Florida: America's wet dream

Shit

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I saw a previous incarnation of the above picture some years ago when I visited some lost souls in Naples Florida, in a then almost new gated community: The Strand. They even had a Lincoln Continental town car and, since Florida does not have front license plates, the license plate holder on the front bumper said: "The Strand".

Almost new meant new communities had popped up as they always do te year after these people paid more than they could afford for a fantasy of duffying all day (the man had 3 "hole in one" plaques on his mancave'swall) until they would die, and the housethen would be very hard to sell because people always bought the newer place. Lower the price enough and eventually you can get rid of it; the houses really are quite nice, espwcially since central airconditioning insulates you from the sun that bakes down in the treeless developments. But the newer development would beome old in its turn, so property values slowly sink into an economic sink hole all over the place, in aa a kind of metaphor for the real sink holes that appear at random in Florida because these snow birds have sucked out the aquafer. The men wasted their lives commuting form Westport Connecticut to "The City" on Matro North (or whatever other bloated commute) and the women had wasted their lives at "the club". What a waste!

These stolid concrete posts and lintels in the above picture is what many of these houses look like when they are in process of being built. Like Egyptean temples before people knew about arches in ancient Rome. Archeological sites where you see lots of columns sticking out of the ground and I always wondered how people lived in such places where all there was were these skeletons sticking up in the air, like some Christo concoction or whatever. I would think that these abstract concrete verticals nd horizontals could befilled out with a modern architectoredwelling; no such luck.

They put skin on the bones, and when the houses are finished they look like "ranch houses" up north just adjusted to a climate where the temperature going below 32 degrees fahrenheit is a big news story in the local newspaper. The space shuttle Challenger wsa launched on its abbreviated mission to the low stratoshpere on one of those memorable mornings.

But the amount of water in the picture is new. It's from a New York Times article, "The Cost of Insuring Expensive Waterfront Homes Is About to Skyrocket" (+2021.09.24) that people are going to have to start paying for the pleasure of building their dream houses on flood plain land (not to ention rising sea levels, of course). Florida always was metaphorically "all wet"; the chickens are coming home to roost, now.

Google says the elevation of Naples Florida is 3 feet above sea level. The New York City subway authority is planning for a 6 feet rise in sea level by the end of the present century. 3 - 6 = -3. Duh! (Palm Beach says it's 7 feet above sea level; much better!)

Birds are the only remaining direct descendants of the dinosaurs. But the snowbirds (right) who have populated Florida in their gold-plated years seem to have had a separate evolution, maybe without any further development from the stromatolites? Except that stromatolites put oxygen into the atmosphere; these creatures use it up.

But they do move aound (they are mostly auto-mobile), to go to the 4 o'clock early bird dinner specials at their local chain restaurant steak houses with interiors reassuringly decorated the like knotty pine paneled rec rooms in their old tract houses back up north and where it's dark enough that you don't really have to see what you're eating. But, boy, is it hot when your stomach gets ready to leave the place and you open the door to go back outside! Do they all go back north after they die, to take up more space in the cemeteries there? Life probably was completer for them, or now, for their children already (they had lots of those, because being an "only child" is bad for a kid's social development to be normal), in a 1953 Chevrolet, Dinah.