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How Hate That State Was Created
Hate That State began with a raccoon, a stolen rental car, and a roadside sign that said WELCOME TO FLORIDA.
The raccoon had intended to go to the dumpster behind a seafood restaurant. He had a coupon. But somewhere outside Atlanta, he climbed into the wrong trunk, fell asleep inside a bag of souvenir
T-shirts, and woke up in a vacation rental where eight adults were arguing over who had booked the bedroom with the door.
For three days, he watched them pay $38 to park near a beach they couldn’t see, stand in line for a photograph with a fiberglass alligator, and describe a gas station as “an authentic local experience.” On the fourth day, someone offered him a tiny piece of overpriced shrimp and called him buddy.
He snapped.
Using a stolen hotel pen and the back of a dolphin-watching brochure, he began documenting everything that was wrong with Florida. He filled the brochure, then the hotel stationery, then both sides of a parking ticket. By the time he escaped in a landscaping truck, he had developed a theory: Florida was a problem, but surely the other states had also done something to deserve a complaint.
He spent the next year investigating. In New Jersey, he was yelled at for pumping his own gas. In California, he met a man who called a $19 smoothie “an investment in himself.” In Wyoming, he encountered a wind gust that moved his entire dumpster six feet to the left.
At a truck stop in Nebraska, he spread his notes across a picnic table. Fifty states. Fifty folders. Several hundred grievances. One unpaid shrimp bill.
A passing graphic designer asked what the project was called.
The raccoon stared at a map, pointed to a state at random, and said, “Hate that state.”
The designer said, “Which one?”
The raccoon looked her dead in the eye.
“Exactly.”
And that’s how Hate That State was born: one raccoon’s deeply unreasonable mission to give every state the ridicule it has worked so hard to earn.