Florida

As many commentators have pointed out in the past two months since the Deepwater Horizon fiasco began, this oil spill is both a terribly physical object lesson, and an almost limitless metaphor. It will change us, whether we fight the change or cry with relief.

Those who link this tarry mess to our pressing need to reduce our addiction to oil are in the right, as are the folks who have had enough of corporate dominance of our media and politicians ass-kissing the oil industry. We are destroying our country. This cannot be minimized, any more than that black crap you see in the photo above will disappear if we just look away.

SFGate columnist Mark Morford writes about how, with each fresh disaster, our language shifts to accommodate new human self-concepts—but that this particular catastrophe, as man-made, greed-driven, and eminently preventable as it was, may have strained the limits of our ability to mentally adapt.

I don’t envy those of you who give yourself the privilege of ignoring this crisis. Because I know that the only reason you can do so is that you’ve never been here. The only way you can bring yourself to not care is if you’d never walked these beaches, never taken them into your heart. I don’t envy you—I pity you immensely.

This is the local beach of my hometown, Pensacola.

Nowadays, when people say the word “home”, they’re usually referring to a building—a house. Our modern society’s trend of promoting both geographical moves and a desire to accumulate property has replaced an old meaning with a new one—as Morford describes tends to happen. We no longer think of “home” as a city or a community, only as our particular little box of goods and gadgets, amidst the anonymity of everyone else’s little boxes. “Home” is something that we own, not something that owns us.

In a lot of ways, this is great—we are free from many of the limitations that dogged our ancestors, and that continue to curtail the opportunities of many more stationary societies around the world. And I’d be a liar if I didn’t disclose that I’ve moved a great deal, and no longer live in Pensacola.

But it is my home in the traditional sense, and I am blessed with that burden. I know what it is to feel cradled by a place, to have a relationship with it. I watch it change, for good and bad, from the perspective of someone deeply affected. The people of Pensacola are a resilient, stubborn, isolationist, pleasure-loving lot, who shout religious nonsense at their neighbors but then help them pick up their yard after a hurricane. The city is 450 years old, nearly twice as old as our nation. And it is beautiful, in nature and culture. I am proud to own and be owned by it.

Plenty of you are also fortunate enough to feel that way about something in life—a loved one, a creative project, a pet, or a location.

Now imagine that this was poured over them.

Imagine watching them die.

Even worse—imagine watching them be killed, by someone who then goes sailing on a yacht, bought with money they made by the killing. Imagine having your hands tied, unable to help your beloved, having to stand by and hope the bastards who set up the torture also know how to dismantle it…and that they can be made to give a damn if you scream hard enough.

(Florida Governor Charlie Crist visiting Pensacola Beach, June 23, 2010)

(photos by  James Amerson and SPage)

I set my first novel in Pensacola for a reason. It is a barometer. The first outpost of Western civilization on the continent was placed here in 1559, and it’s been a quiet bellwether ever since. Shall we let it die? What would that say about us, who have grown so used to moving and leaving, that only our own little boxes seem real?

Self-concepts change. Tar is liquid death. And these boxes, these little fortresses we build against mounting catastrophe, are beginning to seem very, very small.

…it’s freaking hot.

1. The heatwave and humidity has brought the heat index to over 110 degrees for the better part of a week. It’s been between 85-90 degrees at night.

2. My car has no A/C. I haven’t been going anywhere.

3. My iPod Touch’s speaker blew, so I sent it to Apple for a free replacement.

4. I’m finishing a paper on peacebuilding in Bosnia for my Conflict in the Balkans class with Dr. Metcalf. She’s leading a study abroad group to Dubrovnik, Croatia right now (envy!), so she gave us an extra week to turn this paper in. Just when I thought my opinion of her couldn’t go higher.

5. I’m struggling to get my loan paperwork in for my own study abroad trip this fall/spring. Direct Loans is taking their sweet time getting me the loan packet, FSU’s taking their sweet time figuring out when they’re even going to fool with fall loans, and I’ve got seven weeks before I need to get on a plane—if a miracle occurs, and this works out.

6. I love Tallahassee in some ways, it’s a beautiful place (see above pic), but sometimes I feel like it’s an oasis of questionable quality in the middle of an angry desert. It’s very difficult to meet people here who are doing anything with their lives at all, or who care about anything besides scoring a mediocre job in middle management somewhere. It feels hard to be myself—I’m not fit and hot like the South Florida cuties who come up for school here, all of whom are 10-12 years younger than me; but I don’t fit in with the older people either, who have settled into somewhat run-of-the-mill lives, and look on my passion and enthusiasm as a sign of my immaturity and need to “settle down”. It’s making me hate the South, my lifelong home.

7. I guess I’m just feeling smushed right now. Like a lot of my energy goes towards just not letting my spark get blown out…let alone towards building that spark and putting it to good use. I want to be doing that right now. I’m at the age where that’s what I ought to be doing—putting my ambitions and dreams into play. Instead, I’m constantly wrapped up in defending that spark from people who seem hell-bent on extinguishing it.

9. But I still live in a free country. I can go to sleep at night, safe in the knowledge that I won’t get dragged out of bed and beaten. There is darkness in my life. I have serious opponents right now. But I also have a fair chance to defeat them, and get on with the life I was meant to live all along. My life might be more difficult than some people I personally know…but in the grand picture, it’s damn easy.

photo uploaded to Flickr by the catalyst…