My Stay at The Contemporary
Wow, I try to deny my status as a Disney adult in my last post and now I’m doing two Disney posts in a row? Yeah, yeah.
On a sad and likely drunken night that would foreshadow the trip I am about to describe, I came up with the delusion that it was a good idea to spend a great deal of money I didn’t have to stay at an expensive Disney hotel in order to “finish” the book that I’m working on. Since I was young, I always marveled at the three hotels at Walt Disney World that were connected by the Magic Kingdom monorail line. Of the three, I associated The Contemporary the most with business and class. With its many meeting rooms and modern accoutrements, to me, The Contemporary Resort was a unique Disney hotel in that it provided a refuge for the mature, the educated and the working within Walt Disney World. In this sense, I utterly mythologized it. And it was due to this association that on that sad and drunken night a month or so ago, I convinced myself to finally pull the trigger on something I’d been wanting to do for awhile.
I would stay three nights at The Contemporary and use my time there to work on my book in a new and isolated (when I stayed in my room) environment. It was my intention to complete my book while I was there, but spoiler alert, that didn’t even come close to happening. I was essentially cosplaying someone of slight wealth and therefore equally slight importance. On the first day, after driving just over an hour from my home, I wore a suit jacket and my favorite collared shirt. I took the afternoon to take in the hotel, my room, and the shopping and dining options. Despite my initial default towards sloth, I forced myself to do some writing in my room, before I watched the Magic Kingdom fireworks from the balcony and enjoyed one and a half cigarettes.
The writing was acceptable, I made more progress than I had the last time I sat down and worked on my book (which, albeit, was not much). My book is about a father and a son in a troubled and poor southern town who aren’t too good at communicating with one another and are dealing with the death of the son’s mother in very different ways. The son is a thinker and the father is a doer. The book is meant to contrast the two lives. Meanwhile, the mother has become a sort of Dr. Manhattan ghost, she is experiencing the deaths of her multiple reincarnations while trying to make sense of where she is and who she was, and accidentally haunting the house. The book alternates from the father’s perspective, to the son’s, to the ghost’s. And thus, I have dubbed it “The Father, The Son and The Ghost,” mirroring the Christian concept of the holy trinity, despite the story having little to do with religion. Initially, it was called just “The Father and The Son,” and the mom was to remain an almost total mystery. But when I found the manifestation of the concepts I had thought of to be boring, I thought of the trinity, and the idea of the spirit, or the holy ghost, and decided, since the mom was dead, I could inject a bit of themed anthology into the novel. At first, the anthology was going to be random and totally fictional, but then I realized it wouldn’t make much sense for her to be having these experiences. I thought of tying her experiences in by having them reflect books that the son was reading, but I thought this far too cheesy and nonsensical. So, in that hotel room, I decided to make the different stories implied to be the deaths of some of the mother’s reincarnations.
Visions of the film “The Grand Budapest Hotel” swirled in my head, as, in my grandiosity, I pictured myself as the quirky writer taking a ‘holiday’ as it were, in an enchanting establishment. I watched some of the film (one of my favorites) in the bath before I read. It was, of course, hilarious that my own chosen locale was the exact opposite of a high-minded mountaintop ruin of unique and isolated artisans. Rather, I planted my flag in a towering goliath of zombified and fat tourists, waddling to a breakfast buffet, spending their minds out at theme park and hotel alike. But that wasn’t what The Contemporary was for me.
I had my suit jacket dry cleaned. I spent most of my second day at Magic Kingdom, then napping. I told myself I had to, since The Contemporary was one of the three resorts that had a monorail line going right through it, offering the most convenient access to the park possible. When in Rome. After napping, I spent the night drinking, and writing a little more. Barely. I was having so much fun deciding what moments in history I would devote entire chapters of the mother’s story to, I forgot that things needed to happen in the main story. I sort of decided there wouldn’t be much in the way of a ‘main’ conflict, but things still needed to happen in the stories of the father and the son of course. I’d imagine it is the same for other writers, but for me, it is extremely satisfying to write a scene or a chapter that I’ve been imaging and going over in my head over and over again for quite some time. But this makes it all the more irritating when I am done writing this scene or chapter and suddenly have to write the next one. The solution is to drink until you fall asleep.
The next morning, I filled my ice bucket with the ice machine and made myself a nice rum and coke. I decided to take a quick visit to the park again in the evening. I found myself at the bar at least twice. I had been fantasizing about writing at the bar in anticipation of my stay. A good buzz gets the creative juices flowing, but not as much the grammatical… juices? (as I’m sure this blog post displays.) At the bar, I decided to write about the mom in the time of prohibition. I made the decision to purposefully leave gender out of all of the mom’s segments, implying the possibility of reincarnating as any gender. I drunkenly wrote about a drunken writer at a prohibition era speakeasy, sipping whiskey with a coworker and being gradually enveloped by the otherworldly crowd. This chapter replaced what I had imagined in earlier mental drafts to be a Bioshock-inspired, underwater city, cigarette-smoking, jazz infused inner monologue fest that I was leaning towards just scrapping anyways because I couldn’t come up with a way to decisively make it Bioshock-inspired rather than straight up Bioshock fan faction. I may have gone back to my room at some point, but I ultimately ended up at the bar again, where I drank scotch into the night, sitting four seats down from a blind woman.
The fourth day, after the third night, was a sad one. Not only did I have to check out in the morning, but I had to check out knowing I didn’t even come close to finishing my book. As it turns out, a few days isn’t quite enough time to write an entire novel, especially when you spend a good portion of it drinking or otherwise entertained, or both. I can’t say I didn’t have a wonderful time crouched over my computer, insane and alone in my room, biting my nails in fear of my inevitable failure to hit my goal, and drunkenly wandering the grounds of The Contemporary and Magic Kingdom, eating expensive and glutenous meals, buying pins and booze, loathing myself over my own incompetence.
I think I might be an alcoholic.
