Dirk Zearfoss:  

Living in SW Florida, just 45 minutes away from the beaches on the Gulf, is taking it's toll on me, at last. Having discovered that $20 bucks will buy a snorkel, mask and fins and that old bones and teeth line the beaches off of Venice and Manasota beaches has actually caused an unbalance in the tidal levels where I live. Seems that no one bothers with the whale ear bones and fossilized turtle parts. This has allowed me to pick up this oversight of tooth finders with five gallon buckets of bones. This has cost me more gas money, time, SPF 80 then I planned on. But the teeth and bones are endless! Easy 200+ sharks teeth in a day, usually some whale teeth and their ear bones, which one of them when worn down looks like a human ear. And there are those grooming fish that pick off those skin tags which developed from swimming in Naylor's Run under the Bond's Parking lot. I live in a 55+ community right on the Peace River in Florida, walk 20 feet to fish, crab, throw rocks at coconuts floating by, count the manatees, the dolphins, sawfish and alligators. Weather to good to describe. No debt, no guilt, great children. Fixed income. To poor ro file income tax. To poor to remarry. Life is great. Have time and good sense to help real friends and family. Still can ride any coaster made. Have narcolepsy, look it up, it will ruin a good marriage. But the winter's here are so smooth and easy that hurricane season seems like a myth or cheap story to keep people away. Not so, the hurricane season is like a roller coaster in a sense, what with things falling out of your pockets and a roof or carport flying by. Charlie went right over my place, but my brother covered it with a "blue tarp". Can you say FEMA? Put on a second "blue tarp" and it still looked just like all my neighbors. So we roofed and sided and fished and walked in circles for a while, and what do you think happens next? Permits are pulled and inspections are passed! That was way back in 2004 and 05. And to think I have lived in mobile homes since I was married way back in 1976. Only now I have one with a view. Yeah, the axles have been good to me and my kids. Have never had an attic or a basement. What's up with that? I can only dream.. ...oh wait that's right I live in SW Florida. Had the kids down and took them to Busch Gardens, even bought tickets to get inside. I've driven them by Disney World,as close as the Power poles with the mouse ears and cooked up some story about how those towers really were the mice workers keeping formation for the power grid of the Disney empire, anyways it worked once. I avoid those roads now. Oh yeah, the question, how do I hope old friends remember me? Why should I care? I never left anything to be remembered for. Google me and see what comes up. A picture of a water spout on the Peace River about to hit the bridges and go out of my focal range and exposure limitations and hit the southbound bridge and then turn over some trash cans on the beach? My pontoon boat has been transformed into a barnacle bar and oyster haven. Were I to actually walk out to the boat and perchance step on an endanger species, like a Small Tooth Saw Fish or a Bull Manatee, a Goliath Grouper or a stingray, crietty, ( an Australian expression) I may be arrested for some EPA infraction and end up doing hard time on the pile scraping detail on Pine Island or in Naples. Then I would have to wear a silk prison shirt and a wide straw hat and drink fruit juice squeezed from local exotic tropical fruit. So the boat will see many generations of barnacles and oysters, with the occasional word being misspelled by the mullet. The mullet do swim side by side and approach the steps, the ones next door that go down to the beach, and I have video of them doing this. You could play them like a xylophone (the piano in water tanks or tubes that Cal Jayder plays) Spell check, please. So here they come with their eyes bugged out and then they turn and head back out to the open river. At which time a big cast net may be thrown over the whole crowd of mullets and hauled aboard a fast bait boat which then races off to scar all of the Manatees backs which happen to be in the same waters. While the mullet are being chummed, the poor bleeding Manatees take out their remaining energy on my pontoon boat, which by now has the distinctive markings on the engine prop, that it is catalogued into the photo library of endangered species. This is strange. My daughter wants to drop my grandson off for a few days. HHmmm....he's not yet two, lives in S.C. and me in Florida. I told her that the Bull Manatees will breach the sea wall and grab young'uns alive and tie seaweed to them and make them tow them back to the herd, you know, the rest of the Bulls and the Cows. You would think this might rattle this idea of me with the wee babe. But no, it seems that I need to fabricate, sorry, explain the dangers of SW Florida and the tourist situation here. You see, this area needs hurricanes and flooding to keep the economy "vibrant" during the summe...Expand for more