Florida man writes book

Florida, man.

"@_FloridaMan blocked me for a while, but recently unblocked me, and I don't really know why either event occurred. It's one of Florida's many mysteries, like why mullet jump," Craig Pittman says. "I'm convinced it's due to fish flatulence, by the way. The mullet, that is. Not the Twitter blocking."

Mullet flatulence aside, Pittman's experience with Florida Man speaks to the condition of, well, the Florida man. And woman. Only in Florida would the self-proclaimed "Florida Man" block the state's preeminent environmental reporter. Pittman, who works for the Tampa Bay Times, is the force behind exposing the King's Ranch scandal, a chronicler of the travails of black bear and manatee and now, a voice for Florida's more unusual stories. That last item resulted in the aforementioned @_FloridaMan blockage, which makes you wonder: How obnoxious does one have to be to get blocked by the Twitter incarnation of bizarre Florida?

"Early on I was a follower," said Pittman in one of several conversations via email, "but I noticed a lot of what he was posting was old news — stuff from at least two years before — and so I pointed it out on Twitter, addressing him but getting no response. Then my colleague Ben Montgomery did a short piece about that Twitter account's growing popularity, and [Montgomery] noted in it that the photo used was not a Florida Man at all, but rather an Indiana Man, so I tweeted that too. Not long after that I discovered I'd been blocked by both @_FloridaMan and his counterpart, @Flor1daWoman. I notice they've both slowed down posting stuff, and usually what they post is stuff that I (and others) have already put up."

Apparently, @_FloridaMan couldn't handle the truth. (CL reached out to @_FloridaMan via Twitter, but hadn’t received a response at press time.) 

Of course, in Florida, truth needs no help from fiction.

Case in point: Pittman's new book (on shelves July 5), Oh, Florida! How America's Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country, which takes a leisurely 300-page journey through Florida history to explore not only the absurdity of the Sunshine State, but to make the case that as Florida goes, so goes the country.

Skeptical? Read the book. America can thank us for Billy Graham (he started his career preaching at alligators in the Tampa Bay area), the computer (the inventor? A Floridian) and open public records laws. Of course, America can also thank us for Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush.

Yeah, sorry about that, America.

We have some wacky stuff happening down here and even if you argue that it happens because the people doing the wacky stuff hail from Up North, you can't disagree with the frequency with which Florida news items make people shake their heads.

"People who see the news coming out of Florida are astounded at what they read," Pittman says. "The commentary usually carries a tone of 'Holy cow! Can you believe this?'"

But Pittman's book is much more than just a collection of strange Florida news items; throughout, his respect for the state leads the narrative. He admits — freely and repeatedly — that Florida has a statistically unusual percentage of oddball stories, but he also points out — freely and repeatedly — that Florida's history has shaped the history of America, from civil rights to strippers, from tourism to mobsters.

Florida, man… go big or go home, that's our motto.

That respect sets apart Pittman's compendium of Florida stories from Reddit posts, derisive Thrillist articles and the often-not-so-true @_FloridaMan tweets.

"I've been collecting these stories for years and years, dating back to when I was a kid in Pensacola," Pittman says. "As I mention in the acknowledgments, though, I really got serious about it when a Times reporter named Tom Zucco recruited me to help him wrangle anecdotes for an annual feature called the Sour Orange Awards. The Sour Oranges were created by him and Tom French. They were modeled on Esquire's Dubious Achievement Awards but focused on wacky Florida stories. The Sour Orange Awards faded out a few years ago, but then Twitter came along and I started posting them there."

Pittman, a 55-year-old native, put those stories into Oh, Florida! St. Martin's bought the book, perhaps itself a sign of Florida's influence. A search for "Florida nonfiction" on Goodreads yields a colorful assortment of books — most of which the University Press of Florida published. UPF published Pittman's first three books, but Oh, Florida! will find a larger audience with a larger publisher.

"St. Martins' editors realized what people in Florida already know: We're a hot property in an election year, the swingingest of swing states," Pittman says. It helps, too, that Oh, Florida! reinforces the notion of the state as bellwether with historic examples — like the fact that Florida paved the way for casinos in states without legalized gambling.

"The Florida stories I love best are the ones that keep going and keep getting stranger and stranger. For instance, take the Seminole Tribe. A 1920s report said that gambling was unknown to them, and yet they're the ones who opened the door for all the Native American tribes to open casinos, and they've made so much money off of it that they bought control of the Hard Rock chain, and their chairman is a guy who used to wrestle alligators. Where but Florida would you find a story like that?" he asks.

Rather than derision, Pittman focuses on what he calls the "astonishment" people feel when they hear yet another peculiar story about Florida.

"Florida is the most interesting state in the Union, partly because of the wacky stuff that happens here, partly because of the amazing stuff that happens here," he says. "The point I make in my last chapter is that people should realize there's a lot more to Florida than the craziness. There's plenty that's cool, too — our state parks, the fact that the guy who invented the computer grew up here, that kind of thing."

Pittman, like most of us who love our much-maligned state, understands why people want to live here, and he understands that, statistically, some of them will keep making those Florida Man headlines.

"My hope for Florida is that it continues being crazy and unpredictable but also begins to appreciate its own wild and woolly history more, and what makes it stand out from all the other states," he says. "But you can't separate the craziness from the coolness. The conditions that create one are necessary to create the other."

This article appears in Jun 30 – Jul 7, 2016.