DADWAGON

A fun story about sons and fathers made the rounds at DadWagon HQ today. From tcpalm.com:

An apparent family disagreement over lunch and name-calling turned into a violent confrontation involving a candleholder, guns and a bite to the arm, according to records released Monday.

Yes, a 26-year-old man-child of a felon who lives with his parents in Port St. Lucie, Fla., got so enraged at the prospect of making his own lunch, his dad alleges, that he threw a candlestick at his father. The father pulled a gun, so the son’s girlfriend gave the son a gun, which he used to pistol-whip the father. The old man then bit his son on the arm. Both men went to the hospital.

There’s a few lessons for fathers here. Like don’t pull a gun if your son’s girlfriend has the drop on you. Also, instill the joy of cooking in your son early in life, so he won’t try to kill you when he is forced to prepare his own lunch 26 years down the road.

But mostly, this story just seems like business as usual in the pitiless dystopia that is Central Florida. Port St. Lucie may be on the state’s eastern coast, but it is clearly within spit-distance of the Florida Heartland. The Heartland is a place where people get excited about catching a fish called the Crappie out of Lake Okeechobee. Where on the other side of Okeechobee, there’s a place called the Redneck Yacht Club that is actually just a million-dollar mud pit for off-road vehicles to buck around in. It’s the milieu that made Carl Hiaasen famous. It’s a region where father and son draw guns over lunch and then just go ahead and bite each other.

Needless to say, we Conchs, we few who are from the far-flung and not very rednecky island of Key West, don’t feel much affinity for the inhabitants of Florida’s fetid middle.

On the other hand, this Port St. Lucie story could have totally happened at the high school in Key West, too.