Florida

The view from this tenth floor condo isn't panoramic, but it's close.  The south windows face another building, similarly towering, far enough to furnish an illusion of privacy while offering still a disordered grid of backlit vignettes every evening.  To the east is the "waterfront view," a misnomer on several levels, the first level a swamp, the second an inlet, and the third, finally, the ocean.  A narrow island divides the inlet and the ocean and is itself bisected by a single main thoroughfare, congested at shifting points by mansion expansions so consistent you'd hardly know a tenth of the country was jobless.  At neighboring resorts names like the Palladium and the Patrician imagine an aristocratic past with slightly more modesty.  It is, in short, a playground for the rich, chaperoned by lurching palms, tended by the local color - people of color, that is.  To the west is where they, and the rest of Florida, live, staving off economic desolation one tourist at a time.

That brings us back to the condo.  It is here where my parents, like so many, not unreasonably, after working too hard, for too long, rejuvenate in retirement.  In that spirit - or something like it - I'm launching another attempt at the blog game, for my benefit and the world's.  Provision of actual content shall commence in Chicago, where I begrudgingly return tonight.  My first victims will be this year's Oscar contenders.  Speaking of conspicuous consumption.