Florida Man

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Rupert is an anxiety-ridden, panic attack-prone, six-foot-ten, 42-year-old biracial man working for the Spliphsonian museum in Washington DC-the only entropologist with naught above a high school degree-and passively crushing on a co-worker, Leenda, from a distance. Quite suddenly, he is sent to Florida to secretly infiltrate a federally funded, museum-sponsored work program for drug addicts, and evaluate it. Failure to do so will result in demotion to the janitorial job he’d originally applied for.

Once there, Rupert pushes through his many anxieties and gets caught up in four meth-producing enterprises operated by assorted bosses and cookers of varying degrees of insanity-bona fide Florida Men (and Women). He finds, in short order, that his anxiety retreats in the face of people more socially inept than himself, and soon, he is planning to start his own meth super lab, intent on putting these low-rent meth dealers out of business and winning Leenda’s heart in the process-he will become Florida Man. But, the bosses have something else in mind. Inevitably, entropy kicks in and his plans begin to fall apart.

Through panic attacks and self-doubt, moments of clarity and insanity, and through a reality bordering the egregiously questionable, Rupert finds the mental, emotional, and physical strength to save the day-or does he? What exactly is it his friend, Jesus, gives him to smoke? If he thinks Florida is strange, things will surely become significantly stranger. . . .

FLORIDA MAN: BATTLE OF THE FIVE METH LABS: A LOVE STORY began as a joke with a friend. After compiling dozens of “Florida Man” headlines from which to draw inspiration, it practically structured itself, and I couldn’t stop writing. Now, it’s a nearly-88,000-word joke. In the end, it is an odyssey-or, as I like to say, a “wacky romp”-into the world of “Florida Man,” based either directly on, or as a creative annex to, actual news stories, including endnote references.