Chris Nicholson's Writing Weblog
September 25, 2005 • Sunday
A few days ago I was in a town just north of Tampa, Fla., population 50,000. The town consists entirely of gated communities populated by retired people. The town is designed for old people.
The restaurants are few and mostly budget-conscious. McDonald's, Denny's, Subway, Cracker Barrel. The other retail businesses consist mostly of pharmacies, musical instruments, medical supplies, hearing aids (entire stores devoted to hearing aids), walkers. There are also golf stores. The other businesses come in clusters, and they dominate the landscape of nearly every shopping strip; in some cases, they are all that's in the shopping strip: lawyers, physicians, eye doctors, emergency walk-in centers, nursing services, ....
Roads are flanked by golf-cart paths. Residents drive golf carts as if they were cars. They use them for laundry runs, grocery trips, going out to eat. The carts come in red, green, yellow, blue, striped, paisley ... ; they're, covered, uncovered, have vinyl seats, leather seats, upholstered seats. Some sport bumper stickers and mock-vanity license plates, American flags and fuzzy dice.
I'm unsure how to feel about all this. My first reaction is that I'm disturbed that life comes to this. Living in Florida, separated from your family, living in a town stamped with chain stores and cookie-cutter food, where you're always in sight of an office to cater to your myriad medical needs, waiting to die.
Then I wonder if I should be relieved. To know that one day I may come to accept that life does come to this, come to needing these services to be around the corner. And to know that there are places in this country where the whole town was built around making these necessities convenient.
Either way, however I feel it about it now is not as important as how I'll feel about it in 40 years.
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September 23, 2005 • Friday
I finished with the US Open about 10 days ago, and have been as busy since the tournament as I was during.
This year's US Open was excellent, business-wise and tennis-wise. I got a lot of good work done, and booked more for the coming months. On the tennis end, the tournament was a great show, especially for Americans. The highlight was clearly the men's quarterfinal match between Andre Agassi and James Blake. They were both great stories. It was a shame one had to lose, but you have to sacrifice one good story to have the other continue. That evening saw the rare sporting event that transcends mere entertainment, nearly makes you tingle, and it ended with most onlookers being more sad for the loser than happy for the winner.
By the way, don't let the US Open ads fool you: The tournament is not the "highest attended annual event in sports." This year's US Open set a record for attendance of 659,538. The Houston Rodeo has drawn over 1 million spectators for ten of the past 11 years. The Rodeo hasn't drawn as little as this year's Open since 1988.
Anyway, now the US Open is over for me for another year. It was my tenth time covering the event, which feels like a nicely rounded tenure.
Last week I had writing work to wrap up, and other business matters to attend to. This week and next I'm away from my home office, on a writing assignment in Florida.
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