I went downtown with S last night, and I parked my car in the 'spooky' car garage. This is some sort of massive parking lot / building that they are constructing in the center of downtown. Amusingly enough its being built on the corner that was once dubbed 'the most haunted street' in Orlando. Anyways, they opened up the garage long before they have actually finished building the place. As a result it's a huge building of raw concrete blocks with building material scattered all over the place. Every time I go there, despite the number of cars, I hardly ever see another person.
A few random pics follows:
The world's oldest, slowest kid.
Close-up of my face simply because it's priceless.
S got impatient waiting for the elevator, so we took the stairs down. One flight down I noticed a set of wood doors, one of which was slightly adjar. I decided to sneak in and investigate. To my delight I found a corridor packed with massive bricks of foam. It was pretty strange, and gave the place an odd fun-house quality to it. I'm sure we weren't supposed to be in there, but it's not my fault they left the door unlocked.
The walls! they are closing in!
S hold's them at bay.
Just beyond the foam the corridor opened up to a massive un finished room. It was grand in its sheer size, and eerie in its emptiness and unfinished-ness. I wanted to explore, but I decided that running around in there was pushing my luck.
Either the room is shrinking or I am growing! Notice the strange gnome door.
Good for Kesha.
When I got home around 2 in the morning, I saw an odd-eyed cat spying on me from my roof. Actually he yowled at me to let me know he was spying on me. He had been out lurking about in the moonlight. That's what cats do. I like how his different colored eyes illuminate in different colors in the camera's flash. That's the moon behind him. The moon never looks as big as it did on E.T.
2026 Update
Dialing the time machine back 19 years to a half-finished garage Ed treated as the world's least safe funhouse.
Nineteen years later, that “spooky garage” would be a punchline: a half-finished concrete mausoleum that smelled like dust and possibility, where you could wander through unlocked doors because nobody had yet invented the liability waiver as a personality. Now every half-built corner has security guards, QR codes, and a fence with a sign complaining about lawyers. Your digital camera’s flash lit up cat eyes in the dark; today everyone would be filming vertical video on a phone while narrating to no one. Parking itself has transformed—you used to just roll in, maybe wave at a sleepy attendant, and explore. Now the garage is either a robot that photographs your license plate or an app that charges you for the privilege of existing inside its concrete lungs. The world has also gotten much more anxious about trespassing: a foam-filled corridor that was “not my fault” is now a lawsuit waiting to happen, or worse, a TikTok backdrop for someone who brought their own lockpicks. And the odd-eyed cat? Still around, but now he’s got an Instagram account and a grift.
“2007 Ed, when you found that door “slightly adjar” and padded into a foam-brick corridor, did you ever stop to think maybe the building wasn’t haunted but just severely underinsured, or was that half the fun?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2007 Ed: So, Beelzebubba, I reckon “underinsured” wasn’t exactly on my mind while I was tip-toeing through a foam-brick corridor at midnight. More like, “please don’t let a security guard with a flashlight and a grudge find me.” The haunted part is half the fun, sure, but honestly the bigger thrill was just being somewhere unfinished and eerie, like the building itself forgot to become a building. I mean, raw concrete, gnome doors, and foam bricks—that’s not insurance talk, that’s adventure talk. If anything, the only insurance I think about is the kind that keeps sending me letters about my roof, and that’s way scarier than any ghost. And then I come home to a one-blue-eye, one-green-eye cat yowling from the rooftop like he owns the place. So yeah, underinsured or haunted, I’m probably not the one who should be making wise decisions. Take that, foul garage.
