Progress like it or not

The old homestead ain't what it used to be.The road named for great-grandfather Richard Ball is now Tymber Creek Road and yes, that's Tymber with a Y and Grandma Rose the schoolteacher would not stand for this kind of spelling no matter how high-and-mighty the home builders want to be. The road is four-lane instead of two-lane beat-down blacktop. The sign at the entrance reads Tymber Creek Riverside with no attempt to change any other innocent i. A few car-lengths in is a guard shack flanked by lighted gates and a sign "Residents only!!!" and another one "Protected by Simpson Security." Mary leans forward, "What kind of nonsense is this?" I say probably rich man's nonsense. The driver behind me honks. I look through the rearview at a long-haired teenager in a big SUV. In the old times, drivers didn't honk to move you along because it could be Uncle Wilt, R.I.P., who drove a rusty red GMC equipped with a fully-loaded rifle rack. We forget our visit to the old house site where three generations of Balls grew up. Our youngest, Tim, says from the backseat that his pal Ron's dad has a fancy drone he uses to scout for Civil War artifacts and we might be able to see the contours of the house's foundation or the barn or maybe the dock on the Little Tomoka you used to fish from. Tim always has good ideas and sure we might see the house's ghostly outline but what's the point really? Things will change like it or not.

A visitor looks for signs of Florida Man.

I have been here two weeks and still haven't seem Florida Man. I was looking for him Saturday at the beach and saw a very big man in a tiny bathing suit barbecuing under a shelter half. He gripped a forbidden beer in one hand and a bbq implement in the other. The sun was feasting on his bald head and body. Next to the shelter was a huge pickup (you can drive on some parts of the beach) festooned with U of Alabama and Roll Tide stickers. Alabama tourists are welcomed here, I'm told, but Roll Tide stickers are verboten. I daw a young guy in a T-shirt and shorts riding a zoomy street bike weaving in and out of I-95 traffic. No helmet, of course. Freedom! Thing is, you. can see the same thing in Wyoming on I-80. In the summer. Thst's about it so far. At a Chinese restaurant in Melbourne, a robot served us lunch. The robot showed no signs of Florida Man Syndrome.

Mr. Ripley is coming for your gold but not your woman

I was not all agog about Nexflix's "Ripley" as i was for "Three Body Problem" or "Shogun." I became a dedicated virwer of"The Bear" only after I discovered it was not a reality series about a Michelin-star chef who yells a lot. Carny does yell but he's charming and disturbed and well-played by Jeremy Allen White. Ripley's Andrew Scott is a charmless murderer who is inventive enough to keep us watching for the next clever twist. The European settings and black-and-white b camera work are amazing. I've never been so fascinated by aerial shots of trains chugging through Italy. It was 1961, after all, and 2024 shots of high-speed trains racing through the countryside would not have the same effect. The movie imbues Tom Ripley with six of seven deadly sins. A sexual lust is not part of him. The lust for gold, yes, but no sign of libido even when he lures the beautiful Marge (Dakota Fanning) into the Venice digs of legendary libertine artist/murderer Caravaggio. Envy, greed and the others are integral parts of Mr. Ripley. Tom flees his dreary NYC life through happenstance. He doggedly pursues everything that comes after. Marge and Richard Greenleaf are U.S.-bred Eurotrash. They drink fine wines and live in a lush townhouse that overlooks the azure Med. On the surface bobs Richard's fine sailboat. Ripley wants all of it. Tension builds around how he will get it. I was entranced most of the eight hours and sometimes just patient. It is gorgeous in high-def b&w and owes a lot to post-war European directors and cinematographers Take it slow, as you would a pricey wine.

There will come a time when lizards will again rule the planet

i have seen maybe a dozen alligators since I came to Florida 10 days ago. Most were seen on a boat tour at Wakulla Springs near Tallahassee.They are scary, magnificent beasts with an ancient lineage. Imagine you are an early Spanish explorer, a puny human, coming across one as you navigate the swamps of the new world. "Alligator," you might say. That translates to "lizard." according to our tour boat captain. "The lizard," he added for emphasis. King Lizard, or so says this marsuding conquistidor who most likely will die from malaria and not lizard. Large lizards have starred in famous films. "Journey to the Center of the Earth" featured lizards attacking explorers deep in the earth. One of then was Debby Boone's pops Pat. He crooned his way put of the encounter. A lizard attacked King Kong and regretted it. Is Godzilla part lizard or just mutant lizard? The Creature from the Black Lagoon looked lizard- and amphibian-like. Lore at Wakulla Springs says the first-time actor who donned the rubber Creature costume survived and devoted so much time to Friends of Wakulla that his ashes were scattered at the film site. I've viewed some YouTube videos of King Lizard and the Gizzard Wizard. They are quite convincing in their human-skin outfits. But you can't fool me.

We got trouble, trouble, right here in Beach City

Chris and I are looking forward to our April trip to Florida. Both of us did some of our growing-up on Florida's east coast, Daytona Beach for me and Ormond Beach for her. Daytona was (and is) a beach town with all of the trappings: beachside motels and souvenir shops, lots of bars, and a very nice beach. Daytona also has the speedway for auto races. 

Ormond begins just north and it was looked at as the more genteel neighbor. We went to the Ormond beaches when Daytona's were crowded. The beach sand was deeper and less drivable, but most of it was open to surfers with the main destination the Ormond Pier. If you go further north, there is Ormond-by-the-Sea which is a bit redundant and then Flagler Beach, named for the robber baron railroad magnate of the 19th century. 

Flagler used to be a funky little beach town with a good surfing pier but growth has changed it. Palm Coast development is in Flagler County and it replaced thousands of acres of wildlands. For one of my jobs, I used to drop by city and county offices to get lists of building permits and then rush over to Orlando to type all of it into The Construction Report, printed and distributed each Friday. It wasn't really writing but kind of fun.

In case you didn't know, construction is big business in Florida. Big, big business. Florida's big challenge, besides its dingbat governor and legislative troglodytes, is people trying to find affordable home insurance. They could be cast into the homeless by the next climate-change-caused hurricane which can't possibly exist due the state's GOP-heavy legislature banning teaching anything like it in school. I grew up by the beach and we had sand dunes then, created by the Lord Almighty to blunt the impact of big storms' tendency to wash tons of sand back into the ocean. 

The so-called peninsula I lived on is a barrier island. It is supposed to serve as barrier to tropic thunder. It did for many millennia before promoters decided they could make beaucoup bucks by selling plots of sand to Howard Johnson's and Steak-n-Shake and Americans bent on living the dream. I lived that dream and it does seem dream-like to me now, a retired bureaucrat in Wyoming. 

It was a beautiful place to grow up. We surfed by day and waited on tourists at night. Me and my eight brothers and sisters grew up freckled and barefoot, one of the wandering tribes of Daytona. We had a home to go to but, as time passed and my parents got older and more frazzled, we were turned loose to have fun but not get into trouble. We mostly succeeded.

If I sound sarcastic in my Florida appreciation, I sound like this all of the time. Chris has a whole different set of beachside stories. Most involve teens getting fake IDs at 16 and going into tourist bars. They had fun but didn't get into too much trouble, or so she says. 

We were readers once, and young

Chris, Annie, and I took in “Dune 2” at the Capitol City Digital Cinemas LUXX Studio Theater. It’s new. Not quite as fancy as the ARQ Theater and a step up from one of the boring standard spaces. We sat in handicapped seating in the second row. There’s a first row but you have to recline and bend your neck to take it all in. The place wasn’t packed although there was a chatterbox who sat a few rows behind us. We took him out with one of those wicked Fremen bazookas. I enjoyed the movie, thankful that the story moved along quickly and I didn’t notice the passing of 180 minutes. Long movies used to have an intermission. That’s gone the way of Ben Hur’s chariot. I plan to write a nasty letter to someone about this.

In my youth (early 1970s), I was a Frank Herbert fan and read “Dune” and “Dune Messiah.” Many of my friends read the books. We were readers, absorbing Vonnegut, Heller, and Tolkien, even Heinlein. My roommate was a former outlaw biker from Milwaukee who had to leave his hometown for some reason he didn’t want to share. My landlord was a friend who lived next door in a matching concrete block house. He worked in construction. His roomie was my brother who also worked construction – there was a lot of it in Daytona Beach those days – and he eventually got fed up with banging nails and joined the USAF. I worked as an orderly in the county hospital by night and attended community college by day. We all were readers and enjoyed talking about books over beer and weed. On weekends, we were in and on the water.

“Lord of the Rings” was probably the favorite. Fantasy and adventure, cool characters like the Ents, Orcs, and Gandalf. We really had no sense that Mordor was created from Tolkien’s war memories. We knew about the war origins of Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” because he writes about it in the introduction. War had been on our minds quite a lot those days. I had not yet read the great novels by Vietnam vets as they didn’t yet exist. I had no concept of what war could do to the psyche. Tolkien fought in the far-off Great War and Vonnegut (and my father) were in the now-ancient war against totalitarianism. Those battles may loom large as this election season approaches.

“Dune” was a favorite because of the turmoil of Paul Atreides and the giant sandworms of Arrakis. That was the part of “Dune 2” that thrilled me and I could watch again. The Fremen and Paul ride the sandworms! Amazing special effects. Our seats shook. This was also my favorite part of the novel, Paul and the Sandworms. Herbert did a great job creating them and Denis Villenueve and crew recreated them wonderfully. These characters and creatures invented by writers and recreated on the screen became a part of us, a part of me.

One other result of all of this reading. We were steeped in satiric humor and (I haven’t yet mentioned “Catch-22”) the ridiculousness of being human. Billy Pilgrim reacts (or he doesn’t) as he time travels through absurdity. Yossarian does everything he can to cheat death. He is flummoxed at every turn. Paddling in a small boat from a small island in the Med to neutral Sweden may seem crazy until Yossarian finds out his tentmate Orr has accomplished it. He ridicules Orr throughout, wants to bonk him on the head for his endless fiddling with the tent stove and his absurd stories. He won’t fly with Orr because he crashes all the time. Turns out, that was Orr’s way of practicing for his desertion. Yossarian runs away in the book and sets out on a tiny dinghy in the movie. I thought it was unfortunate that in the last episode of Hulu’s “Catch-22,” Yossarian flies off on yet-another mission in a B-25.

I really liked “Masters of the Air.” I did wonder in one episode what Yossarian might make of the Bloody Hundredth. On one mission to Munster, only one of the unit’s planes makes it back to base. Earlier, we see others on fire and many airmen in their chutes trying to escape. The novel’s Yossarian spends three years in combat on 55 missions. His commanding officers want to make pilots fly 80 missions which means Yossarian may never get home. He runs.

Flying 80 combat missions may seem outrageous. Rosie in “Masters” flies his 25 missions and is cleared to go home. He tells his C.O. he will stay on to lend his experience to the new, untested pilots. The C.O. then tells him that the men will have to fly more missions and keep flying. They will be targets, a lure to bring up the Luftwaffe to get shot down by our swift long-range fighter planes like the  P-51 Mustang. The C.O. says something like “we plan to sweep the Luftwaffe from the skies for the coming invasion.” Rosie flies 52 missions and survives.

They were brave and many died. It does remind me of Yossarian’s observation: “The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.”

Poetry Monday: The Letter is in the Wind

The Letter is in the Wind

I could dry up and blow away before

A letter arrives

I drag a lawn chair to a breadbox of a mailbox

The kind 1950s teens used for bathing practice

I sit, and imagine letters

Dear Mike: My love is like a red, red rose.

Mike, I miss you terribly I ache with it

I would gladly read whatever missive lands here even

The bad or sad news

Michael, dear: F--- you and the horse you rode in on

Note: my asthma acts up around livestock

Mike: Grandma died today. She was surrounded by

Friends and family and you

Were not one of them

Mike: Our dog Zeke got run over by the truck delivering

Your Christmas package, the box containing the latest

Brautigan book and a chew toy for foundling Zeke.

I would read them all, even the letter that promised

A scholarship in a far-off place and an ensign’s gold bar

A job as reporter in a strange city that will have

Plenty of stories and you will be lonely.

Dear Sir: You too could be a winner!

As I said, I will read them all perched along the

Lonely rural blacktop named Expectations Road.