As the Tampa Bay Lightning march closer to a third straight Stanley Cup, while the Tampa Bay Rays continue to quietly rack up wins, while the Tampa Bay Buccaneers still rest on the high of having won a Super Bowl two years ago and having retained the league’s best quarterback after he tried to buy a stake in the Dolphins, while the Orlando Magic—Tampa’s NBA Team™, as they’re known—enjoy the exhilaration that comes from getting to mess up the first pick in the upcoming draft…a nation looks on in terror. The greater Tampa Bay area should not be this good at sports. Or at anything, for that manner.
I don’t have strong feelings about Tampa. What feelings I do have aren’t dissimilar from what I think of when I imagine hot vanilla pudding. Maybe it’s good, but it can’t be good enough that I need to risk finding out. Of the non-Miami Floridian cities, Tampa is among the less objectionable, but at the same time, it’s blander than Jacksonville, which has the excitement factor of being the place on this earth most likely to accidentally launch its entire self into outer space through an accident involving what was initially billed as “an innovative approach to landfills.” I have a vague memory of a TikTok going around where two young women celebrated having “made it” in life by moving to Tampa, but even if that wasn’t ironic, it’s more a thing of curiosity for me today than the deeply troubling experience it was at the time. I understand why someone growing up in Parkersburg would be excited about moving to Columbus. I can therefore conceptualize why someone in Tallahassee would be psyched to live in Tampa. It just threw me for a loop at first.
What does trouble me is the possibility of Tampa becoming the center of American culture. That’s a scary thought. Hot vanilla pudding is fine if it’s in a reasonably-sized dish on the edge of a picnic table, various ants making TikToks in front of it, but if it’s the main course? If the thing is a hot vanilla pudding-themed party? If Orlando brought its own hot vanilla pudding and it’s the exact same but in a giant plastic Mickey Mouse bowl, warping from the heat of the hot vanilla pudding? This is where concern comes about.
In short, it’s time we did something about Tampa. What did Al Gore propose about running our cars all the time to submerge the edges of Florida?
