Affection or Just Familiarity

"Me, I want to live with my feet in Dixie

And my head in the cool blue north"

-Jesse Winchester

The view from my office window isn't nearly as impressive as looking down the valley from the living room, but still not bad.

This place was built in 1907 as a schoolhouse, and converted to condos around the turn of the millennium. That was once the playground, or so I'm told. It was paved when we arrived in 2020, with faint outlines of what appeared to be a basketball court. The asphalt was recently jackhammered up, and now sits in piles. Wonder what's coming next?

Last night P and I gave up on renting a movie because someone changed her purchase code on Prime and neither of us knows the new one or feels like going through the ordeal of changing it just to give Bezos another three bucks. Instead we landed on Apple TV, and found there the comedy series Bad Monkey, based on Carl Hiaasen's book of the same name. The action all takes place in the Keys and the Bahamas, and features pretty much every manner of mayhem depicted in the Seven Deadlies.

We found it hilarious, and kept bursting into laughter in a way we never do when John Oliver or Jon Stewart are at their political funniest. And all of it was so very familiar, so very Florida. "Those are our people" Peg kept saying with a smile, sweaty folks who drank too much and got into romantic mischief or had some get-rich-quick scheme that of course involved real estate development.

Western New York is the most beautiful place I've ever laid my head, the locals are mostly kind and honest, the mayhem almost laughably modest up here on the hill. I would say the Corningites don't quite know what to make of us, but our circle is awfully small and I suppose our neighbors don't give us much thought, really. Not to mention that the aging process has made us all the more boring.

But watching that show last night reminded us of what we left behind, the tacky and the gloriously ridiculous Sunshine State. And Panama City is truly one of the metropoles of Floridian mayhem. Bay County boasts the highest per capita rate of boat ownership, the highest divorce rate, and claims the mantel as the swingers capital of that part of the South. I'm thinking all of those things are somehow related.

FN: For the record, P and I are not, and have never been, swingers. In fact, I didn't realize that was going on all around us until I defended a personal injury suit maybe ten years ago, brought by a woman who broke her neck when, while attending a swingers party at someone's house, she was pushed into a swimming pool headfirst and crashed into the bottom of the shallow end. Her tingling fingers and neck pain did not, however, prevent her from engaging in a three-way later that evening. You can't make this stuff up.

I digress.

The question on the floor this morning, before I dive back into tax class on my computer, is whether that warm familiarity also denotes affection. Watching that show we could smell the Gulf, feel the sauna-like heat. We knew those characters, the suspended police detective storing a severed arm in his fridge, the gold-digger trophy wife, the poor local living on the beach being evicted to make room for the construction of a luxury resort. It was so very funny to us because it was so very real.

The question should answer itself in a couple days, when I crawl behind the controls of the Mighty Columbia to fly back to Florida for a few days of work. I'm thinking the fact that this involves being away from P will color the experience enough to leave me eager to fly north by the end.