We 303,447 Tampans are real, lively, competitive, old and broken, young and dreaming, definitely teeming with life when terrorism took shape in 2001. The greatest danger Tampa Bay residents have is from an attack on the giant anhydrous ammonia storage tank (largest in the world) down on Hooker's Point. Depending on the wind direction and speed, it could take out people all the way to Sun City or Carrollwood, with the right kind of impact from a hijacked small plane. There are also 2 dozen large gasoline storage tanks down there, but the ammonia is supercold and its vapors would hug the ground. Also rather flammable. The head of the Navy says to the press in early November 2001 that "Tommy Franks is running this war, he's calling all the shots, he's down in Tampa." Bet Osama got hold of one of the thousands of newspapers that quoted that. Plus what a plus for him to go after our President's brother, the Guv of Florida. He feels this is a religious war because the Bush administration has said God this and God that a lot more than the Clinton one did. Some of the stuff the President said after the WTC evaporation sounded like we were indeed taking up our arms as Christians, just simple little groups of words that they would say are as veiled as we say bin Laden's video messages are to the Muslims. I think with the U.S. Central Command and Special Operations hosted here, we are like the tunnel oldbin is suspected of being in so we demolish it. If Bin Laden is behind all the moves made on the U.S., then Tommy Franks is behind all the retalitory moves and an equal target.
Every little bit of eupherema saved in Tampa will be blotto. Only us web-pagers will survive.
The soil is sand. The roadsides are sand. The concrete roads are made with tiny seashells. The air is balmy. The seasons are just one.January's average high is 70 with a low of 50. July's average highs and lows are 90 and 75 .There are billboards everywhere like L.A. but not about movies like L.A.'s.
DISTINcTIONS
Ligtning capital of the world. There are 44 inches of rain a year., and more days of thunderstorms ach year than any other U.S. location. "Tampa" is derived from a Calusa Indian word for "lightning", Tanpa, which mapmakers misspelled.
Along with Texas, the other state governed by a George Bush's son, Florida has the cheapest Medicaid program for it's poorest. by example, Minnesotaons can be a family of 3 earning $36,000 a year and still get Medicaid. Connecticutians can earn close to that. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Floridians can earn no money at all , and cannot own anything valued above $1000, including their car,to qualify for free medical care.
Until last month, most of America gave students As for grades of 91 to 100%, B's for grades of 81 to 90%, c's for 71 to 80%. Florida gave the A for 95% and above, the B for 89% and up, the C for 85%--- you get the drift. It cut us out of college quicker.
When the fall line of clothing comes out across the vast country, it comes here too--Penneys and Sears and Walmart carrying the same line here as up in New Hampshire and Ohio-- sweaters in September, when we are still going to be running our air-conditioning for 2 more months. Super warm jackets we could only use if we were going to fly to Utah for Christmas. You walk through a Florida department store, in love with all these cool long-sleeved outfits that you can only wear 3 to 5 days a year around here, You don't buy them.You wish it would get cold enough to. Teens see cool teens in photos with cool sweaters and swackets and jackets and coats no one can use more than 10 times a decade here and so we don't buy them for them and so they never get to look so cool, never get that layered look.Our retirees from up north pad around their golf-course subdivisions in tees and shorts all year round. The elderly gentlemen love it-- simple shorts every day til they die!
Florida is sand atop a water reservoir which leaves sinkholes that take out homes or sections of busy road. It is humidity that will take out anything not in air-conditioning in only a year or two,It is rain, every afternoon all summer long, torrential downpours we all accept and goose-step to..
Lake-living is not like Lakers in Michigan who jump into icy cold water to chase the heat. Our lakes are as hot as hot- tub water, not surprisingly as they are not spring-fed, but holes left by removing land , and can fit about 5 houses around each. The salient quality of every " waterfront home" on the market is the "federally protected preserve " on the other side of the pond. Like some dumb American whose brain death could' ve made Reader's Digest's " Life in These United States" , I openly wondered how come Florida had all these bodies of water with Indian land on their far sides--boy were we were rich in Indian land, weren't we, that could never be developed ! How smart we were! But it stretched down into half the lakes around here , and left the other sides up for grabs. Not very good planning on the party that gave the Indians the undeveloped land! I mean, there we were with our JennAires and 2-story caged pools and , with good speakers wired throughout our mini mansions, music and tv amplified all over the lake where thin deer still came in small groups at dusk to drink , and blink at the car headlights and run up into someone's newly planted row of azeleas along the front elevation of their house and stand there, skitterish, some then running left or right to crunch around in another professionally-landscaped yard and returning bleating, trapped by the garges filled with cars and the fences between the homes preventing them from getting north again where the know the field and low brush is that they call home..
Bob had an otter family play in his manmade lake for about 4 months til a gator walked on over from another manmade pond. I can't see any value in these serene pond views for every single Hillsborough inhabitant making over minimum wage but I guess you pay for the mosquito duster with your association dues and think you're on the waterfront. Just wait til you guys see the lakes in Michigan ! You'll never pay waterfront prices for homes on these hot weed-choked puddle-sized ponds again! They are all "No Swimming" signed, due to the alligators and worms that get into your ear and germs, your wounds, and make you very ill . Unacceptable levels of e.coli, always. The fish you catch from shore or bridge from the channel and gulf is too full of mercury to eat, as is the bass from your faux lake.The Hillsborough River from the dam above Robles Park south, and the Alafia River's most popular swimming hole, at the Lithia Springs campground ---these are the region's only 2 rivers----are too polluted to swim in and posted as non-swimming and dangerous, keep out. Alligators walk across land to freshly dug ponds at new housing developments and take up residency, accounting for the permanent disappearances of cats and small and even fair-sized dogs from the pond-view yards of New England retirees.
Hernando County is just north of Pasco County, which borders Hillsborough on its north , (the ports are south; you go north to reach the still- wooded areas and deserted groves becoming fancy places with only 18 $2 million dollar houses in each woodsy enclave , each mansion on a cul-de-sac with no backyard neighbors, places with guard houses and names like Quail Babies and Possum Hollow ; ok, I'm hyperbolizing, they have staid names like Fox Hollow and The Estates of Balmoor . Last year a golfer's purse was stolen off her cart while she was on the greens at one of the ritsiest of these, which takes almost only movie stars. She was one very chilly, agitated Florida visitor til ball-collectors found her diamond bracelet-watch in a raccoon's hoarde, and the purse then nearby, with the credit cards and cash intact but the trail mix and pretzel baggies gone.
"My mistake," she said, calling the news because she felt bad about her initially published accusations hinting that her golf cart driver must have done it and was being treated too nicely afterwards, not fired or nothing'."I should have left the foods in their original sealed bags , not transfered them to something that just folds over." Boy, she must have never gone on any fun camping trips, the kinds where they have bear boxes.
People come here ( shoddy Tampa) for the cheap housing. Houses haven't basements so you save a lot there. They are as likely to be up on cement blocks as anything else--very cheap .Bungalows with house-length front porches with sittable rails and stout pillars are common, as are shotgun houses, uninsulated houses, Florida or sun rooms with jalousie windows on 3 sides, old windows opened by rope pulleys,tin roofs, trailer parks, and weedy, litter-strewn gas station and convenience store lots.The houses built before 1925 smell of rotten old wood coated with fungi and mold.
The electric company recently put a bunch of luciously fat cement poles throughout a ,mid-low income neighborhhood in the middle of the night. The poles are in almost every yard, fatter and taller than anyone's trees. The people complained. The city found the electric company trounced all over that neighborhood's rights. But the electric company, smiling, said they could only say sorry--there was no way they could move those poles now.
While common folk once built their little cottages right on the edge of the Gulf, big-time developers have managed to buy all those little places up and now only the filthy rich get oceanfront.The rest don't even get much access--just here and there.
Tampa is diverse, with an international university with a full compliment of Middle Eastern students, a lot of black people relocated from states that cost much more to set up house in ( what with your basements and heating systems and state income taxes). We have a good organ transplant facility, one clever newspaper columnist and 3 poor excuses for one, movers and shakers from old families who think they run the democracy here, street booze parties that cost $23, piss poor pot.
64% white and Hispanic, 26% black, less than 2% Asian and less than 1% Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders, Tampa celebrates its diversity with fillipino fests and big t-dos on MLKJR day, but it's most-hustled and sponsered pubic events are two drinking, Mardis Gras style parties, Gasparilla and Guavaween.It is these beer-abundant , rowdy costume street parties that Tampa identifies itself with in promotional literature and encyclopedias and where she lets down her hair and shows her rowdy rebel side with street drunkeness and titty-flashing like the French at grape harvest in backwards towns.
There's a billboard up by my house saying
Wanted-- teachers to work low pay long hours. Apply Hillsborough County Schools. .
Tampa is in Hillsborough County, about half-way down the state on the Gulf side where a bay juts in. We are home to Busch Gardens , and there's not much other reason for tourists to detour to here. The 3 beaches are small, smelly, on lukewarm water. one faces a seaplane basin filled with live-aboard sailboats with a view of water about as wide as a pond. Another is along a busy bridge-road , on either side of the busy lanes. The third is so-well known as a gay haunt that families don't go there. men lurk outside the smelly men's room trying to meet other men and no mom wants to let her little boy go in that john.
Tampa has an industry unusual in the U.S.--tropical fish farming. Tampa supplies most of the tropical fish in the nations' aquariums.
The Port of Tampa is the United States' closest deep-water port to the Panama Canal.
Beaches
Local Characteristics
Recreation.
Ethnicity.
Cultural Divide.
A curent televisn ad for the Pubix grocery chain boasts of special promotions at some local Publixes., wherein a little corner like a Montessori section specializes in 30-minute meals by selling thre recipes, ingredients, and cooking implements needed for each of about a dozen right in the same little cozy cubby, so you can get your paella or raspberry chicken fixins and go in 5 minutes. Two stores were depicted, ladies serving upp sample pailla in little paper cups, the stores themselves those amazing super mega deals with everyhing imaginable and a lot of extras. The ad added that only 2 local stores were currently participating--one in New Tampa and one beside the ritzy new Citrus Park Mall, one of those malls near only expensive housing subdivisions and nobodies who live in shacks. my 2 closest supermarkets are the 2 smallest buildings belonging to the 2 different chains represented. Youv'e never seen a Publix so tiny as mine-- no pharmacy,no ready-made salads or Superbowl salad plates, few brands of any given product, no cold wines, no photo department or specialty -prepared meats on kabobs or anything. One size quantity of tampons in a box, 2 brands of those, 1 version each.The lady newsperson didn't hint"Coming up next--a new concept being practiced in Tampa is enjoyed by the rich:,
A few years ago Walt Belcher, the Tampa Tribune TV Guide opinioner, wrote gleefully that there was no excuse for any of us to miss "It's A Wonderful Life" that year, because it was coming on somewhere sometime every single day of December. he then listed each time and channel, and every single one was on Cable except one, which was on a station with a weak signal that no one got in past a bunch of dots and in-out fuzzy sound unless they viewed it while on cable.antenna.
Last week there was a big spread on homeschooling in the local newspaper .It began with a fluff sentence about how people picture homeschooing as done by a mom and kid locked away in a cabin together in isolated conditions with no other kids in the child's world, and how that scenario is kaput. Moms now band together and take the kids to each other's homes to draw on the strengths of creative others --crafting one place, music another--and take them to The zoo's and the Museum of Sciece and Industry's special programs for Homeshoolers; and they all gather in parks and at beaches to get to know each other, and even reserve parts of restaurants for gatherings--- all this fun stuff I'd love to have be a nice part of my daughter's lives.But guess where these Moms are. New Tampa.
While nothing in the article explicitely states that people homeschooling in the inner city aren't welcome to join these happy families, neither does it kindly refer to provisions available for those too poor to ever be able to save up a buck for a car let alone car insurance, to help them get to these happy wholesome gatherings so vital to the home-schooled gal's socialization skills.. And there's those museum and zoo costs. The ideal, I suspect these people presume, from the moms and museums involved to the reporter amplifying it, is that folks too poor to get their kids out to the museum program,or the gated-community-housing of the mom hosting calligraphy class, and too poor to dig up resources needed to start a similar program in their own neighborhoods (tours of black funeral homes and pawn shops,a walk to the river with it's UNFIT FOR SWIMMING signs to collect a bucket of dead fish and beer bottle debris), need to keep their children in a proper, enriching , accredited school where the kids will get ample socialization, opportunity to develop leadership skills, group skills, and self-esteem , and a handle on their strengths and skills and talents compared to others their age.
Good thinking, when you're presuming that all these kids living near each other in the poor part of town are of the same culture, their families acclimated to the same economic ladder for decades--all of them used to, and knowing how to, soak beans overnight and then cook them tastily, eat hamhocks for the protein part of the celery-and -potato soup , buy clothes that fit at the Savation Army where all the size and how-to-wash tags have been snipped off of kids' clothes, and so forth, so they'd all fit in with each other "better than one would fit out here", ipso facto, my particular problem with that is in that, while Tampa is 64% white and 26% black, my neighborhood school is 94% black, and when my eldest went there there was one other white or Hispanic girl in her class each year, and 2 non-black bys. Every year. And what would be my youmgest's class today, has , still, one white girl in one class, 2 in the other second grade class. The socalzation and the weighing strengths against peers' strengths doesn't work here, because at least 85% of the black children reside in a run-down housing project my kids can't go to to play because even if we just drive into it to get to the grocery store we are accosted by black men waving us down, jumping in front of our car to stop it, whistling and waving us their way to try and sell us crack. We hear gunshots coming from there frequently; last week an undercover cop trying to make a purchase was robbed of his marked bills at gunpoint. I would have to walk my child to her friend's there, then walk home alone and get there alive. The child would be with people who's values I would have no idea of, or witness fights or oral sex on tv or in person I cannot shield her from---you just don't leave your innocent angel alone in the projects. And those kids living there, who really are all-of-a-culture, hang--- they never invited my eldest to their homes; they had their enough-people-to-hang-with-already thing going. And none of these families has gas money to take park trips either.
New Tampa
Way past the crowded stately mansions on the Bay and then downtown with its transients sleeping in doorways and then the inner city north of downtown and then the University area with its cheap duplexes and bursting transient populace known as "Suitcase City", developers carved up some isolated groves and woods to make several ritzy subs no one could see unless they had a pass for the security guard. Naturally there followed in the footsteps of these million-dollar homes new schools, the very most modern in architecture and ideas, winning already all the awards for "best":-- best PTA, etc. Next came the classiet restaurants and best groceries as befitting the kings living in the mini-manses; then these people voted to call themselves "New Tampa".
Older Tampa
Port Tampa
Unique Tampa.
Unique Individuals Around Tampa
A Dentist Who Gave Anyone Needing Help Credit, and Then When They Didn't Pay For Months, Never Sent Them A Bill,or Hired Office Staff to Hound Them or Used A Collection Agency Dr. Gary Edenson
A guitarplayer/singer and drummer who you have seen everywhere for 29 years and they haven't tired of it yet
Two men-father and son--covered a lot of Florida church windows with original art in stained glass for over 55 years.Usually such work goes to large well-to-do studios with lots of employees, but these two , who stayed dirt poor their entire lives, did it themselves, as a labor of love, through word of mouth, and God provided.
A fter a night on acid, a bad boy shoots a 4-year-old and 3 law officers and himself; his girlfriend, nowhere near the last 4 murders, gets 25 years and the emotional town of Tampa feels justice has prevailed
Americans fly to Tampa thinking they have won a sweepstakes., and the attention from the press virtually shuts down the Sweepstakes .Here are some real letters by real Amercans to that company,begging to be allowed to win . This shows that the firm knew very well how many people it was gaming with, how low the IQ of its customers apparently was and how apparently to this firm so, and how dear our suffering neighbors are
Hank Carr lived behind the house across the street from them until that fateful day. Mary Rose Duff often hooked outside their living room, laughing and singing ar 3 a.m. Shanna West lives 2 blocks away from them now. Glenn Ritchie killed his brother Terry Ritchie last month just hours after they left their constant posts on the porch of the house next door to these
This page will soon have a link to a 24-hour a day webcam peering through a knothole in a fence at the most popular parking spot for hookers and johns who meet on Nebraska Avenue just south of Waters. They love to park in a driveway which is protected from Nebraska and the owners' home by a 6' tall privacy fence and cannot be seen by anyone else as Cleveland Elementary School facing it is deserted from 3 p.m. to 7 a.m. and on weekends. There is only one other house on the whole street of Arden and it is a block down, so there is no one taking umbrage at the invasion but my little family, hence, the webcam, for police and wives of missing husbands to check out. Until the camera is up, license tag info on all cars parking in my driveway without my permission will be listed here.
November 29, 2001
1:48 a.m.
Florida tag # EO116N 10 minutes
Transplanting self to Tampa:
What you need to know
What's Not Here
Trader Vic's
Hudsons
FAO Swartz
any upscale supermarket
mayor apart from the good old boys' network
state income tax
smoke-free bars---ARRIVED 2003
icycles
snowmobiles
life-sized Virginia whitetail deer
freshwater brown, brook, and rainbow trout
buildings over 13 stories over 30 years old
hills, caves, waterfalls, ski slopes, boulders
seasides
sturdy rose gardens
pussy willows, wild blueberries and raspberries, cherry and apple trees
burrs
abundant fresh-water reserves , deep water tables
state-wide daylight savings time
astute newspaper columnists
mandatory motorcycle helmets
Jack-in-the-box, Carl's, Pollo Loco fastfoods
What's Here
Greyhound dog races
jai lai
Cuan coffee
Cuban sandwiches
lottery
choice of designer license plates
turkey vultures, opossums, armadillos
banana trees, grapefruit trees
fire ants, huge cockroaches, sandspur plants, cactus
sinkholes
citrus groves ripe with fruit bulldozed and burned to prepare land for expensive suburbs,
Subdivisions going up with houses without side yards
Warning --our lakes are fakes
With the internet, a person who loves how Granta magazine got a collection of writers to write about old photographs they had that were'nt anything to look at but became so through the telling , can do the same thing, without having the funds or credentials to submit material for publication, at a time Granta doesn't seek such content, especially by a non-famous person, and have an absolute chance of being read by people who will appreciate the piece as much as any of the mighty narratives in that one issue of Granta that fired the author up and made the picture larger than itself.
The internet puts back an even playing field. It respects the homebound disabled person and gives them power , and opportunities for empowerment, they could never get except.
But a person has to think up tricks, becausee (that should be a word) the rich, able-bodied, energetic people are. My first trick was to never learn Windows on my Windows operating system. And never learn Homestead, Photoshop,Frontpage, or any other rules ( including how to type) or see what web pages were suposed to look like. Personal ones, anyway. I saw Flash media as soon as I got my computer in 1998 and I was going to do my website that way. But I was broke, 7 doctors surrounded my hospital bed in the coronary intensive care unit and told me gravely that I had a year to live, two at the most if I did all they said , in October 1996 and that time was at hand, and I could only make a free web site with no gizmos. No video even, no real music, just midi, or the first five words of a wav tune.Elevator music on my site, right! (We used to have this saying, in group, 1970, Cathy and Jimmy Baldwin, Annie , I don't know who all said it but it went round fast , between girlfriends at two schools. It goes "I'm sure, KBS." It's said by someone who just spent 3 years saying "I'm sure " and wants to specify that they are saying it the way Kathy Brown did.I never met Kathy Brown but I envisioned her. Attention-hungry, loud,the flick of the wrist as she is dismissive of something in a haughty way that secretly hurts sensitive feelings . A Clairol-blonde bombslell with a Camero at 16 or a mousy dark little thng with a moustache on her upper lip and so little left of her drug-fried mind she only knows 2 words, which she evokes when told the class is dissecting pig fetuses. Her euphemism for the "bs" word.
The group therapy counselors asked if it was a fear of authority figures reading our notes to each other or and listening in on the other line; they said we must have needed it. There were some KB loyalists in the group who didn't like the free use of it allowed in moderated situations.Paid child instuctors should not allow us to mock or hate a real person we all know.But the counselor said it had become slang for "I don;t mean this." It must be hard to hide things from parents when you're lazy-- I take notes out of my 16-year-old's jeans pockets everytime I do laundry. I take the pocky out of her notes and eat it if there is any and read a few lines and it goes like " I'm about sure I'm going to give her 5 references, sure, if she'll accept "I.P. Freely". it's a note somebody named Achy-Shin or something passed to my kid. (My daughter's Itchy Groan, an apple core or something.)And I know there's at least 12 people in this world who must at least once in a blue moon, especially now that our brains are 50 and bent on those early years when once was always and a weekend was a childhood and sometimes we don't care which way we're going with this life thing anymore, "SO what if I said the dadburn dog's name wrong--I had a dog named that too once, you know--"; and the stuff of then is prominent and what we were just talking about is gone--neither of us can remember it and the kids are so fed up with our new dumb and dumber act they won't let us know, their lips pressed tight to punish us for allowing them to see that we are leaving them, little nudges by little nudges.
Anyway somewhere on the planet there must be somebody who, saying, "I'm sure" to someone they are comfortabally close to, thinks "KGB".Or is it only me?)
My first trick was to use a computer creatively instead of how others do. Sometimes that works ok, sometimes, like not unrolling fruit rollups , it does not. (They turned out to have paper in them.)
My other trick is to get people who read quality stuff to read mine. I just thought of it, after writing my story of my photo yesterday , just before Gary Mayo fell off my roof.Basically I have several websites which I don't really connect and they honor a movie I love no one has put online, so I did,my grandmother, whom no one had honored online, my late father-in-law's art, noting his unique contribution to Florida and the unique times he burst on the scene of and the collusion impossible otherwise.Then I saw there was no site for my camp or my boarding school. So I put sites up remembering them , using journal entries to bring past campers and boarders back.And I felt my husband's photography in Vietnam was quality art. And it just grew. As I left Florida, which would not give me a heart traansplant, I wrote to my Florida pals. When I left California, I made parts for the people and places there. When newswrthy events happened to those around me I wrote a letter to the editor--me. But I like the idea of someone just hearing of me absently typing my name in Google Image and getting the nonfiction piece about my photograph I just wrote.
Which they do.SO I offer you the chance. Send any photo email with its story. Try to be literary. Read Grranta I think fall or summer 2003--not the greenhouse effect issue but the one prior.Where different writers use photographs to talk different ways. To tell of fractured families and college fraternizing .The rule is it has to be that kind of photo you couldn't enter in a "Best Photography" contest. One of the over-exposed or too dark or a thumb over the lens ones mom kept out of the album but still inexplicably kept, because it was unusual to see two of the players in the same photo or granpa finally looked drunk, no one had ever been able to tell but this photo seared it---or hey that's Gary, moments before he fell off my roof.
Our literary rag is called Eve's Atoms . This is it's first call for entries, poems are acceptable but not fiction, this issue, judging is of literary merit not photography, there should be people in the photograph, as that is the subject matter, these people, but you must have taken the photo, or your parents or grandparents or some ancestor or friend's mom or friend and you own it , it is meaningful to you, and you know someone in it or write of the ancestor depicted. When we get 6 good pieces of literature, I'll put them up , award prizes, alert Granta editors and writers and editors of other literary journals.
Thre's been also a 6-year-long open call for photos of your church's stained glass window if you have a Good Shepard one where Jesus holds a lamb and a ewe looks up at it from his side. I also give you a chance to draw and map where you are so readers can see where they all come from. No one's used these yet. Please do. We're going to be a good literary journal, girl!
