pseydtonne | My Sandals are named Clifford, part 2

(part 1 will arrive later -- it's on my desktop at work)

I'm not ready to write all the Florida stuff yet. It's complex, unlike Florida. I'm going to start with my first day in Florida and move back and forth from there.

Florida is Michigan in the subtropics. All of my assumptions that Florida was fictional got thrown out the window as I sat in traffic at the Saint Mary's River (the border with Georgia on I-95).

I saw everything my mind needed to create a Matrix Docking Station: heavy construction (a common disguise for black-helicopter operations), a "vehicle inspection station" with enough parking for an NCAA semifinals game, and a lack of towns along the road to suggest any temporal interference.

However, I also noticed there were too many anomalies about the crossing. Gas prices went up dramatically compared to Georgia. I figure a computer simulation of an environment would keep things too normal to have high gas prices. Also, they never have to plow in Florida so you start having rub strips embedded in the lane dividers to keep you from drifting. These are small, white plastic boxes sunk into the asphalt; they're angled to be highly reflective and noisy if you drive over them. The DOT tried them in upstate New York around 1990 and the plows pulled them right up by January.

Florida is great for building civil engineering experiments, but the testing could never be thorough enough. Something will work really well there and fall apart during a Thursday blizzard up here. Also, they don't have any geographical features to conquer -- the largest hill I saw was a county dump on route 60. They bank the roads in the middle of nowhere, but mainly to keep people from driving through farm fencing.

Florida has farms! It blew my mind to see cattle grazing on the crappy grasses they have. These are beef cattle and nothing that would willingly give you milk. Mile after mile of cows standing around on flat lands. I also saw orange trees, but I never got south enough to see sugar cane in the fields. I saw a depot for oranges, where the open-top trailers were full of hundreds of thousands of oranges. That was one of the few parts of the trip that looked enjoyably surreal.

We arrived in Florida at 9:30 pm on Saturday the Thirteenth. We crossed through Jacksonville, the last metropolis I-95 enters until it ends in Miami. I could see a bridge with a blue neon stripe (later research showed it may be the Main Street Bridge), which struck me as Eighties-looking but still more stylish than leaving it alone. It didn't look hokey or annoying -- the bridge opened in 1941 and I can't think of a similar bridge around Boston that could gain flair from a single glow.

We also saw a billboard for some radio station that claimed to play "today's Christian hits". Wait a sec... aren't all songs equal in the eyes of their lord? How can one song be more of a faith-inducing hit than another? Do the songs that sail down the charts after peaking wind up with a bad element or simply lose their corporeal tune-ness to become eternal?

After that we only saw the palm trees and the malls. It was night time, so the biggest site was the LPGA Avenue Overpass in Daytona. These people take landscaping to the extreme -- they had alternating short and tall palms all along the perimeter of the overpass. Lights beamed upward. The nouveau riche say hello.

The more time I spent in Florida, the more I understood the obsession with landscaping. All the land is flat and swampy. There are plenty of storms, but there's rarely a cold snap that would kill anything. Fire ants wish to control whatever parts of the place are too dry for the alligators. Humans want something to look at, so they spend every waking hour making things to look at.

I'll get to the part about class warfare among the palms later. Comments, please!

-back in Woburn, ps/d