I'm a Floridan now. Booooo.

I don't know what I thought coming down here to Florida. I mean, sooner or later it was bound to happen. I'd have to go and get my car registered and get some Florida plates and get a Florida's drivers license. I was dreading that day, though, because that would be the day I became a Floridian. Well, it's official now -- I'm a Floridian.

Don't diminish the effect that this has had on my psyche. I still find it hard to concede any validity to someone who grew up below Northern Virginia. It's silly and ridiculous, but I'm not the only one plagued with this delusion, though, so don't judge me.

My Pops used to say things like, "Man that country nigga don't know what he talkin bout." Didn't matter what the person said half the time, all they needed was a drawl.

So, as I kept moving further South, I grew more shamed. For a while, I used to feel unjust pride whenever I pulled out my NY drivers license in DC. It was like "That's right. I'm from up north. I'm cooler and smarter than you." Soon, though, the Strict grew on me. By the time I got my Maryland drivers license and tags, I wasn't too upset...but there was still that feeling of, "Yo, I'm not a New Yorker anymore." That drivers license identified me being almost southern. Sometimes I wanted to give people my life story when I whipped it out. Ya know:

"Sir can I see your I.D.?"
"Sure, here it is. But as you can see, I just got that recently. I'm actually from up north. I don't walk through public places without shoes on."

I'd usually digress because I didn't want a situation like,

"Well I may be from the south, but at least I'm not a fat boy." or "Well I maybe country, but at least I can grow a mustache." At which I'd drop my 40 oz. St. Ide's and run out the store. But the knee-jerk inclination to explain away my new southern identity was always there.

But like I said, the DC metro area is a great place. So I never really felt like cutting myself when I got the requisite Maryland identity indicators. That changed when I moved to Florida.

I generally feel like Florida is the wackest state in the Union. I feel that way because 1.) It shouldn't be wack; and 2.) for some reason, people think that it isn't wack.

Sure, South Florida -- specifically South Beach -- is magnificent; Orlando has its perks -- Disney, Universal and couple cool neighborhoods; and here in Tampa Bay there's Clearwater Beach and Hyde Park. But that's it. You're not getting much else out of me.

Over the past year I had four Florida instances that were semi-epiphanic and most definitely telling of why Florida is the wackest state in the Union and why it pains me that I have a Florida's driviers license and have to drive around with Florida tags.

- When i first moved to Florida last summer, I was big on "getting to know the real Florida" This meant that when ever I was driving home from a road trip or my travels took me anywhere that wasn't urban, I'd try to stop off and take in the scene. Get a keen look at places that weren't Miami, Orlando, Tampa Bay or some beach. I'd think about ducking into a remote gas station; maybe slide into some smallish diner and order a cup of coffee and some apple pie; roll into some dive bar and kop a beer. I'd always get cold feet, though. As some of you may not know, most of un-urban Florida is straight up deep-south, hickville to the bone and I was always weary of puttin my nigga-life on the line.

One day, I was feeling sassy, a bit brave and overwhelmed with irrevrance. I was driving home from some spot that my co-workers dragged me too. My tour guide and I got seperated on the way home so at some point, it was just me and this stupid dumb, pitch black road. About 25 miles from my hood I approached this bar on the right side of the road. The bar was actually a trailer made into a bar. Don't remember what it was called. Just a month earlier I had an experience where I walked into a bar and some dude gave me the finger -- didn't know anything about me besides I wasn't from round his parts and my skin was darker than his his. that motivated him to tell me to go have sex with myself. I vowed I wouldn't let that be the last time I walked in a spot like that, though. So, this time I walked in and sat at a lonely end of the bar and ordered a Bud. If I got accosted or berated or dirty looks, I wouldnt do this again. If my experience was pleasant I would keep giving this New Experiences Mission a few tries. Secretly, I was hoping that I'd get treated unfairly so I could reconcile the cowardly decision to swear off meeting Real America.

That's when an old man with green-brown teeth (he had about seven of them), saddled up next to me and put his hand on my shoulder. He smiled. I remember surveying the room in a split-second, getting my bearings and trying to feel the overall pulse. Who was looking at me? How were they looking at me? Was anyone whispering? Where people minding their business? If they were minding their business then I was cool. If I was the center of attention then it was bout to get nervous.

The ol' man with the breen teeth gave me one of those patronizing, quick shoulder massages, tapped me on my back, looked at the bartender and said, "Put that beer on'ma tab." I'm thinking to myself, "Why?" He answered that question a hot second later. "Now you finish that beer and then go on head and leave. We want you to get in that car and don't stop again until you get where you gotta go." I told the bartender that I was good on the ber and left. On the drive home I wasn't shaken up. I wasn't even upset. I just remember thinking: This is what most of this state is like. It's not that I'm unwelcome everywhere, but 75% of Florida is backwoods. How is that not wack?

And the way this state has been populated, there seem to be random patches of backwoods sprinkled all over the place. Or shoudl I say, random pacthces of urbanity sprinkled everywhere. Up north and the midwest. You usually have a city in the epicenter with suburbs that surround the city. Only once you past the burbs do you get to rural areas. It's not like that here. You can be driving through a city, past a stop-light and all of sudden it smells like maneur and you hear animals moo-ing.

- One afternoon in December I was walking across a high school campus trying to find the auxilarry room that the kids from the student newspaper had moved to. I had missed the class for a couple weeks and didn't want to seem ridculously negligent. I was already late and coming from an interview so I had on khakis and a dress shirt, I wasn't feeling too comfortable.

I walked briskly, or should I say I wandered, meandered briskly. I had about 15 minutes left to make a showing and try to say something insightful. In the meantime, I kept battling off this white-hot rage that kept trying to overtake me. That's when it hit me like Earl Campbell: I have a borderline-murderous disdain for Florida weather. Here it was December and it was, like, 88 degrees. This went on for a stretch of days.

A lot of people don't know this, but morbidly obese people sweat a lot. I happen to be the .0087604% that don't sweat as much as the other pigs that sweat an inordinate amount. But I still sweat a lot. Maybe you don't see it on my brow and I may not be wheezing like Tony Soprano, but trust that under the garments, i'm tricklin. This just doesn't jive with a state that never really gives you a true reprieve from the sun. Even when its 70s, you're so close to the equator that it feels like the sun is smothering you, like the way you feel when someone, say maybe your father, is looking over your shoulder while you read a magazine and he's chewing granola really loud or, say maybe your mother, asking you where you're going and launching into dramatic maternal concern over the friend you're leaving with. Florida sun can drive a nigga like me to insane depths of complaining and oneriness.

There's just something really unauthentic about a place that never undergoes nature's natural seasonal shifts. True, I leave people voicemails in January, letting them no that it's 71 degrees, sunny and i got my sun-roof open. I appreciate those moments. But I have far too many moments like my moment on Springstead campus.

I finally found the room. The kids laughed cause I looked a mess. I didn't mind. Not until I sat down. That's when a few beads of sweat trickled down my ballsack (sorry Mom) and swayed there like a pendulum for a moment. I just closed my eyes, pursed my lips and clinched the stack of papers in my hand. At that moment I wished Florida weather was a real person, so I could wack him in the chops and spit some real foamy saliva in his face.

I couldn't though. I had to take it. 10 minutes later the AC had cooled off my shirt and pants, but they were still damp with fat-sweat. I was standing in front of the class with my arm extended against the wall like Kramer when he was modeling the Calvin Klein underwear. Next thing you know I dropped my arm and felt that freezing/damp fabric against my skin. I made "The Oh Face". Embarrasing? Yes. Maddenning? You don't even know.

- In Buffalo, we have six kinds of animals: dangerous dogs, stray dogs, mangy cats, squirrels, sparrows and huge rats that gnaw through your garbage cans. That's it. Every once in a blue moon, Pops might spot a bluejay on some tree-limb and he'd get hysterical. "Children! Children! Children! Look! Look! Look! Awe man...that blue jay is awesome! Look at how bright blue that bird is! Awe man!" I used to think: Wait, the bird is magnificent, ture, but are you gonna act like a giddy school girl now?

I think that bluejay was the only bird of color in the whole city and it would just fly around making appearances. He probably liked Butler Ave because my father would go bananas, like a bluejay groupie.

When it came to the animal Kingdom, Buff was severly lacking. Even our Zoo sucked. It was like the size of a Super Wal-Mart (and I'm a huge Zoo fan)...pathetic.

So coming down to Florida can be somewhat amazing. In the end, though, it's just bizarre and actually fairly annoying. The first few times I saw some derivative of a swan crossing the street, I was taken aback. Splendid, I thought, this Florida ecosystem is the dookie. But soon, the fact that you'd be driving on SR-50 and see some exotic bird prancing across some brown grass strewn with garbage in the middle of the road, breathing in pick-up truck exhaust was just stupid, and sad. This would be fine if I lived in some exotic oasis or in some tropical country. But I live in Spring Hill, Florida.

Still, nothing is worse than the little lizards that crawl around everywhere. They look like lil raptors. And they're everywhere. They're harmless, but everywhere. And if you don't watch it, they show up places they're not supposed to be.

One afternoon, as I was getting ready for work, I headed out to my living room to put on my steps. I look over at my blue jean Chucks and this frikkin lizard is posted on the F'n white leather tip of my friggin blue-jean Chucks. Just posted there, froze, probably scared, because as an animal he can hear the almost inaudibly high pitch tone of the steam escaping the pores of my skin. My fist clinch up like I'm ready to punch this lil lizard in his face.

I calmed down instead. First I scanned the room to see if he brought a party with him. It seemed, however, as if he was flying solo in my abode. So, for some reason, I thought that opening the door would be the move. Like he was a fly in my car and I could just roll down the window or something. To get to the door, however, I had to move closer to the lizard and since the lizard is deathly afraid of humans, he keeps moving further and further away from the door. So I'm scramblin now. Don't know what to do. I gotta get this lizzard out my crib. I can deal with a roach, a mouse, a flamingo, but not a lizard. I was just not willing to compromise on that. At this point, my only option was the usher him into my second room that I use to store boxes, hang my gym clothes and keep empty luggae and seldom used shoes. I only resigned to this decision after several feeble attempts to play the angles and get him moving back of the direction of the door, like, I was Larry Bird and I was playing angle-defense to funnel James Worthy into a trap on the baseline. The lizard would not go for it. That bish was bright.

I got the lizard in the room, though, shut the door, locked the door and sealed the cracks with towels. I was gonna suffocate and starve that nigga to death.

Days later, I bought some chicken-sushi from Wal-Mart. Doesn't that just sound stupid to you? Well, I did it. As the night wore on, my stomach started letting me know that buying chicken-sushi from Wal-Mart might be the quintessential bonehead purchase of the new millenium. I went to bed grimmacing that night. I remember being in the stage where you're dozing in-n-out of sleep, about to get into some real nice heavy zzz's. I was thinking, "I'm gonna have a nightmare tonight, I should've nevr watched Kiss the Girls." Ever since my nigga Dubb told me that eating too late or spicy food before bed gives you nightmares, I try to never fall asleep full or with an upset stomach. But my hands were cuffed.

Next thing you know I'm into some deep sleep. And the dream sequences begin. The final one put me in my crib. It was time to go to the gym, so I opened the door to my other room to get my clothes. But as soon as I even cracked the door, a huge Jurrassic Park raptor leaped out and started clawing my face and steppin real hard on my crotch. I remember saying something outlandishly random like, "Oh no you didn't grow up this fast!" That lil nigga lizard messed around grew up to be a raptor. That's when I awoke suddenly, sweatin like a fat-bish, panting like a fatter-bish. Straight petrified. See, I know very little about anything besides music, sports, english, pop-culture, what a girl wants and sociology. Anything remotely close to science and I'm a dunce. That means animals. I couldn't tell u a poodle from a pit bull or why it rains. About the only scientific facts I know for sure is that the earth is flat and we breath in carbohydrates and we breath out oxidents. That's it. That's as scientific as i get. I had no idea if that lizard was gonna get bigger and turn into a baby gator or somethin.

Now that I was conscious, I decided to man up and go check on the lizard, see what he was up to. Had he gnawed through all my books, had me a home out a pair of my Timberlands? I was hopin I'd open the door and that bish would be belly up on one of my air mattresses, dead from hunger or carpet poisoning. Only, as I got closer to the door I went out like a pussy cat, "What if I open the door and he darts out and I can't find him and he'll be milling around my room every night, maybe try to hop on my bed and crawl in my ear when sleep?" I turned around and said I'll give him a couple more days.

It's been three weeks since i shut the lizard into that room and sealed the door with cheap towels. I haven't opened the door since. And that's what Florida and its wild animals will do to a nigga. Not only do you have to deal with driving down four lane streets, wrestling with dualing feelings of amazement and sorrow at some exotic bird steppin over an empty can of Red Bull. Not only do you have to kick your screen door at night to make sure reptile isn't lurking near the handle. But, now, i'm a prisoner in my own crib because some lizard wanted to infiltrate The Dude's castle. My gym clothes hang on the shower rail in my other bathroom nowadays and I, out of the blue, thought it'd be cool to read Native Son again, but I couldn't, because my box of books are in the lizard's room now. Eff Florida and that licnese in my left pocket.

- Whenevr you live in a place where the majority of the people were around the same age as Elvis when he died, it puts a weird spin on the community. No matter where you go in Florida, you can't escape the seniors. It's not possible. They're in your neighborhood, at your 7-11 buying bubble gum (what r u a kid, now?), they're in your cafe and they're on your road.

Really, if we were to take the bad driver stereotypes -- asians, broads, drunks -- it's really not true wht they say. For the most part, those things are fine on the road. We're dealing with a whole other species when we start broaching the subject of seniors on the road. Roads can entropically spiral toward mayhem when seniors are out between the time they wake up at 4am, until they retire for the day at 6pm, a couple hours after they've eaten dinner.

This Spring I was headed to run a few errands and hit the gym before heading to work. It was a bright, sunshiney day, I pull out of my hood and start heading south down US-19, a busy thoroughfare with four lanes on each side. As I'm moseying down US-19 at an average spped, maybe 55 mph, I notice a car behind me in the rear-view. I switch to the slow lane. This lane can be perilous because it means you have to watch for old people making right turns out strip mall lots. Danger. In fact, in big cities the far left lane on highways is the HOV lane. In Florida, the far right lane on busy streets is the Senior Lane. I rarely see a regular person driving in these lanes.

About 5 miles from the bank, you get to the huge Target strip mall witha Target, a publix, a Home Depot, a Chilis, Applebees, Steak-n-Shake and a bunch of other smaller stores. It's a very busy lot. You can either exit the lot at the two opposite ends that have traffic lights or the one in the middle where street/business planners trust drivers to make sound judgement. For some reason, seniors like to use the non-traffic light exit and it always baffles me as to why they do it. Is it a late-life crisis? Are they trying to prove a point? Is this the late-life version of purchasing a convertible? If you were to sit at this mall-exit for 3 straight hours, you'd hear a loud horn-honking about once every three minutes, usually related to a poor senior exiting that resulted in something near fatal.

It was my turn that day. Wasn;t nearly the first senior experience and definitely wasnt the last, just the most harrowing. Grandpa decided to jerk out into the lane with ABSOLUTELY no regard for oncoming traffic. I slammed on my break (tire screeching and all) and careened into the next lane to my left, to avoid rear-ending Gramps. That cause the oncoming car to my rear-left to do something similar, which cause the car in the next lane over to violently jet to the left forcing the car in the fourth lane in the grassy medium where he ran over some orange cones and probably blew his shocks.

Here's where it's gets incensing. I pressed my horn so hard that the air-bag was probably about to come out. Either that or my palm wouldve went through the wheel. I gnashed my teeth so hard that I had something that resembled porcelain residue on my gums. Out of all the oblivious senior moves I've encountered in my year here in Florida, this one took the four-tiered German Sweet Chocolate cake. But as I pull up beside the car to glare at, who absolutely knew to be a senior, the old man seemed genuinely unaware that anything happened besides him exiting the lot after picking up some lox and cream cheese. He had his glaucoma shades on and appeared to be in his own world. I nearly blew 17 gaskets.

When us humans get mad, amny times we like to let others know we're mad, especially the object that made us mad. And when we let that object know we're mad, we want some type of response from the object, no matter if it's an inanimate object. If i stub my toe on a table leg, I'm gonna kick that table leg and quietly curse it. If the table leg doesn;t respond, well that makes more angry.

In most regions, when someone does something stupid on the road and someone drives up next to them to give them the finger or shout obscenities or a threatening stare down; two things either happen, 1.) the person in the wrong stares straight ahead, which is a sheepish way to acknowledge they were wrong. And you'll be able to tell in the profile that they know they just did something fabulously boneheaded. or, 2.) the person in the wrong takes humbrage with your reaction and curses back or generally behaves just as juvenile and without decorum. And, there's one more, sometimes the person may notice that the driver who's life nearly ended reacts calmly and civilized. in these cases, the doofus driver usually might mouth some apology or don some really contrtite facial expression.

But only in Florida do you deal with the seniors who 100 times out 100 never even realize that they almost caused a 100-car collision and this happens 100 times a day. I know this is taken years off my life. It's like what Marvin says on Anger off his Hear My Dear album,

Anger, can make you old, yes it can
I said anger, can make you sick, children
Anger destroys your soul

These seniors are gonna destroy my soul, ain't they Marvin?!?!?!?!!!

What made that day even worse is that I got the gym and had to wait for 77-Sue to slide off the treadmilled, dressed in her Sunday's best, because seniors were up in that bish like locust. Which circles back to the warped sense of community in most of Florida. The fact is, seniors want no part of a community. They don't talk, don't care. At that point in their lives, the world is small, just like it is during the toddler stage.


So, no, I'm not a huge fan of Florida. I won't front. Life is good if you live in South Florida or in the few cool neighborhoods of Orlando, Tampa, St. Pete or Clearwater. There, you run into a few less seniors trying to take your ife on the road. Your trips through the backwoods are less frequent. There's less of a chance that a lizard might comandeer your second room, grow into a Raptor and so the soldier-stomp on your crotch. And the berating heat is offset by cafes, good restuarants, young people and sidewalks (don't even get me started). Living in Florida is far from living in Alabama, like I said, Florida is the wackest state because it shouldnt be wack at all.

Still, everytime I have to take out my license to write a check, pay for alchohol or get on a plane, I'll be overcome with square feelings.

I think my sis Lyd summed it when I msg'd her and a few others about finally getting a Florida license and the accompanying feelings. She text'd me back a few minutes later not trying to lessen the blow whatsoever...

"Oh my God! A Florida license! LOL. That's so lame!!!"