Sailboat Update

As of yesterday, the local salvage company that takes care of things such as this was setting up shop to dismantle the entire boat and take it away over land; this is all that remains from a similar operation a few years ago about a half-mile south of there (again, left-click twice to see largest version; you can just make out the current boat along with a land rover which was out hauling gear). This is only visible during extreme low tide, which is what it was Thursday. Note the beautiful sky with wavy cirrus stratus as brilliant contrast.

It was hot also but there was a nice breeze off the water to cool me down. I met a tall gorgeous blonde who actually spoke to me just south of the guarded section in Palm Beach Shores; she seemed genuinely impressed that I had walked up to the pier and back but she also dispensed with me rather quickly so we'll see--I'll be back tomorrow and I'll be looking for her.

"Well, We All Make Mistakes,"

is how this was explained to me early Saturday morning, before MacArthur Park was even open, by the short overweight young lady who was working the morning shift as a park ranger (again, left-click each picture twice to view the largest version--this was the north end of the park; note the Lost Tree Village guesthouses on the right in the first photo and the Singer Island condos in the distance on the second). I also speculated that if you had as nice a boat as that, you'd take better care of it; which she rejoined that perhaps on the other hand you'd take it for granted. Ah well--Ahoy there 'Sea Fever' of Wilmington, Delaware: you are parked in the reddest zone of all of South Florida. Move your vehicle post haste or it will be moved for you (note yellow poilce tape at left; the North Palm Beach police mean business--grr).

It was hot at the beach, with surprisingly few honeys out. The breeze was out of the south and all that warm Caribbean air is pushing our normal afternoon thunderstorm activity off the charts. The water was nice and cool but I did not go in, except to get these shots. No jellyfish but I did spy one octopus, about two feet long, washing ashore as if it were dead, behind Lost Tree Village on my way back.

There were many turtle nests about, even in the beach renourishment area; shows what I know.

My bag was taken from me Friday but I still retain my census ID; supposedly all the vacants have to be verified--calling proxies to make sure they indeed spoke with said proxies, et cetera. This was supposed to be an eight week operation and we finished it in four because nobody goofed off; did we talk ourselves out of a job? So far today no call but we'll see.

Skipped the beach Sunday in favor of the pool; I swam for a couple hours but then my next door neighbors showed up. I ignored them for a while but then cut out; it's a good thing Claire gave me PR back--I've found two outright mistakes along with incalculable polishing. At least I have something constructive to do.

Dawn's Early Light

This is the sight that greeted me Friday morning, just after seven a.m. (I don't know why the next shot won't enlarge when you left-click it, but it doesn't) The second picture is from Saturday morning (Free Plug Alert--by the way, in case anyone is interested, the camera immortalizing these extraordinary images is an Olympus Stylus Tough 8000--waterproof, freezing weather safe and shock-resistant to two meters. This is my second Olympus digital camera and I continue to be stunned by how wonderful the color is). The third demonstrates to a certain extent what I've been saying about that one sea wall--that it can be dangerous when the surf is high.

Anyway, the fourth and fifth photographs are from the beach restoration project up in Juno. These people are being fined thousands of American dollars a day because they were supposed to have been done by March 1st, the beginning of turtle nesting season (I have seen one group of four nests on the south end of Lost Tree Village from March fifth and another group north of there that is dated March eighteenth and that's it). However much the money is, it's not enough. The fourth picture shows how they are attempting to filter out the largest rocks and shells from the sand. The fifth picture tells the tale. I have seen tracks of some highly determined sea turtles over the years, but I cannot imagine how any turtle could scale a sheer cliff such as this--I can't do it and I'm a biped.

Enough of my soapbox. Otherwise the sky and the ocean were both beautiful again as we were blessed with two concurrent gorgeous days. No trace of the brown pelican so maybe I was wrong. Plenty of would-be pampered Persian princesses were out again, seeking their place in the sun and their very own cute rich guy to snag. One waved back at me, twice, from her veranda on the sands. Another said hello to me from her chaise, whom I responded to in kind. I also saw a couple out hiking in the afternoon who always wave to me who live there in the Dunes condos, just south of the park, the wife being more friendly and happy to see me than the husband, of course. At the liquor store on the way home, I flirted with two Ashleys who work there while securing some Froggy B vodka and some Schweppes tonic water for myself (another free uncompensated plug), the two girls side by side, one white and the other black, on adjacent check-outs, both pretty cute. Other than that, nada.

Still haven't heard back from the contest either. Our lawn got mowed Friday while I was at the beach and it looks pretty nice. Today is mostly overcast as we have another front coming through with more rain, so I'm resting my feet and my legs. Saturday I got there later than Friday and walked the same distance but finished fifteen minutes sooner, which doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense, but there you have it, sports fans. Tomorrow I'm hitting C&D (my favorite discount fruit and vegetable place--yet one more free and shameless endorsement) for more fresh strawberries and blueberries for lunch on my beach days and some potatoes for my patented Parmesan steak fries. Tuesday is supposed to be nice also, when I'm planning to be back in the sun. God is great, our beautiful blue world still spins and I'm feeling lucky. Life is good. It's amazing, but it is.

What A Mess

This is the beach renourishment project in fabulous Juno Beach (from the south end, facing north), otherwise known as How To Spend Millions Of Dollars On The Most Ridiculous Mess Ever. This whole thing is supposed to be for the benefit of the sea turtles. (The project is working its way south, towards the camera, so the beach you see in the foreground has not yet been widened.) Do you see the ship out in the water, on the right (left-click on the picture with your mouse to get a larger version)? That is dredging sand off the bottom of the ocean and they are pumping it onto the shore and distributing everything around with bulldozers. The problems with this are: 1) the sand is now so firmly packed that no sea turtle alive would be able to dig through it and 2) in addition to sand, they are also sucking up sharp rocks, about the size of your fist or larger. Because of the heavy machinery, they are also breaking up many shells that now have sharp edges. In my mind, I envision any sea turtle coming to this beach to lay her eggs as crawling over one sharp rock or, failing that, trying without success to dig into the sand and promptly heading back into the ocean, to lay her eggs somewhere else.

Anyway, enough of my rant. You can see that otherwise the sky was beautiful but there were some clouds. The breeze was off the ocean and it was comfortable when the sun was out. I saw a few people fishing, all without success. Up by the pier, I happened to overhear one fisherman saying all anyone's caught in a week was cobia, which is similar to kingfish, at best only marginally edible until they get too big, which opens the possibility of their having eaten something poisonous to humans. I was back to my car at a little after three, so it took me about seven and a half hours of mostly walking, although I did indulge myself by running to reach the pier on one really boring stretch of the beach north of this dredging project.

Most of the public beaches were closed to swimming, again because of the sharks, but I saw none. A nice looking honey was studying a thick textbook, something medical, while trying to catch some rays south of the big hotel, whose name escapes me, just this side of the main beach. Another blonde cutie in front of another new and expensive hotel said Hi to me and smiled as I walked by, but she seemed awfully young and it looked as if she was there with either her family or friends. She also had her cell phone out on her beach blanket, as if she were expecting a call.

I did some more work on the sequel, so the ending is coming along but I don't want to post it here until it's done, which could be a while. Also got caught up on the newspaper. Otherwise, I'm sitting here waiting for the telephone to ring, as I did find a few job positions in the last couple weeks to apply for. But with more than six people unemployed for every position that opens up and my resume looking terrible, unfortunately the silence makes a great deal of sense. I did apply for a Census 2010 job and took the test and passed, but when I called earlier in the month, I was informed the soonest that hiring might begin is late February, if not early March.

I have enough money to pay this coming months' bills, but I won't have enough to make my car payment on the eighteenth. If nothing materializes between now and then, I will be forced to sell some diamonds, gold and coins I have. Then I do have cash advances on some credit cards but after that, I'll have to sell my condo, so at least I have a way out, because I owe only $27,520 on my place. Sadly, many people who either bought at the height of the real estate bubble or took out a second mortgage do not.

Caution: Bees Drinking

This was the sign on the barricade that greeted me yesterday at the park when I approached the drinking fountain, in quest of liquid refreshment. And what were bees drinking? Why, water, of course--what else would bees be drinking? If I were a bee, I might be tempted to drink mead, which is fermented honey--the drink of choice among the old Anglo-Saxons of Beowulf fame--but this is probably why I wouldn't make a very good bee.
What were bees doing at the beach anyway? They were perhaps asking themselves what I was doing at the beach--and as well they might. I have seen dead bees at the beach, which I take care not to step on, but why they are there to begin with is a mystery I shall never solve.
There are usually one or two bumblebees that stake out some territory near those same showers, but up until yesterday it has had nothing to do with the water. There is an open trash container as well as a recycling bin, so I had always associated bees with the presence of juicy and rotting garbage. These were smaller honey bees (perhaps), but they still had this air of territoriality about them.
Otherwise it was quite beautiful but also very hot at the beach yesterday. We had a break in the temperature for a few days, which caused me to believe fall might be in the air, but now it's turned back into the furnace again--the blast furnace that you walk out into every day that everyone feels the need to hide and escape from.
But back to the beach--the usual suspects were out and about. And I had one very nice young honey say "Hello" to me and I said "Hello" back but that was the end of it--she was surrounded by all her friends and I don't feel comfortable making conversation with someone in front of an audience. Notice that I always have an excuse.
When I was in high school, my excuse was my acne, which was then quite acute. Afterwards in college and beyond it was my succession of trashy automobiles, along with not having my own place. I haven't had a girlfriend that wasn't just over the telephone or the computer in fifteen years. This has lead many people to conclude that I'm a homosexual. I am not--I'm just extremely picky.
But now I've run out of excuses. My current situation is untenable--if I can't get a roommate, a job, a publishing contract or some combination of the three, I'm going to have to sell my place and move somewhere, away from all these retired people who are losing their minds to dementia, Alzheimer's and time. But even if I do, my resume is still going to look terrible. Thus is the dilemma.

Honeys at the Beach

Were there honeys at the beach yesterday, basking in the warm Florida sun? Was there also a repulsively fat bald guy who keeps proselytizing me and tries to convert me to his religion every time I see him? And does he also speak to himself as if he has an I-phone hardwired into his head with a direct line to the Almighty ("Hello God--this is Fred again.")? The answer to all these questions unfortunately is yes--sadly, the beach attracts some strange people.
It would be pleasant to report that there are always honeys at the beach, but this is inaccurate, unjust and unkind. The later it gets to be in the year, the more it's just tourists and old people. Also the beach itself becomes looser and more like slogging through quicksand than more finely packed during the summer, so to walk the same amount takes considerably more effort.
Which is why I'm doing this now instead of getting ready for the beach again. Some of the girls around here do look better with a tan and they notice that and this does draw them to the beach, but it would be a mistake to suppose that's the only reason I go.
Yesterday was a very nice beach day, which I thanked God for, and there was sunshine almost all day long. There were also bait fish in the water, just north of Lost Tree Village, and they were being chased by something--possibly sharks and definitely tarpon. I saw some dorsal fins a few hundred yards out near the pier and the pelicans were out, all unmistakable signs of fish activity.
There were also people fishing in the water, some in water past their waists. This you could label either extremely foolish or quite daring, depending upon your point of view, because these sharks, while not large enough to eat you alive, could quite conceivably take your hand or foot or a nice chunk out of your midsection, points I pondered while the people in the water seemed not to care.
All my life I've had reasons why I didn't have a girlfriend--I was too busy with the book, my car wasn't nice enough, I didn't know anyone I wanted to ask out, and so on. There only reason I have left is the sequel, which I'm still doing work on. That's the only thing keeping me sane at this point.

No Beach To Walk On

This was the title of my aborted fourth book, stolen from a line in a Star Trek episode, which was going to be about a really bad hurricane that hits Palm Beach County directly--before and then the aftermath. Today it becomes part of a reason I aborted the beach walk--the surf was too high, there was all this trash all over the place, there were storms north and south of me, and finally I just didn't feel like doing it. The beach goes downhill every year around this time, so it was no surprise.
I walked for a few hours at the mall, but this got to be a drag also so now I'm home. I'm almost half way done with the sequel so that's coming along nicely as well.
The reason I never finished this book is because after the third one didn't get picked up, I became so dispirited about the whole thing, I lost interest in it. Plus I finally had found a decent job and I was learning about financial markets and all this so it kind of just went away. I knew the third book needed a rewrite but how to do it eluded me until I got the idea for the subplot and then it hit me--what had been missing in the book.
One day after I had gotten fired from my last job, I was sitting around and feeling sorry for myself so I decided that I needed a break. So I went on YouTube to look at some music videos that some other people had done that amused me. Then in one, I saw some original artwork that I didn't recognize, so I wrote down that website. From that website, I found a link to another website that had some fan fiction posted. I read two of them and they were O.K.--nothing to write home about--but then there was one story that seemed promising and it just stops, right in the middle of it, as if whoever was doing it simply lost interest in it or died. There was one chapter that I felt really needed a rewrite, so I decided to see what I could do with it. I played with it for a few days until I felt like I had gotten it into shape.
But then I realized I had made a mistake and it still wasn't right. So I started again and this time it came out pretty well. Then I tried to write to the people most closely associated with all this and no dice--the e-mail was either returned or wasn't answered. Then I was walking at the mall one day and it hit me--this was perfect for the third book. So I started work on it the next day and the rest is history.
I guess it just goes to show that you never know what you're going to find when you start looking around on the Internet--and that ideas germinate in devious ways. This I've stolen also--it's from Robert Heilbroner's Worldly Philosophers book--something else I heartily recommend. Stealing can be very habit forming, it appears.
But the most difficult part of this transition has been the self-esteem issues associated with not having a regular job where I show up every day. All these years, for good bad or indifferent, I was able to support myself in the manner to which I have become accustomed. Now, I'm working at home and I'm happy--instead of working somewhere else and being miserable. But part of me was tied up with what I was doing and that's been what's hardest to get away from.
Were there honeys at the mall today? No, that's not a rhetorical question and I'm glad I asked me that. There were--but this is a subject for another post.

B. Careful of the HEAT!

This was the cautionary note that the lifeguards at Ocean Reef Park have inscribed in the message section of the data board that I noted early yesterday upon my arrival to the beach, just before eight o'clock. I also saw 'maybe tarpon and sharks' for Wednesday which had been erased for Thursday, so I'm inferring that maybe those large silver predators that I saw on Tuesday jumping out of the water going after the bait fish weren't sharks after all but tarpon. That could be, as tarpon are more apt to jump out of the water when stimulated than sharks.
But back to the heat--you can get heatstroke at the beach if you're not careful. In fact, as viewed from above, my travels there would seem to the casual observer as the proverbial quest for water, as I venture from fountain to fountain, some chilled and some not. As one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's characters once remarked, Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. Freshwater, that is--not saltwater.
I drink tap water at the beach with absolute abandon, which is strange because at home it tastes funny--it has all this calcium in it which I don't like and makes ice look cloudy, so I indulge myself with bottled water for ice cubes and lemonade there. But at the beach for some reason I drink quite a bit.
Well, the main reason is I sweat. I drip all day long, even with a breeze. It's still hot but not as stifling as August was. The sun in Florida is very strong and if you're not used to it, it can be overwhelming.
Very clear blue skies and hardly any people greeted me at the beach yesterday. I observed a much larger but less well defined school of bait fish off the shore of Lost Tree Village, in North Palm Beach, which is south of Juno, on my way back but this time the show wasn't as good. A lot of individual fish jumping out of the water, being pursued by something presumably larger, but not as many of the spectacular mass flying fish and aggrieved predator thrashing in frenzied retaliation. The lot of them were moving south again but this time more slowly, as by the time I got back to my car, 4:15 p.m., the school hadn't made it down the coast yet to the guarded beaches.
I saw two baby sea turtles but sadly they were both dead. One had gotten caught a few hours earlier in some dried seaweed and had hundreds of fire ants all over him or her by the time I got there and the other had simply flipped over on his or her way down a hole and hadn't been able to turn back over. Such are the vagaries of survival in the world of baby sea turtles.
No pictures as there wasn't anything worth recording. Some honeys were about but none that had eyes for me without male escorts. Chicks that flirt with me in front of their boyfriends/husbands or otherwise smile or say hello give me pause. One woman more my age up around Juno did say "Hi" to me as we were both walking the same way--however, I threw her back. And I did have to take two 500 mg painkillers because my right foot and back were both acting up. But still--all in all, it was a beautiful day.

Fishermen vs. Fisherfools

The beach was back yesterday and I was back at the beach, almost alone. This happened last year also--once you hit Labor Day, everyone kind of gives up on the beach unless it is really, really sunny out.
Yesterday there was some cloud cover, but I still got some sun. No baby sea turtles but lots of bait fish in the water, which some sharks were feeding on. All you can eat, as they say. The school of fish started out huge--hundreds of feet in diameter--but became dismantled by the later parts of the afternoon. It happened to coincide with my return to MacArthur Park on the way back and I followed its mostly southerly sojourn down the coast.
I tried to get some video but the small sample I've previewed didn't come out that clearly--you can't see detail, parts of which were spectacular. When the four or five foot sharks would go in after the six or seven inch mullet, the smaller fish would jump out of the way, sometimes out of the water, and the sharks would follow suit. Sometimes you'd have two or three fairly large silver sharks coming out of the water at once and it was quite a show.
But back to the fishing--the only times that I see successful fishermen on the beach is in the spring and again in the fall, when the fish are on the move, because of the changes in the seasons. (The fisherman pictured here was working the inlet, which you can see in the background, as this faces south, so the land you see behind him is Palm Beach. This was taken in August and the fish is some kind of jack, similar to tuna. It took him about ten or fifteen minutes to land the fish and he said he was going to throw him back. I don't know what kind of bait he was using, but I remember it wasn't a lure or a spinner.) Where I go, Singer Island, is the point in the entire U.S. Eastern Seaboard where the continental shelf is closest to the land--here, it's maybe five miles out, as compared to over a hundred miles up by, say, Virginia. So as a consequence of that, when fish are on the move, they do come fairly close to the shore here, and attract larger predators.
Up in Juno, south of the pier, they'll set up about five or six large rods and reels apiece and they'll mostly catch pompano, which is about as good as what you're going to get around here. Sometimes the bluefish are running, and you can pull in as many of those as you want or have the energy for, but they are a lesser grade.
Fisherfools, on the other hand (forget the trip to the dictionary--it's not in there), spend an enormous amount of money on boats, tackle and bait and wind up with exactly nothing worth eating. Now I realize some people fish the way some people play golf--just as an excuse to get out of the house and avoid someone you may be married to but whom you may not get along that well with, so you 'fish' as a way of passing the time, if say you're retired and you don't have anything else to do. I guess I'm more utilitarian--I prefer to accomplish a lot of things at once.
As for the honeys, they were out also, and not just at the beach. On my way home, a young brunette babe driving what appeared to be her mother around in perhaps the family car did smile at me when we were side by side and stopped at a stoplight, so if you're reading this and you were at the wheel of a white Mercedes convertible going west on PGA Boulevard Tuesday just before five o'clock, wearing your hair up, and you happened to see some guy in a silver Acura who looked like he just came from the beach, driving without a shirt on, that was me, so if you'd like to leave a message, please include your name and phone number so that when I call, I don't sound like a complete idiot.
The landscaping people have arrived this morning with their many machines--their weapons of suburban warfare--to do battle with the lawn again. They may hold the upper technological hand, but the grass is resilient, and has secrets of its own, along with the resolve of nature, so the struggle continues there also. Got some more work done on the sequel but otherwise still waiting for some response, any response. Everything that I've been reading suggests this is a lost hope and a forgone conclusion--if you're not already a published author or if you're not a famous person, just forget it. I guess the publishers have been burned once too often by picking something up and no one paying any attention, no matter how well written it was, simply because whoever wrote it was unfamiliar. They have a saying over in Japan--the person you wait for never comes. Sometimes it feels like that, but we'll see. TTYL.

Vampires At The Beach

Before I settled on Klara, I had asked a few other attractive young women to help me with the book. My routine generally consisted of approaching members of the target audience--as Carolyn is 24 and single with no boyfriend when the book starts out--to ask them what they're reading. To answer, most would show me the cover of the book. Then I would either guess what the book was about from the title or ask them to describe it. This in and of itself helped me a couple of ways. One pretty young lady, who seemed a little too eager, was reading a book titled Love the One You're With. I remarked to her, "Now we know what that's about, right?" Another desirable young woman's book was titled Flawless. My guess that it was about the fashion industry or models turned out to be wrong, but the reticent soft-spoken brunette I questioned did allow it was about some girl, presumably without imperfections of any kind. The working title of my book at that time was The Secondary Refraction. Based on these experiences, the more I thought about it, the more that seemed too cryptic, so I changed it to Paradise Regained, because that's what happens at the end of the book--Carolyn and John along with Brandy and the gang get to their South Pacific island before the U.S. military does, deploy the bubble machine from the aliens' specs and bingo--instant impregnable island fortress. I did a http://www.dogpile.com/ search on it and was surprised to learn that no one since John Milton had used that title in the 1600s, so I thought, Why not--it's shorter and more positive, implying the requisite happy ending, in addition to being truth in advertising.
Another more intelligent college-aged young blonde honey coolly and tersely advised me that her book was about vampires. This became a recurring theme. I remember when I was working at the call center up in Juno Beach, across the street from the turtle place, ten years ago when I was getting the first draft of my book together. The general manager kept asking me why I hadn't come up with the books on the magician's assistant as he called it, referring to the Harry Potter series. The answer to that question which I never gave him is that you have to be into something like that to be able to write convincingly, persuasively and passionately about it--and I'm just not into witchcraft and spells and warlocks and all that, the same way I'm not into vampires. But I am into science fiction.
What I think has happened in the last fifty years is that science fiction has gotten way too technical for the average person to understand it. My first book was a spy novel with a romance subplot set in real time--1994. The second was a young adult coming of age story set mostly in 2012. The third book takes place in 2042, but I have taken pains to make it as accessible as possible, more back to basics. Whether this was a mistake, whether I have outsmarted myself, we shall see.
Allow me by digression to explain. Yes, fiction is a brand-name business. The same way most people would patronize a McDonald's rather than an independent restaurant in an unfamiliar locale simply because as bad as McDonald's is, it's nevertheless a known quantity, so also have publishers realized that they can make more money from one million Stephen King books than from ten thousand titles of ten thousand lesser-known writers. The flip side of that, however, is that publishers always need genre books, because some people go through these things--romances being the obvious example--as if they were going out of style. My general impression of all the people that I've polled and those that I haven't is that people are desperate for something--anything--to read that is well-written, so much so that they're willing to read what they consider mediocre until the proverbial good stuff comes along again. So many girls' judgment of what they were reading was, in dreary tones of world-weary resignation, "It's O.K." And when I followed up with why they were reading it to begin with, the answer was always that a friend or close relative, i.e. their mother, had recommended it.
Everyone always thinks his or her book is different. The market's never been worse for first-timers. Even if the book does get published, I am going to have to work full time or more at making it sell. I was invited to join Toastmasters a few years ago by one of their members but since I didn't have a salable book at the time, I thought I'd hold off until I did. That's my ace in the hole--that and the book fair in Miami in November. If I could just get one person to write me back, to ask to read the book, then I would have more confidence about this whole thing. I remember this is what drove me crazy last time--the waiting.
It's mostly cloudy outside now but there's no way to know how it is at the beach except by being there, as where I live is six miles inland and as previously stipulated the weather in Florida is very strange. My expensive mixed nuts--toasted but not salted--from Sunnyland Farms in Georgia arrived a little while ago via UPS. I can keep this routine up for about six more months before money is going to be a problem. I should know whether the book is a go or not a long time before then. I know rationally that one way or another, I'll do the right thing, but knowing it emotionally is something else. The future remains a scary place but it is the only place I want to live.