Hello friends. Yes, here’s someone who lives in Florida – for both benefit and detriment, as the hostile environment can be encouraging. Daring to walk around so one may feel invigorated and spiteful and, at times, sympathetic to our MK-Ultra land. Merge into humidity – car fumes ahead.
After another brunt of Weather Manipulation so the time came to venture beyond this simple abode. Seeing as the entire peninsula was caught, and our soon-to-be visitor was sporting a Category 6 consolation, so our saga began in earnest. It’s not a flashy pre-planned itinerary but it still counts for something, maybe. It does feel like descending a distant cousin of Dante’s Inferno; elements exchanged – no gulf of fire but a submergence of opposites.
It took roughly an hour and change to pack. Of course, when you’re wondering whether you’ll have a home anymore, you’ll have to pack more discreetly, practically, but also minimally. What’s really worth keeping? There’s something appealing about only needing a backpack and a suitcase to contain all functions, but rare to keep when you settle in long enough. Difficult!
At first glance. One may then realize that mostly nothing is worth holding onto – beyond dodging the inconvenience of another purchase. A rich man may not thread a camel through an eye of needle, but he may at least find himself efficiently packed and prepared to purchase all again.
Leaving around ~10:30pm toward Jacksonville, and luckily dodging the gridlock on I-75, so came abound the familiar I-4 corridor – after some not insignificant sleuthing through well unknowable roads.
Sporting a trunk of everything you hope to start life over with so each section of the interstate serves perfectly for enactment. That perhaps you will settle instead into Kissimmee, or into Lakeland, into Plant City, Winter Haven. Yet with each envisioned place so the canvas may remain blank.
Because it all seems the same. Beyond the monstrous outlet malls popping between – and nestled within exits so our Golden Arches do bring mild comfort, gas stations surround, curious apartment complex placements hugging the highway – not much else in store.
This sure is Evacuating, though it seems one is trekking toward but more evacuated places. The only evidence of life was the sparse dotted roads of headlights connected to off-ramps one could peak for a second. Most of the mileage was of grasslands, forestry – broken billboards and a wonder whether fixing it would mean anything.
There were universities smack up against too – at least Polytechnic University. University was supposed to serve as a place of promise, but when you’re commuting interstate over all barren land to enter this streetlight district structure with Practical Architecture of glass panes fused into steel cylinders – is this what one shall hope for? Maybe you remember your college years; wouldn’t you think seeing your college along the interstate render it just as meaningless as the broken billboard? One could at least remain deluded that the lone college campus had something, but if it’s against the stream of cars Going Places of course you’ll feel stuck and uselessly useful.
The leading theme here is how quickly a little world shatters against the vastness and emptiness abound. The insignificance won’t be lost on you as you inevitably realize the canvas isn’t blank, but practically the same, and in that sameness of all the other Residents of these evacuated places, so you feel but another ant in an orchestra you can only begin to wonder.
A silver lining here is shattering, too, the tightly held routines – fragile fiction’d Schedules or Big Plans laid as cotton to rend. The relative “shortness” of these roads makes one realize that day trips all around this Florida state aren’t so farfetched. There’s nothing preventing one at all from sightseeing Tallahassee, snorting in Miami – if either is your jam.
One could suppose that such advantages aren’t cashed in as living Suburbanly and Secludedly is what’s gradually engraved in the psyche. Where the wandering mind may instead see such ventures as steps into abyss – that to float along probably requires some Default Network off-switching as otherwise – when booking it from hotel to hotel – if you ever start narrating, you may find yourself speaking it all into a sludgy aftermath. Reduced into but another hotel consumer. An insect on a dead thing painted all pretty as a tourist plaything.
Northern Florida has a fluidity to it. Previous visitings of friends at UF, or once attending a golf tournament in a futile attempt to merge into some higher economic class – it was hard to grasp onto anything. The apartments felt all broken even if the handles stood stable on, and the roads feel all crooked even if it is a straight line. It did feel as the river rapid does – maybe it’s just the speed by which the residents around there live so casually.
Sometimes it feels as though they’re fighting for the joyous day, and it’s not like one would ever paint that foolish. It seems there’s always a persistent element of fun surrounding the optimism laced into their water – but half-drunk so each proceeding moment came. Such fluidity made it seemed like you never knew what would happen. Such fluidity also leaves some deep grooves into each sidewalk to entrance. One could trace the echoes of teasing and party shoutings along the broken asphalt, doorways, discarded beer bottles. Resurrected through the current unison’d breath, until there is no one left.
Maybe all of Florida is like that. Maybe not. No one’s ever bother to say, but Florida has a certain accent in it. You can tell someone is from Florida when they trail with an “or something” – or maybe that’s something in your home town and it’s been replicated here. Maybe it’s an English which seems all drunken as a result.
Artificiality is the ruling credo after all, merging all of these cultures into the insane asylum for distant viewing. A blend of northern to southern and midwestern talking, mannerisms. You just don’t know what you’ll get, but you can know you’ll never be any of it fully. A chimera at best, cast away from the heartland nevertheless. Fashion yourself a watchtower and wonder whether if all of these blendings could count as their own Floridian invention.
The first time “Florida man” came up so was in an internship of Seattle. As was the first time that talking as one does doesn’t work elsewhere. Precisely choosing each word felt like taking a sprawly sicken’d structure to shove into a tightly woven suit of clauses. Or but another delusion there’s anything different: in either case it makes sense to be the funny one when you’re already casted as such: a waiting wacko news piece – not like it matters.
Maybe it’s all like this because it’s always Summer. No distinction of meaning, no perforation of seasons – there’s short spurts of cold to leave one deeply unsettled. Now displaced and in a random hotel.
Would you view it as a Faustian incubation chamber? Maybe such designations ought to be reserved for more ambitious states. Contenders including New York, Texas, California, Illinois even. But maybe a hidden element here is a willingness to assert. We can certainly ordain some assertions in a well-justified righteousness – Texas with its border crisis, New York with its Stock Markets, California with its Tech monopolis – but here, there’s no righteousness nor profiteering and controlling necessarily. It’s just insanity disguised as self-interest. A “what if” hanging off the cliffside, maybe. Probably not. Most of these states are too large to shoehorn into something anyway. It would be better to select cities, wouldn’t it? Still outside the jurisdiction of understanding or judging anyway.
Most hurricanes aren’t that serious. It’s a shame this one seemed to be, breaking records and placing high up in the Hurricane Games. Looking at the North Carolina flooding, it only made sense to not gamble on this one. Then you start wondering what you’re even gambling.
One question you’ll confront is what is the point of a home if you can’t feel safe within it? What’s the point of a home if you’re forced to have little attachments to it? When you train yourself to forget it?
As a sandy state it does make sense everything slips through your fingers, however quickly or slowly it goes. Why wouldn’t you be insane when you genuinely cannot ground yourself?
Though even if you do ground yourself, there’s a terror in wondering what happens next. The same as spore finding a glow’d perch of cave for rest, so it’ll then cover the walls, crawl up through the cracks and may swallow up every living thing in the process. By floating along you don’t witness the potential destruction waiting to take root.
To be the blackened flower, petals for a poisonous drip – held down by nothing, a blend of mostly nothing, holding mostly nothing, directed in wind and believing but little and cultured in a twisted metal orange haze: honestly, it’s probably a good thing Florida has its reputation. When you’re a product of it through-and-through, it’s no wonder why some of the others do what they do. It’s no wonder we got the Baker Act too.
Maybe it does take a special outlook to live in lands of variable annual high winds and floods to follow.
Well, in any case, had some long car drives and some titillation in anticipation while roaming the hotel block. Came across a guy tweak out in the back of Publix – surprising since that’s usually reserved for the Walmart districts. Checked out Buc-ee’s too – no surprise most attending are all jaundiced from the frequent purchases of double-chunk fudge and brisket. The family-friendly mascot pressed up against the fattening family therein made it feel like a Ground Zero of some disease, with its background of 50+ gas pumps to let it properly spread.
Almost two-thirds of a week lost, but upon return and clearing the stagnant air so the Floridian waits for the next one. Autumn brewing!