"One thing certain, my paychecks are getting smaller because of missed days. I need a three-day weekend to recover from working even the slightest jobs. Worse, my reserves have fallen so low that I "can't move back to Texas". This is the firs time since my early twenties that I've been in this boat. The company wants me to start managing a project in Hollywood that is faltering, which I declined but then thought it would do me good. Ocean Towers or something like that, plus I'd be on site twice a week instead of cooped in the office. I'm not really management, but I'm allowed to do as I please so taking a rest is easier on site.
For the record, I've been offered a management position, but I don't feel I know enough about how things are done on at the site level to take on such huge projects. Even prior to my heart attacks, the most men I've managed at once was 17 and they were already a trained crew. I again declined, I just don't feel up to it."
Back in 1997, it was a sad day for the world. The Ford company quit building the "Thunderbird". I was my childhood dream car, although that could be because it was one of the few brand new cars I'd seen as a youngster. For that matter, the same could be said in 1988 when they trimmed the T-bird down so it looked like a Cougar. I think they used the same frame. Anyway, 1997 was goodbye to a classic. Here's a 1957 original, designed to compete with the Corvette.
Author's note 2014: Ford brought it back for an "eleventh generation" in 2002-2005, but it flopped because it was not the real deal. Mind you, one of my co-workers bought one.
Hurricane? It must have missed here by many miles. I’m glad I went out about noon to get a coffee, and the Wall Street Journal. It gave me a chance to leisurely drive down 103rd and the Palmetto, where I took some rare photos of a clear bright day with empty roadways. As I headed south to the coffee shop, there was only one other car on the freeway. A black lady in a Rick Case Honda WD5 WMG, and she cut me off. I had to slam on the brakes to avoid killing her, she did not even look coming off the ramp and across four lanes in front of me at half the speed limit.
They die by the thousands with that attitude. By the time they reach grade school, they are experts at acting as if any criticism of their behavior is racist, and never thereby learn from their mistakes. The trouble is, trucks moving down a freeway don’t care if your great-grandparents were slaves. No, not all blacks, just all the ones I’ve seen in Florida.
Almost everything is closed, but a few clever places have a plywood sheet they can swing open until the last minute and are doing a brisk business with late shoppers. Notice, I had to buy a New York paper. Otherwise the city is shut down solid, odd because most places I’ve seen would need only an hour’s warning. I’ve got tons of extra time, I looked at stock trends and more real estate. My personal gauge of a bubble about to burst when rent and monthly payments are the same, because the only thing that separates the two is usually a down payment. Rent can’t overstep the margin, and when rent maxes out same as monthly payments, it means the property owners are completely at the limit of their credit. They live well for a few years or decades, if you discount the ulcers.
From my viewpoint, these types will be doubly hurt when real estate takes even a temporary plunge. Not only will they feel the squeeze of competition for lower rents, they will be unlikely to be able to borrow even more money to purchase in a declining market. Such people must sell at a loss to even get new operating capital. I know several people who are convinced the entire country is going to retire and move here, yet Miami is not even in the top twenty list. I also know I have always been several years ahead of most in my predictions. Come on, be fair, what did I say about Enron? We’ll see, of course, and remember that back then I never had any money to tie up for five years to prove I was right and this time I do.
Real estate is going to tumble like nothing you have ever seen. The baby boomers have lived their lives on inflated, borrowed, fabricated wealth. When they all try to retire at the same time, they will discover that phoney money is damn hard to spend. That when you hit 72, the banks won’t lend you another $100,000 just to keep your numbers going up, in fact, they are getting worried about getting back what they already lent you, and will take your house if they have to. My goal, within 5 years, is to own a Miami property for 1/3 of what it is selling for today. They say disinflation is a terrible thing, but I don’t see how. I think it weeds out the businesses that charge too much, which in turn is a result of the abuse of credit, both buying and selling. When is the last time I got a discount for paying cash? I’ve seen ads for zero payments for another two years, and people stupid enough to go for it.
My observation that the further from the eye, the more perpendicular to the storm you experience the wind, seems to be true. (Now that last sentence is highly evolved grammar, or what.) I don’t think this storm is going to turn around and head back this way at all. The wind is now straight west. A few more people have decided to get out of the house, I see. I dropped in at the Church and worked the crossword puzzle. (One of the answers was CTRLALTDEL.) I thought JZ might show or I’d get a few good shots of real weather. Neither was anywhere near Little Haiti today at noon. I looked around in disappointment, because a lot of going out for me is scoring, as we used to call it.
I am a lounge lizard when I do go out. This is a holdover from my late teens when I dated this doctor’s daughter, Judy. She liked lounges, while I was still young enough to prefer pubs, which had more action for someone in my position. I could not really afford lounges costing about 50% more for the same thing, and rarely had rock and roll entertainment. By the time I hit oh, say 28, I actually preferred lounges, thanks to her. Once I began touring lounges on weekends, my scoring average just soared, and stayed like that until I was in my late 30s and went gray. I’m not tall or anything, but I was a blue-eyed (dark) blonde and I did get a lot of attention over it. That’s why I suppose I kept checking lounges whenever I went somewhere new, to see who I could meet up with. A lot of women that would never otherwise go home with someone they meet in a drinking atmosphere will do it with a blonde man. I’d also meet women I’d known years earlier in the strangest places, a piano bar in Hawaii, or a sports lounge in Tarzana. Suddenly, they would indeed have something to do with me, but by now the proverbial shoe was on the other foot.
Miami, is weird, it is not like most towns. There are very few lounges here, and they are clustered way over in hotels on South Beach, where you can’t park. With police that arrest people the minute they approach their cars. The places that are called lounges are stripper bars, which keep stressing their clientele are “gentlemen”. And blondes in Miami are extremely rare, causing a stop at nothing demand. Let me describe the typical Miami bar. Inside are about a half-dozen pot-bellied ugly men, the regulars, all TV-watchers. There is only one waitress, and she is a dyed blonde, or what passes for one in Miami, with their three-week old black roots. This waitress is shacked up with the bar owner, that is how she got her job, and she thinks she is perfection. I’d like to say that I am a blonde, I have three blonde sisters, I’ve screwed 75 real blonde babes in my life, and lady, you ain’t no blonde, so just serve me and get lost. I don’t want you around, because I might get drunk enough to start thinking it is okay to be just a “little bit of a slut”, and I don’t want that to happen. I’ve only met one real blonde in Miami, and she is a neurotic anorexic.
Those were sharp words! My point is, I suppose, that I hate false advertising. I am equally against men to pretend they are decent, respectable human beings, just to pick up women. It is a hold over from a Dear Abby guidebook I read in my early teens. It basically advised women that it was okay to fake anything in the hopes that the guy would fall in love with you before he found out the truth. It did not surprise me, after reading that, about towering divorce rates. Even in my late twenties, I still did not appreciate getting fooled when discovering a girl was not really blonde, or even as blonde as I thought. The blondest blondes I’ve ever had are still treasures in my memories. Kim B., Robyn S.n and Sandy W. and Charmaine V.K. The near-blondes are Phylis H., Joyce F., Sherry P., Brenda S. and (the receptionist at world of dance, Springer?). The others, while blonde, were not all that blonde after all. Yes, erotically, it makes one hell of a difference, because you can “see” what you are doing. If this seems cruel, it is not, just that I loved the blondes more. I learned early that I could not have the things that tall, handsome men got for nothing, and see no reason, by comparison to what I had to adjust to, why non-blonde women can’t lower their sights as a practical matter of course. Starting with barmaids. Ha!
Over all these decades, I would like to apologize to that doctor’s daughter. We simply met five years too soon. My goal at 18 was not to settle down and raise children, I was barely over being a child myself. If I’d been a few places, maybe I would have known how special you were. But at 19, everything I did was new and better than before. There was no reason to believe that this would ever stop, if she did anything wrong, I felt I would continue to move onward and upward. That is really what I thought. She would travel, you see, and collect phone numbers from men in faraway places. She would never cheat, I know, but she was always “laying tracks”, and I could not have spoken up without revealing that I’d been with far more women than she’d assumed.
She was thus not exactly blameless, and I was too possessive to forgive it. I wanted then just what I want today, something that is mine without being forced to continually prove it against my will. When we would go out, she would entertain passes from all sorts of men, usually men big enough to punch me out, maintaining she was just being polite. I was very young, and could not understand why being polite to strangers was so much more important than being polite to me. To this day, finding a strange man sitting with my gal when I return from the washroom is a death sentence for the relationship. Like, maybe you came here to meet him, but I didn’t. What? Well, if that is true, how come I never find a horny woman sitting here when I return?
Back to real estate, the lowest priced condo in Miami Beach is up on Indian Creek. A studio, asking $69,500 and actually stating the condo fee of $134.00 per month, which includes utilities. It did not say which utilities. Based on a loan of $65,000, that’s $665.84 for the mortgage over ten years, total just under $800 a month for occupancy. That is something I could go for financially. I don’t know why it is the cheapest, but there are several others in town at that price. It’s when I see a two-bedroom in that range I might look deeper, and my prediction is it won’t be too long until I see them.
The last thing for this Saturday, in case I have not mentioned it before, is that I hate Sony Corporation. Every product I’ve ever bought from them expired shortly after the warranty. They are slimeballs who try to sell you your own warranty by calling it a service contract. There are no Sony Authorized dealers, just ripoff shops that pay Sony a fee to put that sticker in the window. They never have the belt or part for your model in stock. Every repair is 2/3 the cost of a new unit. They have no loaners and they lie to your face. They will tell you a certain model is in stock just to get you into the store, sometimes 50 miles away, then pretend they misunderstood you. My $350 Sony editing tape deck I bought in 1998 just died after about 100 hours use, proving they have a shelf life even if left alone. I bought this deck, a year old model, still in the box, but it was missing the manual. I called, and they said I had to get it from their dealership.
I drove over there, to be told they did not give out the manual, but they would copy it for me. For an outrageous $1.00 per page. I offered to give them a $200 deposit to let me photocopy it across the street for 5 cents a page. They said no. I paid them $44 for 44 pages. Later I discovered I had 20 pages in English, and 24 pages in French. Sony only hires ignorant filthy crooked sumbitches, and I can prove it over and over. Every one of them is a lying thief who does not give a damn after they get your money and they refuse to be responsible for anything they say or sell, like it is your job to ship things back to the factory. And pay for that, too. I hate Sony. (Why did I buy? Because I had a rare tape I needed to edit of a private trip into Angel Falls. The software would only work with Sony equipment. This is the other tale of woe I got about Sony. They confirmed Sony tape heads were permanent and never needed adjustment. When I showed them the ruined tape not five seconds later, they said the tape heads they just told me were permanent now needed adjustment, but Sony was not responsible because their heads never need adjustment, see. They said they would do it for $650 per tape, I had three tapes. I told them the trip to South America did not cost me that much. Now you know how I rate slimeballs. And the liar, in this case, was the company president on the west coast.)
