Cheeseburgers In Paradise

My husband had never heard of Jimmy Buffett until we'd been married for about five years. Unsuprising really - he’s from the Birmingham in England and was raised on UB40. And then one night, drunk and bored at home, we played each other song after song from YouTube, going deeper and deeper into our respective pasts. When I finally landed on a live performance of Buffet’s Son of a Son of a Sailor, my husband had to stop me. ‘What the fuck is this?’ he asked.

Now, after about another decade, he’s a Buffet fan. Day one of a four day, just off that firefighting shift? The cold drinks are out, Jimmy is on, and our feet are up on the back deck.

It might be tempting to ridicule the sort of person who would mark Jimmy Buffett's recent death as a middle manager from Iowa. Maybe that’s a stereotype with more than a little kernel in reality. Go ahead and get your shots in early. After all, Buffett is known for a very specific brand of Florida-flavoured country kitsch that is only a step above novelty songs and does not resonate with everyone. His nearest neighbours musically are Jim Croce and Let It Flow-era Dave Mason with a soupçon of Leon Russell; lyrically, think more Johnny Paycheck and Jerry Reed. These are not the names you drop if you want people to think you’re very cool. His biggest hit topped out at 30 in the Billboard charts in the 70s.

I used to have a friend whose favorite takedown of Boomers was that they think they produced Janis Joplin but actually they produced Jimmy Buffett, a line she ripped off from Vice, and I could not understand her frequently repeated disdain for a guy who as far as I could tell just wanted to make people happy and mostly succeeded.

When she came to visit I hid the skull-shaped Margaritaville Cozumel mugs. Obviously.

For the people he did attract though? Buffett was a touchstone. Parrotheads flocked to Buffet’s concerts, ate at Margaritaville, and tailgated like their lives depended on it. In many ways he was the personification of a vibe. The music is fine, with sometimes introspective lyrics over a Caribbean-lite beat. What made it important was the image. The three minute checkout from real life when a song came on the radio, or the time it took you to finish that cold beer, or the couple of hours you could get to the beach and put your toes in the surf.

Of course all the wrong people hate that message, and that’s how you know he was Very Good Actually.

The old school Florida vibe is not about giving your entire life over to work only to drop dead the very second you stop producing economic value. Maybe the DeSantis vibe is, but for many and varied reasons, fuck that guy. Jimmy Buffett wasn’t even from Florida and he understood it better than anyone. Bulgur wheat and carrot juice are good for you, but cheeseburgers are tasty. And sometimes what you want is tasty. Work can be joyless drudgery, get your ass down to the local bar. A failure to laugh will indeed drive you insane.

The other thing about Buffett is that you can’t enjoy him ironically. You have to be someone who actually wants a cheeseburger in paradise, gets wasted away again on margaritas, and genuinely counts down to it being 5 o’clock… somewhere. In fact everything truly great about Florida is best enjoyed free of irony and snark: Weeki Wachee mermaids, Gulf coast sunsets, fishing off a bridge, gator rasslin, conch fritters. It’s the opposite of posturing, of too-cool-for-school, of whatever the hell Vice thought they stood for. It is earnest and relatable and wears its heart on its cutoff sleeve.

Jimmy Buffet was a symbol of what Florida could have been. What the people who flock to the Gulf coast condos hope it will be. They might be sitting in traffic an hour each day on the interstate five days a week, and Jimmy Buffet was the escape from that. The hope that someday they would earn that leisure, that beach bum existence. Living on sponge cake. That they too could get a slice of the good life, before we all die in a fiery environmetal apocalypse, before the bubble bursts.

In many ways it is fitting that Jimmy passed on Labor Day Weekend, the subject of his biggest hit. Come Monday things won’t be alright, but we have until then to try.

Getting ready for Alyssa’s wedding

In April I went back to Florida for a cousin’s wedding. I only RSVP’d at the last minute then went looking for flights and a hotel room, which I was shocked to find were far higher than I’d anticipated or remembered from all the trips back when my Dad died a couple of years ago. There was a small highway motel near Tarpon Springs though, and I hoped to catch some beach and some diving before the ceremony, so I went ahead and booked.

Diving was cancelled due to weather so on the morning of the wedding I went to the beach at Sand Key, which looks like Florida used to, and is next to Clearwater Beach, which does not. The I went back to the motel, changed, and drove to Brandon for the ceremony. I thought the drive would only take an hour; it’s just on the other side of Tampa from Pasco County. It did not.

I passed places that had changed even in the few years since Dad’s death. As I often joke with people, I remember when Boot Ranch was still actually a ranch. Everything felt different, again, and not in a good way.

It turned out the reason for the expensive flights and unavailable hotels was that Taylor Swift was in town, playing whatever they call Tampa Stadium now for three straight nights. I saw someone online this week saying Jimmy Buffett is Taylor Swift for over-55 white guys and… you know what? He was. The Swifties turn out for their girl. They entirely and unironically adore her. Sure the music is aural wallpaper. She represents something to them. More than an idea, an ideal.

At the wedding there were a lot of people I hadn’t seen in years. And when I say years I meant decades. One former wife of a now-deceased uncle ran up and hugged me before I spotted her. ‘There’s my birthday buddy!’ she said, because we have the same birthday. I smiled tightly and moved away. I guess I wasn’t supposed to remember that she was also selling stories about my teenage years to the Sun back when the Mail was ridiculing me and my father. Above-the-fold front pages headline for three straight Sundays, no less.

Here's a story she didn't sell: When I was about 14 years old she and her younger son and me and my mom all went to the Keys together. We sang along to tapes of Jimmy Buffet and Billy Joel (also not cool) on the drive. We stayed in a cheap motel on Marathon. We ate a Cheeseburger in Paradise at the Key West Maragritaville, long before it became the hospitality chain it is today. She bought me a conch shell in Mallory Square, one with the end sawn off so you can blow it like a horn. There is not a lot of stuff left from my childhood but I still have that conch and it has even been used, when I lived in Scotland, as a shofar to see in Rosh Hashanah.

Here's another one: her eldest son died when he was 30. I flew back for the funeral, put on a remeberance event afterwards, and stayed with her out at a little five acre parcel that had once been a horse paddock north of Tampa, helped clean it up and move in a mobile home, because she did not want to immediately return to her little cinder block house in Clearwater where he died. We burned trash and cooked BBQ, hung a tire swing and christened the spot Levy’s Landing.

We have a history, she and I. A long one. But being able to remember the times we were close also means remembering the time I was hard up after leaving London and before my first book was published, working a minimum wage job in a commercial kitchen, where I broke my leg and she threw me out of her house the next day. Something about not paying the rent I hadn’t even not paid yet. I ended up in a grimy bedsit in South Ward - the literal epicentre of Clearwater’s crack epidemic at that time - with a couple of friends from high school as my main emotional support. She didn't tell the papers about that, either.

At the reception I swapped seats with someone so I didn’t have to sit near her, which also meant I wasn’t sitting with family. Oh well.

The next week, I got a call from my mom. She’d had feedback that my “attitude” had “ruined things”. Weird how none of the people saying that were the bride, or her siblings, or their mom - the people I actually went to see. Weird how not one person who had a problem with my “attitude” has ever mentioned my father’s death to me. The cousin getting married helped me out when the rest of them pretty much left me high and dry to deal with it all. Where were they then? Not a card, not a text, nothing.

The soi disant aunt who tried to hug me? She’d known my dad since they were kids. Almost sixty years. She couldn’t even say to me, sorry to hear about Paul. Much less, sorry I betrayed you to the tabloids.

Maybe they felt betrayed by me. I didn’t invite any family members to my own wedding in 2010, didn’t even tell them about it until long after it happened. None of them met my husband for years. That wasn’t an argument I wanted to dredge up on someone else’s day. How, when you know someone in the family is selling stories about you, you end up cutting everyone out. How once that seal is broken it’s difficult if not impossible to go back to how things were before. They think I’m a jerk and a snob. I think I’m protecting myself and the people who are my real family these days.

I don’t believe I will go to any future family weddings.

I have never fitted in with the rest of my family, not really. I am weirdly frank about things that make people uncomfortable. This also means I find it hard to fit in with people, in general: I will talk too often and too louly about sex or death or medicinal chemistry or whatever. But the world is very large, and it contain a lot of other humans, and some of them are for me.

There is a saying that there is the family you are born with and the family you make. That family are the people who, when you have nowhere else to go, will take you in. It is a deep human need to have a sense of belonging, of community. Even as alienated as modern life and existential dread and social media make us all feel, we can’t help but keep going to new places and trying to embrace the good in people around us, to make them family. Weaving our safety nets with whatever materials we can find. Whether it’s cousins or Parrotheads - we need community. No man is an island.

On the rope swing at Levy’s Landing, 2000

The first time I heard of Burning Man was a few years before Chris died. I was living in Santa Fe and a couple of tech guys who had talked me into the Santa Fe Century were now talking up Burning Man.

How is that not just a bigger Zozobra? I wondered. The nearly hundred-year-old event held annually in Santa Fe where a giant puppet is filled with people’s worries and sorrows from the previous year, and then burned with much fanfare downtown. Because ART, I was told. Because COMMUNITY.

Well okay. But if that was the case, why would I go two states away just to hang out with the same people I was already hanging out with?

Over the years the concept fascinated me, not because of the positives that I heard from so many people who had gone to Black Rock City, but because it seemed so deeply in conflict with the values that people say it demonstrates. How is it “radical self reliance” to be doing, essentially, glorified camping? You have to truck everything in, and everything out. You get to pretend, for one week a year, not to be tied to the grid you are intimately tied to (and indeed, because of the ecological sensitivity of the site, absolutely cannot leave your waste in) in the name of art or freedom or… something.

As the festival has expanded it seemed even more ridiculous. Burning Man bears little resemblance to self-sufficiency, and it’s insulting to be told that by people parking up semi truck trailers and leaving them running so they can enjoy air conditioning in a place where such things fundamentally should not exist. Not people like you and me, but people like Peter Thiel and his acolytes. Or Neal Katyal, former Obama administaration acting attorney general who defended Nestle’s use of child labour (successfully) before the Supreme Court, running around in head-to-toe tie dye while off his head on ayahuasca. To see the ruling class partying in a grim mockery of ‘roughing it,’ the same people whose money and influence could end things like homelessness and lack of fresh water, but who resolutely choose not to do that while the rest of us try to find ways to tighten our belts, keep our heads down, and put out the recycling, for all that fucking matters anymore.

The whole thing has shades of Broadacre City, the suburban development concept of Frank Lloyd Wright who believed it would (according to his Foundation) “take advantage of modern technol­ogy and communications to decentralize the old city and create an environment in which the individual would flourish”. It was car-centric, giving each nuclear family an acre of space - which sounds generous if you don’t know how intensively an acre would have to be farmed to provide for a family, or never ask questions about who does the maintenance and where do they live if the acre instead is laid to lawn and garden. He conceived of hospitals where no one would ever “need ever see another disabled or sick person unless he so wills”. No churches, just “nondenominational worship spaces”. No professors, and only one university per state.

Then he designed it with absolutely no waste treatment plant whatsoever.

You need water and waste management and morticians and all that un-fun stuff if you want to have a society that suppports arts and radical creativity. You have to have cleaners. A fact we almost acknowledged during the pandemic, but promptly went back to ignoring in favour of continuing to pretend that all products and services are magically delivered on a bed of orangic, gluten-free, hand-dived unicorn pubes.

The concept of a city where fear of decay and death is codified into the infrastructure can never become reality for more than a couple of days. You can’t have life without death. You can’t have food without waste. You can’t have people without society, the things that people have already decided they do together. We are subject to all the same laws as any other living thing, and no ivory tower - be it Wright’s or Thiel’s or whomever else’s - can will it out of existence because poop and sickness and stuff they don’t like are inconvenient. This is the worm at the core of life. There is always going to be the quotidian grind between margaritas, and then you die .

You can’t vibes your way out of shit and death.

I live off grid, which makes you very aware of what goes into delivering the modern conveniences we take for granted. Also what goes into removing things, once brought in. Our toilet is composting and the container it all drops through is simply the first part of a years-long composting chain. Greay water is recycled for plants, and pretty much allw ater here gets used at least twice. Since the county doesn’t collect our rubbish, we have to drive it out, which makes you extremely aware of issues like overpackaging and reusing materials where possible. It’s a lifestyle that, give or take the internet and solar panels, wouldn’t be entirely unfamiliar to an abuela living in this same state in the 1930s and 40s. Or even to tribal members in New Mexico today, some of whom don’t have plumbed in water. We harvest all our own firewood and water, I do a lot of canning because our array won’t support a chest freezer, and so forth.

So to see this week news of the gates shut down at Burning Man, while attendees are prevented from leaving due to rain, well… it’s a strange kind of feeling somewhere on the schadenfreude-to-horror scale. These people claiming they are self-sufficient are going to actually have to try to be so, as the organization is unable to send in trucks to pump out the chemical toilets they rely on.

A few years back, I gave an ignite talk at ORD Camp in Chicago called Why Are You Still Shitting In Drinking Water. Afterwards I was angrily confronted by someone who accused me of fearmongering, and kept saying over and over that I couldn't really believe, could I, that public utilities were at risk. (I can and I do.) Even though I had given concrete examples of exactly those things happening that same year: the Flint water crisis, and Magdalen, NM running out of water. I find myself hoping maybe that same guy is at Burning Man this week and having a rethink.

When they make the inevitable Netflix documentary about what's happening at Burning Man right now I hope we get a breakout star who admits to offering a blowjob to the guy who pumps the portaloos.

After working in emergency management, not to mention just observing the world as we experience what is surely only the opening salvo of the coming environmental crisis, has only sharpened my views on the topic. Anyone who thinks it can't, or won't happen to them, and doesn't prepare accordingly if they have the means to is a fool. And these rich people playing Stone Age Cyberslut so they can get high with every fintech douchebro in the West fucked around and found out. These people want to send colonists to Mars? They can’t even get their head around the logistics of pooping in a bucket for a couple of days and taking their piss bottles out when they go.

Everybody who talks about radical self-sufficiency but has never actually lived off grid longer than a camping trip will vastly underestimate the amount of time you spend thinking about what happens to your shit.

I repeat: You can’t vibes your way out of shit and death.

One thing that you learn pretty rapidly living off grid is that it's actually impossible to be entirely self-sufficient. Where I live is not capable of producing all of the sustenance I need to survive, even though it is 20 acres. Not without extreme hardship anyway. Huge portions of my life are given over to thinking what to do about our toilet waste, our drinking water, and our firewood. “Normal” prepper preoccupations, like hoarding ammo and storing food, are pretty far down the list… but not entirely absent, it just happens that other things we are usually happy to delegate to whoever keeps the sewers clear and the water coming out the taps are pretty dang important and have a steep learning curve to achieve once you decide to lone wolf it.

Instead, you have to develop your community. We came with some experience, having lived in a part of Scotland where that hadn’t come onto the grid until the 1980s and even so “the grid” was a single power line that went down in storms several times a year. We learned a lot more from the many other off-gridders we met on moving here, and we still learn something new probably every week. Where we have a skills or equipment gap, others fill it. What we bring to the table in skills is somewhat smaller but growing all the time. Not everyone is a good neighbour - it’s about 50/50 out here - but the ones who are, are more Parrothead than Burner in their inclinations. And while that is an ongoing source of surprise to me, maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe the future of small community resilience is not, in fact, irony and detachment and aesthetics and thinking the tech will save us. Maybe it’s good old fashioned talking over beers with the people who live closest to you.

What about the much vaunted community vibe of the Burners? Let’s just see, shall we, what any of those currently rolling in the mud in Nevada come back with. I suspect it will be less advocacy for water rights justice, and more flinging VC money at “solutions” that are only affordable and of interest to the wealthy. Or finding novel ways to turn human waste into the next Soylent. I could be wrong.

Either way, if it came down to Buffett fans vs tech bros, I know who I’d prefer to spend the end of days with.