It occurred to me this morning as I awoke, desperate for a column idea and the deadline-clock ticking away, that all these thousands of people moving to Florida everyday have no idea what wonderful bugs we have. That Florida could easily be the bug capital of the world. We breed ‘em big, we grow ‘em ugly, and we make sure there are plenty to go around. “Twenty bugs for every man, woman and child,” goes the state motto, “and double on Sunday.” This “occurred” to me as I walked into the kitchen to put the kettle on the stove. I was greeted by a silverfish the size of an engorged tuna. He emerged from the shadows and asked if I could spare any cottage cheese. I hate silverfish — I don’t think they’re fish at all — and I put a lickin’ on him. For a third generation Floridian, it’s a typical morning: Throw a bagel in the toaster, start the coffee and do battle with the arthropods. It’s a way of life, and many a song have chronicled these great crusades. I’ve never lived in any other states, but I don’t think there’s anywhere else where bugs are as par for the course. So accepted, not fashionably, but just as something we have to put up with. There’s your Uncle Eddy, and the cockroach. You invite both to Christmas, and you endure the bad jokes and how they creep up on you in the middle of the night when […]

It was just sitting there in my brother’s backyard, rotting, decaying — no longer so much a vehicle as a potting bench. It was like some rusted and forgotten object of war, discarded in a jungle somewhere. Once a clunker, now an overgrown heap. If I’m not mistaken, it was a 1964 Volvo, with its rounded pug-nose and long hatchback. I say “was” because it had long left this earth. Leaves covered up the sides and hood, rust had threatened to detach the body from the frame and a tire was not only flat, but off the rim. When Ernie, our buddy, and a former roommate of my brother’s, packed up to leave for New Zealand, he parked the Volvo in my brother’s backyard. None of us, including Ernie, thought he would stay so long. But he’s since been named prime minister, and looks to be there until the New Zealanders come to their senses and ask him to go explore another country. That said, my brother Scott decided to take action. Part of that was due to his girlfriend, Holly, who told him that few gardens she admired ever had Volvos in the middle of them. Scott can be a lot of things, but dumb is not one of them. Besides, he was starting to feel the same way. Too long he had tried to tell people the partially buried car was an Indian burial mound. But it’s no easy task moving a petrified Volvo that had sunk roots […]

And so the end is near. I can see it, just over there on the horizon — the end of the semester. When you work at a college, years are no longer years. They’re semesters. And semesters fly by like someone’s yanking them away with string. They start out slow, gain speed and roar out of sight before you can say, “What the heck’s a semester?” And when they end, they take a whole new crop of kids with them, headed for the real world to claim jobs, make families and wonder for the rest of their lives how they could have run up $20,000 in pizza debt. This semester I’m losing a bunch of them. My kids. I’ve been with Flagler College almost two years now, and my office runs the student newspaper. So I’ve got a chance to get to know a bunch of them, and it’s getting me a little misty thinking about them going away. What will I do with my time? Work? All day they pop into my office, dropping their bodies in a chair like you dump clean laundry on the bed. Sometimes they sigh or stare. Rarely do they have anything important to say, and usually I’m in the middle of some panic attack or crisis involving mass quantities of money I shouldn’t have spent. I speak fast like my calf is brushing up against an exposed electrical wire. “What’sup?how’sitgoing?Youdoingalright.Goodgoodgood.Nowwhattheheckdoyouwantanditbetterbeimportantbecauseifitisn’tI’mcallingsecurity … again.” They don’t have anything important to say because they’re college kids […]

Is nothing sacred anymore? Apparently not. Now, I’m not naïve. I understand the world is run by money, marketing and the consumption of Cheese Doodles. But I want it to be about something more meaningful. Not people selling the rights to their names on eBay. eBay, that part circus, part flea market where people sell everything from Aunt Nelly’s gnome collection to body parts. Now the new fad seems to be people auctioning off names, as Matthew Jean Rouse is doing. Matthew Jean, a 31-year-old father of two, doesn’t like his middle name. According to The Associated Press, he wants to let someone in the general public give him a new one, and he’s asking big bucks for it. As of press time, someone who doesn’t understand the value of money has bid $2,175. “If he wants to walk around with ‘Fool’ as his middle name, that’s his problem,” Rouse’s wife told AP. “If someone changes his name to ‘Poophead,’ he may decide it’s a little more important than he thought.” I hope someone does name him “Poophead.” I hope someone names him “chicken legs” or “stinky behind.” I hope someone names him “slap me.” There comes a point where you go too far, and Matthew Lugnut Rouse has reached it. Terry Iligan, a 33-year-old mother of five from Knoxville (a place that I would now recommend not drinking the water), sold her entire name on eBay for $15,199. You can officially call her “GoldenPalace.com,” after the online casino. GoldenPalace.com, […]