Lately I've been writing about Disney World a lot. In fact I have about ten stories finished - you can read three or four of them below - and hope to have about twenty before I call it a book.

The thing is, I've never been there. The times I was in Florida, I never had the money, or the time, and in spite of having ten children, same - never had a few thousand to drop.

But this doesn't seem to be a problem. I can put almost anything into Google and get reams of information about it. It's almost like you can walk through a door into an alternate universe. All of a sudden, Mickey and Minnie are real, and there's a host of other characters. Thousands of employees will tell you what it was like to work there. Usually they are able to explain how the Disney culture is different from the culture around.

Disney is extremely well marketed to the upper-middle class American entertainment needs. It has managed to stay at the top of its game for fifty years and, in spite of raising its prices astronomically at every turn, keeps the park full and the money rolling in. Their marketing is based on perpetuating the "happiest place on earth" idea and quickly eliminating anything that might tarnish that image. I'm not down on them for squashing people's right to say something negative - they're not after me now, for example - I think it's part of good marketing. If employees agreed not to say anything negative, hold them to it. What's interesting to me is the fantasy/reality line - that is, when people genuinely get confused about what's real and what's not, and Disney does nothing or doesn't quite know how to deal with the problem. There are a lot of people, for example, who stalk or fall in love with the Disney characters. Not the people who play them, the characters. There are people who are living the fantasy. I could in fact use my book to explore schizophrenia and why it is that some people just slip into a fantasy world, since the real one is putting too much pressure on them.

Instead I am mostly using it to explore the American family - husband, wife, two kids - in all its glory. Maybe I'll do the other kinds of families too, step-families, large families, no-kid families, I'm not sure how. In the modern world we don't really have much of the upper middle class, two-kid families anymore, so in a sense I'm investigating what's left of them. Who actually goes to Disney World? What happens when they get there? In what ways to the various folk tales that this whole world is built around, affect their experience?

It's a rich vein for a book, lots here. You might be mad at me for writing about some place I haven't even set foot in. But in fact I've read and read about it. I avoid some areas of it; there is no way I can cover it all. And within it are entire worlds - each movie, for example, has its own entire culture, with its characters represented and played out somewhere within WDW - which makes me even more of an interloper, since I can't possibly know them all.

Ah but that's who I am. This is as close as I'll get to the place.

There's a house across the street from the abatement that we use to get out of our garage and onto the street, such that, as we face the street for the first time when leaving our house, that house is right there in front of us. It's white, old, and traditional, and has a small front porch. When we moved here there was a chair on that porch and a guy would be sitting in it every once in a while.

There were a couple of break-ins in our garage that October, as we were still moving in, got covid, and were a little unorganized, and I had failed to lock the garage and even left the window open enough for someone to crawl in after removing the screen. I kicked myself and vowed to keep the garage locked from then on, a vow I have had trouble keeping. But soon after, the guy in that white house was arrested for breaking in to other houses around town and I became convinced that he was responsible for our break-ins too. I peered over at that house, now empty, and the chair on the porch, but restrained myself from just marching over there and fishing through whatever he had. Instead I wrote a letter to the police saying I'm pretty sure he would have X, Y & Z and let me know if you find these among his stolen goods. They never even responded.

The guy who moved in after him had New Mexico license plates on his car, but kept to himself pretty much, and lived there right up until this last August. I kept meaning to walk over and grill him about New Mexico, as we'd moved here from New Mexico also, but I never did, and he was gone before I could. In September a black family moved in with two small children in diapers, who would be out there when the mother was mowing the lawn. The chair was put on the curb about two weeks ago.

It was an old leather reclining chair with a couple holes in the leather, and as I drove onto the street I'd look at it and wonder if we could use it anywhere. I hate seeing old furniture go out to the dump if there's any possible use for it. So I said that to this kid who has been staying with us. His family lives in extreme poverty; his sister is pregnant with a baby and in general he was having trouble, so we just let him stay with us. What I told him was, in general I like to save chairs like that although my wife is not so crazy about that; it looks like maybe you boys could use that chair somewhere, in the attic if nowhere else.

Well, he and my son hauled in the chair, and in the process, found a $100 bill in it. It was the kid who found it, apparently, not my son. Without thinking I told him, I'd probably return it to that family, them being a family and all, but you found it, you can do what you want.

Later it occurred to me that chances were pretty good the family knew nothing about the hundred dollar bill. In fact the kid from New Mexico probably knew nothing about it either. I think in its own way it was what was left of our stuff, coming back to us.

I think the kid is using it, a bit at a time, for his sister's baby and his own needs. First he has to cash it; nobody believes him that he just found it. But that will resolve itself in time. I meant it when I said, it was his to do with as he wanted. It was a somewhat privileged outlook of mine to be able to say, return it, you can always get more money. I could always get more money, but in his shoes, I'd have a harder time returning it. And the other aspects of the back story didn't really fall into place for me until later. When I said that, I'd only been thinking of the family.