It's high time I say something about the city I live in: Orlando, Fl.

Last Tuesday Thomas Friedman went on the Daily Show to discuss the importance of switching to a green economy and mentioned in passing "half finished condos in Florida." Hah! You don't know the half of it Mr. Friedman.

The following Sunday, I was walking downtown and looked at the banners for the downtown Eola Farmers Market. The logo always reminds me of the Comedy Central logo, which is funny because our Farmers Market is a joke. It consists of twenty tables, two of which house unappealing overpriced produce and the rest of which contain bad arts, crafts, and incense.

Later that day, a friend sent me a link to the latest entry at DefameOrlando, which is nothing but self-righteous trash talk about the downtown scumsters and clubs and pseudo-nostalgiac meandering about Orlando's supposed good old days before our raves disappeared and our goth population died out, (read: got jobs and had babies).

These things happening in succession compel me to speak out.

Believe me when I say we realize the rest of the country makes fun of Florida on a near constant basis. Hell, we feel so held down we make fun of ourselves. Why would anyone come here? Infrastructure's bad, there's nothing to do, and our schools are horrific because our kids are just supposed to feed into the service industry.

Florida history in a nutshell: Semi-tropical savages, sweaty white money, agriculture, mansions, service industry, railroad, resorts, more servants, their children, public works, sprawl, skitter back into the swamp, have children, send them to in-state university or community college on Bright Futures, and like baby turtles to the moon over the water watch them crawl back to our 'cities'.

Help us.

SoDo, light rail, a team of Segway Ambassadors. Bad, good, no need.

Don't send us more development money for the peach and teal plastic and warped Spanish mission flair we left back in the suburbs and redneck coastal and swamp towns. And STOP with the plazas. You gave us a gross plaza (called SoDo, of all things), with a Super Target to supposedly expand the urban limits of downtown, for what? To put it in the condo brochures. We brought a little action, and you took us and built a bazillion condos. That nobody wants. There isn't enough action to merit the price or endure the monstrosity. You try to attract professionals from other cities where they are paid more to do the same work, but they want some action in the brochure. Pff.

Orlando was built on entertainment and hospitality via Disney and later, Universal. So where is it all? All the people who whine about nothing cool to do and nowhere to go should be opening their own businesses. Some try but they're scattered all about and hidden in the sprawl. Build more buildings nearby so we can create a little more diversity and competition in close proximity and professionals will move here. They will become patrons of our businesses, they will fill seats in restaurants, bars, clubs, shops, theaters, and galleries.

A city just has to be fun and easy to live in, and we'll all shuffle our money about within it. That's all. Make it easier for us to shuffle our money about.

I live one block east of the edge of commercial downtown. Fifteen blocks farther east is Bumby Avenue and a Giant Plaza. It's an easy walk but unfortunately I don't give a hoot about Houlihan's, Pier One Imports, or anything else except for Total Wine. That whole plaza should disappear. Replace it all with a grid. Build up. Put a parking garage on the corner instead of wasting a square mile with a parking lot. Keep your big chain stores but include room for other things. Promote pedestrian traffic. Fit more business into a smaller space and turn some other stupid plaza into a park.

Doesn't our city employ anyone to oversee her growth? Do we let just any money come do whatever it wants? Do we think we're Tampa or Miami or something? We are a vegetative swamp town, not a breezy beach town. Those condo and plaza people don't want to come here. We need to ooze. Sure. Put a Super Target on a corner somewhere in the middle of everything else. Don't break the pedestrian line, and when you do give us convenient and accessible mass transit – cities 101.

So when you make room for local entrepreneurship, how will our cultural identity emerge? Dunno yet.

I do know that we're surrounded by citrus, beef, swamp, and beach. Whatever the attraction to whatever demographic, something uniquely Floridian must come from that. We have to develop our voice, and our place among the cities of the country. The developers' choices do not reflect our voices. They reflect what the old white people wish our voices were.

I am not at all a Jack Kerouac fan, but he was born in Orlando. No wonder he dreamed of being On the Road.