"In what fucked up universe would Florida assume supremacy over the entire earth?!" Was one of the more frequent questions running through the minds of those who by impudence or insolence were put to the alligator guillotine. There were other questions to be sure, such as "Am I living in a teen's spiteful LiveJournal post right now?" or "Didn't I move into a gated community to avoid this sort of thing?", but none so poignant as the first. The answers to the question of the soon-to-be-beheaded and the many more cranially privileged who came under the yolk of Florida arise from the land itself. Not from its geography, natural resources, or any other such rhetorical contrivance of the historian, but from a strange happenstance, a confluence of the mystical and the chemical, a fate bound to the swamp.
Florida's reputation during the opening decades of the 21st century was one of cultural isolation and endemic fucked-up-ness. An autobahn of auto-tuned cannibals, criminals, cranks, geriatrics and mock Civil War generals all bracketed by a fleet of mobile meth labs on the ground and a Camusian sun above. Its population was disparate and combative, a patchwork of Walgreen's parking lot refugees plagued by poor governance and a steady importation of madness. From North Korea to South Jersey, Florida bore an infamy as endless as the Ever Glades. One woman even joked that Florida was Australia's Australia. However, much like Carrie, Florida was about to turn the prom of 21st century life into a blazing inferno of plastic flamingos.
The year 2023 began just as any other with corporations colluding and butt fucking their way through our political institutions and into our hearts. Of greatest significance to the Florida Renaissance was the creation of the world's largest Xanax factory on the shores of lake Okeechobee. Tax payer funded and granted diplomatic immunity by Richelle Scott, the then governor of Florida and deranged offspring of former governor and Putin wannabe Rick Scott, the Xanax factory opened amid a series of mysterious deaths and a surfeit of Maroon 5 cover bands. Despite these ill omens and the presence of an impenetrable miasma surrounding the factory, few cared to investigate. If you've got leprosy, you probably don't care if you have scabies. Then, as if the land itself just got a prescription from a corrupt doctor, Florida swallowed the Xanax factory.
Sinkholes are a common occurrence in America's choad, but this one was all together startling. The Xanax factory (which was said to contain enough Alprazolam to sedate both Robin Williams and the Sun) sank instantaneously to an uncharted abyssal depth, drawing down with it the entire Okeechobee watershed and creating an interminable whirlpool at it's center. This redneck Charybdis abided no exploration being both too turbulent and too toxic. Concerns about it's growing girth and the contamination of the water supply were diverted by Richelle Scott's state-wide, cross-promotional music fest, Dubstep Stairway to 7-11, that sought to unite classic rock, dubstep, and jam bands for the dual purpose of snacking and amending the state constitution to allow corporations to adopt the adult population. With the populace of Florida awaiting the "drop", the land of Florida braced itself for the up-welling.
Changes were subtle at first. Native species began to grow larger than their normal size. The water turned a pharmaceutical blue. And the disposition of Floridians began to shift from dissociation and violence to uncommon, Dude-like chillness. The fabled institutions of old Florida, namely pill mills and bath salts mines, were slowly abandoned and converted to community recreation centers frequented by a zealous populace willing both to break dance and kill for their beloved institutions. Unnoticed by the rest of the nation, Florida underwent a metamorphosis that not even the hirsute love child of Ovid and Kafka could have imagined.
Of course, all would have been for nothing were it not for the indefatigable will of a woman. Cassandra Krusaphos was an alligator wrestler and a poet scrapping by in Tampa whilst buffeted by the injunctions to ambition all persons mired in their mid-twenties must endure. Bonded to Florida by love and history, she had long lamented it's self castration and envisioned an empire forged in the latent madness of the swamp. A cunning observer of the changes brought about by the Xanax whirlpool, Cassandra was perhaps the only one capable of wrestling the gator of history and prying open it's jaws...or butthole.
Cassandra began small by organizing disaffected people into creative collectives and promulgating poems proclaiming a new age...but this time without Enya. Her drive for demagoguery was matched by her insight for industry through which she realized the potential of her savage surroundings. Harnessing the mutations of natural species, Cassandra domesticated the now Bruce Vilanch sized Green Anole turning it into both work horse and cattle. Lizard meat became so popular that she spawned a chain of family-oriented restaurants called "Reptards" modeled after Ted Turner's buffalo grill (incidentally, Cassandra would later feed Ted Turner to her lizards). With a fleet of giant reptiles and cult of uninhibited artists, Cassandra founded her imperial city, Xanoplis, upon the banks of the benzo abyss. Cassandra, the poet queen and Marxist dino-rider, then set her sights upon Tallahassee.
Mounted upon a lizard and armed with the totally marketable skills of a Lit degree from a liberal arts college, Cassandra and her cohorts besieged the Wet 'n Wild water-park turned governor's palace in Tallahassee slaughtering politicians, lobbyists, and Richelle Scott. The coup was met with adulation by the public as Cassandra stood atop the pee and band aid filled rubble holding the head of the former governess. In a speech that would later be called "a 69th wave rad fem revision of the Gettysburg Address on shabu" Cassandra extolled the virtues of Florida and asserted its independence from the United States. Though West Virginia and New Jersey protested claiming that they would become the de facto laughing stocks of the US, the majority were in support of the defection. Thus Florida became a free nation and so embarked upon an era of political and cultural dominance that would change the world forever....
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