Welcome to the Sunshine State.

Welcome to the Sunshine State. Where America sends its old, dysfunctional, pissed off and plain batshit crazy.

Recently, I read an article that gifted my beloved home state of Florida with the snazzy title of being that real weird kid in class. And I agreed wholeheartedly.

This place is nuts. It’s too hot. The suburban sprawl is an epidemic. The mosquitoes are murderous. The tourists can’t drive. The gifts shops are tacky and you can’t swim in any lake unless you want to lose a leg to a hungry gator. And that’s not even taking into account the people who live here. It’s a state filled with people from somewhere else. Go ahead, ask someone. Ask the person who has lived next door to you your whole life.

“Hey, where you from?”

“Rhode Island.”

Okay. Let it be known that Joe the Neighbor was born in Rhode Island but moved to Florida when he was a kid. A two month-old kid. And yet, they’re never from here. Oh no, never ever from Florida. We’re a state of people on their way somewhere else. Especially here in Central Florida.

Home of the theme parks and the subdivisions that never got built. Oh, they’re there. Taking up space after they cleared out the orange groves because the families were showing up in masses. From New York, from Puerto Rico, from middle of nowhere, Ohio and backwoods, South Carolina. Then the real estate market fell apart. So you’ve got a city geared towards being everything for everybody but the people who live here. Streets are crowded with drivers who all learned to drive somewhere else. Neighborhoods are filled with houses that were slapped together and are now falling apart. And into foreclosure. Depressing, sure. But like I always said, you can’t keep the crazies down. And hot damn, we’ve got some crazies.

South Florida’s Sun Sentinel newspaper website’s blog FloriDUH never runs out of material to write about. Our citizens are that great. Just today there was a piece about birds dive bombing patients at a clinic, a couple hanging out naked in some dude’s backyard, and a women telling a man she loved him only to stab in the chest. Twice. There’s a reason for all those cop shows like Dexter, CSI:Miami, and The Glades finding inspiration for their off the wall murders here. We’re a melting pot of people who got the hell out of dodge from somewhere else.

But there’s something about this place. Something that entices people to run away somewhere that gets melt-your-face-freakin’-kill-me-now hot and humid here. Where the traffic blows, the schools are atrocious because of how terribly we treat our teachers, and high paying jobs are the punch line to a joke we don’t get. Our state lacks the historical, beautifully kept homes and towns so abundant up north, because this is a place that will build a strip mall if a patch of grass just at it funny. You want history? Head to St. Augustine. It’s all we got. But hell, we’re a state of dreamers. We’re people with big ideas that just got too distracted by the beach to do anything about it. A state of too many sunny days to count and year-round tan lines. Yes, those retirees are here in force, but because of them we have some amazing thrift stores. And yes, it gets more northern the further south you get, but by the time you you get down there you’re in the Keys drunk off all that Hemingway whiskey and Buffett margaritas, and damn, they don’t write all those songs about those islands for nothing. We’ve got some lovely orange groves tucked away past all those interstates and golf resorts. Coast line running on both sides of us with a beach never more than an hour away. Air boats racing across our lakes chasing gators, dirty honky tonks surrounded by black, swampy water, and we’re not sure if we’ve found the fountain of youth yet, but those pirates were onto something because here in this penis shaped nuthouse we get to catch a vacation buzz off all those excited, sunburnt tourists who have to turn around and go home on Sunday. 

But here? Here we’re gonna continue to avoid Monday. We may be broke because of it, but that ice cold beer ain’t gonna drink itself.