Saturday, August 24, 2013

Down In Darkest Florida



Two hapless, homeless-sapiens got in a bit of a tiff this week down at Key South . . . or Key East . . . or Key Wherever.  Seems these two gents living in a camp among the watery mangroves were fighting over a sack of something.  

No mention what was in the sack but I think it’s a safe bet that it was not diamonds, rubies or pearls.  Anywho, whatever was actually in that sack, be it porn, poop or pills—it’s all the same--was apparently pretty important to both individuals concerned.  Grabbing a filet knife the 59-year-old stabbed the 53-year-old plumb straight square through the heart.  The latter, with an unearthly scream, flopped face down into the water.  Surprise.  The cool salt must have revived the victim for no sooner did he fall flat than he leaped to his feet and promptly pedaled away on his bicycle.  He did not get far. Swamp Cops found him lying across the bike a short distance from the camp, dead as dead can be.

Living in a homeless swamp camp among the mangroves?  In a purely survival sort of sense, I’m not sure how anyone could “live” in a mangrove swamp ANYWHERE in Florida.  American crocodiles, twelve-foot alligators, Burmese Pythons, poisonous water moccasins, rats as big as coons, coons as big as wild hogs, wild hogs as big as . . . well, you get the point.  And imagine the fire ants, and imagine some more the swarms of starving mosquitoes, and imagine even more the plentiferous Florida sand burrs that are so needle-like that they will penetrate shoe leather, flatten bike tires and would certainly play holy hell with sleep a hundred times a night.  Then, suppose you take a bath once a month even if you didn’t need it?  How about washing up, and watching at the same time, for a hundred varieties of man-eating sharks, barracudas aplenty, invisible stinging jelly-fish, and a dozen species of sand rays that will stick a poison spear in your calf as quick as the invasive Lion Fish will stick his poison quills two inches deep into your butt and other unnamed body parts.  Add to all this the mornings, noons and nights spent among delirious drug addicts, bat shit crazy mental patients and criminal cutthroats, then throw in the furious heat and tropical rain, and the picture is pretty much complete.  Like playing on the computer?  Enjoy TV?  Forget it!  Can’t sleep without an a/c or a fan?  Forget it!  Need a little peace, quiet and sanity to hold onto your marbles?  FORGET IT!

Truly, it is the grossest of understatements to say that the dead man above has gone to a far, far better world than this morass of misery on Key Hell.  Perhaps his blessing was simply “suicide by argument.”

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Naked One-Legged Man Dies After Tossing Bricks”—Oh, yeah, that’s the startling headline yesterday in our local fish wrap.  As if it ain’t bad enough that someone was running loose throwing bricks through windows up at Pensacola, and as if it ain’t bad enough that he’s naked and stark raving nutz, but for god’s sake it’s a man hopping around on ONE FRIGGEN LEG!  Somehow, him managing to die on someone’s lawn during the entire crazed episode seems just plain anticlimactic.

“Neighbors  saw 55-year-old Norbert Chabannes crawling across a yard,” ran the report.  “They told deputies he cut his arm while unsuccessfully trying to break into his next door neighbor’s house.  That’s when he crawled across the street and threw a cinder block at a home. . . . [A] deputy found him delirious in the front yard.  The deputy says Chabannes collapsed while he was trying to reason with him.”

“Reason with him?”  “Delirious?”  “Crawled across the street?” Unbelievable.  Who could make this crap up?  And do tell how a one-legged man could balance and hop long enough to toss anything, much less a concrete block?  Lord!

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Times is Tuff—Apparently, even thieves are down and out in these hard economic times.  In addition to burglarizing churches and distracting kids selling girl scout cookies while a cohort pilfers the till, addicts have recently taken to stealing our local newspaper racks.  Not only is there a few bucks in quarters in these cumbersome things but they can scrap the machine itself for metal.  Also—and this is a first to my knowledge—some idiot broke into our local library last week and stole the tackle box that contained  about ten bucks from the sale of old and used books (not surprisingly, no books were taken).  Next stop for these cretins, I suppose, is grave robbing and fishing out the coins tossed into fountains outside restaurants devoted to crippled kids.

Times is tuff.  When the goin’ gets tuff . . . hmmmmm?   When the goin’ gets tuff the addicts get more desperater and more stupider.  “A man’s gotta eat” has been replaced by “A man’s gotta getta hit.”

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Darwin Award—A young lady in Michigan decided to buy a monkey recently from some nice gentleman who said he was calling from the West African armpit sinkhole nation of Cameroon.  The price was $50.  Since fifty smackos for an honest-to-goodness simian seemed like a pretty sweet deal to the 25-year-old rocket scientist, she eagerly sent the cash then settled in to await her monkey in the mail. 

When the seller contacted the American again and said that, so sorry, but before he could send the ape he needed a bit more cash—say, about $300 more--for shots, taxes, food, etc.   The young woman agreed.  But alas, still no monk in the mail box. 

When the seller called again and demanded even more dough before he sent the primate, the really dim light bulb finally began to flicker feebly.  Sensing that just maybe she was being hosed, the woman decided to report her concern to the local police.

I suppose that anyone who believes they can buy a $50 monkey through the mail from Africa might also imagine that the cops in Mudville, Michigan have nothing better to do with their time and budget than spend weeks and weeks and thousands upon thousands of dollars trying to retrieve the lost $350 of an absolutely perfect moron. 

Items like this back up my belief that before one can be an “old fool” one must first be a card-carrying young fool.

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Flasher-Pervert Outbreak.  Like aids, herpes, clap, and crabs, seems that right now on the Gulf there is an outbreak of that most pernicious and disgusting sex disease of all, viz., sexual perversion.  I mentioned in the last post that one William Waldman was run down and cornered like a cockroach after he exposed himself to kids at a local beach.  Well, believe it or not, seems there are now copy-cat flashers at large. 

Several of these steaming dog piles are running around in this area, exposing their naked ugliness to women and kids.  Truly, these are some pretty broken animal crackers.  Just yesterday, Lust Control nabbed Albert Hickerson.  This old degenerate, age 76—say again—old degenerate, age 76, was seen sitting on a picnic table chokin’ his chicken.  And yet, as quick as these moral meatballs are taken away to predator prison for one day or less and treated to a few free hots and a cot, like sown dragon’s teeth, it seems two more arise to take their filthy place.

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A thought while biking today. . . .

Pretty much every day I run through the local online mug shots just to see who’s on there and make sure I’m not one of them.  If a body wants to know what we are dealing with in this country with regards to crime and drugs then I suggest they too take a daily spin through these rogue galleries.

“Such faces!” I tell myself.  “The cold, dead eyes of this one are certainly those of a murderer. . . ,” I muse.  “The disheveled hair and strung-out filth of that one clearly belongs to a drug addict. . . ,” I surmise.   “That iron grimace frozen on that loser’s face and his blitzed eyes, looking neither quite awake, nor quite asleep, are definitely those of a stone drunk alcoholic. . . ," I wager. "This creepy looking old reptile is no doubt a pedophile. . . ," I vouch. "All these others look like career criminals steeped in crime . . . all, All, ALL look like they truly belong where they are at,” I smugly tell myself.

And then, when I read a few of the arrest records, I am startled.  Some of these people seem pretty normal.  One old duster my age—who I had wrongly guessed as one of our local sex steamers--had been arrested simply because of driving with a revoked license; another was a store manager jugged on a minor warrant; yet another was a preacher’s wife who had failed to pay a traffic ticket.  

So much, then, for mug shots.  I mean, have you ever seen a good one? I certainly have not.  The Pope would look like an axe murderer if he were in a mug shot.  Jesus would look a drug dealer in a mug shot.   Your wife would look like a homeless meth-addict in a mug shot.

Check out these two mug shots.  If you had to pick one, which would you most likely let baby-sit your kids?  If you picked the one below, sorry . . . that’s Albert Hickerson, the log flogger and kiddie flasher mentioned above.  Wanna try again?