The Once and Future Roadie

I just found a really small animal bone on my writing table..  Most likely it is a stray cast-off from one of my alcohol-induced chicken feasts where I take a half a Winn Dixie roast chicken and hack away at it with one of my sheath knives that seem to be reproducing here in my room faster than I can give them away...everyone I know has a Buck knife that I gave them; Smyrna Jan has the big one (I originally bought it for myself but that knife, a Buck 139, for some reason gave me the willies so I gave it to Jan because he IS the willies and ain’t afraid of nothin’,  not because he is brave (he is) but because he is crazy as hell and capable of anything).  I kept a very nice little rubber-handled unit that cuts just right slicing ribs or apples or anything else and I also use it to cut up half a chicken when necessary and that, most likely is where this little bone came from...and yet, I don’t know.

Be that as it may, I am here to report somewhat shame-facedly that I never made it to Mexico Beach to save the day.  In fact, looking at the reports from the Panhandle, nobody else made it up there either.  As near as I can tell, they got things cleaned up pretty good but rebuilding has not progressed much at all.  I was headed there to rebuild a string of Macburgers that I can guarantee you are up and running by now, with or without my help.  The rest of it is predictable;  what was once a sleepy little seaside village with an alluringly charming name will soon enough be a solid wall of high rise oceanfront condominiums.  It is the Florida Way and anybody who don’t like it, well, I feel the same way while at the same time making my living building those very same atrocities and so what can I say?  I am, after all, a Trailer Park inhabitant and a Florida Man…

Meanwhile, the rascally bastards that owned the Whispering Pines finally found a buyer and things are kinda-sorta topsy-turvy. The new owner is an Orlando lawyer and since taking over a month or so ago he has evicted four trailer’s worth of miscreants and deadbeats.  Those newly empty trailers are scheduled to be thoroughly cleaned and painted and rehabbed with new doors and windows and then sold to worthy customers, over age 55 and preferably having pension checks or social security benefits that can be routed through a kindly benevolent Orlando lawyer’s office.

Me, I have always been something of an outlier here at Riverside Palms Mobile Home Village. (Yeah, that’s the new name.  But last week they cut down all the palm trees and the pines too.  They ain’t whispering any more.)  Not my pines, though.  Because of my unique position in a far corner, next to a large lot owned by the city, the pines and palms are just fine.  They are off the trailer park property and it seems to me my squirrel population has increased in both quantity and nervousness; squirrels and chainsaws are far from simpatico but some sympathetic handouts of extra peanuts has done a great deal towards smoothing things over with not only the squirrels but also with a group  of jays and redbirds that were passing through but now seem happy to stick around.

And yet...and yet;  ya don’t make it to 64 years old without learning to sniff the wind and keep an eye on the sky and there’s something coming.  I don’t know what, but there’s a lawyer in it and when has that ever turned out any good for anyone involved, except the lawyer?

But listen to this:  I have been unemployed for over two weeks now.  I have been riding my bicycle every day, and I don’t mean beach cruising.  I am slamming out daily twenty mile rides and bragging about it on a new blog I started called The Paleo Cyclist.

What happened was I came in from the Road and found decent local work and got into a groove.  It was a groove that involved slow but steady beer drinking all day (yeah I drank at work get over it I live in a trailer) and also involved the Blonde’s considerable skill at preparing her native West Virginia fare, fried chicken and dumplin’s and all manner of crockpot wonderfulness that, along with a case of beer and a half-quart of Capn’ Morgans a day resulted in what might at best be described as an amorphous blob occupying the airspace of what had previously been a cyclist.

So…

Well, I am pretty happy to be typing here on the TPC again.  I am going to do more of it.  What is over there at the Paleo Cyclist isn’t really writing, or entertainment.  It’s just a journal of my struggle to find my way back to something a little more better than where I am now.  But as I was typing it up every day after my ride I started to think, well, maybe someone else might get this, someone else might want to see this…

tj