It was a beautiful morning. The sun was bright and warm and burning off the last vestiges of the morning cloud cover. The air was already hot, but the sand was still cool on our bare feet. We trudged silently through the silky-soft white sand until it turned to that darker shaded, hard-packed sand from which the tide was gradually receding.
We set up at the edge of where the incoming waves were struggling to make their way up a sandy incline. This incline ended at a little ridge that was about a foot high where the tide was forced to an abrupt stop. We perched our collapsible chairs atop this ridge and I plopped our bait cooler down in the sand between them. Then we forced two pole holders into the harder sand and baited our hooks before trudging into the warm water until we were about waist high. There, we cast our lines and let out some slack as we walked back to shore. We stood, holding our poles, watching, waiting, hoping for a few minutes before we slipped the poles down into their holders. Then we settled into our chairs to watch our lines and await the huge fish we just knew were going to take our bait.
And so we watched, waited, re-baited our hooks after several crafty sea creatures made off with our bait, and detangled some seaweed that became attached to our lines. We probably killed 20 minutes to half an hour this way, waiting for that yank on our lines to inform us we’d hooked the unseen fish out there toying with us.
We were so intent on our work that we failed to see two men approaching on bikes from the south. It wasn’t until they’d pulled up and dismounted their beach bikes that we noticed them. They weren’t what I would call “friendly looking” gentlemen.
They gruffly asked if we’d caught anything, to which I replied we hadn’t had any luck. Then one of the men told us that we didn’t need our poles if we weren’t catching anything, and that they’d take them off our hands.
At first, I thought he was kidding, but then one of the men pulled a knife and we readily handed our poles over without further dispute. The men shouldered our poles and then rode off on their bikes as AJ and I looked on in disbelief.
It was a strange experience. I’ve never been robbed before. The whole thing left me feeling very vulnerable. I can tell that it has rattled AJ too. Personally, I’m just glad we’re safe. I’ll trade two fishing poles for our safety and well-being any day. Plus, we have a couple spare poles in our condo’s storage unit, not that we’ll be going out to use them anytime soon after this little incident.
3:58 p.m.
Not much going on. I’m just taking a break from doing some cleaning and re-organizing of the condo to help us kill some time. We’re undertaking some projects we’ve been meaning to do for years but never seem to find an opportunity to handle. Liz and I are going through the closets, bagging and boxing up stuff we no longer need or use (we still have stuff from when AJ was little – baby and toddler stuff). While we’re working on this, AJ is doing some dusting, and cleaning up his own room. We’re also laundering the sheets on the beds we rarely use in an effort to keep them fresh.
Pretty exciting stuff, I know, but that’s our life at the moment. It feels good to at least be able to put our spare time to use and de-clutter this place. It’s a project we have time to do several times a year back home. We never seem to find the time for it here because we’re always having too much fun. We have several boxes of stuff, a trash bag full of clothes, and a high chair and disassembled crib that are all ready to be donated to charity (if the opportunity presents itself after the Su flu has passed).
September 7th
9:11 a.m.
I didn’t write more yesterday because I didn’t feel like it. Plus, there’s really nothing to write at the moment – nothing GOOD at least. I think all this being indoors it starting to get to me. I can tell it’s getting to Liz and AJ as well. Tempers are short, and we all just seem to be getting agitated at little things far faster than we normally do.
The status quo with the flu remains – bad, bad, bad! There’s only one news channel left, and the reporting is mostly supposition and conjecture. No one seems to know what’s going on any more because communications are down or no one is there to answer the call if it goes through whether it’s at a hospital, government agency, news network or just about anywhere else for that matter.
It’s crazy! We as a society have become so used to knowing what is going on ALL THE TIME that not knowing is really scary. We feel so in the dark now. I hate it. We have all this time on our hands but we don’t know what to do since no one is telling us. Will this thing be over in a couple more days? Will things get back to some semblance of normalcy? Will help be coming or will there at least be someone coming around to tell us what the deal is? I mean, this is all pretty ridiculous. You’d think they would at least have sent out some further emergency details or response plan or SOMETHING! But nothing! Just confusion and silence from our government. Service on our phones and tablet has been spotty to say the least, not that there are any updates to get. I’ve even tried the old radio/CD player we have here in the condo, hoping for some sort of news message, but other than a repeated pre-recorded message from the Emergency Alert System on several channels telling us what we already know – stay inside, don’t go to hospitals, stay away from flu carriers, shelter in place until further instructions are issued – there’s nothing other than dead air or static.
Wow! Thanks a bunch for nothing great government savior. They make you dependant upon them by creating every law, tax, and regulation imaginable, and then in your time of need – POOF! Where are they?! It really makes me mad! You can’t even get information on the internet lately because service sucks. Either there’s no signal or if you CAN get on, pages won’t load or if they do start to load, everything just freezes up after a few seconds. It’s ridiculous and extremely frustrating! But there’s nothing I can do.
5:22 p.m.
Thank god it’s almost time for dinner! We’ve been going out of our gourds here trying to come up with things to do to stay busy. We’ve even resorted to counting seagulls on the beach. Yes – counting SEAGULLS! That’s just how bored we’ve gotten. The cable is out completely. So is the internet. Now we’re left to our own devices, which sad to say, is not the best option. We are resorting to tricks from the old days that in all honesty just aren’t cutting it. We’ve succumbed to the instant gratification of the internet age. Board games, Eye Spy, cleaning, scenery watching, and casual conversation just aren’t enough when we’re used to email, streaming videos, on-demand television, and instant everything.
I wonder how other residents here are doing. I’ll bet they aren’t as bored as us. No offense to them, but they’re used to sitting around all day doing nothing. We’re not. We’re used to being out and about.
At least we still have cooking together. It’s something that we can do and enjoy as a family, even in the apocalypse. Mom is in charge of drinks (thank god for alcohol!). I’m writing in between sautéing vegetables, and then I’ll start browning the ground beef. Around that time, AJ will get the water boiling for pasta. We’ll do some spaghetti with meat and vegetable sauce for dinner – a good comfort meal. And we need all the comfort we can get right now. I think we’ll make enough so that we have leftovers for dinner tomorrow night.
We’ll make some garlic toast to go with our meal to liven things up a little. Liz is our garlic toast extraordinaire. She can start working on that once she’s done with the drinks and we’re close to having the pasta and sauce set to go.
Liz has just served me my cocktail. I get a rum and Coke. She’s having a gin and tonic with fresh lime. AJ is having a cocktail too – a Coke float with some vanilla ice cream that we bought when we first arrived and that we’re trying to finish up.
Ooh, my rum and Coke is really good! I haven’t had one in quite some time. It’s fun to have a drink you haven’t had in a while. It can bring back all sorts of memories with it – like lying on a beach in Cancun as a college sophomore on spring break. But we won’t go there (not the time or the place).
All right, enou
gh writing, time to get to cooking!
September 8th
10:10 a.m.
We did our best to sleep in this morning in an effort to kill a little time. The days are long enough without getting up at the crack of dawn.
The excitement of the morning was watching Dan Highmore screw around with his pineapple down in the planter in the front lawn. This has been a running joke around the condo for two years now. One night during happy hour, Dan stuck the top of an old pineapple in one of the front yard planters. Damn if the thing didn’t take root and eventually start to sprout. Tending to the plant has been Dan and Angie’s pet project ever since.
This morning, Dan farted around with it for at least 15 minutes, watering it, preening it, and clearing away some debris from around it.
Life is so different down here from Chicago. It moves at such a slow pace. Everything back home is rush, rush, rush. Here, it’s almost as if people do things as slowly as possible. Now I’m starting to understand why. If their days all move like yesterday did for us, moving at a snail’s pace is their only way to kill time.
On other fronts, we finished the last of our milk today. I wanted to stretch it out a little longer, but I also didn’t want it going bad. It was getting close to the “sell by” date on the jug, and I didn’t want to waste it, so we all had bowls of cereal this morning. Guess it will be powdered creamer in the coffee from here on out. Oh the hardships (I jest – at least for now).
2:16 p.m.
The power went out again today for almost an hour. It really got me worried. It also got me thinking. What happens if it goes out and stays out? The temperature inside the condo went up by several degrees just in the hour the air was off. And what about the food in the freezer? I think I’m going to make some extra ice and put some ice packs in the freezer just in case the power goes off for a longer period of time. Then we can throw a lot of our frozen stuff in the coolers to keep it fresh for at least an extra couple days.
That’s my afternoon project. At least it gives me something to do. AJ is helping me – my little man. He’s being so grown up through all this. Even after the fishing incident, he seemed almost more pissed about the loss of our poles than scared by the fact that we were robbed at knifepoint. I guess it’s that age – the “I’m invincible and nothing or no one could ever hurt me,” stage. In a way, it must be nice. I vaguely remember it myself. But it can also be very dangerous. It’s the same reason the military likes young men and women – they still think that way. A lot easier to get someone to run into battle headlong when they always think, “It’ll be the other guy who gets it, not ME.” I guess it’s kind of the same with society as a whole. It’ll always be “someone else” who will get the flu, until suddenly you’re puking your brains our and your organs are shutting down one-by-one until you’re dead.
Hmm…fun thoughts. I think it’s time to get to my ice making.
4:44 p.m.
HO-LY CRAP!
I can’t believe what we just saw. I’m actually having trouble writing right now because my hands are shaking so bad. Liz has taken AJ in the bedroom to try to calm him and keep him away from the scene outside.
I need a couple minutes before I continue.
5:15 p.m.
Okay, I think I’m ready to write again. I took a shot of rum before sitting down here at the dining room table. Typically, I’d write outside, but not after what I just witnessed out there.
So it was a little after four this afternoon when I heard vehicles in the beach access parking lot. This piqued our interest because we haven’t heard vehicles down there for days. Being curious, and having nothing better to do, the whole family went out on the balcony to see what was going on.
Peering over the north-facing side of the balcony that overlooks the beach access parking lot, we could see two aging and rust-ridden vehicles parked below – an SUV and a small pickup. I guess I shouldn’t say “parked,” they were pulled askew across several parking spaces, their occupants out and wandering the area. There were five people in total – three men, two women. All of them were somewhat grungy in appearance, and they wore dingy clothing. From first impressions, they appeared as less than reputable characters.
We watched quietly from our balcony perch, unnoticed by the newcomers below. They mulled about the area for a while, several of them inspecting the lot’s trash bin while several others settled themselves on the stone benches positioned around the beach access area’s lone picnic table. Here, they were shaded by several palms from the slowly settling afternoon sun.
Eventually, the trash inspectors wrapped up their work, having claimed several items from the receptacle that included a torn towel, a stained t-shirt, and a pair of broken flip-flops. They ambled over to join the others around the circular stone picnic table where they proceeded to break out several pint bottles of what appeared to be liquor.
I couldn’t tell what the group was drinking. I’m guessing either vodka or gin since the liquid inside the bottles appeared to be clear. Whatever it was, it seemed to be doing the trick, as the more they drank, the more rowdy the behavior of the group became.
Eventually, having consumed the contents of one bottle, one of the men stood, took the glass bottle over to the parking lot’s edge, and threw it down hard on the asphalt. It shattered, spraying shards across the lot just behind the pickup truck. Personally, I thought it a bad decision since this meant they’d likely have to drive through the glass on their way out, but it didn’t seem to bother any of the other drinkers.
AJ seemed to get a kick out of the act, though, as I suppose many 12-year-old boys would. A softly hissed, “Yes!” was his reaction to the smashed bottle. I didn’t like his reaction, but thinking back, I could totally understand it at that age.
At this point, we were all becoming a bit bored in our watching of the scene unfold below us. In just about any other instance, we would have lost interest at that point and gone back inside. However, due to the boredom we’d been experiencing, we continued to watch. It was an unfortunate decision.
I need another shot before I write this next part.
5:43 p.m.
Ah, that’s better. A second shot of rum isn’t going to erase what I saw, but it makes it slightly easier to write about.
So I was at the part where the people down in the beach access area were boozing it up and getting a little rowdy. But at this point in their antics, I wasn’t really concerned. They seemed like a pretty harmless lot, just picking through the trash and drinking – all in all, not that far from the norm in Cocoa Beach.
There is a small white wall, maybe three-feet high, about half a foot wide, and covered in decorative stucco that divides our condo lawn from the parking and beach access area. It’s not much, but amazingly, in most instances it works to keep trespassers at bay. Most of the time, the biggest nuisance that comes with the wall is removing the trash that people leave on it – mostly empty sunscreen and beverage bottles. Occasionally, a brave beachgoer will hop the wall and trudge across our lawn to use our hose at our own beach access walkway to wash off their feet. But that’s a rarity since we have “private property” signs posted near the wall as well as at the wash station.
Anyway, the little white wall ends right at the dunes where the public beach access begins and where there is a raised, triangle-shaped planter. The planter acts as an additional buffer between the beach access walkway and our condo building’s lawn before the overgrowth of the dunes starts in earnest. The border of this planter is built from small, rectangular-shaped concrete blocks that are about 4-inches high and are stacked four high. This is also where Dan and Angie Highmore’s pineapple plant is situated, and this plant is exactly what the people in the public beach access were drawn to.
At first, one of them wandered over close to the wall and simply pointed out our unusual feature to the others. But soon the group began to fixate on it, the alcohol obviously taken over, until one of them could no longer restrain himself and jumped our small dividing
wall. As I feared, he headed straight for the planter. Once there, he jumped into it, pulled a knife from his back pocket, and whipped out its blade as he knelt beside the pineapple plant. A second later, he began hacking at the base of the plant.
Now this is not the first time someone has confronted our beloved pineapple. I have to admit, it’s proximity to the public beach access makes it quite conspicuous. The unusual sight of such a plant makes for an inviting target, especially for beachgoers who might find their throats a bit parched or their tummies rumbling after their beach excursions – or in this instance, if they are too drunk to see straight.
I knew what would happen next, and it didn’t take long to prove my fears right. Out charged Dan Highmore from his ground-level condo, ranting about people constantly attacking his beloved pineapple plant.
At first the man with the knife stood up from his knelt position beside the plant and took a step back, apparently surprised that someone would be confronting him about such a minor infraction. But then, seeing as how the person yelling at him was old enough to be his grandfather, he recovered, standing his ground as Dan approached. I was a little concerned for Dan considering that the man he was confronting had a knife, but in prior instances, pineapple trespassers had retreated fairly quickly under Dan’s wrath.
As Dan continued to approach, laying into the man in the planter all the while, I saw Angie Highmore exit their condo behind him. I didn’t like this turn of events, but I assume that seeing her husband outnumbered by the drunks in the beach access, she was playing the role of active reserve. I have to admit, her presence did little in the way of intimation factor – a frail, 70-something tottering across the lawn – but I assumed her presence as witness would do the trick. I even called out a greeting to her as she walked. This was mainly to catch the attention of the drunks below and let them know that others were watching if they decided to try something. I even considered going down to assist the two seniors, but I figured by the time I got down there, all the excitement would be over. Once Dan gets on a roll, it usually doesn’t take him long to protect his planter.
The Dystopian Diaries Page 65
