Skip to main content

palatka/ocala, florida

just back from a planned, yet unannounced, trip to florida. my parents house, to introduce them to my girlfriend (y vice versa). lots of fun, middle of the swamp palatka crescent beach san augustine (mobile) ocala -- my grandparents' farm. "stancil's pineywoods farm." the road that was a dirt road until a few years ago, named "stancil avenue." cuz it only went to grandpa's sandpit and my cousins' trailer, nothing but stancils.
anyway, they're widening it to four lanes, eminent domaining a large chunk. the future se viene. uncle harold had to run fence along the new edge. and the entrance, with a wooden sign my grandpa hung there 60 or 70 years ago. being moved. because too much traffic. they (my mom, her brothers) don't want to sell the farm./ but it makes no money, no money in florida cattle anymore. no money in hay, all the farms do horses now. import special stuff from canada.
and the city is coming. every month more. every year the tax assessment grows, so they have to start selling it. and not sellnig it to make money. they're selling it to get cash to pay the taxes. it's shrinking with no ROI. of course, they could sell the whole thing, there'd be profit in that, but loss in equal measure. bunch of developers want to put bighouses with toy horse farms all over ocala. that or strip malls.
can't stop time. but ni modo, can't touch memories either. nos vemos en otro lado, grandpa.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Refugees in Europe deserve help, but refugees in U.S. deserve to "be sent back"?

--> September 4, 2015 Hillary Clinton on the refugee crisis in Southern Europe:   “Well the pictures, well the stories, we’ve been watching this terrible assault on the Syrian people now for years, are just heartbreaking. I think the entire world has to come together, it should not be just one or two countries, or not just Europe and the United States. We should do our part, as should the Europeans, but this is a broader, global crisis.   We now have um, more refugees than we’ve had, in many years, I think since the second world war. And as we’ve seen tragically, people are literally dying to escape the conflict in Syria. Uh, I think that the, the larger Middle East, I think Asia, I think everybody should step up and say we have to help these people. And I would hope that, under the aegis of the United Nations led by the Security Council, and certainly by the United States which has been such a generous nation in the past, we would begin to try to...
10 comments
Read more

be the movies

i guess it's because i've been watching too many movies about relationships. or that most movies are specifically about relationships ,and i've just been watching too many movies. whatever: recently the screen seems to invade my imagination. too often. i thought maybe i was a character from Closer . only in a few scenes, not the whole thing. "there's always a moment." in my film class this quarter, we read shit about the overwhelming sense of realness in film. how and why it can surpass literature, visual art, stage, and tv. nothing can manipulate as effectively. it controls time and perception (you cannot go back and re-read a page at a movie theater - but i'm re-reading a book stanza now). And yet, love knows it is a greater grief To bear love's wrong, than hate's known injury other forms often suggest to us that "we are there," in a moment. but the experience of directed gaze at a photo or painting, this is limited to 1 sense, and we ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Jared Kushner & the Meritocracy

Congratulations to Jared Kushner for getting the federal government to cover a well-deserved $800 million loan! This is such a feel-good story, showing our meritocracy at work: As a child, Jared's family ran a small business of owning 25,000 apartment units. They barely scraped by on less than $100 million income per year. The Kushners were forced to live off of government assistance, via the rent received from their low-income tenants. When it was time to apply for college, Jared didn't have the advantages of other applicants. For example, he wasn't a great student, his GPA was low, and he got a bad score on the SAT. It was only by a stroke of luck that Jared's dad Charles cobbled together a $2.5 million donation to Harvard. Just in time to get him a spot.  Yet even with a Harvard degree and Ivy League connections, poor Jared didn't find anyone willing to hire him! Except for his dad. So, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps and took an entry-level positio...
1 comment
Read more