There’s a great line in the movie, Easy A that speaks to the uniqueness of Florida.
Due to his “condition,” Micah was sent on an extended visit to his grandparents’ in Palatka, Florida. And if there’s one thing worse than chlamydia, it’s Florida.
If you haven’t seen the movie, please do. One of the funniest films in years.
If you listen to Adam Carolla’s podcast he routinely has a feature called “Germany or Florida.” They pick some insane and depraved story (often somebody on drugs killing livestock, making love to livestock, or battering livestock) and the crew has to guess whether it happened in Germany or Florida.
Florida, as a whole, sucks. We’re all on the same page about this one. Yes, there are nice pockets. I happened to be in one this past weekend.
Visiting my girlfriend’s extended family in Inverness, Florida – a six hour drive from Atlanta. When we got down to south Georgia and eventually northern Florida, all of a sudden the signage changed. Gone were the Georgia peaches and pecan rolls, and up were roadside orange stands, and billboards about homosexuality and abortion (they are against both, by the way).
Inverness is a smallish town about an hour outside of Tampa and a hundred miles from Orlando. Each home seems to sit on a dozen or more acres, and Spanish Moss grows down each canopy oak tree that populate the yards. The accents are thick, but the people are nice. There are a lot of boaters, hunters, and for some reason, recumbent bicyclists. Also, 70% of the population is retired. It’s an odd mix of people and you want so badly to dismiss them as rednecks, but they’re kind of not.
I was shooting pool with a 13 year old cousin, and he answered every question I posed with a “Yes, sir,” or “No, sir.” I was so impressed I told his mother that he was the most polite boy I had ever met. I’m definitely teaching my children (once I accidentally have some), that they’re going to do that yes-sir crap. It’s so cute.
I will say this – teeth. Lots of bad teeth in Florida. But hey, there’s a lot of shit-awful teeth in the UK, too, and those people have better television programming than us.
I did hear a lot of stories that began with, “Did you hear about what happened to so and so?” Those stories never concluded with a VP position at Xerox. But I didn’t meet any of those people.
So, I’m revamping my sweeping generalization about Florida being a wasteland of idiocy. Nice people there, and I’d go back. I mean, I’d visit 100 other places in the U.S. first, but, you know, eventually.
