This is The Parlour, a place for intimate conversation, a real-time archive, a shared diary passed between a rotating cast of queer characters every week in an attempt to capture a kaleidoscopic view of what it’s like to be a queer person right here, right now.
I decided to write this week’s The Parlour like an actual diary entry, loosely documenting my Very Florida Day™ from exactly a week ago.
***
On Wednesday, I wake up early. Lately, I’ve become obsessed with looking at seasonal sunrise maps and joking that my ideal life would look like moving from city to city throughout the year in order to always live someplace where the sun is up at the hour I deem most appropriate for the sun to rise (between 5 a.m. and 5:45 a.m.). I love my early mornings, but I do not like rising so long before the sun. Due to the tilt of the Earth’s axis, I have learned, the sun will never rise as early as I want it to in Orlando, no matter the time of year. I instead will have to learn to be comfortable in darkness.
I drive to the gym and lift weights. During benchpress reps, T-Pain sings the words “up down” in my ears, which is exactly how I describe lifting weights: up down up down. You’re just picking a heavy thing up and then putting it down. Over and over. I think I thought it would be boring before I started, but it has proven to be anything but.
It’s arm day, and I feel strong, though I’m recovering from a weekend of high-intensity tennis. My team made it to Florida’s USTA sectionals, where I played and won two singles matches against players from way up north in the state’s panhandle. I’ve got a bloody knee struggling to scab over and two toes jammed dark purple. My sister keeps telling me the nails on them will fall off but that I can’t know when, could happen in a week or a month, maybe more. She’s a runner, so I take her word for it.
After the gym, I pick up my newly strung racquet at the local pro shop. I need to be better about not leaving my racquet in a parked car for too long. This Florida summer heat will wreck the string job.
We drive to St. Augustine so Kristen can speak at a press conference about book bans in Florida. We stop for coffee along the way and so I can work a bit from the road, and I pick up a local newspaper to later use as collage materials (my latest obsessive hobby). At the community college where Kristen will speak, a small but passionate group of defenders of literature and the first amendment rights of Florida’s students have gathered outside, under a tree, hoping the shade will provide relief from the scorch of mid-afternoon August.
Under the tree, Kristen speaks about her love of Florida, and tears well in my eyes. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve heard her say these things; they gut-punch me every time, make me proud. Of her and also to live here. A high school student speaks, too, practicing the speech she hopes to use on debate team this year. Her last name is my middle name, and I mean to tell her this, but I forget in the flurry of group photos and people talking about next steps.
The organizers of the press conference tell us the district meeting that took place before was rough. Book banners — think: Moms of Liberty types — screamed in their faces, called them awful names, accused them of wild transgressions. The people who want to take books out of classrooms want to do far worse than that, too. Book bans are just the beginning.
None of these people show up to the press conference, thankfully. Under the tree, everyone is fighting for the same thing.
We could have driven the hour and half home to Orlando after, but we had decided to stay the night in St. Augustine and have a little adventure after the press conference, so we drive to our hotel to check in.
Later, we drink wine and eat cheese and fruit outside, again shaded by a big, old Florida tree.
Later, we get popsicles from the same little shop we went to together more than five years before, my first time in this old city.
Later, we look at shark teeth in a novelty shop in downtown historic St. Augustine. I’m obsessed with sharks as of late. Shark horror films, to be exact. Non-Jaws shark horror films, I have to specify, not because I don’t like Jaws but quite the opposite. It has been one of my favorite films ever for quite some time. But lately, I wanted to see what the rest of the canon holds. More on that later, in future writing, I’m sure. We do not buy any teeth. Why would we when we can so readily forage for them in the wild on New Smyrna’s beaches back home?
The streets are spookily empty. It’s off-season, a server explains. But even given that explanation, it’s too empty. I’ve read day-trip tourism is down. The middle class has less expendable income for day and weekend trips. Hotel prices have skyrocketed. This seems like exactly the kind of city to be affected by that, and I tell Kristen we should make the trip more often. It isn’t far from us, and lately I’ve been enjoying long drives and exploring the side-of-the-road restaurants and cafes throughout Florida and beyond, like when we took the scenic route home from Savannah and ended up in a seafood joint with killer fried clams and burgers that looked, from the outside, like a gas station.
Later, we watch tennis in a dive bar. Kristen says she’s excited to watch the U.S. Open with me in a week, now that she finally understands the rules better. She was at all of my Sectionals matches, cheering me on from the stands, carrying my things, even sweeping my side of the clay court after. A good tennis husband. I was the only member of my team with a spouse there the whole time. Yes, I’m flexing.
Later, we eat seafood at a restaurant we’ve been to before, only once, the same trip as the popsicles. After dinner, we walk to a small spot along the water known for its martinis. The night has cooled; the air smells like saltwater, briny as our drinks.
The next day, we will stop at the beach on our way home, a beach we’ve never been too and already want to return to. I’ll snap a picture of an informational plaque about the Anastasia Island Beach Mouse (peromyscus polionotus phasma) and joke it’s me, the beach mouse. I’ll find a perfect spiraled shell and present it to Kristen. She’ll drink hot coffee, me iced tea. And we’ll watch surfers catching larger-than-normal waves, presumably made by the faraway storm.
All of this, all of it all of it, is the Florida my wife writes and talks about. Florida, never boring, she always reminds. Florida, full of big, old trees, many hundreds of years old, offering shade, refuge.
This is lovely! Also I do want to hear more about the shark movie exploration! Deep Blue Sea a classic, but my fave Syfy channel original garbage has to be Sand Sharks. Very B-movie nonsense but I enjoy it enormously