Our Nation’s Flaccid Penis

AKA: Florida

I have long thought that Florida resembles nothing so much as a floppy, dangling wiener. Which, I guess, makes Louisiana the nation’s scrotal sac, but I digress. Having returned from visiting my mom in good ol’ FL, I’ve reconfirmed my vague enmity towards our country’s wang.

It’s such a weird place. Half of it is retired liberal Jews from the Northeast driving 50 foot long towncars, and the other half is gator-wrasslin’ rednecks driving pickups with gun racks. They live uneasily side by side, but they really don’t mix that much.

It’s a state of odd contrasts. My mom lives in West Palm Beach (elderly Jew central) which is not to be confused with Palm Beach, where the rich WASPs live. On Christmas Eve, we went to a fancy-schmancy restaurant to dine amongst the WASPs, and on Christmas day we went to my mom’s weird neighbors’ house to eat ham and yell at the TV during football. Christmas Eve - $90 bottle of wine. Christmas Day – Wine in a Box With Spigot. Eve – wore my silk Pucci shoes. Rest of the week – green rubber flip flops.

Getting off the plane, you know you’re in Florida. It’s nothing but families with little kids flying down to see Num Num and Poppy or whomever, dragging massive suitcases and strollers and car seats and all the other crap families with little kids have to carry. One of the little kids is inevitably in little kid melt down mode, which starts with some whimpering and whining and swiftly crescendos to “I won’t, I won’t, I won’t!!!” The harassed-looking parents can barely keep themselves and their massive brood of spawn together, so they do nothing to stem the kid’s freak out, and either he has fortitude and can keep it up for the duration of the flight, or he’s a pussy and peters out only after irritating everyone in earshot.

The families are met by hoards of the wrinkled, shuffling grandparents who think it is their God-given right to operate motor vehicles to the day they die, crap reaction time and vision be damned. They’ve been driving since 1924, dammit, and nothing’s gonna stop them now!

Near to the grandparents are the slutty redneck girls picking up their scary redneck boyfriends; girls who feel a handkerchief provides adequate chest coverage and that a skirt needn’t do much more than cover the top portion of the buttocks. The boyfriends are heavily tattooed, surly, and missing teeth. Cliché, really, but there it is.

Brochures of Florida make it look like a sunny, warm paradise. It is in fact, a humid, fetid, purgatory. I always go down to see my mom with a swimsuit and the determination to get a tan, and time after time I come back with the swimsuit still folded in my suitcase and my skin as pale as a three-days-dead fish. It always rains, sometimes a little, this time a lot. My mom helpfully added, “Before you got here, it hadn’t rained it three weeks.” Thanks, mom. No tennis, no lounging on the beach or by the pool, barely any leaving the house, and a general longing for a clear sky above.

All of which, despite the craziness of it, makes me appreciate my surly, dirty, and beautiful paradise of New York.

Now scroll up and take another look at the map. It really does look like a penis, doesn't it? You're welcome.