Ah, The Villages, or as Mr. Cracker and I call it, The Villages of the Damned. As non-Social-Security-collecting Floridians, we are perpetually at war with The Villages and its accursed ilk. Let me set the scene for you:
You’re driving down some two-lane highway in bucolic central Florida, a road that winds through citrus groves, cow pastures and occasional one-traffic-light towns with names like Catawaxahatchee. There’s nothing but static-y country music on the radio.
Then the music changes, and the stations begin to feature syrupy 50s crooners and DJs who sound like they’ve been hit with a Thorazine dart as they announce another hour of “the music of your life.”
You notice a sudden profusion of billboards featuring air-brushed senior citizens smiling in bathing suits and golf shorts, beckoning passersby to join their over-55 active lifestyle communities—to come join a world free of surly teens, squalling toddlers, hung-over working adults and middle-aged pains-in-the-asses, to join a world where everyone is carefree, work-free, wrinkled, elderly and wise.
“Come live the life you’ve always dreamed of,” the signs say—and it’s true if you’ve always dreamed of living in mass-produced modular housing surrounded by old white people from Buffalo and Cleveland.
And then suddenly you see it rising in the distance, a hellscape of sun-blasted fake stucco buildings with pseudo-Tuscan archways shimmering in the highway’s heatwaves. The strip malls are dotted with souped-up golf carts. Doctors’ offices are absurdly over-represented among the strip malls’ tenants—urologists, proctologists, internal medicine specialists, opthalmologists, etc.
You notice something even stranger about the ersatz town than the overload of doctors’ offices—the profusion of funeral parlors, seven or eight serving one little town.
As for the residences, you can’t really see them properly as they’re tucked away in walled-off cow pastures with the few entrances guarded by glum old men in too-tight polyester rent-a-cop uniforms.
It’s a thoroughly depressing scene and an abomination to the natural order of things, in my opinion. Yes, many of the inhabitants are arrogant, loud-mouthed know-nothings who will flock to ogle Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Mike Huckabee and piss and moan about the government taking over their Medicare.
But why aren’t they in the dead steel mill towns from whence they came, irritating their own children and grandchildren with their obnoxious views? It’s bad enough that they’ve got their feed-straws sunk deep in my wallet even as they work to deny me and my family any chance at a decent national health care plan.
But adding insult to injury, they infest the roads at rush hour in their Buicks, driving 15 miles at a stately 32 miles an hour with their blinkers on to make the early bird special at Denny’s. When they should be back in Buffalo and Cleveland annoying their own descendants.
The economy is just god-awful here, and many of the developers of these wretched “lifestyle communities” have gone belly-up. If you ask me, that’s the one bright spot in the whole shit-pile.
