I live on the beach, not on a postcard.
floaties if you don't want to (and if you don't want to, you clearly have something against adorable family photos).I work at a fucking T.J. Maxx.
I remember when they ripped up all the native trees down town
and replaced them with palm trees.
They keep replacing them with palm trees
because the fucking things won't keep living.
and replaced them with palm trees.
They keep replacing them with palm trees
because the fucking things won't keep living.
I also work at a decrepit, locally owned Dollar Theater. Our best nights of the week are when we show children's movies. Parents love bringing children to the only movie theater in town that sells Drought Beer and bottom-shelf wine.
we find ourselves smoking...
again.
on the stoop outside work
watching traffic.
(It's mostly tourists).
We're getting through this
people shouldn't bring their children here.
on the stoop outside work
watching traffic.
(It's mostly tourists).
We're getting through this
one
glass
of wine
at
a time.
(like usual)
putting out our cigarettes in empty beer bottles
or flicking them at mini-vans that drive by.
Wayne's there with his motorcycle, like clockwork, for the free Amber Back we give him during our after-hours binge drinking session that costs the place I-don't-even-know-what. He's like... sixty million years old and has hand tattoos, but he's got a boyish face and charm about him. We're all so different in age because that's the kind of place this is.
i'm biking home now because i finally got my DUI
i'll see you all in Hell
(where we belong)
because i'm going to see you tomorrow
at T.J. Maxx
fuck you, i thought you were lonely, i thought you wanted to hang out.
you're right
i'm not drunk enough yet to sleep alone
you know i've got wine at my place
i know that of pretty much every place.
cool, we'll get out of here then whenever the traffic lets up. it's almost midnight, they'll probably all be settled in their bar stools soon.
yeah okay
can i get another cigarette?
(like usual)
putting out our cigarettes in empty beer bottles
or flicking them at mini-vans that drive by.
Wayne's there with his motorcycle, like clockwork, for the free Amber Back we give him during our after-hours binge drinking session that costs the place I-don't-even-know-what. He's like... sixty million years old and has hand tattoos, but he's got a boyish face and charm about him. We're all so different in age because that's the kind of place this is.
i'm biking home now because i finally got my DUI
i'll see you all in Hell
(where we belong)
because i'm going to see you tomorrow
at T.J. Maxx
fuck you, i thought you were lonely, i thought you wanted to hang out.
you're right
i'm not drunk enough yet to sleep alone
i'm biking home now because i finally got my DUI
you know i've got wine at my place
i know that of pretty much every place.
cool, we'll get out of here then whenever the traffic lets up. it's almost midnight, they'll probably all be settled in their bar stools soon.
yeah okay
can i get another cigarette?
people shouldn't bring their children here.
I thought I already published this comment but whoops, I didn't. Here's the belated explanation:
ReplyDeleteThe video, which I wanted people to watch before (not during) reading the blog, is put there to kind of set you up and visually explain what Fort Walton Beach is about when you live there. A lot of people, upon arriving, don't ever understand what it's like to live in a poor place that literally depends upon tourism to survive. We're sandwiched in between Destin (a hugely rich city that sort of exploits residents of each area) and Gulf Breeze (another ridiculously ritzy outlying neighborhood). So we are on the beach but we are kind of forced to be the scene of depravity. We have most of the tattoo parlors, most of the liquor stores, most of bars, and nearly all of the night clubs.
The video is a stop motion I created myself. You see the beach sometimes but it's been purposely left out of it. That is what living there is like. It's always in the background of your mind (being the reason you ever make money etc.) but people aren't always at the beach either, you know? I have to live my life, it's not a vacation for me. I practically never went to the beach when I lived there unless we felt like getting drunk there since we were under-aged and cops (and parents) didn't usually snoop about the dunes.
It being a really small and desperately poor town, children and adults alike get hooked on stuff. I got literally two DUIs in the area. Most of the people you know there have a substance abuse problem or arrest on record, and I mean from young ages too.
I wanted to capture the sense that, when you live there, your home isn't ever really your home because your well-being depends upon the presence of strangers who are both intrusive and destructive. Drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, and everything like it are in high demand because of those same tourists and are always easily supplied for the same reason. Most of the people there are working two jobs (I was one of them), both always service industry (because that's all that's there; there are very few offices to work at), and you know they usually get stuck doing that for their whole lives. A lot of teen pregnancy and just like, hopeless situations. To get out of the shit you had to work really hard to do it so it was always really ironic (and laughable) to me when people would tell me "wow! you live in paradise! how could you ever be so ungrateful?!" because, most of the time and for most of the locals, you couldn't enjoy the paradise that surrounded you because of all the shitty tourists and their effects (condos and restaurants lining the ocean front so that you can't see it unless you find a public access point which were always few and far between, always getting laid off in the winter, bars never being too far away and thus always pouring out dangerously drunk people plus all the noise that goes along with that, etc.)
My computer crashed recently (all my pictures were lost) so I used some pictures that my friend who also lives in Fort Walton Beach took. Because of that, I am in some of them. You can find her lovely photography at this link:
Deletehttps://www.facebook.com/leapz?fref=ts
Every video you see here is something I made and you can check them out or my other stop motions at my YouTube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/leezorz133