If you possess an ounce of insecurity, southeast Florida will destroy you.
The bathing suits plunge low and gather so crack-deep here, they might as well be privacy pasties for the actors in a Lars von Trier ode to porn.
McLaren built only 700 units of the 765LT Spyder, a racecar in streetcar clothing, a rocket ship so fast you can’t even use a small percentage of its power band in the bumper-to-bumper traffic on Collins (in Vanilla Ice voice) “A1A Beachfront” Avenue. Though I spent most of vacation near the hotel pool in Miami, I still counted 7 McLaren 765s on my few sojourns into the inner recesses of gator-infested Gomorrah.
Move up the coast, and you hit Surfside, current residence of exile for Ivanka and her pet fecal nubbin Jared Kushner. We’ll return there in a bit.
North of here is Palm Beach, where even the ghosts, Madoff, Epstein, and Pulitzer are filthy. Still amongst the living, you’ll find Donald Trump and the author James Patterson, who I know is still getting his because despite not reading one of his novels since high school, Amazon Alexa for some reason asks me once a week if I’d like to pre-order his next book. Based on this one sample, AI will never inherit the earth.
And then on to Jupiter where Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods spend their respective sneaker money on cigars, opiates and benzodiazepine.
While Woods resides on an actual island, almost all of these folks live on a metaphorical one. 80% or more of the world’s wealth has some kind of beachhead here. The top 1% in the Sunshine State earned forty times the income of the bottom 99%.
Income is probably the wrong word. The money is coming from dividends and interest condensating off the mountain of grandpappy’s surplus gold. It’s more of an outcome.
Most of this baronial class live on a thin strip of land between the Atlantic and a moat, otherwise known as the intercoastal waterway. The ICW is not a late 90s teen drama-spewing television channel, but a meniscus topping a very full glass of saltwater. Though it is water, the ICW’s bubble tension jiggling like Mercury in the direction of the wealthy might as well be blood.