Florida 2

O Florida! You are florid indeed, but I want no swamps, no humidity, no poison flowers. I only want green lawns and golf clubs in summer, sun-slanted hills clad in endless green scarcely different from old Eire. Great tropics, slants and the drip-drop of plants, another Antipodes.
The green lawns, the smooth hills. Pastoral golf-courses where old men play, in clean polo shirts and grim gopher expression.
O Florida, naked peninsula, sorrow of Spaniards, hothouse of the world, bottleneck, human-ruined Paradise! Who dares slant its sun across you from on high, marking the linebacks, punishing alligators, in a mild and commonplace day? And I wish I could escape into the hills, the swamps, the trees, go forth there and make great loves in the fenlands and forest, the surf and sunshine.

I was attached to a suburban golf club. It was a reputable place, mostly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, so I felt rather out of place, being neither Anglo-Saxon nor Protestant, and only incidentally caucasoid. Perhaps I should explain myself: I am a hipster, a college boy, a gen x phantom of cigarettes and T-shirts. I like sneakers, fagpackets, and am lackadaisical about my hairdos. I frequently have a goatee in the style of Butch Vig, and a comparable expression of boredom. My hair at times grows scraggily long, at which times I push it behind my ears. I am the "slacker" but am too cool to call myself any such thing. I only mumble cursewords in answer to any queries about my job description. I am far too postmodern to have subcultural affiliations. But I have a nice line in ironic nostalgia.

How then did I come to be in this golf course cum park, this Flordia concourse, sun-splashed and genteel? I'm not gonna tell you. It's not important to the fundamentals of the story. Perhaps you may perceive, dear readers, gentlemen and ladies, that I myself do not know the reason.