23 May 2009
 
Mouse Land in Rain

I am still a little weary from the week. I slept in until after six this morning, trying to replenish the batteries.
 
We attended a major conference about information technology and warfighting down in Orlando last week.
 
It was a cautious success, I think, since we rolled out some corporate firepower , and the company booth was nice. I have a backpack full of trinkets from the trade-show floor, which featured a lot of vendors talking to one another, and periodic delegations of "VIPs" which included mid-grade bureaucrats, an Air Force Senior Master Sergeant and an Army Warrant Officer. 
 
That is all fine, but I sensed a whiff of desperation in all the glitz, this thing having been planned before we drove the economy off the cliff, and long before the election of the charming man who occupies the White House now. 
 
Above all things, coming down, there=2 0was the rain. It came in drizzle and sheets accompanied by fierce booms and sideways lightning. I wondered that the people of the Mouse were able to gamely put on their fireworks show each night at nine sharp.
 
The rockets flew up into the cotton sky, the color of the explosions muted red and white. My room on the tenth floor of the North Tower of the Marriott World Center faced Mouse Land, two or more miles away.
 
Two or three times a day I would trudge back and forth, the resort restaurants jammed with convention patrons, and eating from the food car ts with $8.00 ham sandwhiches and $2.00 mini-bags of chips. It came to a dime a chip. I counted.
 
Great Pharaonic structures are built in that direction against the low green horizon; at the distance I could not see if the tiny protuberances dotting a large bridge-like structure that, if memory, served, where actually gigantic green faux marble busts of Mickey Mouse. 
 
From my line of sight on the balcony, the golf-ball dome of the Environmental Prototype Community of Tomorrow- EPCOT- was mostly concealed by a fantastic structure that might have been inten ded to resemble a land-bound ocean liner. Flanking the beached structure was the Nickelodeon compound in blue and white neon. 
 
Mostly it was gray rain against green vegetation.
 
I was mostly a booth-babe at the convention, hanging out at the company pavilion, laminating luggage tags out of business cards for visitors and furtively checking e-mail back in Washington.
 
I had a chance to share a few words on the convention floor with the redoubtable Major General John M. Custer of Fort Huachuca. He is and intense man with the face of a raptor and the poised energy of coiled steel. He is the Army’s premier digital thinker, and his keynote speech challenged the contractor community to understand the world in which his troops must live and fight. He came to the company booth with his pilot-fish of digital cammie-clad aides.
 
I complemented him on his cogent reprimand from his address, directed to those who told him to "think outside the box."
 
"I AM the box!" he thundered from the stage, rising to full height, badges on his green dress blouse flashing in the spotlights. "I am an Army Major General. I have checked all kinds of boxes to become one. Do not expect me to change. Do expect to listen to my requirements."
 
He had quite a moving speech, and I liked him enormously. He talked about the generations, too. He said there are those who do not understand the digital age in the slightest and those who visit it like us, able to poke keys and use the Internet for basic function.
 
And then there are those to whom the digits are the stuff of life itself, immersed, enmeshed and woven into the warp and woof of an invisible world.
 
From the stage, flanked by enormous Jumbotron images of himself, the general made the digital divide real. He said that his daughter, who is in her early twenties, had never owned a record album. When she found a collection of the general's old discs, he used them with her- as skeet targets for the shotgun. 
 
I take it all with a grain of salt, though the kernel of truth is at the root of the hyperbole. 
 
I was going to relax in Mouse-land after the Captains and the Kings departed the conference, but the sadists back in Washington invented a crisis that required personal attention, and found myself blinking on the ground Thursday morning, early bright, in the brilliant sunshine of northern Virginia.
 
It was all on its head, the Florida Weather here and the gray rain of early spring down there. The roar of the motorcycles says it is almost Memorial Day.
 
The pool at Big Pink opens this morning. I never did get in the pool down in Mouse Land, though it looked magnificent, all cascading levels and swim-up bar. I suppose I was concerned about getting wet on the way to get in the water.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com