[314] Screed City

[314]

02/05/2025 Wednesday. Wooden side table on rolling table. Room 209. Home 2 Suites, Hollywood, Florida.

You ever been to Miami? I have. Can’t say I was impressed. I won’t say I was impressed. Maybe I went to the wrong part, but I walked around for four hours and I didn’t see shit. Construction? Yes. Traffic? Yes. I saw an iguana and some coconuts. I saw tons of cops. Tons of unhoused people. I thought only woke, DEI’d cities had problems with end stage capitalism? Where did I get that idea from? Ol’ Pudding Fingers himself? The one thing I saw that was very weird was mid-twenties men with dyed blonde hair driving electric bikes around and delivering things. How is that a thing that you do? You know, maybe in the naughty aughties when Eminem was a thing, but now? And here? It didn’t even seem like a cool thing to do. Like it was just a thing. Get a job driving a bike around. Check. Dye hair blonde. Check. Okay, that’s my life now. I feel like Philp K Dick might be running Miami from the great beyond. Everyone seems too lazy to have an original thought and too burned out to care. I mean, I also saw a bunch of early twenties tech bros throwing coconuts at a manatee from the deck of a yacht named, Save The Neck For Me, Clark. I don’t know. I wrote a short story about my time in Miami:

[Insert short story]

Northwest East First Avenue South at Twelfth Street Boulevard Place In Miami Where A Man Was Living In A Doorway

I thought the guy was joking. It was just after noon and eighty one degrees. Humid. It was February. I was from New York. If anything, he should have been the one thinking I was joking. Freezing his ass off. In February. Up in New York. Because he was from Florida. And I was mugging him. Instead he was holding a knife pointed in my direction. Mugging me. Kind of. It was like I triggered a rattle snake or something. Like he just popped out of from the shadows. Like under a rock. I was just walking down the streets of downtown Miami. All the sudden there is this guy stabbing at me in broad daylight and its hot and I don't know where I am and I'm just trying to get back to the train and there is construction everywhere and I think the guy is joking. He isn't wearing any shoes for crying out loud. Just socks. And he's stabbing at me with a knife? In the middle of the day when its like a million degrees outside? In February? And nobody is around, just dozens of construction sites with two hundred foot cranes. I tell him I don't have any money. He can have my wallet if he wants, but I am not letting him take my driver's license or my credit card or the picture of my kid from fifth grade or my Osha card or the train ticket I would need to get back to the hotel, but he can have my wallet if he wants it. I take it out of my pocket and show him I don't have any cash. I laughed when he poked into the money part with the tip of the knife. Like he was a surgeon. I told him that there was nothing in there to take. I told him that we were closer to each other financially than the people who where building these sky scrapers above us. That if he wanted, I would take him somewhere to get something to eat, but he was not getting the things in my wallet that had value for me. That is when he stabbed me. The guy didn’t even take my wallet. He walked back to the shady rock he slithered out from under and left me bleeding on the street. The shady rock was a doorway to a building that was being constructed. A place where nobody lived. I watched him take one of his dirty socks off and clean his knife with it. My stomach hurt from the stab, but the knife did not go in very far and I didn't think he punctured my bowels or stabbed any of my organs. Watching him clean that knife like that did not fill me with optimism. I needed to get to the hospital. And soon. And there was nobody around to help me. I sat down on the sidewalk and yelled at the guy to get help. He looked at me like I was something confusing. He put his sock back on and stood up. He walked over to me and kneeled down. He stabbed me in the chest and took my wallet out of my hand. He looked inside hoping to find cash, I suppose. When he didn't find any cash he went back to where he had been sitting and took his sock off again and cleaned his knife again. I watched him put his sock back on and take all of the things out of my wallet that had value for me. After he decided those same things had no value to him I watched him throw everything on top of a mound of discarded coconuts he had apparently been eating or drinking the water from or maybe they weren't even his. My chest hurt and I could hear blood pooling in my lungs. I was trying desperately to stay awake. To ignore how desperate and dangerous my situation had become. I needed help. Half an hour before my phone had died. Just after I walked back over the bridge that had taken me to Miami Beach. I knew where I was going so it didn't worry me. Desperate, I took it out of my pocket to see if I could get it to turn back on. The guy saw me do this and stood up. He walked over and took the phone out of my hand and walked back to his shady home. I watched him playing with my phone as black drapes started dropping down in my peripheral vision. I watched the guy take his sock off again and use it to clean my phone. The drapes closed with the sound of high pitched ringing and the smell of salty wind and the smell of dirty socks. I heard a rooster crow.

It was dark when I woke up. I woke up because a rooster was crowing. I looked over at the guy that mugged me. He was laughing at something he was watching on my phone. The blue light reflecting off of his face. The phone was plugged in. I felt my chest. It hurt. My stomach hurt also. The reason I felt my chest was not because it hurt but because I wanted to confirm that the guy had taken the charger out of my jacket. I confirmed that he stole my phone charger. I tried to call out to him and get him to help me but my lungs weren't working. I heard bubbling and my own words almost silent as they came out of my mouth. A couple walked over me and scoffed at my condition. I tried to get their attention. The man said something about how disgusting downtown had become. The woman was wearing such a revealing outfit that I was distracted by her buns as they crossed under the street light. The mugger looked at me annoyed because I was making noise. He turned up the volume on my phone and I could hear he was watching a documentary about denim and the history of jeans. I tried to get his attention again. He stood up and walked over to me. He stabbed my leg with his dirty knife and went back to his home. I watched him take his sock off and clean his knife. I watched him put his sock back on. Now my leg hurt. The rooster crowed and a convertible drove by with Latin music blaring. I heard a woman squeal and the sound of tires screeching. I can't say I enjoyed dying on a street corner in Miami, but I did learn quite a bit about denim on my way out.

End

I don’t known about Florida. I just don’t. You can’t walk anywhere. Its too damn hot, even in February. The culture is tourism and plastic surgery. Mostly butt stuff. And not the kind that Professor Curly likes. Everyone is kind of a dick. The traffic lights are a million years long. The only thing to do is go to the beach and get a sunburn. Oddly the breakfast nook serves microwave burritos for breakfast. The only currency anyone takes is BitCoin. Which, one day its worth enough to buy a yacht and the next day you have to sell the yacht to take the subway. All the ladies wear weird spandex pant suits. I’ve seen more camel toes here than at a dromedary race. I don’t know. At least in New York there is a sense of community. Here it just feels like everyone is isolated and kind of pissed off. Or maybe that is just America in general and New York is actually kind a very nice place to live. At least Brooklyn, where you can ask a question in the line at BJ’s without somebody yelling, “Yeah, it’s a line! Don’t worry it moves fast!” As you are holding a jug of milk and a jug of almonds and everyone else has a four foot wide cart filled to the brim and are going to the 15 items or less line. Or, you watch a guy stand up on the train and say to another guy, “I guess the train is going this way?” because he can’t sit backwards on the train and the other guy yells, “What the hell do you expect me to do about it?” I did see an iguana though.

[insert iguana photo]