In Terminal B of the Orlando International Airport, there is an art installation. A cube of glass contains a man, sitting on the ground, resting against his bags. He is the Weary Traveler. He has fuzzy hair, a mustache, a Polo shirt, bad sneakers, love handles. He looks tired. The mannequin is eerily lifelike, so that there is a vibe of “is this man alive and sleeping? Or is this man actually fake?” outside the glass cube. Spectators, all in some stage of arriving or departing, circle warily, take pictures with their phones. It’s an unsettling scene, because the man is so lifelike and also because the level of irony is difficult to detect. Is this a sincere depiction of weary first-world travel, the culturally compelled hauling of children to tourist sights that are brand extensions of intellectual property franchises owned by an international entertainment conglomerate? Or is this installation making fun of everyone for doing the schlep? Are we being represented or implicated? Both? When headlines ask rhetorical questions in the New York Times or the Atlantic — “Will AI change pancakes forever?” — the safe answer is always No. But whenever I think of a binary question and wonder aloud if a particular situation isn’t both , the answer is yes, of course, it’s both. If it can be both, it is both. 

I have traveled to Orlando, Florida, for work and pleasure more than any other American city. There are other cities where the in-laws live that I have traveled to more often, but that’s different. That’s for family reasons. It’s almost a sub home. Truthfully, I mostly come to Orlando for work. I’ve been here maybe fifteen times for two to three-day stretches, and what I remember every time I arrive is how little I remember about Orlando. Nothing in Orlando seems familiar, while still always being familiarly shallow. The sites of Orlando: toll roads, retaining ponds, screened-in swimming pools, flat highway vistas under construction. Palm trees. Malignant levels of sunlight. But there’s no emotional familiarity. The town feels conceptual, abstract, a 3-D printed version of a city. It possesses no nostalgic pull. 

I have a friend who calls some locations “thin places,” and I think he means it in a kind of C.S. Lewisian sense of thinness, that is, a place whose pull on you is so strong that it seems to pull you into another dimension — of memory, of nostalgia, of friendship. This is unscientific, admittedly. And it sounds hokey, but I feel it, too. My prime example would be Oxford, Mississippi, a college town built on a square. It has the right mixture of incremental change and decade-upon-decade of sameness, so that it always feels utterly familiar. Also, it has an uncanny ability to act like a portal that leads to everyone else in Mississippi. I often joke that if you want to find someone in Mississippi, just go to Oxford and hang around for an hour. They will appear. Something will have brought them there. In this way it’s much more a hub of cultural activity than the capital city, Jackson, where I live. Oxford possesses a magnetism, and it’s not because of the football team. 

In Orlando thickness reigns. I wonder if it has to do with the amount of construction in the city. Perhaps I just always go to different places? But that’s not quite right either, because I’ve stayed several times at the same hotel, though I don’t know what it looks like or how to get there. Its geographic relationship to the airport feels arbitrary, ad hoc, improvised each time upon my landing. The very entrances to the hotel property feel re-drawn before my arrival, deliberately unmemorable. I know I am near the “parks,” but I don’t know how near, or which ones. 

At the Brookstone, in Terminal B, they’re selling the new Metallica LP. I read somewhere that Metallica had to purchase their own vinyl pressing facility in order to keep up with consumer demand. Life just keeps getting stranger. The electrical outlets inside the rows of chairs don’t work. Everything here is life As If. It’s not a trip if you don’t take notes.

Perhaps it’s because Orlando is in many obvious ways a deliberately fake city, a city whose primary economic engine is tourism, and not just tourism but a kind of live-action role playing of childhood entertainment, a deliberate fantasy land, a structured nostalgia. (Which I have taken my children to, and yes, they enjoyed the Uncrustables, just like everyone else, so what of it?) 

It’s Vegas for children. (No smoking, no copulation.) It feels temporary. It feels season-less, and yet the buildings are simply this season’s model. It’s not necessarily bad. This is old news. This is meant to be observation not indictment. This is what happens when I show up too early for my flight. It’s a place that makes me want to buy a nine dollar coffee-adjacent beverage that contains a thousand calories. I feel there will be no great stories set on a Monorail. 

Maybe the fact that I have no sticky memories from my trips to the city is just a consequence of middle age. Maybe I’m late to the magic of Orlando, or anywhere. Maybe it’s not the city but the traveler who is too thick to retain detail. Maybe I am the fake man, weary from my adventures through the fake landscape. The prepared environment. Is it any wonder that Terminal B is the only place that feels familiar, that feels somewhat homelike? It’s where I always end up. It does, after all, have a Chik-Fil-A.