When Brew still worked for IBM, he applied for a booth at The Delray Affair, a street fair designed to keep the tourists around for an extra weekend. He sent the committee a copy of Screed, saying that he was (1) crafts-oriented, and (2) local.

If you looked at the economy of Delray Beach, it could be described as a three-legged stool. Tourism, agriculture, and construction.

I guess a fourth leg would be banking, insurance, and real estate, developing farmland into condominium complexes for retirees and building ugly strip malls for them to shop at, roads to get them there.

At least tourists went home after the season. Retirees stayed.

Brew was local in the sense that he'd been born and raised in Delray Beach, and wrote about the changes he had seen. Sort of like Faulkner writing about the changes he had seen in Oxford, Mississippi.

Now, he wrote about Point and Shoot, in between Florida's Emerald and Florida's Forgotten Coasts.

In fact, he was a senior fellow at the Point and Shoot Institute (PSI), a prestigious left-wing think-tank.

And Screed was crafts-oriented because it was a collection of self-published pamphlets.

Now, he was serializing his books on the worldwide web. Daily, as he wrote them. And every 17 years he'd have one published by an independent press, like LitVision Press, out in California.

Today, at booksALIVE 2005!, he would see the co-authors of Green Empire: The St. Joe Company and the Remaking of Florida's Panhandle. One of them, Kathryn Ziewitz, lived in Panama City. Her day job was schoolteacher.

Brew had written a book called THE SALVAGE ARCHEOLOGIST OF FLORIDA'S CO-OPTED COASTS: A MEMOIR OF 38 YEARS OF GRACIOUS CRACKER LIVING. He called Florida's Emerald, and Florida's Forgotten Coasts Florida's Co-Opted Coasts.

But it was as if Carl Hiaasen wrote Team Rodent and then had to send it to Disney. That is, to the people who co-opted the coasts. Transformed them into gated communities with No Trespassing signs. Had the taxpayers move highways, build airports, add interstate exits, and construct a theme park on the scale of Disney World, or Six Flags, or Sea World, to replace the ticky-tacky goofy-golf courses and Tiki-god water-slides of the old Redneck Riviera. Replace Clinton with a daffy president.

Why do they hate us? They hate freedom. They hate democracy.

They don't hate us.

We're just efficient little Eichmann technocrats destroying paradise to make a buck.

We're banal, in Hannah Arendt, or Ward Churchill's phrase. Us and the planners and regulators who are supposed to manage our growth, to protect resources, to control the exploitation, referee the shell game, look out for the public weal.

Brew got turned down for a booth at the Delray Affair because the local burghers didn't like what he had to say, in Screed, about them, and the University of Florida Press, who published Green Empire: The St. Joe Company and the Remaking of Florida's Panhandle, wouldn't even read the manuscript of THE SALVAGE ARCHEOLOGIST OF FLORIDA'S CO-OPTED COASTS: A MEMOIR OF 38 YEARS OF GRACIOUS CRACKER LIVING, because they didn't like what he had to say, about them.

In Delray Beach, Brew held a counterfair in his front yard, and called it The Dreyfus Affair - Banned Books.

In Point and Shoot, Brew posted SALVAGE ARCHEOLOGIST at The Daily Bulletin.

Local. Crafts-oriented.

Genius loci. Spirit, or tutelary diety, of a place.

Brew was the spirit, or tutelary diety, of Point and Shoot.

Brew made up a billboard for THE DREYFUS AFFAIR - BANNED BOOKS. Another, smaller sign said FLORIDA'S SHAME.

Louisiana's shame was it refused to license chiropractors. Florida's shame was it licensed writers, and refused to license Brew. It not only would not give him a fine arts grant, it excluded him from the Florida Artists Directory, from which schools K-12 through junior college, selected writers to be a Poet in the Schools (PITS), on the grounds his work was unsuitable or inappropriate.

Unsuitable or inappropriate for junior college? Brew called himself a Poet Out of the Schools.

Art Brew, POOTS.

Well, now, Brew had a publisher.

He had a booth.

booksALIVE 2005! invited him, and gave him a book-signing booth, in the Gulf County Community College Conference Center, as a local author.

Brew made a sign up for the show.

Hell, having a color printer was better than a plywood billboard.

Hate me, motherfucker.

Hate in one hand and shit in the other and see which hand fills up faster.

As Larry says about Mardi Gras, or graduate school, or parties in general, "I ONLY FUCK MY WIFE."