area, it has grown cosmopolitan. The same does not feel true of Tallahassee. It may host two large universities. It may have nicer areas on its northeastern side. Many roads may even come with bike trails, a nice touch I also saw in my last business trip to Madison, Wisconsin. At its heart, Tallahassee feels good ol’ boy redneck, with a dash of Cajun thrown in. There are Starbucks in Tallahassee, but proportionately far fewer than in most cities. A search on Google Maps shows only eight Starbucks in the entire city. This was a source of consternation to our group, for whom quality coffee was critical. The Carmel flavored water represented as coffee at the Courtyard Inn didn’t quite do the trick.
There was a dearth of other expected institutions in certain parts of the city. I take these for granted elsewhere. Where I live you cannot walk two blocks without tripping over an ATM or a bank branch. In certain parts of this city, ATMs and banks were simply unavailable. You could drive for miles on the major roads and find neither. Maybe in these neighborhoods people like from paycheck to paycheck. Maybe they use neighborhood cash checking businesses instead. However, I found the lack of banks in many areas of the city disturbing.
Also disturbing were the number of obese citizens in Tallahassee. Maybe obesity is part of the good ol’ boy culture. Thank goodness for the students, who generally have fewer weight problems. They provide some balance to a city that is disproportionately not just overweight, but obese. Perhaps the obesity is one consequence of farm subsidies, which have made grains and processed foods so plentiful and cheap, while pushing up the cost of quality vegetables and fruits. A doctor specializing in diabetes should consider moving to Tallahassee. He would have no lack of clients, particularly among the African American community. I imagine Glucophage manufacturers would want to set up special distribution outlets in Tallahassee to handle the demand.
Wherever I go on my employer’s dime, I try to take in some of regional cuisine. As you would expect being near the Gulf coast, there is plenty of seafood, as well as Cajun cooking in Tally. I have not yet been to New Orleans, but I suspect the Cajun cooking we sampled is not quite as good as what you can find there. Naturally, being in the South, finding grits and black-eyed peas on the menu was a given. Barbeque joints are also popular. The hardest kind of food to find in Tallahassee is the quality healthy kind. There are no Whole Foods in Tallahassee. I am not sure a Whole Foods store would be commercially viable there. The obesity epidemic in the city is no doubt fed by the many, many greasy fast food joints available in the city.
One upside to living in Tallahassee is that it is a cheap place to live. 1960’s era housing, particularly the run down three-bedroom ranch type house with a carport can be had for a song. While you may not get the variety of foods found elsewhere, at least food is cheap. A retiree looking to pinch some pennies could pinch many pennies living in Tallahassee.
Overall, my northeastern biases are probably showing. If you prefer relatively slow traditional Southern living with some of the advantages of living in a city, Tallahassee should meet your needs rather well. While in Madison, Wisconsin at the end of September, I was impressed enough by the city to mention it to my wife as a possible retirement community. I think we can rule out Tallahassee as a place to spend our golden years. Nonetheless, I was glad to becoming acquainted with Tallahassee, although my acquaintance is likely to remain fleeting.
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October 21st, 2007 at 11:42am
Posted by
Mark |
Travel |
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When I feel a desire to look at porn there is no better place than the privacy of my personal computer. Thanks to the Internet, Usenet and high speed cable modems porn is available at no real cost (aside from internet access) for those who want it.
But I assumed that porn was still dirty. I assumed there was still some stigma attached to it. The dearth of strip clubs and adult “bookstores” (as they used to quaintly be called) here in Northern Virginia suggested to me that porn was still socially unacceptable. Even the men’s magazines at the local Barnes & Noble are wrapped in plastic.
I know there are a couple places in my county where hardcore pornography can be procured. I stumbled on one a few miles from my house some months back that I never knew existed. Who knew that MVC Video wasn’t a competitor to Blockbuster? I know of a hole in the wall in Fairfax City and have heard rumors of such an establishment in Springfield. Needless to say of course nothing on the shelves at the local Blockbusters ever gets beyond an R rating. We have no strip clubs in Fairfax County and I’m sure zoning wouldn’t permit it. But we do have one and only one Hooters down in Fairfax City. This is as ribald as Fairfax County gets.
So I figured most who needed a porn fix were getting it safely and discretely online. No need to suffer the glare of the morally sanctimonious clerk anymore. Basically I assumed we were still ashamed of it. If we had a Penthouse or a Hustler we were hiding it under the mattress.
But my recent excursion to Florida suggested that I was entirely wrong. At least in Florida, porn is mainstream.
Not that Orlando (where I stayed) was overwhelmed with strip clubs and adult video stores. It tries to project a family image. I knew strip clubs could still probably be found on South Orange Blossom Trail somewhere, unless things had changed in the thirty years since I lived in Orlando. (I got my undergraduate degree from the University of Central Florida.) Most likely prostitution is still available somewhere on the trail too.
I can’t claim to have spent vast amounts of time in adult bookstores. But what I remember from the few I visited in DC before they were driven off 14th Street was they were dank places that smelled like a men’s room that had never been cleaned. And if you were expecting a woman to be a patron, you had best wait for a blue moon. It seemed to be a place for older men in trench coats to frequent. But the common denominator, aside from the bad hygiene, was that they felt sinful. That was part of their allure. You hoped that no one you knew happened to be in the neighborhood when you dodged into the store. But you enjoyed the thrill that maybe just maybe you might be caught. Or maybe just maybe you might find your minister perusing the BDSM magazines.
Fast forward to Orlando in 2004. I am there on business and looking for T-shirts to bring home to the wife and daughter. And nearby is this adult “emporium” establishment, awash in nice inviting bright lights. I hardly recognized the place because it looked so entirely ordinary. From the outside it might have been a drug store. Well it wasn’t much out of my way so I popped into the store, figuring here in Orlando at least the older men didn’t need trench coats.
It turned out I was the closest thing to an older man in the place. Behind the counter were two happy young ladies (presumably over 18) smiling and welcoming me into the store like they were Wal-Mart greeters or something. I figured this had to be the wrong place because, well, there was a woman behind the counter and it was so darn bright in there. And also it was clean. And it didn’t smell. And there was Muzak on the speaker system. And just behind the counter were rows and rows of adult videos, DVDs, books, marital aids and other assorted adult novelties.
So I’m walking up and down the aisles. It’s an extensive place: a veritable superstore of adult merchandise. There’s the anal sex aisle, there’s the oral sex aisle, there is a portion of an aisle devoted to gangbangs, the compulsory lesbian area, an extensive gay sex area, and specialty areas devoted to those into (I swear I am not making this up) grandmothers, midgets and pre-op transgender folk.
And not only are there women behind the counter, there are women walking the aisles, sometimes with a boyfriend or two in tow, sometimes together. Well knock me over with a soda straw! Women come into these places on their own initiative! The very idea! To be fair the women seemed less interested in the selection of DVDs and videos and more interested in the vibrator and lube section of the store.
I expected people to maybe be wearing dark glasses but everyone is so casual and chatty it’s like no big deal. There is even a teen wandering around who couldn’t have been 18 … who let him into the store?
And everything was wrapped or encased in plastic (for security, presumably). The DVDs and videos are adorned with lurid XXX pictures leaving no detail to the imagination. There were shiny wet human orifices opened for your viewing, often inserted with all sorts of things, some human, some artificial. If you are squeamish about body fluids it’s not a great place to visit. But clearly the patrons were nonplussed. Maybe they were shocked the first time they came in. But now they seemed inured. They seemed almost bored. It made me wonder why they were there.
In fact I quickly found out, much to my surprise, that I was bored by the place. Surely I thought there must be something in this vast superstore that would appeal to my prurient interest. But I couldn’t find a thing. Oddly it all seemed the same. It was like Sam Walton was running a porno superstore.
I am upset. Someone changed the rules. Everything was all hanging out but it was boring. It didn’t feel sinful. If I were still a Catholic I wouldn’t have even bothered bringing it up in confession. Where can a teenager go these days to feel guilty about something? Porn was a great but safe way to feel guilty, naughty and rebellious. Over the last 20 years the material seems to be a lot more lurid than I remembered it. Everything is now designed to be more shocking. But in the process porn has become so over the top that nothing is shocking.
Sometime over the last twenty years or so (when I obviously wasn’t looking) pornography became mainstream. I am sure there are plenty of places in the United States where it can’t be purchased locally. But in the home of Anita Bryant this particular culture war seems to have been won by the progressives. Pornography is not going to go back in the closet. It’s been mainstreamed. Somewhere doubtless there is a company specializing in the stuff on the Fortune 500. It’s been mass marketed and mass merchandised. Stores have been redesigned to be inviting to women. I have to assume women too must have secretly lusted for this stuff but felt too intimidated (until recently) to actually go into one of these stores. Those days are gone.
But I am also sad and nostalgic. Without the allure of shame and sin, can pornography survive? Will we reach the point of such saturation that women have to return to petticoats for a few generations so we can appreciate it again?
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April 26th, 2004 at 08:17pm
Posted by
Mark |
Sociology |
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Back from a MySQL User Conference in Orlando, Florida. It was a good conference and perhaps a lead for a future topic on how open source software is going to either kill or fundamentally change Microsoft at some point.
While I was there I took a couple hours to see my sister Lee Ann (along with her husband Rick) at a Steak and Ale Restaurant off International Drive in Orlando.
International Drive is the ritzy area of town and full of tourists sick of Disney World. Lots of places to spend money and the competition must be rough, because apparently in order to entice tourists to part with their money, they have to deliberately construct upside down buildings.
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April 16th, 2004 at 09:57pm
Posted by
Mark |
Travel |
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