A friend sent me a piece from Elle, an advice column written by the actor Jemima Kirke. She’s British-American, chic in an effortless way. When I wear a Harley-Davidson tank top, for instance, I resemble a someone ejected from Quaker Steak and Lube. She wears one and looks like Jane Birkin.
Kirke tackled a likewise chic reader question: “Which city do you think is better to live in when you’re young and figuring s— out: Barcelona or Paris?”
She replied:
“Well, Florida is really where you go if you don’t know who you are or what you want. Nothing is normal over there and no matter how weird things get there’s always something weirder right around the corner. It’s a little bit like Wonderland in Alice in Wonderland. You fall down the rabbit hole, intending to find the exit but it’s a disorienting place and eventually, you adapt. Not to the place, but to being disoriented.”
Cue the bugged eyeballs, because I’m not sure I’ve read a better description of the confounding act of existence here. Kirke, who has lived in Florida, distilled a specific resilience only made possible in a place like this.
Like what? Like a jumble of contradictions. Like whimsy and grit. Like sunshine and rain at the same time. And I don’t know about you, but I need permission to feel disoriented right now.
Tampa is preparing for its goofy, joyous Gasparilla pirate invasion. Meanwhile, a city on America’s other end is being invaded. Federal officers detain children, batter down doors, drag citizens through snow in their underwear and accost anyone who dares intervene.
We’re supposed to put on corsets and drink? Anyone with a remotely examined life knows such revelry comes with a plus-one of heaviness. Watching palm-sized video after video of malevolence while rays of light stream through tropic winter windows? It feels screwed up.
We adapt to being disoriented.
There’s no better place to marinate in confusion than Key West, land of wanderers and open containers. I spent a few days there this month for a writing workshop. I stayed at the Lighthouse Hotel, former home of Ernest Hemingway’s mistress and an early LGBTQ+ guest house. On my trip, the desk clerk worked alongside Fenrir, an enormous white dog named for a Norse wolf. Fenrir was afraid of roller luggage.
The hotel was across from the Hemingway house, a limestone fortress of literary history and polydactyl cats. That was down the street from the wine bar where I met a couple of boating roamers from Tarpon Springs. That was around the corner from the Green Parrot, the famous dive with the world’s best piña colada if you don’t mind the possibility of stray hair.
And all that was a mile from Key West City Hall, where I took writing classes and where a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions rang out.
The protesters chanted for ICE to leave Key West, a famously diverse portal to the Caribbean. Locals have reported that the island’s many Haitians, Cubans, Bahamians and more have stopped zipping to work on e-bikes. High school students have been detained and deported. The Overseas Highway is an immigrant snare. Officers arrested 11 people in the airport Chili’s; they were having a family reunion.
“Conch Republic” merch hangs in a million gift shops, but do people buying Gulf of America T-shirts know what that means? The symbolic secession, a token of Key West’s defiant spiritual core as much as a tourist slogan, feels darkly ironic now. The whole concept of the Conch Republic sprang from 1982 protests over — you know it — a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint.
Lest we forget, Florida is a place where people have always bucked the expectation to roll over and comply. It’s not a place to disappear or disassociate, not even in its most idiosyncratic enclaves, not even on its most fun-filled pirate days. It’s not a haven to block out chaos, to shove down rage and sadness in favor of sunnier, sillier things.
Florida is the place to feel it all.
“It’s a state of mind I highly recommend,” Kirke added to her thoughts. “Just make sure to tell your friends you’re going before you leave.”
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