On the Road Again (cont'd)

At Bald Point, a guy was standing on a pier
with a cast net. I saw a school of mullet
about 50' down the shore, within easy casting distance.
I said, "Don't you see that school of fish down there?"
He said, "Yea, I'm trying to keep from having to walk
down there." I thought, Why the fuck would they swim up here?
Where you're throwing a cast net? It's like the guy who kept going to
the Emergency Room with ciguatera poisoning. The doctor asked him,
"Why do you keep eating barracuda?" "They're so easy to catch," he said.
Some people give sorriness a bad name.

A park is not enough, a zoo
is not enough, if the entrance
to them is choked by houses,
and Lot For Sale signs, no alcohol,
no explosives, no public displays
of affection, no tits and no veteran's preference,
no minority set-aside, no tickee no laundry nobody slides,
my friend. Nobody gets home free. Everybody pays to ride.
Exact change only. No shoes, no shirt, no service.

Florida's Forgotten Coast,
formerly Florida's Last Frontier,
is an opportunity just waiting to be
exploited by a forward-looking corporation.
Disney calls it Visioneering. Carl Hiaasen calls them
Team Rodent. The net ban was a land acquisition strategy.
Like the railroad barons killing off the buffalo in the name of
westward expansion. People who do not know their father's history
get to see it repeated on their children. The same old sad, tired hustles
are fresh to people who haven't seen them. Haven't been put through
the ringer of property rights versus social justice. The plantation lives.
And you and I aren't Captain Charley.

The town dump in Carrabelle was built on an Indian site,
8FR3. Big sherds peeping out of the spoil bank, like yesterday's treasure.
An arrowhead, a person's skull, the neck bone is no longer connected to
the head bone. We lost something somewhere.

THE SALVAGE ARCHEOLOGIST OF FLORIDA'S CO-OPTED COASTS:
A MEMOIR OF 38 YEARS OF GRACIOUS CRACKER LIVING and OLD FOLKS
AT HOME: A FLORIDA CRACKER'S SUNSET CRUISE are like Leo Lovel's
Spring Creek Chronicles I and II. Only they use the N word and are thus
unpublishable by a reputable commercial house, as unsuitable or inappropriate.
I can no longer remember which is which. Lovel's books were self-published.
He sells them in state parks and national wildlife refuge gift shops. I can't even
do that. The best I can hope for is some kind of underground, outsider reputation,
that keeps my name alive from hand-to-hand, word-of-mouth publicity. Us
versus the machine. The Buzzard Cult was a mortuary complex,
and I intend to be an explosion in a charnel house, from intestinal gases.

First The Oaks, then Harry's Georgian,
now Julia Mae's Seafood. Make room for
boat slip condominiums. I feel like Rip Van Winkle,

wake up after 40 years to find everything I thought I knew
transmogrified by progress into its mirror opposite.
Devastation masquerading as progress. Charley fucking McCarthy
in the White House, his brother the worst governor since Claude Kirk.
All satirists are conservative. Shit used to be blacker and richer.