Salty Land

Perhaps one of my favourite passages from Jimmy Buffet’s A Salty Piece of Land (with some padding for context):

People were starting to make a bundle with the ecotourism racket all over Belize, and I wanted to join the parade. I knew every jungle trail, waterfall, stalagmite, and stalactite in the bush, but I had no experience in the tourist trade. This country was created by pirates, and that still counts for a lot of how things are down here. It is a good place to fuck up and start over again. So I figured this: If you want to learn how to survive in the jungle, you train in Belize. If you want to learn how to survive in the tourist business, you train in Orlando. I wanted my own theme park. It’s amazing what you can get people to buy if you package it right.”

“Did you go to Disney World?” Ix-Nay asked.

“You can read the future, can’t you?” Archie said in a strange voice. “I believe in visions myself. Disney World was where I had my vision of financial success. It was in Disney World where I determined how I would make my bloody fortune.”

“And what was your vision?” Ix-Nay asked.

“The first time I went to the Magic Kingdom, I was shocked at the number of grumpy adults and crying children I saw coming out of the place. The children were overloaded with sugar and going off like Guatemalan volcanoes, and the parents were fifty pounds overweight. They were sweating and shouting like drill sergeants. It didn’t look like any Magic Kingdom to me. And that’s how I got the idea for Cat World.”

“Cat World?” Ix-Nay and I repeated at the same time.

The words brought a roar of laughter from Archie. Well, I got my hands on a piece of property just off Buena Vista Drive, and that is where I built Cat World. It was really pretty simple. We dressed little lab rats in tiny mouse sweaters and ears, and then we let our customers feed them to a pack of very hungry alley cats.
“We kept the cats in a jungle setting we constructed. It looked very authentic, I might say. Even had a couple of python wiggling around in the dirt and a talking toucan perched up in a mango bush.
“It worked. We had lines around the building. You should have seen the happy smiles on those faces that walked out of my place. I called it post-traumatic-theme-park-stress-release-therapy. They did a feature in the local paper, and we even got on the cover of one of those grocery-store tabloids. We were making a bundle until a scum-sucking, spineless lawyer and a sheriffs deputy showed up with a cease and desist order from the county.
“They didn’t just shut me down — they kicked me out of the bloody country. Booted out of the land of the free! You don’t fuck with that little rat in America, I can tell you…..”

————-

🙁 I think Potato Pancake is biting the dust. Or. The gravel? *sigh*