It was night time in the city. Nightlife downtown is a commonly replicated aesthetic. I forgot to add SpaceGhostPurrp’s Blackland Radio 66.6 Part 2 to my MP3 player, so I had to go for my second favorite gothic rap album, God’s Wisdom’s Goth. I like this album from both an ironic and genuine perspective, although GW’s voice is so cute that I can’t hate on it. It was a short walk back to an IKEA parking lot to our car. We then drove to a gas station, inside a buzz-cut guy wearing a sport jacket hit a vape, and then seemed to weirdly drone off to nowhere walking in the midst of nowhere. The drive back to our hotel was primarily uneventful. 9 PM.

Having dinner with Dad’s Niosh friend led to us outside as they told us about the town. It was 8 pm. The sky was like the scales of an Atlantic Blue Marlin. I was shuffling some James Ferraro after the Lucy shuffling got a little too repetitive, and i then thought it’d be good to put on God of London. I sadly did not see any of the “[expletive that I can say but whatever shut up] in lingerie” Ferraro fantasizes/prophecies/foretells in his vision of consumerist cities and urban centers, I, wearing a Twin Fantasy shirt, ended up seeing some androgynous crop-tank-topped person with a mop of dark brown curls who noticed me and my Car Seat Headrest shirt, and I could clearly ascertain that they knew what I was. Dad’s work friend relayed us stories of his stories of Ybor, the arrest of alleged serial killer Howell Emmanuel Donaldson III at a McDonalds, as well as seeing a famous drama YouTuber. That seemed to be a better fit for the Ferraro vision of downtown centers: white noise.

We’d been driving to Tampa, finding ourselves in an IKEA parking lot. We were in Ybor City to meet some friend of Dad’s from Niosh who briefly got fired by mass federal worker firings earlier in the year. The afternoon was getting old. I put on Liquid Metal, and as I walked around the city with the family, we had ice cream at some gentrified and overpriced creamery where the poster listing off the restaurant’s history used the wrong version of the world “principles.” The whole thing reflected the feeling of Liquid Metal. The cashier called me bro and dude as if we were close friends. For a joint trying to be hipster, they sure lacked any recycle bins. We left the ice cream place, went on a very short walking tour, then walked through the town’s perimeter once or possibly twice.

We listened to Greg Sestero’s audiobook of The Disaster Artist on Libby and ended up in the overflow parking of a free manatee viewing area. We were there for one purpose. I put on Mort Garson’s Plantasia, a delightfully grand, cute, charming one for the occasion. We walked on a little trail. At some point we came across a parking lot with a clear sidewalk divisor in it, my sister and I both had a headphone in each ear. Some worker or employee or volunteer was telling us to walk on the sidewalk, which was stupid because we were clearly walking towards it. Then, we arrived at a series of piers, the wind was cool and in that particular area, very constant. On the first set of piers we saw virtually nothing- that’s just the way these things go of course, however, upon reaching the second area containing piers, we were greeted with some real sights to behold- the head of a manatee poking out of the water, six dolphins periodically popping out of the water. It was quite beautiful! We moved on to climbing a look out tower that led to a surprisingly anticlimactic view.

I first shuffled Lucy for thirty minutes after reaching part 3 of Revisionist History’s series on gun violence, and then proceeded to put on 666 by Black Dresses on the shuttle ride to some car rental in Orlando after I exited the airport. 666 I think was a fitting choice, the song’s gentle but oppressive, pessimistic nature for my lethargic mood at the time. I found myself then putting on Not Available by The Residents. We talked to the rental guys, received our rental car, and following this, we drove to a very millennial cafe in the middle of the block of some random street a block away from a park surrounding a pond. We arrived ten minutes before the place opened. An old guy passing us told us he suspected the place had shut down. This was not true, this old guy didn’t appear to be familiar with the concept of shops being closed and open during certain hours. In visiting the park, we found ourselves walking amongst a crowd of people doing a walk for Type One Diabetes, and eventually had to diffuse into the organization’s crowd once the time came to return to the cafe. We stood behind a man red as a lobster resembling my old gym teacher from middle school. This area of Orlando showed the Florida man joke to be correct. Everywhere we went it appeared something was happening. This album fit rather well for the scene, the constant chaos, the uninterrupted weirdness and eventfulness.