Day 2: Haunts

We spent the morning visiting old haunts. I drove down to Hollywood from Fort Lauderdale, and took a left into the main part of town. Not much has changed; they tore down the old library and replaced it with a rectangle of office complex that happens to be a library, but the city hall was still the same, with its Governmental granite and marble feel. We turned into the residential neighborhoods.

There's been a big push to install trees everywhere. And another to block off exits from the subdivisions, apparently as a way of creating choke points that deter house invasions and other forms of theivery. We stopped by The Monroe House, the mansion my dad mortgaged during that brief sliver of time when he could have been considered "rich." He's not, now; I don't know where he is or what assets he has, but I know he's nowhere near what he was back in the latter half of the 1970s. The Monroe House had two servant's quarters, a screened-in swimming pool, a private sunning deck, a jacuzzi, a tennis court, and electronic windows. It is an enormous property with absolutely nothing to recommend it to a rambunctious eleven year old, much less his ten-year-old sister and six-year-old brother. It has a pool, but almost everyone has a pool; you learn to swim in Florida, or you end up drowning. The library, my bicycle, the video arcade, and the used bookstore were my refuges away from this place. Money did not go well with my parents.

But the trees... the trees were everywhere. Every street was overhung now with them, shading the neighborhood. It looked slightly Steven King meets Louisiana, with 90F+ temperatures and mugginess everywhere.

The Diplomat House

It's hard to say if The Diplomat House was an improvement. It was a house they had owned before they'd moved to Monroe, and it was the house my mom moved back to after the divorce. Again, a tense place to live, and not much to recommend it. It was... comfortable. That's the best you can say. Mom thought the place was being well-cared for, but as I went by I signs both of rennovation, and of decay. The back door was strewn with trash, where someone had lazily dropped some near the trash bin and not bothered to pick it up.

The neighborhood was very Jewish. Temple Beth-El was still there, although the old park was gone, replaced with dense condominium dwellings. The Temple was shielded from the road on three sides by eight-foot high shrubbery.

We drove up past the old strip mall that had my favorite bookstore-- it's now a nail salon. But the mall, which was built in the early 1960s, still looks like it was built in the early 1960s. Across the street, though, a huge new mallplex had opened up, replacing the single-lane mall that had once stood there.

It was nice seeing how little had changed. Hollywood is still run down, but it appears to be heading neither up nor down. The once popular dogtrack is now a Casino and dogtrack. There's been some renovation of the outdoor performing arts park. The shopping center with the food store and the drug store is still there, but updated with some more modern styles-- more of that pastel yellow and faux terracotta red that "evokes" the older Spanish styles. A Starbucks is on one corner.

Day 2 (continued): Dinner (again) with Mom and Paul

Omaha and I went to dinner a second time, this time at a restaurant. Paul acted as if he'd never met us before, which seemed to really bother my mother. Apparently, this was his first time interacting with people who were on a first-name basis with her, but who he himself didn't know. "I never knew it was that bad," she told me briefly while Paul was in the bathroom. "He doesn't know who you are at all."

But the conversation flowed. Paul's son, a 50 year-old criminal law attorney who looked like he was younger than I am, and who made a very weird and uncomfortable vibe appear on my gaydar, was joining us for dinner at an Italian restaurant.

He told a story he found amusing, about how his client was supposed to be in court that day, but hadn't been. He was in another jail somewhere else in the county. The client had been in a bar, and someone had come in and given the juke box enough money to override the client's choice of Foreigner, pushing those requests down to the bottom of the queue and favoring Frank Sinatra instead. A fight broke out, and the client lost the fight, but both ended up going to jail. The other guy tried to take a cue ball to said client's head. Look, never get into a fight with someone who puts Sinatra on the juke, okay?

I'm still not sure why assault with a deadly weapon was funny. Even for the victim.

Anyway, we managed to get through dinner without too much weirdness. I made a joke about Jewishness in that way that only Jews can, and Paul said, "What, you're one of us?"

"I'd better be, since L's my mother."

"Oh, you're L's son! I wondered." Oy, vey.

Mom didn't remember that Jack Horkheimer lived in my neighbornood, nor one of the members of Earth Wind & Fire. But Paul remembered the Earth Wind & Fire guy, and my parents weren't much to care about "some guy into astronomy. Who cares about astronomy?" as my mother put it, so I was hardly surprised. (My mom encouraged me in many things. The sciences were not among them.)

After dinner, we all headed back to our respective residences.

Dear Washington Bar Association: Please, Dear Gods, Never Lift Your Ban On Advertising

Every state has billboards by the side of the road advertising something. But you have to wonder about Florida: two-thirds of all standalone outdoor advertising in this state is dedicated to law firms.

In Washington, there's no one overriding theme to outdoor advertising. There's a lot of insurance advertising, and a lot of fast food advertising, and a lot of digital service-oriented advertising (cable TV, internet, other service providers). But there's plenty of space for smaller services-- plumbers, coffee, medical services, non-franchise restaurants. It's very diverse.

In Florida, there's none of that. Two-thirds of all outdoor advertising is law firms, most of which cover "Personal Injury." It's kinda scary: do people get hurt more often in Florida? Apparently, different states' Bar Associations have different rules, and in Florida the rule is "anything goes." And many law firms (and there are many, many, many law firms visible along most major causeways, too-- one owned a two-story spanish manse occupying a whole city block in Fort Lauderdale!) have the cash to squeeze everyone else out of the advertising market. At one major intersection in Tampa, there were four full-sized billboards looming out over the thoroughfares, and all four were for lawfirms-- two for the same woman in a cream pantsuit, one for three old guys in old-school power suits, and one for two glowering bullet-headed thugs promising "Aggressive Representation!" All were personal injury, although the old guys promised they could do "maritial issues" as well.

It gives the impression that everyone in Florida is suing everyone else. That's the only explanation for the bizarre phenomenon. After the thousandth billboard or so, you start to wonder why it's so blatant and excessive.