Tim Dorsey

“A strip club is one of the few places where two groups voluntarily come together who have such precipitous contrasts in net worth and familiarity with violence, each group with a head-and-shoulders edge in one category. The basic math of a tropical storm.”

“Do you think heaven's like that?Could be worse, said Serge. You know all those pushy people who keep telling us we're not going to heaven? It could be full of them instead.”

“The television was on Florida Cable News. A gray-haired man behind the anchor desk reported near tragedy at a state motor vehicle office, where a man who had failed the eye exam pulled a gun and fired fifteen shots at the staff, hitting nobody.”

“I realize the congressman isn't in. I want you to deliver this message to him personally: Tell him to shut his goddamn mouth!... I know we're working behind the scenes to protect the oil company from its victims. That's exactly why he needs to go mute. Those were the strict ground rules from the beginning of his term: no press conferences, no interviews except Fox, and sit like a silent lump in the committee... Because he's fucking stupid! And I'm not going to let him throw this away! Do you have any idea how hard it was to get a moron like that elected?”

“Nature's what it's all about, but our people have been brainwashed into thinking that life is a cell phone against your head and the TV on a beer commercial with hot chicks.”

“First, they set the hook with mind-bending kinky shit. Then a year later you're living in a Talking Heads song, dressed like Teddy Ruxpin, living with a strange woman in a big house full of frilly throw pillows, experiencing the frequency of sex that can only be charted by Halley's Comet. and you're wondering: How did I get here?”

“Yes, give us books about the psychotic behavior and peripheral weirdness we see all around every day -- and we will laugh in its face. We are a proud people.We are Floridians.”

“Almighty Father, please stop making jerks. Amen...Break!”

“Belong to a religion? Doesn't bother me if you do, as long as it's not one that says to stop thinking and be loud about it.”

“I smell panic," said Serge. "These are different animals now. They're starting to winnow out the weak at the fringe of the herd. We need to hurry or this could affect our snack situation.”

“Hang on to your dreams with everything you got. Because the best life is when your dreams come true. The second-best is when they don't but you never stop chasing them.”

“Look forward to the wonderment of growing up, raising a family and driving by the gas station where the popular kids now work.”

“Always walk away from a fight. Then ambush.”

“Don't make fun of people who are different. Unless they have more money and influence. Then you must”

“I'm getting a diamond-hard boner just thinking about it.”

“An ax came through the door. Then two firefighters. They looked down at and assistant mall manager crying and wearing a melted toupee, sitting cross-legged next to a mall cop with a bleeding ankle and a mouth full of paper. One of the firefighters look at the other. "Not again.”

“[Those] on fixed incomes are the nation's math elite.”

“Rain is the last thing you want when you're chasing someone in Miami. They drive shitty enough as it is, but on top of that, snow is a foreign concept, which means they never got the crash course in traction judgment for when pavement slickness turns less than ideal. And because of the land-sea temperature differential, Florida has regular afternoon rain showers. Nothing big, over in a jiff. But minutes later, all major intersections in Miami-Dade are clogged with debris from spectacular smash-ups. In Northern states, snow teaches drivers real fast about the Newtonian physics of large moving objects. I haven't seen snow either, but I drink coffee, so the calculus of tire-grip ratio is intuitive to my body.”

“The last door on the second story was the exception. Fresh gold letters:MAHONEY & ASSOCIATES, PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS.Mahoney sat inside. The only associate was the fifth of rye residing in his bottom desk drawer.”

“But you have to understand, mental illness is like cholesterol. There is is good kind and the bad. Without the good kind- less flavor to life. Van Gogh, Beethoven, Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvia Plath, Pink Floyd (the early Piper at the Gates of Dawn line up), scientific breakthroughs, spiritual revolution, utopian visions, zany nationalism that kills millions- wait, that’s the bad kind. Tim Dorsey (Hurricane Punch)”

“A prosthetic leg with a Willie Nelson bumper sticker washed ashore on the beach, which meant it was Florida.Then it got weird.”

“Serge bowed his own head and closed his eyes "God, please protect us from your followers. Amen”

“Nothing builds confidence like live ammo.”

“There was no Disney World then, just rows of orange trees. Millions of them. Stretching for miles And somewhere near the middle was the Citrus Tower, which the tourists climbed to see even more orange trees. Every month an eighty-year-old couple became lost in the groves, driving up and down identical rows for days until they were spotted by helicopter or another tourist on top of the Citrus Tower. They had lived on nothing but oranges and come out of the trees drilled on vitamin C and checked into the honeymoon suite at the nearest bed-and-breakfast."The Miami Seaquarium put in a monorail and rockets started going off at Cape Canaveral, making us feel like we were on the frontier of the future. Disney bought up everything north of Lake Okeechobee, preparing to shove the future down our throats sideways."Things evolved rapidly! Missile silos in Cuba. Bales on the beach. Alligators are almost extinct and then they aren't. Juntas hanging shingles in Boca Raton. Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo skinny-dipping off Key Biscayne. We atone for atrocities against the INdians by playing Bingo. Shark fetuses in formaldehyde jars, roadside gecko farms, tourists waddling around waffle houses like flocks of flightless birds. And before we know it, we have The New Florida, underplanned, overbuilt and ripe for a killer hurricane that'll knock that giant geodesic dome at Epcot down the trunpike like a golf ball, a solid one-wood by Buckminster Fuller."I am the native and this is my home. Faded pastels, and Spanish tiles constantly slipping off roofs, shattering on the sidewalk. Dogs with mange and skateboard punks with mange roaming through yards, knocking over garbage cans. Lunatics wandering the streets at night, talking about spaceships. Bail bondsmen wake me up at three A.M. looking for the last tenant. Next door, a mail-order bride is clubbed by a smelly ma in a mechanic's shirt. Cats violently mate under my windows and rats break-dance in the drop ceiling. And I'm lying in bed with a broken air conditioner, sweating and sipping lemonade through a straw. And I'm thinking, geez, this used to be a great state."You wanna come to Florida? You get a discount on theme-park tickets and find out you just bough a time share. Or maybe you end up at Cape Canaveral, sitting in a field for a week as a space shuttle launch is canceled six times. And suddenly vacation is over, you have to catch a plane, and you see the shuttle take off on TV at the airport. But you keep coming back, year after year, and one day you find you're eighty years old driving through an orange grove.”

“Back at the Rash [a Florida nightclub], a waif in a lime latex body tube went into the rest room to snort the newest designer drug, XGB5, which gave people the uncanny sensation of throwing money away while chewing their own lips off. It was hard to come by and everyone had to have it.”

“What do they mean 'serial killers'! said Serge. (person 1), okay. But (person 2) was self-defence and the (person 3)-I mean, that was the World Series! You can call me a murderer, fair is fair, but as soon as you put 'serial' in front of it, everyone automatically thinks your crazy.”

“Murder is such a charged word. You know how some people fixate and won't let things go? They're called cops. ”

“Serge's attention-deficit disorder was the first of many hyphens. Obsessive-compulsive, manic-depressive, anal-retentive, paranoid-schizophrenic. He was believed to be the only self-inflicted case of shaken-baby syndrome.”

“Your mom's not that bad," said Jim. "Are you trying to make me mad?" "Okay she is." "I knew it. You've never liked her." "What's the right answer?" "So you're just telling me what I want to hear?" Jim reached over and put a hand on his wifes. "I love you.”

“Jesus. Why'd you do that?" "That motherfucker slapped me!" "And you just kill him?" "You never motherfuckin' hit a woman!" "How could he have missed you dedication of feminine virtue, especially when you keep saying motherfucker?”

“I've been like everywhere And we went to a bunch of different places and got really stoned Then we wnet to another place and got stones again ANd we met these other stoners and went somewhere else and ate tacos ANd I lost my keys and we couldn't go anywhere, so we just got stoned Then we ran out of weed, but I remembered my keys were in the other pocket, adn we went somewhere to score, and got stoned..."Colman..." "And more people came over, and we found a bog of marshmallows and made s'mores....”

“That, and the untended mental health problems. We have all these insane armed hobos coming from the Midwest, usually Ohio. Fuck Ohio.”

“I don't suffer from insanity. I can actually say that I enjoy it.”

“The whole family is a bunch of dangerous freaks...Most are ex-cons or junkies or deranged from inbreeding. Five have died violently, three are back in prison, two have gone insane from untreated venereal disease, and one writes book reviews.”

“Relieve stress through hysterical screaming.”