live baby gators
STIMULANT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 011 // AUGUST 17, 2024
If you wanna write about “America” you’re probably kind of a dumbass like I am, but if you know that and don’t care, a good place to start is writing about billboards. These great big highway advertisements constitute as much as 82% of the United States by area. I was a passenger down from Atlanta to my parents’ new place in Florida a few days ago, so I’ve seen plenty and learned a bunch about America. Below is a list of cool billboards and road signs I saw on the drive and why they are more red, white, and blue than the flag or a warm pie or whatever. Or maybe this is just my slapdash autobiography. Please pay attention. You will be quizzed on this.
SIGN ONE: “WELCOME TO FLORIDA”
Being in Florida reminded me that I was going to fucking Florida. My parents met in a Manatee County high school–yes, high school sweethearts, very cute–so whenever I tell people that they’re moving back down to the Gulf I feel this compulsion to add “They’re from there, so it’s not like when most people get older and move to Florida.” Really I’m just trying to cover my own ass I guess. I don’t want people thinking I grew up in a household where life spent on Bigot Beach was the ultimate goal. It’s unfair to paint the Orange State with that broad brush, slightly more fair to paint Manatee County with it, but Florida–and America–are not fair places and I think they get a grim satisfaction from being treated the way they treat others. The Golden Rule, etc.
Ron DeSantis, the famous right-wing governor who looks like a reverse circumcision, says the Sunshine State is “where woke goes to die,” which, I mean, the joke writes itself. As if “woke” is a wounded dragon staggering off a battlefield, lungs of flame falling out its tattered body, needing a tropical cave to rest as it drifts toward oblivion, and the woke beast murmurs… “uhhhhhhhh Florida’s nice this time of year.” I was really hoping they’d put “where woke goes to die” on the Welcome sign. Probably the tourism board said that wasn’t a good move. The Welcome also feels American because America can only be experienced in discrete chunks of weird shit, a gradient of psychosis cut to pieces by bureaucracy. Somewhere in the hallucinogenic desert, Arizona fits into California; the cowboys don’t care, but the LA movie stars do. Where Illinois’ southern tail meets Kentucky’s west-protruding rump, the land of bluegrass somehow becomes the land of blues. The Ohio River and its consequences delineate who can get an abortion. So speeding down an interstate and suddenly being Somewhere Else after hours driving through identical woods seems quite beautifully American.
SIGN TWO: JESUS AD OUTSIDE THE SEX SHOP
or excuse me, “adult supercenter,” which sounds like something a therapist would say. There were two of these actually, one in Georgia and one in Florida, kissing cousins across the border. Has anyone ever been converted by a billboard saying I AM COMING BACK SOON in black letters on a yellow background? If Evangelicals love anything, they love futility. I’ve got a weird relationship with God. Maybe that’s why I can’t imagine most believers seeing Cartoon Christ casting a shadow over the beat-up junker in the sex shop parking lot and thinking, “Yeah we run shit.” I can imagine some angry day-drunk horndog, a regular Cowboy Dan, sitting in that junker then jerking off with a new toy then feeling bad about it because Jesus was watching. Sorry to sound perverted.
The hot gloopy weather of Southern summers makes it hard for me to feel sexy, and I never liked working up a sweat with that atmosphere waiting beyond the window, even if the AC’s on inside. The two things I don’t ever do these days but feel like I should be doing: praying and fucking. In both cases it’s unclear where the line between wanting something and feeling obligated to want it exists. The hot gloopy weather again. It melts everything into half-measures. Not shades of gray, but the shit-brown color you get when you put too many paints together on the canvas. America resolves contradictions by shoving things against each other in a way that could be erotic but instead feels cheap, desperate, a little sad. Like when you put Christianity and sex next to each other, but instead of anything attractive or seductive you could do with that, it’s just a billboard for Jesus’ website looming like a monster over a helpless porn-and-dildo emporium.
SIGN THREE: A TRUCK THAT SAID “PEDOWITZ” ON THE SIDE
Look man I just thought this was funny. What an unfortunate last name to have in the kind of job where your name gets printed on large objects. I’m sorry to whatever person has that name because I’m sure they get tired of people making fun of it. Their website says they’re “the NYC Trucking & Rigging Company Long Island is proud of.” I asked Dani, a woman I know from Long Island if she was proud of them and she said, “I do not have enough information to conclusively say yes or no” which is a pretty resounding endorsement by the standards of a machinery moving company. Honestly the only reason I wrote it down to remember is that this was in the middle of the interminable piney expanse between Macon and Valdosta, and I was getting restless. Sue me (actually don’t). If I had to connect this to America as a whole, I’d say people with European names starting businesses that the general public knows nothing about and has no opinion on is pretty much the American Dream. Rock on Pedowitz!
SIGN FOUR: BUC-EE’S IN FIVE MILES
One time in an Instagram caption about Texas I described Buc-ee’s as “The Temple of American Heaven” and honestly I kind of cooked with that one. There’s no place that better upholds Uncle Sam’s various insane promises. Never before has a gas station so ruthlessly marketed itself. Never before have I wanted merch from such an establishment. Never before has the square footage of a convenience store reached 75,000, which is the size of Buc-ee’s’ largest location and, for reference, the size of 1.3 football fields including endzones. A size that massive removes some “convenience” from the “convenience store” since navigating a building that large with aisles and aisles of food and tchotchkes could not only consume a lot of time but deal intense psychological damage to the unsuspecting. You could do The Maze Runner in that shit. Every Buc-ee’s is a monument to sloppy roadside excess, like those big baskets and balls of yarn they build in bum-fuck Ohio and Kansas and wherever else has empty space and a decent highway.
Also uniquely American about Buc-ee’s is the food. You can get a breakfast burrito and a cinnamon roll for $7 USD (not counting tax and tip). They have 22 varieties of housemade fudge. The sweet tea flows in glorious rivers for 2 bucks a pop. I thank my lucky stars I don’t live less than a road-trip's distance from a Buc-ee’s because I’d abandon my body to the whims of the beaver. Don’t call it healthy or unhealthy. Like most of America, call it post-health, hurtling brightly towards a future where health–physical or mental–doesn’t matter much anymore. God bless the smiling overlord of America’s imperial profits. God bless Buc-ee’s.
SIGN FIVE: LIVE BABY GATORS
These were everywhere around Gainesville, FL. I swear on my life there were forty. Each one depicted an adorable cartoon gator with big sparkling eyes and a charming open-mouthed smile. While baby gators do have bigger eyes than you’d expect if all you know about gators is fully grown ones with beady little peepers, the ads’ cutesy stylization would piss them off if they could read. Does an alligator recognize itself in the empty pupils of a billboard? I guess humans see ourselves in the colorfield hell of minimalist design, so gators might do the same. That’s the Americana of those signs: the dagger teeth and hydraulic jaws of the bayou’s scariest residents reduced to some confused hatchling, possibly drugged into complacency. What once meant death on stubby legs, now baby-proofed and bubble-wrapped into another roadside attraction.
I’ve got a soft spot for cute little babies, so I’d like to check the LIVE BABY GATORS out someday. Even–or especially–if it brings me to awkward tears in the petting zoo. I’m not some Animal Liberation Front ideologue, but staring into their real-life slitted pupils instead of the round ones printed on the billboard could remind me what to care about and why. Free the gators, man, don’t let booger-eater kids poke them in the stomach.Then there’s that meme quote, “and yet a trace of the true self exists in the false self.” Because I care now, don’t I? Otherwise I wouldn’t write about it. Just from the cartoon gator, I care. And that’s American too. We built suburbs and skyscrapers to get away from trees and soil, we synthesized our own chemical foodstuffs when real ones didn’t taste how we wanted, the feudal lords of Silicon Valley made a website to replace every physical meeting space. But it hasn’t worked. Americans increasingly want real flowers, real food, a bar to meet a lover and a playground for the kids. Even as our fear of the world pushes us into our ivory tower at the top of a planet we want to control, there’s something in us, as in everyone, that says “no.” You can’t beat the thrill of spying a real live gator and its hatchlings out in the underbrush. That’s the bright side.
Once we arrived at the new house–gorgeous, though not yet a home–I stepped into the South’s humid heat and took a breath. The fifty nifty United States are a ragtag quilt of misshapen pockets, and now this place becomes one of mine. In a couple weeks, I’ll drive back to upstate New York, through the Carolinas, D.C., Pennsylvania. Meet the new country, same as the old country. That’s the future, though, and this is Now. Florida and Georgia are Now. My new neighbors have pet peacocks, though I have yet to see them. Some might say there’s only so much difference from one state to another—the sun still sets in the west. But the sun falls over the ocean here, not the land, leaving a burning golden stripe brighter than God or QuikTrip lights across the Gulf of Mexico. Pines and palm trees sway in summer wind. The other way to write about America, if that’s what you wanna do, is write about the dirt beneath your feet and the trees on either side. I wouldn’t be so good at that, evidently. I’m more comfortable with the cartoons, the trash heap, the artifice. But you could write it perfectly.
LIVE BABY GATORS was edited by Charlie Zacks.
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