Hi guys. We need to talk.
I’ve been at this Miami Creation Myth nonsense for eight years now. At first, it was simply an exercise in building an audience for my homonymous book. So, I started posting memes that celebrated and critiqued my ridiculous hometown on the shores of Biscayne Bay. Then came the essays and short stories. Eventually, a rhythm developed: I posted one original meme every day and an article once a week. I built a website and established a brand. The newsletter was an organic evolution of this process wherein I included a weekly story, my favorite meme, upcoming events, and any relevant news coverage.
Things snowballed. Folks started liking, sharing, and following. A stream of media interviews, podcasts, panels, speeches, presentations, and workshops followed. I published a few short story collections and created a merch store.
And, wouldn’t you know it, the big day finally arrived! The Miami Creation Myth published! I launched in front of a capacity crowd at Villain Theater. Dozens of positive reviews rolled in as well as a Gold International Latino Book Award! My silly little novel became Books & Books’ best-selling independently published title of all time. It was everything I could’ve wanted and more.
But I kept going for another four years. I continued posting memes, writing articles, and organizing events. The Miami Creation Myth outgrew the book and became a satirical outlet to, if not rectify, then at the very least call out Miami’s blatant inequities. I wanted my city and those who ran it to be better, which is damn near impossible when you have no power, so I settled for mocking the above instead.
Mind you, The Miami Creation Myth is not, by any stretch of the imagination, my day job. That entails running my own public relations and marketing agency. As any entrepreneur can verify, working for yourself is extremely difficult, even at the best of times. That’s on top of my odd hobby of picking up literal tons of other people’s trash in the mangroves—a part-time job with the worst pay and benefits imaginable.
All this is to say that, after 38,485 pounds of trash, three years as an entrepreneur, and eight years spent publishing 2,800 original memes and 173 articles, I’m freaking tired and everything hurts!
It’s my fault, I know. No one makes me go to the mangroves, and certainly, no government, company, or nonprofit pays me to do it—but that’s beside the point. I simply cannot continue the same pace of writing and posting I’ve kept up with The Miami Creation Myth because, to be perfectly honest, I desperately need more sleep.
It’s therefore with a heavy heart that I announce that The Miami Creation Myth is ending as you’ve come to know it. The entire crazy content archive will live on in the website and Instagram page but, as of this week, I will stop posting the daily memes and weekly articles.
Man, that sounds dramatic.
But don’t despair! The Miami Creation Myth will change but it’s not going away just yet. The incredible support I received from tens of thousands of my fellow Miamians kept me going for years. So, as a sign of my appreciation, my parting gift is a commitment to publish one chapter of my new book titled Florida Rising every week for free until we get through the whole thing.
I won’t even tell you what it’s about. All you get is that it involves a genius male OnlyFans model, glow-in-the-dark alligators, ayahuasca hallucinations, TedTalk erections, Battle of the Bulge Part 2, and one Governor of the Free State of Florida, Rhonda Santos.
Maybe you’ll love the book and, by some miracle, a literary agent will catch wind of it and want to sign me. Maybe it’s God awful and no one will give a shit. Let’s find out together! All I can say for certain is that I don’t have an editor, so any typos and grammatical mistakes you catch are my own.
I still love satire, Miami, and writing satire about Miami, so maybe once this is all said and done, I might still publish the occasional meme or article. We’ll see how sleep deprived I am then. Either way, thank you so much for being on the wild and often very silly ride with me.
Without much further ado, I present the introduction and first chapter of Florida Rising.
This book is based on real events. Only the people, places, and events are fictionalized. The stupidity is 100% real.
Introduction
You think this book is fiction. You think it’s a hyperbolic lark through a fantastical version of Florida so you can laugh at my home state.
But it’s not.
Almost everything you’re about to read has a rock-solid basis in reality.
The orca? Yeah, that happened. The Miami Seaquarium threw the carcass of a male killer whale named Hugo into a landfill in 1980. You can find pictures online. The donutting EVs? Saw them with my own eyes at a climate conference. The glow in the dark crocodiles? Not exactly true to life but close enough. And the crotch critters? OK, those were completely my own invention because I found the concept funny, but the underlying theme of people haphazardly eradicating supposed pests without understanding the ramifications of their disappearances on the broader ecosystem is alive and well in the Sunshine State. Also—and I can’t stress this enough—they make me laugh.
The book’s history is very real. Florida’s human story began thousands of years ago. There were more people living in South Florida in 1491 than in 1900. These indigenous groups were systematically devastated by Western colonizers who ignored their humanity and treated them with the same contempt as the bear, panther, and other native Floridian denizens they perceived as obstacles to the righteous spread of Western civilization. The fact that the Seminoles and Miccosukee were able to maintain their independence and cultures despite the encroaching white man’s genocidal intents is a testament to the herculean efforts of their past and still-extant communities. I am incredibly proud to call them my neighbors.
Florida’s ongoing ecological devastation described within these pages is also 100% real. I rode my bike across hundreds of miles of Everglades canals that still drain the lifeblood of this globally unique ecological jewel—an emerald smashed to pieces by humanity’s callous obsession with profit. I’ve seen the sugar cane fields south of Lake Okeechobee go up in flames every winter. I inhaled their noxious chemicals that leached into the canals and out to sea where they bred statewide algae mats that killed millions of marine animals.
I also worked with my father on cleaning a toxic waste site—an open pit where companies dumped tons of jet fuel, arsenic, bromide, mercury, lead, and practically every other lethal chemical you could imagine over the span of decades. It was located 100 feet from a canal, where all that nastiness inevitably leached into our drinking water. There are hundreds of similar recorded and unknown sites across the state.
There’s one four miles from my apartment, right next to the City of Miami’s wastewater treatment plant. I unwittingly rode over it with my bike many times as a child because there weren’t and still aren’t any signs informing the public of its toxicity. Both the dump and the plant have independently released unconscionable quantities of poison into Biscayne Bay. Hilariously, the plant is located just across a narrow channel from Fisher Island—the most expensive zip code in the entire United States. So, when it rains a bit too hard every freaking year and the tanks overflow, millions of gallons of South Florida’s collective poop literally laps at the houses of the country’s richest oligarchs on its way to shutting down Miami Beach. This is one hell of a state.
Finally, I removed more than 38,000 pounds of trash from Florida’s most sensitive ecosystems like its mangrove forests, seagrass beds, hardwood hammocks, back dunes, and coastal prairies.[1] I’ve viscerally experienced the effects of humanity’s cavalier fixation with overconsumption. I also take solace in the fact that a massive grassroots community is committed to addressing these environmental disasters, though our state elected officials seem hellbent on doing everything in their power to stymie our efforts.
My whole state is going underwater. I might become a climate refugee in my own lifetime, reliving the experience my parents worked their entire lives to protect me from. And yet, all anyone can focus on is moving to a sinking Florida. So, while we wait for the climate apocalypse, neither I nor my fellow Floridians can afford to live here, which is just as well, because any generational wealth in the form of property I might inherit from my family is going to make wonderful housing for all the fish that’ll move into it in the next 50 years. Fuck!
But, hey! The book is a comedy! And I promise I pulled out all the stops to make you laugh. You have a wild ride ahead of you. But the reason I wrote this as a satire and not a moody literary fiction memoir is because (1) I’m not sure what literary fiction is, (2) everything I write turns into satire anyway, and (3) I desperately need to laugh at this stuff.
So, enough about me. Let’s talk about you. I promise the gags are coming. I really hope they elicit barely audible chuckles while you sit on the couch, loveseat, waiting room chair, toilet, airplane, or anywhere else you happen to be reading my book. Florida is very easy to laugh at, but I only make fun because I truly love it. I want the Sunshine State to be better for all its residents—human, animal, plant, and assorted others. Until then, I’ll keep making jokes at its expense.
[1] See if you can spot where I make fun of myself later in the book!
Chapter 1
Antonio lay naked on a blanket, hands behind his head, a satisfied look on his face, and a younger man’s head resting on his chest. It was on a cool January afternoon. Stately slash pines swayed high above in a gentle breeze. Spaced well apart with sparse canopies bunched at the uppermost reaches of their trunks, they gave the appearance of living Grecian columns supporting a bright blue firmament. Their fuzzy needles allowed plenty of sunlight to stream onto the thick grove of chest-high silver palmetto that surrounded the open field in which the men lounged.
Antonio, a 43-year-old software designer, had just finished a tryst with José, his on-again, off-again “loveable himbo,” as he secretly called him. José wrapped his lithe physique around his lover and lifted his shaggy head.
“I still don’t get why you always want to hook up in this place,” he crooned.
Antonio raised an eyebrow and repeated what he’d said at least a half dozen previous times.
“Because cruising is a foundational part of the culture,” he replied earnestly. “This was one of the few spots we could have sex in relative safety. It’s important.”
José rolled his eyes and smirked.
“But we can have sex anywhere now! Just get on Grindr and you’ll be smothered in dick!”
“You’re not nearly as safe in this state as you think you are,” responded Antonio, a grave expression on his face. “If it were up to the fascists running Florida and the crazies who vote for them, we’d be back in the closet or burnt at the stake…”
He snapped his fingers.
“Like that.”
“Ugh!” cried José rolling away. “Why do you always do this after we fuck? Also, why are you literally the only gay man I know who still wears a condom? You know we have PrEP now, right?”
“Sure,” retorted Antonio, propping himself up on an elbow. “But PrEP doesn’t protect you from mega-gonorrhea and syphilis.”
“Wow,” said José, all sense of mirth gone from his voice. “Way to basically call me a slut.”
A few seconds of silence elapsed as a snail kite called overhead.
“But…” retorted Antonio. “You are a slut.”
They both burst into laughter.
Antonio pulled off the condom and walked a few feet to a sinkhole that carved an almost perfectly circular 30-foot pit in the limestone. It fell about two stories before breaching the water table. An acrid odor rose from the brown-gray liquid below.
“Whoa! Whoa there, Mr. Superwoke!” cried José. “Don’t tell me you’re about to throw a condom into that hole! Ever heard of the dangers of plastic pollution?”
Antonio spun around with an annoyed look on his face.
“You really don’t know the history of this place, do you?” he asked.
José threw up his hands and gazed at their surroundings in disbelief.
“Why no, Antonio, I don’t know the history of this one random patch of grass in the middle of a random palmetto grove next to a random hole in the ground. Why would I?”
“Well,” began Antonio with a professorial air. “This random hole in the ground was used by local and state governments for decades to dump literally thousands of tons of raw sewage, jet fuel, arsenic, mercury, and—I kid you not—a killer whale carcass from the Seaquarium. So, I don’t think tossing one tiny used condom in there will make much of an environmental impact in the grand scheme of things.”
José’s expression morphed from disturbed, to appalled, to aghast.
“You mean you’ve been making us fuck next to a toxic waste dump for years?” he yelled, getting to his feet.
“That’s why it was such a prominent cruising spot!” responded Antonio defensively. “No one else wanted to come here!”
“Fuck your fucking cruising spot!” screamed José. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“It’s history!”
“Fuck history!”
“Don’t be like that! It’s important!”
“Agh!” raged José at the seemingly endless lecturing.
Just then, a man dressed in camo pants, a filthy gray long sleeve shirt, and a blue cap emerged from the palmettos, a large trash bag in one hand and what looked like a giant set of tweezers in the other.
José and Antonio froze mid-argument.
The interloper made eye contact with both naked men, looked at the ground, grabbed a candy wrapper with the tweezers, stuffed it in the bag, and looked back at Antonio, who still had the condom in hand.
“You’re going to pack that out, right?” he asked.
Antonio nodded silently.
“OK, great. You gentlemen have a fine afternoon.”
He then disappeared back into the palmettos.
“Let’s get out of here before any more weirdos show up,” said Antonio.
“Fine!” fumed José. “But I’m never sleeping with you again unless it’s indoors on a goddamned bed!”
Antonio collected his clothes while José seethed. Then, deciding he didn’t actually want to pack out the condom, he waited until José’s back was turned to unceremoniously toss it in the hole. The two then hiked 300 feet through the pine rockland undergrowth to their waiting car.
Later that night and a few miles south, the ground did something it absolutely never did in Florida: it shook.
If you like our stories, check out The Miami Creation Myth hardcover.
