(I’d use my own picture…but there’s no fucking way I’d go down there to take one. Wait- why is there a little boy down there???)

How is this still going on? And why is Satan’s law firm, the ACLU, the only body genuinely attempting to rectify the situation?

It isn’t just the human rights violations inherent in forcing ~100 men to live under a bridge in oppressive heat with virtually no electricity or water (which is undeniable, even if said men enjoy fisting 9 year-old boys.) The real issue is the inability of the DOC to keep the others under wraps.

Of 259 offenders listed as “transient,” 106 have ABSCONDED. I haven’t researched the magical world of sex offender management extensively, but I’m guessing the inability to locate 41% of sex offenders and predators is objectively preposterous. I’d also assume that these numbers were substantially lower before legislation mandating pervert apartheid was passed. I calculated Fulton County, GA’s sex offender absconsion rate, too…it’s about 10%.

The offenders who are at least superficially law-abiding live in tents under a fucking bridge, and the ones who aren’t…almost half of the people we’ve deemed unsuitable to live among us…

…are loose; free to rape, batter, and flash with abandon.

Almost weekly, newspapers and magazines publish surveys denouncing Miami as “the worst” of something.

These surveys are spot-on.

My pictures from various third world countries and Miami made for a fun game: “Is it Miami, or is it Haiti?” (Other variations include: “Is it Miami, or is it the Dominican Republic?” and “Is it Miami, or is it Jamaica?”) I’ve fooled even longtime residents of Miami.

Take a guess!

(Ok, this one’s too easy. It’s Miami, obviously.)

3rd most dangerous. There have been so many shoot-outs at the club across the street from my residence that when they occur, they’re no longer deemed newsworthy.

9th most miserable. If Miami weren’t so warm, it’d undoubtedly be in the top 3.

I happen to disagree with this one. I’ve driven in LA. I’ve driven in DC. Only in Miami do I find myself trapped in the left lane on the highway behind an oblivious old Cuban man going 30 MPH in a cargo van twice a week.

This is especially appalling when you consider that ALL the cities preceding it on the list have substantially higher median incomes than that of Miami.

Second only to Detroit. DETROIT!

I went to OSU v. USC last weekend.

I believe the SEC to be the only half-decent conference in the NCAA. Besides, people in the Midwest are too fucking polite. I don’t think one person said an unkind word to me. Walking to the stadium at any SEC game, fans of the rival team will scream profanities at you. Five year-old girls will pelt you with cups of beer. That’s the way it ought to be.

NJ to OH:

Downtown:

High Street:

These kids liked my friend’s stupid suit so much, they gave him free jello shots and beer.

By the stadium:

Someone else got the stupid pants memo.

Tailgating:

The game:

106,000+ attendees- a record for the stadium. They still lost.

Impromptu weekend trip to New Orleans.


Tulane area:

…say dey gonna beat dem Saints?

Block to block in NOLA goes from pretty…

…to pretty shitty.

From the local free paper’s “best of” feature.

The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway is a bridge that puts that 7-mile joke in the Keys to shame. 24 miles of creepiness.

The Causeway meets land again in Mandeville.

Mandeville is gorgeous…eerily quaint.

…creepy.

This is probably one of the towns that had a civilian militia stationed at the parish border to keep Orleans parish residents the fuck out after Katrina.

More NOLA:

Bourbon Street bullshit:

Disappointed with his loot, post-mooning.

Jackson Square.

Once a brewery; now the city’s saddest mall.

Hurricane preparedness.

Canal Street.

French Market.

Magazine Street.

Mid-City. Obviously.

Airport. Thrilling.

The ValuJet Memorial.

Fishing by the side of the Tamiami trail.

There were something like five of these motherfuckers dead in one quarter-mile stretch.

The buildings in the background are apparently failed timeshares.

Riverside drive:

The Watchtower.

Valerie Wisecracker.

Airport.

Dinner at the Seafood Depot.

Tall fucking mangroves.

Casualty of Hurricane Wilma.

Floyd.

06: Designing Mokai from rakontur on Vimeo.

Once again, thank God for football season.

At the ass end of last season, my Gators were down three games and the bullshit Buckeyes were still undefeated. Strength of schedule was always the topic of argument between myself and my misguided Big 10 friends. I mean, how much do wins against teams like Akron and Kent really matter?

Sure, Florida lost a few games…but before that tragic Capital One Bowl loss to Michigan (which can be attributed to the curse of the Heisman, obviously), our losses were to other SEC powerhouses.

And they were close games. My heart was broken as I watched the Florida/Auburn game at a shitty bar in the Meatpacking District. Watching the LSU game from my seat in Baton Rouge’s Tiger Stadium the following weekend was even worse.

But in November, seeing the mediocre Illini assram the Buckeyes while freezing my ass off in the Horseshoe made the pain subside quite a bit.

Saturday night was a bloodbath, and 35-3 is the kind of score you’d expect a team like USC to have at the end of a season opener against a D2 school.

Mark my words- the Big 10 is bullshit, the ACC is irrelevant, and for the third consecutive year, the BCS champion will be an SEC team.

…but hopefully, said SEC team will have a real opponent this time.

It was after 4 am on the last night of my most recent visit to NYC. I’d just gotten back to my boy’s place after a night of heavy drinking.

“Harlem had a good run.”

*************************

Look! Another Times article about gentrification in Harlem! The Pioneering, Open-Minded Yuppies Muster the Courage to Deal with the Natives! I especially enjoyed this part:

“And many new residents are uncomfortable with Harlem’s noisy street life, including sidewalk barbecues that can draw large crowds. Some believe there are too many churches on the one hand — Harlem has more than 100 houses of worship — and a casual flouting of the law on the other, with people littering, double-parking and drinking alcohol on the street. Some white women complain that they seem to receive more rude sexual come-ons in Harlem than elsewhere.”

(Please note that this isn’t the Times‘ photo; it’s mine. And it’s much cooler than the one they used.)

In an Evolving Harlem, Newcomers Try to Fit In.
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: September 6, 2008
In the past few years, the “Village of Harlem,” as older residents still call it, has become a 21st-century laboratory for integration. Class and money and race are at the center of the changes in the neighborhood. Lured by stately century-old brownstones and relatively modest rents, new faces are moving in and making older residents feel that they are being pushed out. There have been protests, and anger directed as much at the idea of the newcomers as at them personally.

Mark A. Thomas, 29, formerly of Atlanta, says more middle-class residents would benefit Harlem, but he worries about older neighbors being priced out of the area.

Through it all, the voices of those newcomers have often gone unheard, at least publicly. But to listen to them is to hear the story of a neighborhood in transition from a different perspective. For some, it is a daily struggle to fit in or an extra effort to develop a defense for the occasional flare-ups of anger they encounter. Others are charmed by Harlem’s quaint formalities and distinct sense of its history — qualities they say are missing in neighborhoods in the rest of the city.

There have been tensions — a woman recounted being subjected to constant sexist and racist epithets before she moved out of the neighborhood. But there have also been fish-out-of-water situations laced with humor, like new arrivals looking for barbers who cut straight hair or buying expensive wine in liquor stores with plexiglass partitions. A white pastor teased his parishioners, many of whom are black, about the stereotypical lateness of Harlemites, and got a laugh.

A move of just a few miles can necessitate significant adjustments, recent arrivals say, that can be as staggering as grappling with what it means to be the only white face in a particular place for the first time in their lives, or simply adapting to the practice of greeting strangers. But again and again, newcomers, many of whom are white, and older residents, who are typically black, describe one phenomenon: If the old-timers do not like the idea of the new arrivals, once they get to know them as individuals, much of the animosity fades away.

Joshua S. Bauchner, 35, joined the local community board this spring, becoming the only white person among its 50 members.

“At my first meeting, I was the white guy in the suit,” said Mr. Bauchner, a lawyer who bought a Harlem town house with his wife last year. “Someone said, ‘That seat is for a board member.’ I said, ‘I am a board member.’ Everyone came up to me, shook my hand, asked what I did, and we traded business cards. To the extent that I was an integrationist, there was no issue.”

Megan Newman, a woman in her 40s who works in publishing and recently moved to Harlem with her husband, after having lived most of her life in other neighborhoods in the city, described it as “such an interesting, oddball place.”

“It was like moving to a different city,” she said. “There’s a courtliness where people say ‘Good morning’ and ‘Good night.’ I wasn’t used to that.”

What is occurring in Harlem is part of a wider trend across the nation reshaping poorer black enclaves like the Fillmore District in San Francisco, Bronzeville in Chicago and Columbia Heights in Washington. Harlem, because of its status as a symbol of black success and independence, has been among those most closely watched.

As their numbers have increased exponentially in central Harlem, many white residents say they would like Harlem to rethink its view of itself as a neighborhood that belongs to black people.

“Yes, Harlem is an African-American symbol, and I want to know all the history, but it has also been other things, too,” said Denise Hand, 39, a public school teacher who won a lottery in 2004 to buy a condominium in a building near Morningside Park that had been vacant for years. “My grandmother lived in Harlem. I don’t feel like the interloper, because I realize the city changes. I don’t feel guilty.”

Even during its bleakest years in the 1970s and 1980s, Harlem possessed a modest-size black middle class. But from the postwar period until recently, central Harlem had only a tiny white population.

In 1980, for instance, the neighborhood had 672 white residents, about half of 1 percent of the population.

From 1990 to 2005, the percentage of white residents rose from 1.5 percent to 4.3 percent of the population — or about 5,000 residents, according to census data. But real estate agents and politicians say they believe that number has probably at least doubled during the past three years.

Chrissy Nance with her daughter, LuLu, at home on 120th Street. Before moving there, she said, “a major concern was how the people would take to us.”

Russell Nance and his wife put in solar panels as part of a renovation of their brownstone.

During that same 15-year period, the percentage of black residents in central Harlem declined to 72 percent from 88 percent, even though the black population remained steady, at about 85,000.

Awkward Introduction

Russell Nance, 36, a lawyer, and his wife, Chrissy, 35, a schoolteacher, who bought a vacant 19th-century brownstone on 120th Street in 2006, are typical in many ways of the recent arrivals who moved to Harlem for its housing value.

Their first visit, however, in 1998, was accidental, and it brought a forbidding sense that Harlem was not safe for white people.

“We were visiting friends on the Upper West Side and we missed our stop,” Mr. Nance said. They got off the subway at 125th Street.

While waiting for another train, the couple said, several people began taunting them while invoking the name of Yusef Hawkins, a black teenager killed by a mob of white youths in Brooklyn in 1989.

The Nances hopped on the next train and made no plans to come back. “We never really had any reason to,” said Mr. Nance, who lived downtown at the time.

Years later, once they decided they wanted more space, Harlem, because of its affordability, became an option, however unlikely. They made several tentative trips to the neighborhood to see whether they felt comfortable.

“A major concern was how the people would take to us,” Ms. Nance said.

The couple eventually settled on a brownstone near Marcus Garvey Park, and for much of the past two years they have been restoring its hand-carved wood detailing and tin ceilings.

Now that they have a sense of belonging in Harlem, the Nances have turned their attention to more quotidian concerns, like what kind of business the neighborhood is most in need of — a topic that has become a parlor game among newcomers.

Ms. Nance, who had the couple’s first child four months ago, says it is a good Thai restaurant. For Mr. Nance, it is a place with beer and burgers.

“Like anybody else, I want a nice place to live with reasonable amenities,” Mr. Nance said. “I think that’s what anybody wants. The trick is to do that while affecting as few people as possible. Harlem does have a character. I don’t want Harlem to become Union Square any more than anyone else does.”

Settling In

Mark A. Thomas is an African-American resident new to Harlem. His introduction to the neighborhood could not have been more different than the Nances’. A visit two years ago left him so enthralled that he moved from Atlanta a few months later, even though he owned a home there. He now rents an apartment in a 19th-century red-brick town house on Strivers’ Row, a landmark area in central Harlem that is still one of the most sought-after addresses in the neighborhood.

Mr. Thomas, 29, who works as a deputy director for City Futures, a nonprofit urban policy organization, said that while he worries his presence might be harming longtime residents because of the rent he is willing to pay to live in Harlem, he believes the neighborhood needs an infusion of middle-class black residents like himself.

“We’re part of gentrification too,” said Mr. Thomas, who has become a self-taught student of Harlem history. “I’m torn about it because I can afford to live in Harlem.” He said many of the objections to newer white residents come not from people his age, but from those a generation or two older.

“Older blacks didn’t have any choice but to live in a black neighborhood,” Mr. Thomas said. “So they get nervous when a white person wants to move in. But if you talk to young African-Americans, they want the neighborhood they live in to be integrated.”
At New Song Community Church on Frederick Douglass Boulevard one day this summer, the pastor surveyed the hundred or so people who had gathered in the sun-splashed sanctuary and began a folksy homily on Psalm 24 and the importance of faith and prayer. It was all standard stuff for a Sunday morning in Harlem, with one exception: The pastor at New Song is a white man who moved the church to Harlem from his Washington Heights apartment about four years ago, while many of his parishioners are longtime African-American residents.

The minister, Jeff White, has grown so comfortable in the pulpit there that during the service he referred to a common stereotype.

“God doesn’t work on our schedule,” he said, urging his congregation to find time each day to pray. “You know, sometimes when I’m waiting for a friend and they’re late, I’ll say to myself, ‘I’ll give them another 10 minutes.’ ” He paused, then added, “Since I’ve been in Harlem, it’s more like, ‘I’ll give them another 30 minutes.’ ” There were both groans and laughter.

The clash of old and new has led to other humorous situations. One evening, Ms. Newman, the publisher, made a trip to a liquor store to buy wine for a dinner party. The shop had a thick, bullet-resistant plexiglass window separating the clerk from customers.

“I bought three bottles of wine,” Ms. Newman said. “The guy at the register asked if I wanted him to open them for me.”

Not everyone, however, believes Harlem’s experiment with racial integration is going well.

Michael Henry Adams, a historic preservationist and community activist, said the influx of newcomers, particularly whites, had begun to turn Harlem into something ordinary.

“This is happening all over the city, and it’s wrong everywhere, but it’s particularly wrong in Harlem, where you have the black cultural capital being devoid of black people,” Mr. Adams said. “I don’t think tourists will continue to come to the neighborhood if it is entirely white.”

Harsh Words

And many new residents are uncomfortable with Harlem’s noisy street life, including sidewalk barbecues that can draw large crowds. Some believe there are too many churches on the one hand — Harlem has more than 100 houses of worship — and a casual flouting of the law on the other, with people littering, double-parking and drinking alcohol on the street. Some white women complain that they seem to receive more rude sexual come-ons in Harlem than elsewhere.

One of them, Amelia Cason, a 25-year-old teacher, lived in Harlem for about three years until she switched jobs a few months ago and moved to the Upper West Side.

Ms. Cason said that while she enjoyed much about Harlem, she was made uncomfortable by a barrage of sexual comments when she wore a skirt and heels. She took to wearing coats, even in summer.

“It was impossible for me to walk two blocks without someone saying something,” she said.

Ms. Cason said that now she wonders whether she may have overreacted at times.

“It’s hard to divide what is nervousness about being white in the neighborhood from standard sexual harassment,” she said. “It’s entirely possible that if a well-dressed white guy on the Upper West Side said something, I would take it in an entirely different way than I would with a black guy in Harlem, so it could be my perception. But you can’t mistake the meaning” of a racist, sexist epithet.

James O’Brien, 34, an artist who bought a condominium in Harlem in 2003, said he had become accustomed to occasional uncomfortable exchanges.

Mr. O’Brien said recent arrivals were sometimes verbally challenged by African-American residents — although he said the face-offs seemed to be more a way of reaching out than an act of hostility.

“Every couple of months, I have a confrontation with someone,” Mr. O’Brien said, that involves complaints that “you white people” do not care about the neighborhood’s longtime residents. “I’ll ask, ‘What are you angry about?’ And their anger kind of dissolves, and then they’ll say, ‘The new money coming in is aloof and snobbish.’

“What I realized is that it’s an introduction to dialogue. And so we’ll talk.”

The drive to Gainesville is a backwater one.

This train thing was full of veterans.

We happened to stop at a rest area when it did, and a vet with a glass eye offered to give me a tour of the back of it.

This gator fan bent over to pick up a flag that had fallen off the pickup…then dropped it and flicked her off. Fuck, I love football season.

I was with a hurricane, too.

Degenerates.

Yes. Gators on the left, ‘canes on the right…yelling at each other across 13th Street.

The Hare Krishnas.

Gospel of the PVC pipe.

…nice.

Mellow Mushroom sucks.

The aftermath.