Suppose, many years ago or just a few years ago, there was a split in time. A fork in history. Two tracks, two futures emerged-- and we are in the wrong future (suppose, for a moment, that there could be a "right" future and a "wrong" future). Suppose that wrong future is painted in dystopian colors, everything feels off somehow, the beat is all wrong... This wrong future is unfolding all around us; we are caught in the tragicomic reign of a foolish tyrant; most people consume non-food substances laden with chemicals; et cetera, et cetera.

yes, and I knew the Future was unappealing, but I didn't actually enter this sci-fi future until Florida happened.

Florida. Here we have gated "communitites" which are prettied-up-prisons, if you ask me, one after another, for miles and miles, and people pledge their loyalty to them; there is no where else to go...

...unless you venture inland. Pressed right up against the Gated places are mined-out wastelands... and the area formerly known as the Everglades, half of which was drained to mine rock and plant sugarcane. Fields and fields of it, hot, muggy, the whine of the crop dusters overhead, spraying who-knows-what, an eerie country that runs on for miles, pierced by the occasional shantytown... whispering all this land is supposed to be water, a river of grass. If you hear the whisper -- the reminder -- you may also realize that it all will be water again, thanks to rising sea levels, ironic -- The feeling of doom hangs leaden over this land, heavier than anywhere I've ever felt.

Belle Glade is an outpost between the cane fields. This town is in a state of squalor that I have only seen in the worst of city ghettoes. People work on the sugar plantations under a special visa program that doesn't pay them shit. Many of them have no plumbing or facilities in their homes. There was a "suicide" here two years ago that was a pretty remarkable "suicide"-- a black man, who had been dating the daughter of a white official, managed to hang himself with his own T-shirt.

I know there's a note of melodrama here, but it's well deserved, believe me you... and i don't know what to do, because this is not a moment, it's a process // the process that's happening across the country (& i can't speak for the world) is most advanced here in Florida; though most of the East Coast is already in its grasp. I want to point out that South Florida is a different case than the Florida Panhandle. In the panhandle, it's just your generic Deep South weirdness with a Christian edge, like Louisiana or Georgia or that kind of thing...

South Florida is different. It's on the front lines of this Process. It's so difficult to describe, though I've been writing about it since I was a kid: the plague of vacancy, and more: the gated poshlands and the plantations and the mines are just the most obvious outward manifestations of it. The fact that my hometown of Columbia, Maryland was bought by a company called General Growth Incorporated just an ironic outward symbol, language reflecting what is actually happening.

We cede acres every day to this strange process, this disease.
I've always had a keen since of land, geography, direction, territory -- and this is about territory, to me, now -- my territory being eroded. We see independent businesses closing down all the time, the last gathering-spots that aren't totally mediated forced to shut their doors-- what is to be done? We will have no choice but to meet in the streets, and that is a good thing, but a dangerous thing. How many times in my life have I nearly been arrested for "obstructing the sidewalk" -- What space is left?

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