How Sour Sweetness Really Is

I bit into an orange in Jacksonville, Florida, after having to battle darkness, a tree full of thorns and the laws of gravity. Yes, for one split second I embodied the reincarnation of Eve, only to realize that the purity of the situation left my red bloody fingerprints all over, and my mouth stinging with fresh citrus. Evidence.

In life and society, there are things you can't truly realize looking in from the outside. Oranges are no different. But when you bite into one picked seconds ago and barely ripe, you find how deep that really goes. Live oranges begin to bite back. The southern United States, and in particular, Jacksonville, Fla., is no different.

What an outsider knows of the south is hillbillies missing teeth, old poker playing retired women, cigarettes, and racism. All of these things are true. They all run rampant. We drive everywhere, we have missing teeth, we gamble, we're poor and run down and our prospects are looking worse all the time.

But the rules and philosophy one must play by to survive the south are much more subtle. There's a life of acceptance for the way things pass, a recognition of fate and lack of control. But it's not complete acceptance or a will to lie down. It's the mindset of city-removed, blue collared working class people, a people that dominate the south.

Whereas, in the north, you'll find cities and the mentality of want, the south has a feeling of need short of neediness.

All of it's very isolated, though many have neighbors nearby. It's isolated by its segregation of culture. The hipsters have a spot, Five Points, where they drink out of four-dollar Guiness glasses, two-dollar Pabst, shoot pool and watch Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey on a Friday night. It's a spot in the historic district of Riverside, populated by old houses and even older trees. There are a few young people, but the older generations of gauged out punks and hippies who never really left San Francisco stick around this area as well.

At points, I went from standing alone with a bunch of bonfire people I'd never met before after being dropped off by a cowboy hat wearing coke-head, thinking I lived in the north and would die in the south. Property is a big deal in the south, and in the middle of southern nowhere you have to be aware that property owners reserve the right to shoot you. People buy guns for a reason, and trespassing is an easy card to play for someone you don't like around your bonfire.

I made it out alive, to gamble on some dogs on 550 yards. The place was like an airport but with no one really going anywhere. There were men and women sitting around drinking three-dollar beer and eating dollar buckets of popcorn, old, decrepit wrinkly people with missing teeth, their empty spaces filled by cigarettes, and of course, gambling. The only advice I was given was that If I thought too hard about who to gamble on, then I've already lost. I ended up winning a few races and took some photos, but lost more than I gained. Then I went bowling.

Bowling Monday nights on Roosevelt means two for the price of one and five-dollar pitchers. All these drinks in a city with hardly any public transportation made me wonder how many maniacal drunk drivers were on the road at the same time, how many times on the highway I was teasing death with a goofy beer grin. The crowd at the alley consisted mostly of a group of young twenty-something workers from nearby restaurants, who have made it their thing to bowl there every week. I bowled a perfect 43 then a perfect 59 and got out of there, 3am, and a few cigarettes worth of a ride home.

Still hyped up on campfire aroma that pervades the whole city at times, I biked around and got yelled at by vehicle users. Then I got pulled over by a cop who told me I needed a headlight for my bicycle, and that I was lucky he's nice because someone else would give me a ticket.

I hit the mattress at about 6 in the morning, woke up at 6:30, started fighting inanimate objects, got on a plane and left the south. I'll be back again though. Being 21 down there is quite different than any other age.