There’s a game people like to play online. In fact, there’s an entire website dedicated to it. It’s called the “Florida Man Birthday Challenge” and the premise is simple enough: You type your birthday into the site’s search bar — month, date — along with the words “FLORIDA MAN.” Whatever headline pops up becomes your official intro into the Florida Man historical record. When I type my own birthday on the site (December 16th, Sagittarius Sun), I discover that a naked Florida man once stole a pickup truck from a car dealership. That’s right. Simply walked into the dealership, fully nude, and then climbed inside a 2021 model Ram pickup and promptly drove off. 

Florida Man stories include the kind of incidents that involve tossing a live alligator at a fast food employee (admittedly more exciting than someone hurling, say, a cat), stealing $30,000 worth of turtles, and attempting to “eat someone’s face” after ingesting bath salts. These crimes are odd and incomprehensible; the kind of behavior that someone might associate with a badly behaved toddler whose brain has yet to fully develop. The hit doc Tiger King fit into this particular trope; early pandemic led to people’s obsession with the weird Florida vibes that the Netflix special focused on. Murder? Tigers? Shirtless, pierced and tatted, oiled-up men? A name like Joe Exotic? For viewers, it checked every satisfying box. After all, Florida Man headlines often involve wild animals — we’re a state chock full of hazardous ones; gators and sharks and snakes and a large variety of poisonous insects — and the stories about our zoology almost always also include sex, nudity, drugs, and the misuse of motor vehicles.  

It’s understandable people outside the state equate Florida with outlandishness. All of the things that make us interesting — our overpowering heat and rampant humidity, our hurricanes (and the people who decide to shoot guns into them), the subtropical flora and fauna that’s both beautiful and deadly, our beaches and lakes and springs and unlimited tourist traps — lead to the most exciting news coverage. I mean, sure, we have the same issues as every other state. There are drug problems and homelessness and an uncaring state government that takes money away from education and its citizens in order to fund itself. The usual fare, right? It’s just that Florida’s weirder.

This slurry of Florida Man content on the internet and in public perception is also due in part to the Sunshine Law, a prime example of freedom of information legislation: Arrest records and mugshots are readily available online for the general public to gawk and point at. If you’ve committed a crime in the Sunshine State, that information becomes accessible to everyone, everywhere, immediately. In the age of the internet, when nothing posted is ever truly private or removable, Florida criminal activities sit at the forefront of shameful behaviors that can never truly be wiped clean.  

Not every story involves a serious crime (though plenty of them do), but the majority of them center on the fact that someone, somewhere in Florida, has done something dumb, bizarre, or absurd that has probably gotten them arrested. While the terminology can make it feel as though a single individual could be perpetrating all of these crimes, Florida Man is not some kind of lone super antihero. Florida Man is larger than that; an archetype, a movement — a sea of Florida bodies, all capable of the weirdest shit you could ever dream up. 

And then there’s the real kicker: Taken at face value, the meme asserts that for Florida residents, there’s the possibility that at any given moment, you’re in danger of becoming the next Florida Man. What the “birthday challenge” — and the term Florida Man itself — promotes is the fact that people who live in Florida are all likely dangerously stupid and certifiably insane. 

As a third-generation Floridian and someone who writes about my home state for a living, I often find myself flummoxed when it comes to navigating my feelings regarding Florida Man. After all, I’d be lying if I said I’d never once laughed at a headline. The cop who claimed that fast food workers put dirt on his food when it was really just seasoning? Comedic genius! But there is a difference between chuckling at a concept and acknowledging what has somehow become a stand-in for bad feelings and uncertainty about Florida as a whole.

Florida Man has become the state’s own boogeyman. People outside of the bubble actively fear and loathe us because of what our government has decided to promote and endorse, despite the fact that our state is heavily gerrymandered and voting has become an exercise in futility. If you live here, you’re at fault, regardless of your feelings and your actions. In the eyes of outsiders, it feels as though we’re all Florida Man.

This sentiment becomes wildly apparent whenever I travel. On a recent trip to Chicago for a friend’s wedding, a stranger approached a group of us at a neighborhood bar in order to make small talk. On finding out I’m from Florida, they expressed their regret at the fact I have to live there. “I hope you get out soon,” they said, voice dripping with sympathy. 

I understood that they weren’t trying to disparage me. They’re concerned with our politics, like most people who give a damn about those who are disenfranchised. They’re not wrong about the difficulty that’s attached to living in a red state. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to remain living in a place that is systematically stripping away my rights. I don’t begrudge people outside of Florida these opinions — I know what the news looks like, and it’s discouraging to see how reckless our elected officials are when it comes to empathy and care. But the galaxy brain connection between our state’s government and its people sometimes finds weird alignment through rampant internet usage and bad faith reasoning. Gator thrown at a fast food worker, they think. Naked man stealing a truck, they think. Maybe they deserve it, they think. 

In the grand scheme of America’s problems, it’s easy for outsiders to point at us and say that we’re what’s wrong with this country. I think the harder lesson is that Florida is no different from anywhere else; the headlines just turn our hardships into a joke to make things more palatable. 

When I consider Florida Man and its position in the larger social construct of the world, I begin to wonder about my responsibilities to this place and to the narrative itself. It’s true that I am inseparable from it. The umbilical cord of my Floridian existence has long fed and fueled me, dictating the kind of writer that I’ve inevitably become; someone focused on the messiness of the body, the outlier, the bizarre, a person who craves questions and mystery. Florida refuses to be pinned down. It is that very refusal — a resistance to being known, to being stable — that continues to enthrall and delight those who speak about it. There’s something magnetic about this place. 

Maybe I don’t want to reclaim Florida Man. Perhaps I just want to reimagine it. Transform it, turn it into the thing that Florida could someday become and often is. Understand it, finally, as a place that refuses to be categorized. To show care to myself and to the people who live here and our continued questioning and unknowing. In that way, I embrace the roiling sea of Florida Men as my community; as a collective that I can contribute to in a helpful way. We can’t and won’t disregard the fact that we’re going to stay strange and continue to be completely, authentically ourselves; we also can’t forget the wonderful alongside the troubles. We can claim our state proudly, even to sympathetic strangers. We can stay, and live, and thrive. Wacky headlines don’t describe me personally any more than they describe anyone else in Florida. Strange things happen every day, everywhere.

Florida Man is in everybody. Even you, voyeur of headlines and the internet. Welcome. We’re glad you’re here. Let’s get weird.

I barely had enough money at the time to put gas in my car, but I wanted the kiddie pool very badly. Needed it, really. 

The pools sat in a giant stack outside of the Walmart Supercenter next to a pile of bagged mulch and discount beach chairs. We were there for groceries after a very long, bad week of work, and suddenly a pool seemed like a necessity. 

“It’s cheaper than going to the movies and we can use it over and over again,” I told my then-partner, and she reluctantly agreed. I waited to grab one until we left, lugging it out to her car while she maneuvered the grocery cart. We stuffed it in the back seat, wedged behind our heads alongside sweaty bags of food as we drove back home.

Living in Orlando means getting used to the oppressive heat. One of the ways Floridians do that is by regularly throwing themselves into various bodies of water. We live for excursions out to the springs, lakes, and oceans. Nicer homes have their own in-ground pools (and the requisite expenses that go along with keeping them clean). A kiddie pool seemed perfect for me, a raccoon of a human who got her dinners most nights from the convenience store. I set the kiddie pool on the back patio — a cracked slab of concrete that never got much shade — and filled it regularly with a busted old hose rigged with duct tape that I sometimes used to wash the dogs. To me, it seemed like ideal enjoyment: a fun, cheap way to cool off and decompress. Most of my days were spent running myself ragged. To soak in a pool meant to truly chill the hell out. 

Growing up, my family couldn’t afford much. There was no pool at our tiny rental home, no access to bodies of water other than the garbage-filled retention pond out back. That’s where I’d seen my first used condom, floating near the reedy lakefront, bloated as a dead jellyfish. My grandparents bought a kiddie pool for my much younger cousin one summer, and I spent any time they’d let me sitting in it, the littler kids begging me to get out so they could play. Buying a kiddie pool of my own felt like a throwback to a younger, simpler time. 

My now ex-partner only got in the pool with me once, but after I got it set up in our backyard, I used it religiously. She moved out not long afterward and took a lot of our things with her. I got to keep the pool. It was bright blue plastic — not inflatable, the rigid cheap stuff. You had to roll it along on its side like a giant hula hoop to move it anywhere. It was covered with cartoon marine life. A seahorse with a grin full of shiny white teeth that looked like dentures. Fish wearing baseball caps. A starfish in sunglasses. It was so, so stupid. I loved it. 

When I was angry with myself, with my then-partner, or with my work, I climbed into the kiddie pool. I drank a beer or three. I brought books out with me and read them right there in the water, pruney fingers carefully flipping pages. The dogs roamed the yard as I lay back and attempted to dissociate. I stared at the limbs of the oak overhead and listened to the world revolve and move around me. I was tuned into everything. There was a neighbor starting up his lawnmower. Someone leaf-blowing. Kids screaming as they chased each other down adjacent streets. Wind rustling through the flapping leaves of palm scrub. Another neighbor yelling at her husband for screwing up the hamburgers he was grilling for dinner. And once, my dog digging up the dead body of a squirrel, rolling around on it, eating it in two gigantic gulps.

I was working on what would become my debut novel. It was a book about taxidermy. I’d spent weeks thinking about that work without actually doing any writing. I mean, I’d researched. I’d read. I’d dug through web forums about scraping and curating dead animals; the process of reanimation through careful, painstaking preservation. But I did not want to write the book. I was afraid of what it would look like — the kind of breadth it would take to build such a big world. Mostly, I was afraid that I would fuck it up.

I have fucked up many other things in my life. My relationship with my ex-partner is one big example, but even on a day-to-day level, I have to work hard to convince myself that I am a fully functioning and capable adult. I drink a six-pack of beer instead of cooking myself a meal. I make dumb jokes instead of interrogating my hurt feelings. I bought a kiddie pool and laid around in it instead of confronting the fact that my day job at the library was bringing me a lot of misery. It felt extremely possible that I might wreck a book, too.

Sitting in that pool, I promised myself that I would work on it. That no matter what, even if no one ever read it, I’d finish that damned novel. So after long days working my library job, I’d go home and devote my time to the book. I’d stop at Publix and buy loads of frozen pizzas and cases of beer and cubes of boxed wine. I’d let out the dogs, put the pizza in the oven, and throw the hose into the kiddie pool. Then I’d take my computer out and perch it on a plastic chair. And I’d eat that frozen pizza, drink my drinks, and try to write. It’s a miracle that I never dumped my laptop into the water. Maybe it’s a miracle I got anything written at all. But somehow that kiddie pool made it feel manageable. Just sitting inside that water, trying to tell a story about a Florida backyard not so different from my own.

I used the pool far into the fall, when the weather turned Florida cool, which isn’t exactly frigid, but not an ideal time to be sitting around in a plastic tub wearing nothing but a swimsuit. I sat in it and read. I sat in it and cried when I was worried about money or had a bad day at work or wondered if I’d ever finish my book. Fully estranged from my family — the family that lived only five minutes down the road — I sat in that pool and struggled. Alone, watching the leaves fall off the oaks and swirl into the hose water, I found it okay to cry. The only living things that ever saw my tears were the dogs, and once, that same neighbor who was grilling, which I found deeply embarrassing. Then I’d wipe my face, dry off, and head back in the house again.

When the book found a publisher, I was elated. And terrified. There I was back in the pool, but for very different reasons. Not to avoid the bad feelings I had about my work and the fact that no one might want it, but because someone actually did. I sat inside my kiddie pool, drinking beer, and willed the world away for weekends at a time. I was worried. I was happy. I was worried that I was happy. 

The pool didn’t care. It took me, my anxieties, the book, as well as all the bugs and leaves that accumulated inside it. 

What is a kiddie pool? A body of liquid, a small place to put your body. A vessel. I thought a lot about the kiddie pool when I was away from it; waxed poetic over it with friends via text message and also chatted about it late-night drunk at the bar, picking up women after my divorce was finalized. The pool was a momentary womb. A place to float free. The pool was important because of how my body fit inside it and how it fit around me. 

The pool was a place where I could think, but most importantly, it became a place where I didn’t have to think at all. I could just … exist. Floating there in the backyard, sweating despite the cold hose water, drunk on shitty beer, I could sit inside a place that felt very much like home. And when that very Florida novel came out, the very queer one that I’d put my whole heart into, I celebrated that fact in my kiddie pool. It was purple-pink dusk and the mosquitoes were flying, but I’d lit a citronella candle to ward them off. Then I lit a leftover Fourth of July sparkler. Held my beer aloft, looked down into the water riddled with oak leaves and dirt and grass trimmings from the yard and thought, “This is all I want. This is mine, my Florida, my little corner of the world.”

Kristen Arnett is a queer fiction and essay writer and is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Mostly Dead Things.