40
Rupert drives his forest green 1970 Cadillac DeVille convertible down the Tamiami Trail, heading south. He doesn’t put the top down too often, as he still hasn’t gotten used to the intensity of the sun down here—he doesn’t imagine he ever will—though he is sporting a pair of vintage knock-off Ray Buns. He finally got his sunglasses. But, there was no way he could refuse to return and help out Jesus, who’d done so much to help him through all of that mess. Going back to “normal” wasn’t an option—not after the Florida experience alone, not to mention adding the reality of Crack Planet, the ótrúlegt vá, the Sprungians. It’s pretty hard to come back from that.
Rupert never went to Crack Planet, and he figured he would someday. Despite understanding that he no longer suffered from anxiety—an impossibility if one had partaken in ótrúlegt vá, which he had—changing his thoughts about it proved to be harder than one might, well, think. His preceived anxiety has improved a lot, but it’s not perfect. It might never be perfect. Changing one’s perception or expectation of one’s reality is harder than kicking any drug, though similar in many ways. But he works on it, pushes his limits, retraining his brain to move past old thought patterns and expanding his comfort zone.
It’s work, but it helps that he changed his shitty attitude. He had to accept that living one’s life according to a belief in the inevitable incursion of social entropy on every aspect of one’s existence makes one blind to all the ways it’s not inevitable. And that’s stressful.
Upon reflection, Rupert finds it interesting that, with all the time, effort, and money spent on fighting drug addiction, no one utilizes nearly as many resources addressing the average person’s addiciton to their own shitty thoughts, and yet here he was. But he keeps focused. In fact, it’s safe to say that he and Leenda have become born again negentropists—while obviously accepting the fact of entropy in its various forms in the universe, they choose, in their lives, to hope and strive for some personal order out of that raging chaos.
Rupert drives and wonders whatever became of Bucket.
As for himself, his life has changed a lot. He turns the massive, green auto-eyesore off of Tamiami, pulling into the Osprey School’s Visitor Center’s parking lot. The sun beats down. The air is thick and hot.
He waits, thinking.
Yeah, he thinks he’s made the right decision. He’s doing some good in the world, and not only by making himself a more worthwhile human being on a one-on-one basis—he’s still a professional.
No longer an entropolgist, he and Jesus are Senior Sales Executives at JesRupe (Pronunced: Hay-Sroop) Industries, and also a Senior Sales Consultant to individual national JesRupe franchises, which means a little travel now and then. Neither he, nor Jesus, act as representatives any longer. No more hot, sweaty days behind the FFG for them—they most often conduct business via smartphone from the white, sandy beaches of Siesta Key, tanning their already-brown asses, and occasionally ogling scanitly-clothed passersby. Hey, it’s a living.
But that’s not all. Rupert spends at least half of his weekly work hours doing hard research, as he is on remote faculty at Crack Planet’s Gôddärd Anteé University in their Sun and Crack subdivision, under the umbrella of their Ótrúlegt Vá Studies department. He’s not nearly as well-versed as his Sprungian colleagues, but he’s got the advantage of working in the field—together, they are working to answer some questions, make some advances, make the universe a better place.
What gives ótrúlegt vá its instant rehab properties, despite its being almost molecularly identical to Earth crack? Almost. Unfortunately, the additional unidentifiable molecule involved only rasies more questions than it answers. Perhaps they need to be looking a little more to the left.
Sunlight arrives to Earth as low entropy, high energy light waves, and leaves the Earth’s atmosphere as high entropy, low energy infrared radiation. Is there something notable about Crack Planet’s atmosphere? Is there some force related to the planet itself, like a specialized gravitational pull? Whatever the case, when Earth jettison’s its high entropic, low energy infrared radiation into space, it travels—is pulled?—straight to Crack Planet. How? Why? No one knows exactly. Or vaguely, to be honest. But specialists believe it has something to do with the sun.
Ótrúlegt vá isn’t man-, or Sprungian-, made, like Earth crack—it is mined from the ground. For millions, if not billions, or trillions, of years, this “mineral” has absorbed the Earth’s high entropic, low energy infrared radiation and, over time, like coal creates diamonds, this crack transforms into a low entropic, high energy lightwave. That’s right—ótrúlegt vá is not a solid substance, but a wave, and it glows like the sun at high noon. It is also self-igniting, but that’s a phenonemon for another department. All of this occurs naturally, unlike filthy Earth crack, which is manufactured by humans and means that it must, by default, bring disaster and ruin.
Not so with ótrúlegt vá, this solar offspring—the stuff of gods.
So, Florida—the Sunshine State: Why is it so batshit insane? No one can say for sure, but Rupert has his own little theories. Regular Earth peoples might compare Rupert’s Florida transformation with the coal/diamond scenario, but Rupert understands it was more akin to the ótrúlegt vá scenario.
Rupert arrived in Florida a highly entropic, low energy person. Over the course of his stay, under immense social and professional pressure, he trasmutated from that to a high energy, low entropic individual. See, Florida Men and Women are, by nature, high entropy, low energy. They live unaware of their entropic state, leading them, by larger cultural standards, to not give a shit about much of anything, but their low energy—emotional, physicological, physical—leads them to widespread and chronic drug abuse. What the rest of the nation perceives is a state full of crazy people just getting crazier by the day, but for someone like Rupert, who arrived embodying an unrecognized form of the Floridian Condition—his exposure to the Florida sun, compounded by his interpersonal activities, actually caused the mutation, and instead of becoming more dysfunctional, he became more functional by his own perception and standards. Society, though, would see him as just another Florida Man calling 911 because he hadn’t received his tax returns. Geographical context is, apparently, not important.
So, what about the Sunshine State? This Florida sun, apparently so different from the sunshine falling throughout the rest of the country, the rest of the world . . . well, here is another of Rupert’s theories: It’s not just Florida. But, there are reasons why Florida has its international reputation as a massive outdoor asylum. The first being that the state of Florida has some of the United States’ most unfettered open-record laws (ironically, also called “Sunshine Laws”), which means journalists looking for a wacky scoop on a slow-news day can pilfer through the public record and out the wildest shit the state’s residents have to offer from ther criminal lives. However, some states’ open-record laws are equally permissive, so . . . why Florida?
This is where Rupert thinks the real meat of the matter lies: Everyone goes to Florida—and what do they go for? The weather. The sunshine! Like California, its native-to-transplant ratio is pretty skewed, but California’s open-record laws are more stringent, so while there are people living in both states from all over the country—hell, all over the world—it’s Florida’s general diversity that most frequently gets showcased in the newspapers and online.
The crazy is everywhere, and perhaps, Florida gets more than its fair share of loons, not by nature at this point, but by reputation and self perpetuation. It’s widely known as a haven for nutters—why wouldn’t they flock to this mecca?
Of course, these are all just theories—theories about ótrúlegt vá, about Crack Planet, about Florida, and its ever-scorching, madmen-making sun—which Rupert doesn’t really discuss with his peers. For now. He does discuss it with Leenda, and Jesus, and even Stanley, who’s taken the Dean’s position at GAU, and he agrees that it has merit and is worth pursuing. So, that’s what Rupert does in his spare time.
He’s never been happier or more fullfilled emotionally, socially, or professionally. How is any of this even possible?
* * *
“Oh my God, put the top up, are you crazy?”
Leenda dumps her things into the back seat. Rupert smiles at her, gets out, and they both pull the convertible’s top up and secure it.
“You’re going to burn us both to a crisp,” she says after they get in, then leans over and kisses his cheek, like she does. Although not thrilled with the idea of returning to, and living in, any part of Florida, Leenda had said to Rupert: “I cannot live without you.”
She said those very words.
He remembers those words exactly, because he had looked her straight in the eyes for longer than he thought he’d ever looked anyone in the eyes. He’d been looking for something—some hint of a lie. Some exaggeration. A sign of hyperbole.
He’d found none. A moment of negentropy—in seconds, his Universe collapsed with hers and they birthed a new, fetal plane of existence, a cluster of buzzing, vibrating atoms—that was love.
As they pull out of the parking lot and back onto the Tamiami Trail, from the nearby Spanish Point jungles rises a solitary monkey screech, splitting the heat of the day. It fades into the distance streching out between it and them, and together, here under the blazing sun, none of them gives a shit.
The End.
Yes, it’s the end, but Florida Man Fridays continue, and will until the first week of March — I guess I had more citations than I thought.