Tampa, Verne, and the Twenty-Three-Minute Track I've Played 2,007 Times

2026-04-30

There's a track in my Apple Music library titled "Ride Audio: HORIZONS." It's twenty-three minutes and thirty-three seconds long. It's the full ride-through audio from Horizons, the Future World pavilion at EPCOT that ran from 1983 to 1999 — the one with the desert farms and floating cities and the space colony called Brava Centauri.

I have listened to that track 2,007 times.

The play counter probably started years ago — I don't remember exactly. But two thousand and seven plays, at twenty-three and a half minutes each, works out to roughly 780 hours. Roughly 32 days of my life inside that ride audio. A solid month. Sitting inside George Wilkins' synthesizer score, riding past the same desert farm and the same undersea kelp tower and the same Brava Centauri docking bay, again and again, for years.

I put it on when I need to focus. I put it on for long drives. I put it on when the world is too loud and I need a 23:33 wall of optimism between me and the noise. Ride Audio: HORIZONS is my brown-noise generator. It's also my comfort blanket. It's also a love letter I keep re-reading.

If you've heard the AuADHD framing of "this brain LIKES to play the same song over and over" — that's me. Repetition isn't an indulgence. It's executive function infrastructure. My brain found a free, portable, twenty-three-minute-shaped tool that drowns the world out and lets the focus part of me actually engage. The fact that the soundtrack happens to be utopian-futurism Disney optimism instead of brown-noise app #47 is honestly a quality-of-life upgrade.

Now here's the thing I noticed only recently:

For all 2,007 plays, the only portion I have ever fully memorized — the only stretch I could lip-sync if RuPaul ever, against all conceivable odds, made HORIZONS a Lip Sync For Your Life — is the brief Jules Verne section.

Grandfather: "There's the grand old man himself, Jules Verne. This is the way a moonshot looked to him back in the late 1800s. Old Uncle Jules may not have had all the answers, but he had the right idea."

Grandmother: "He was just a little ahead of his time."

That's it. Maybe twelve seconds of audio. The grandparents are walking the audience past a scene depicting Verne's 1865 imagination of a moonshot. Old Uncle Jules. A little ahead of his time.

And of course that's the section my brain memorized — because that's the section that belongs to me.

In Verne's novel From the Earth to the Moon (1865), the Baltimore Gun Club builds their giant cannon at a place called Stones Hill — just outside Tampa. He picked Tampa specifically because of the latitude (closer to the equator means a launch boost from Earth's rotation) and because of the coastal access. He was writing a hundred years before NASA picked anywhere in Florida.

NASA ultimately chose Cape Canaveral on the east coast of Florida instead of the west. So Verne was off by about 130 miles east-to-west.

But he called the STATE right. In 1865. With math, vibes, and the educated guess of a French novelist who had never been there.

Tampa has a street named after Jules Verne for that reason. I drive past it.

So my chain of significance, when I sit and let my brain map it, looks like this:

  1. 1865 — Jules Verne picks Tampa as the cradle of spaceflight in his novel.
  2. 1958 — NASA picks Florida, basically validating him a century later.
  3. 1983 — Disney puts Verne in Horizons as the patron saint of dreamed futures.
  4. 1999 — Horizons closes. The pavilion goes dark. The audio outlives the building.
  5. Now — I move to Tampa. I listen to Horizons audio 2,007 times. The only part of it my brain refuses to let go of is the part that is literally about my hometown's place in the story of human imagination.

That isn't coincidence. That's a coordinate system.

Old Uncle Jules planted a fictional cannon outside Tampa 161 years ago and I'm sitting in the orchard he imagined. The track is 23:33. The state is Florida. The city is mine. The dream is shared.

Some people have a hometown.

I have a homing.

The same way migratory birds know which beach to return to before they have words for it. Twenty-three and a half minutes at a time.

If we can dream it, we can do it. He dreamed it. Florida did it. Disney memorialized it. I'm living in the answer.

Thursday, April 30, 2026 — Tampa, FL (Verne's first guess)