GAINESVILLE: GREETINGS FROM THE VELVET RUT

Sending greetings from the "velvet rut," where I relaxed and learned to love central Florida.

Four years ago, I went on an app-based dating spree to soothe the pain of an unexpected breakup, which happily coincided with the rollout of the first COVID vaccine. It was an exciting, weird, frankly horny time of intensive ego repair, during which I met and briefly dated a number of fun but wholly unsuitable men.

One man was exactly half my age, an adorable stoner with a part-time job at Trader Joe’s. Another had a mild brain injury from overseas military service; he wrote and recorded a Neil Young-style song about me after our first date. I went out with the smart, louche, underachieving brother of a famous actor; a stand-up comic with a foot fetish and no discernible sense of humor; and a middle school math teacher whose only desire was to be pegged (an interest I did not share, alas).

Every day that summer was an opportunity to briefly connect with someone new, and to chip away at the pain of being dumped over the phone by my boyfriend of two years, like an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with updated technology and a lot more boning. This period of my life, summer 2021, felt brand-new and unpredictable and sometimes hilarious and sometimes stupid, and I knew it couldn’t (and, moreover, shouldn’t) last more than a few months. Eventually I got tired of the personal upkeep–so much shaving, so much blow-drying. I was done fielding blunt inquiries about the state of my orifices. Done explaining to men that I found no useful information in a dick pic.

And then, using the same dating app, I met and soon fell in love with a very suitable man, an age-appropriate academic with impeccable manners who was in New York that summer, but who actually lives in Gainesville, which he called “the Berkeley of Florida.”

I’ve never been to Berkeley, but I understood what he was saying: that Gainesville, because it’s the home of the University of Florida, is not Florida Man or Scarface or Disney Adults or highly sensitive national security documents stored in a bathroom with a gold toilet.

It is true that Florida is full of dangerously corrupt and stupid politicians who put their own self-interest ahead of their constituents, but that is also broadly true in New York and almost everywhere, and should not be used to discount the entire population of the large, wildly diverse and criminally gerrymandered state of Florida, for which I have had a soft spot since the first time my parents drove our family from Syracuse to Disney World in a pickup truck, in 1978.

This suitable man, still my boyfriend with whom I am still in love, continued to visit me in New York, and I started visiting him in Gainesville, which requires a flight from New York to Atlanta and another to Gainesville, or a flight to Jacksonville and a one-hour drive on a super-highway, surrounded by vaping, pill-addicted, serial texting teenagers and elderly folks whose families should have taken their keys away years ago. I almost always choose the connecting flight.

I feel relaxed and unbothered and generally well-fed and entertained in Gainesville, a progressive college town in the north-central part of the state. The deciduous trees are heavy with Spanish moss and the palm trees drop their German Shepherd-sized fronds on the streets and the city limits give way to wet woodlands and citrus groves and a prairie populated with wild buffalo and alligators. There are dozens of lakes and rivers in the surrounding area. It’s less than a two-hour drive to Atlantic or Gulf beaches, with a series of swimmable springs closer than that.

Flowering cactus plants in Gainesville

Within walking distance of my boyfriend’s home is a public park named for late hometown hero Tom Petty, whose posthumous presence pervades local culture. My friend EB, whom I’ve gotten to know over many visits to Gainesville, has tipped me off to the micro-economy built around dubious connections to Petty and other famous dead men.

“Sometimes it seems like his corpse is being paraded around for the benefit of various business owners and cultural institutions,” said EB, who grew up in a small town outside of Gainesville and now lives in the city with her husband and kids. “There’s a local ambulance chasing lawyer with an ad that goes, ‘I was Tom Petty’s first lawyer, before he made it big, and just like Tom, I won’t back down.’” See also: “Rock On: A Tom Petty Tribute Ballet.”

The metaphorical corpse of another natural blonde lends cachet to the River Phoenix Center for Peace building, a Gainesville non-profit established and administered by the late actor’s mother and her husband (not the dad of the talented Phoenix family, who led them into the Children of God cult, and out again, once he realized how rotten it was). Bo Diddley Plaza, a space for concerts and community events, pays tribute to the legendary blues and rock guitarist Bo Diddley (née Ellas Bates McDaniel), who was from Mississippi but spent his sunset years in Gainesville.

Fried chicken biscuit sandwich at The Florida Room

In Gainesville, I’ve eaten delicious Cote D’Ivoire seafood and impeccable doughnuts from Flatfish, Detroit-style pizza at SquareHouse Pizza, and a killer chicken biscuit sandwich at Florida Room. There are excellent farmer’s markets, and my favorite grocery store there is Ward’s, which has both a substantial hippie health food section and a butcher counter slinging pig ears and chitlins and feet and smoked turkey wings and every part of the pig and cow and lamb and chicken, with an emphasis on what’s most suitable for southern-style barbecue. The University of Florida has a world-class agriculture school, with a butcher shop supplied by the meat lab, and right outside, there’s an array of animal penis sculptures by the artist Carol K. Brown, which were installed in 1988.

A more recent addition to the Gainesville cultural scene is The Lynx, a bookstore owned and operated by novelist Lauren Groff, who prioritizes the stocking and marketing of titles that are challenged or banned in the state.

And then, of course, there’s Division I sports, a huge thing in Gainesville. The UF men’s basketball team won the NCAA championship in 2025, and the football team is a perennial contender for various titles. Football home games create absurd if predictable traffic nightmares in the small city, but also generate excellent revenues for restaurants, bars, hotels and retailers.

However, the biggest game of season, UF versus Georgia, is always played on neutral ground, in Jacksonville, which creates in Gainesville a weekend-long population and cash vacuum that’s been filled for the past 23 years by The Fest, a multi-stage punk festival featuring bands like The Spits, Gainesville’s own Assholeparade, and The World Is A Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die. The Fest also features stand-up comics and live wrestling.

In describing Gainesville's pace of life, its relative affordability and its cultural offerings, my friend EB used the term “velvet rut,” which I hadn’t heard before, and which lends itself to a hacky joke about adult film names.

“The velvet rut” is in fact a slight pejorative, applied to various college towns and mid-sized cities with just enough going on socially to keep an ambitious creative person rooted in place. The thinking goes, you’re (probably) never going to achieve major national artistic success while living in Charlottesville or Ithaca or Eugene or Gainesville, but the rent is cheap, the vibe is progressive, and there’s always a cool band playing downtown. Why leave?

Coming off my unsustainable no-strings summer, I worried that a committed, monogamous relationship might itself become a velvet rut that eventually turns to miserable burlap. Several years prior, I’d filled the rut of my dead marriage with gasoline and set it on fire.

I’m now four years into my relationship with this man, no longer looking at Gainesville from the perspective of a tourist. Most of the time I’m with him, I’m at his dining room table or on his big sofa with his dog, working on my writing projects while he works on his, leaving for the occasional walk or to pick up provisions for dinner cooked at home in his well-stocked kitchen, which is roughly the size of my entire New York apartment. There are plenty of regional attractions still on the list – the state park beach in St. Augustine, the mermaid show at Weeki Wachee Springs - and if this is a velvet rut, I’m settling in.