God Bless You, Florida Man

“We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe; but there is something in the dragon’s image that fits man’s imagination, and this accounts for the dragon’s appearance in different places and periods.”

–Jorge Luis Borges

Florida inhabits a strange place in our imaginations. Juan Ponce de Leon once thought that’s where the Fountain of Youth was located. Nowadays, it is a source of political jokes and strange occurrences in the news. These stories occur with a strangely high frequency, to the degree that they can be collected and summarized by one term, Florida Man.

Florida Man, exists simultaneously within our world and outside of it at the same time. He is the news stories that you read incredulously, having to check that the website is not a parody. It is those stories you snigger at and tell your friends about, as you all laugh incredulously that somebody exists like that. Despite being a constant source of amusement for many people, I do think Florida man serves an interesting and almost vital role in our times.

In some ways, these stories of dubious value become greatly important in our lives. In a world (I can’t even say that phrase without imagining it being said in a movie trailer) where value is determined by one’s possessions and desire can be sated by purchase or rentals, anecdotes of Florida Man that yield amusement and laughter are a direct contrast to that. Such stories are often freely given, and freely consumed. They are passed from person to person, expanding in our minds, and sometimes in the telling of the tale, till they take on a life of their own. Spreading laughter and enjoyment where they go. Florida Man is, simply, a kind of mythical being that exists both within and without our lives thrilling us and enchanting us all the same.

In this excellent article, Eugene McCarraher argues about such enchantment:

No doubt this will all seem foolish to the shamans and magicians of neoliberal capitalism, whose own imaginations are lavishly imprisoned in the gaudy cage of disenchantment. The Romantics would remind us that our capacity to act well relies on our capacity to see what is really there. For there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.

Florida Man serves as a great reminder of this. He is a local legend in our eyes, everyone knows a story about him, or knows somebody like that. He is our cousin or uncle, or that guy we went to highschool with. His existence is something we all laugh about and forward each other in emails at work or post on Social media about, each of us feeling a gentle reprieve from the mundane consumerism that plagues our lives.

As we go about our day, we chuckle from time to time about these tales, perhaps repeating them later to friends and we remember that there are somethings money can’t buy.

The mythologizing of the world is not over yet; the process was only halted by the development of knowledge, diverted into a side channel where it exists on without comprehending its own meaning.  But knowledge is nothing more than the construction of a myth about the world, since myth lies in the very elements themselves, and there is no way of going beyond myth. 

–Bruno Schulz

We all laugh at Florida Man, for his failures are larger than ours, but in other ways, so are his successes. He exists in the same region as John Henry, Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan and invigorates us with his tales.

God Bless You, Florida Man.