#at least i was here. ordinarily i don’t work saturdays so i can’t imagine if i wasn’t

[pliablehead]

shoutout to the middle schooler who asked if we carry any Homestuck books, which caused me to have to try to explain Homestuck to my most annoying, Least Online A Human Being Can Be coworker at 10:30 in the morning

[365daysofsasuhina]

[ 365 Days of SasuHina || Day One Hundred Thirty-Nine: Cinnamon ] [ Uchiha Sasuke, Hyūga Hinata, Uchiha Mikoto ] [ SasuHina ] [ Verse: Best Years of Your Life ] [ AO3 Link ]

“So, uh...what’s your favorite thing to make?”

Back in Home Ec once again, Sasuke’s bored out of his mind. The day before was a mini school festival, and given all the rush and preparing leading up to it, their teacher has decided it appropriate to give the class a day off from all of their sewing, baking, and other activities they used to make some money for more supplies for class.

And given that all of the underclassmen girls still seem terrified of him for...whatever reason, Sasuke falls back to the usual company of his fellow senior, Hinata.

She’s taking the time to casually knit something she was unable to finish before the craft sale. Pale blue wool dances over her needles, done almost subconsciously. “Um...can you be more specific?”

“I guess out of all the things we do here.”

She considers that with a hum. “...well, I really like knitting,” is her first answer, given with a laugh given her current project. “It’s...soothing in how repetitive it is. I can just sit and get a little lost in it. Um…” Nibbling her lip in thought, she looks around as though trying to pick out things from their surroundings. “I like to bake, too...almost anything, r-really. But my favorite are cinnamon rolls.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Mhm! They’re just so…!” Hinata beams to herself, cheeks going a light shade of pink at a happy memory. “When they’re warm, and the icing is still gooey, and the middle is all fluffy...it’s the best…!”

In spite of himself, Sasuke grins as she describes it. There’s something really...endearing about how into it she is. Clearly it makes her as happy as she looks. “Y’know, I’m not big on sweets...but I might have to try some sometime.”

“Oh, I could make you some! But...it’s quite the process...and you have to eat them warm. They’re so much better.”

“What about it takes so long?”

“Well, you have to put the dough together and knead it, and since it has yeast in it, it has to r-rise. That takes a while. Then you roll it out, and put the filling in...roll it up...and cut the rolls. Then it has to rise again -”

“Whoa, really?”

“Mhm! And then you finally bake it!” Hinata can’t help a soft giggle. “So all in all, in takes a few hours, start to finish. You have to be d-dedicated to it! So...it’s obviously a little, um...too long to do in class. And since exams are coming up, I...won’t have time to stay after school. I need to study.”

“Yeah, me too…” In spite of himself, Sasuke finds he’s rather disappointed. He has an idea, but...he’s not sure if it’s...appropriate. Sure, he talks to her every day in this class, but...he’s not sure if he constitutes as a friend. Trying to appear nonchalant, he offers, “Maybe on a weekend sometime?”

Looking up, Hinata blinks. “Well...the school is closed then...unless there’s an event on. But...I doubt the classroom would be open…”

...she didn't take the hint. Drat. “Uh…” How to say this without sounding too forward... “My mom’s got a pretty nice kitchen. I could...get the ingredients sometime, and we could...make them there…?”

...another blink. “...oh!” Embarrassed at not realizing what he meant, she laughs, going a bit pink. “I...s-sure! She wouldn’t mind…?”

“Nah. I bet she’d be psyched, actually.” His older brother cooks like a maniac whenever he’s home, but...well, besides a few things he’s tried since starting this silly class, Sasuke’s still not an avid cook or baker.

...and he can just imagine his mother’s face at him bringing a girl home. He’s never brought a girl over. Ever.

It’ll be amusing.

“I’ll tell her you’re giving me lessons. She’s been pretty jazzed about me taking this class. Bet she’ll be happy to see me in the kitchen.”

“Oh, good! And...I guess that would technically be true. Um...sure! Just let me know when you...want to try it?”

“Sure. Uh...got a list of what I’d need?”

“Yeah, I’ll dig out my favorite recipe when I get home. Um…” Still blushed, she asks, “Do you want me to...text it to you?”

“Good idea. Here…” They exchange numbers, Hinata promising to send him the list and a rundown of the recipe as the bell rings.

“I’ll let you know when I’m free.”

“Okay! Bye.”

Huh...he’s actually really excited about this…

A weekend passes without any word - Itachi makes a surprise visit home, so Sasuke deems it a bit more critical than baking. But when Friday arrives without any signs of anything else popping up, he decides to ask if she’s free.

“Yeah, I can make it! You’ve got everything we need?”

“Yup.” He’s only double checked like five times.

“Okay - any, um...particular time I should be there?”

“I tend to kinda sleep in...maybe early afternoon just to be safe?”

“You sleep that late?” she teases.

Sasuke can’t help a pout. “No. I just mean so no one feels rushed.”

Giggling into the cuff of her sweater, Hinata shakes her head. “I know, I know. That sounds good! I’ll text you when I’m on my way.”

“Got it.”

Saturday morning, Sasuke’s in a tizzy. He volunteered to do dishes the night before after dinner, making sure the kitchen is spotless. Not that Mikoto runs a messy house. He just...wants to make a good impression. Whatever’s left from breakfast he fervently tidies up.

His mother notices, perking a brow. “What’s going on?”

“I’ve got a cooking lesson.”

That catches her attention. “Oh?”

“Yeah. Friend from Home Ec’s gonna teach me how to make cinnamon rolls.”

Mikoto perks up another hair. “Is that so...? Who’s the friend?”

“Her name’s Hinata.”

At the word ‘her’, his mother’s eyes go round, her mouth in a small matching ‘o’. After a blink, she calmly replies. “...I see. Well...I was going to work on my flowerbeds, but...if you need any help, let me know!”

“Will do.”

Once she’s out of sight, he breaks into quiet snickers.

Priceless.

His phone buzzes at about twelve-thirty, and she estimates a twenty minute bike ride. Setting up for her arrival, he’s just putting the finishing touches to his lineup of ingredients when the doorbell rings.

“Hey.”

“Hi! Um...w-where should I put my bike?”

“We can put it in the garage.” They might live in a nice enough neighborhood, but...well, better safe than sorry. Once her ride is tucked away, Sasuke leads the way in. “So, ready to see me fail miserably at baking?”

“Oh, you won’t! I’ll do most of the work, anyway. You can watch if you don’t want to do any steps.”

“I gotta give at least some of it a try.”

Hinata starts walking him through the steps (after complimenting his prep work), showing him how to activate the yeast. “See the foam?”

“Whoa, cool.”

Next they mix the rest of the dough, adding the yeast mixture and beating it until it goes smooth.

“Okay, now we need to knead it.”

Sprinkling flour on a marble slab Mikoto often uses in her baking, Hinata shows Sasuke her technique before letting him try. It takes a few turns, but eventually he gets the hang of it, Hinata occasionally dusting more flour when necessary and checking the consistency.

“That seems good! Now, it has to rise.”

“For how long?”

“An hour.”

Covering the bowl they set it in, they leave it in the warm kitchen before...turning to each other

“Um…” Hinata smiles sheepishly. “Anything you want to...do?”

“...we could, uh...watch a movie or something.”

“S-sure!”

He lets her pick, not knowing most of what his parents have bought and hoarded over the years. He could load up Netflix, but...he’s feeling lazy. Hinata, too, seems a bit unsure and picks one at random. Some newer James Bond movie he’s never seen before. They both settle on the couch and just...sit and watch, a timer set on Sasuke’s phone.

And of course it goes off during a tense fight scene, making them both jump. “Oh!”

Migrating back to the kitchen, they remove the cover and find the dough’s grown!

“Dang!”

“It’s supposed to do that!”

Mixing cinnamon and sugar, Hinata watches as Sasuke carefully rolls out the dough into a long rectangle, then brushes it with butter.

“Very good!”

They both sprinkle the mixture, and each help roll the whole thing up.

“...I think we might need two pans,” Hinata laughs. Carefully, she cuts the long roll into pieces, laying them in a thin layer of syrup along the bottom of the pans.

Then it’s back to rising.

Retreating to their movie, the pair watch in a far more comfortable silence than before. Neither notice as Mikoto wanders in for a drink of water, peeking at the two over the couch with a sly smile (and doing the same to their rising rolls).

Movie ending a bit before the timer, they find the dough big enough anyway. Once the oven heats, in go both pans, and then it’s time to wait one last time. Hinata sits on a stool, Sasuke leaned atop the counter opposite her.

“You were right - your mom does have an awesome kitchen,” Hinata admits sheepishly.

“Yeah...I need to use it more. Guess it’s a good thing I’m taking this class. Learning how, bit by bit.”

“Mhm!”

After a small pause, Sasuke decides to admit, “And I got to make a friend out of it, too.”

Jolting a hair, Hinata goes pink as the timer goes off. “I’ll...I-I’ll get them out!”

They look...amazing.

But they’re not quite finished yet. Hinata whips up the icing, and dribbles it over the buns while they’re still hot. “...okay. Time for the final step.”

“...which is?”

“Eating them!”

Sasuke fetches plates and forks, and Hinata dishes them up. She’s right: they look gooey and fluffy.

“Well...here goes.” Tearing off a hunk, Sasuke gives it one last glance before popping it in his mouth.

She watches, seemingly not aware of her intense expression.

To torture her, Sasuke chews slowly, exaggerating a thoughtful look. He will admit...these are pretty damn good. And he doesn’t ordinarily like sweet foods.

“...well?!”

He just gives a thumbs up, still chewing, almost choking as she gives a little cheer.

...that was cute.

They continue eating, sparing another roll as Mikoto joins them. Her own test goes just as well. “You must share your recipe with me!” she insists to Hinata, who sheepishly nods.

Together the pair clean up, doing the dishes and wiping down the counters. Sasuke refuses to let her leave without taking one of the pans.

“Trust me dear, we don’t need them all here!” Mikoto laughs.

“But then I’ll eat them all…” Hinata mumbles, going pink as her companions laugh.

With that...they reach an impasse.

“I’ll, um...I-I’ll bring the pan to school on Monday!”

“Yeah, sure. No rush.”

“I...I had a lot of fun.”

“Yeah...me too.”

...silence.

Nibbling her lip, Hinata carefully stores the pan into her bag, which she slings on her back before retrieving her bike. “I...guess I’ll see you then.”

“Yeah. See ya.”

Looking a little torn, Hinata hesitates before taking off. A hand waves back over her shoulder.

He waves back.

And...can’t help but feel a little lonely.

...maybe he’ll go have another roll.

     More Home Ec AU! Ahhh I really like this one, it's so fluffy and pure xD      Hinata finally gets to make her cinnamon rolls. And Sasuke gets to help! And inch a little closer to realizing that Hinata is TOTALLY girlfriend material.      I think Mikoto approves x3      Buuut on that note, I'ma call it a night~ Thanks for reading!

[devilsknotrp]

Congratulations, SB! You have been accepted for the role of Kenneth “Ken” Hawker with the faceclaim of Kyle Chandler. This is a sample application to demonstrate one way you can fill out your application form! If you have any questions please don't hesitate to reach out to us and we'll do our best to help. The application process is not meant to be overwhelming; we're all here to write. If you would like to apply for a character connected to Ken in some way, just shoot co-admin SB a message over on her account, @principal-hawker!

OUT OF CHARACTER

Name: SB Age: 28 Pronouns: She/her Timezone: PST Activity estimation: I’m online just about everyday! So get ready to get sick of me. When work picks up I’ll be a tad more sporadic, but chances are I’m lurking throughout the day anyway. Triggers: (REDACTED)

IN CHARACTER:

BASICS

Full name: Kenneth Michael Hawker Age: 55. Born January 12, 1941 Gender: Male Pronouns: He/him Sexuality: Heterosexual Occupation: Principal of Devil’s Knot High School Connection to Victim: Ken was familiar with Linda’s teens through the school. He’s struck up a friendship with Linda through their shared time at the PTA. Alibi: Ken was preparing for that evening’s PTA meeting and finishing up some paperwork in his office. Faceclaim: Kyle Chandler

WRITING SAMPLE

“Alright, alright, now everybody settle down so we can get the hell outta here, okay?” The raucous crowd settled quickly, each and every one of the citizens knowing full well what kind of ear full they’d get if they disobeyed. Ken had run these PTA meetings with an iron fist for as long as most of the town could remember. Before him, his mother, and before her, well let’s just say the Hawker family has been around a long while. “Now, first order of business-”

Ken barely got the meeting started before a barrage of frantic hands shot up into the air, whispers beginning to echo around the room. The man raised a weary hand to his face, dragging it down over his mouth. It was gonna be one of those nights. He could already hear the questions, the concerns, the fear. Was it was happening again? How could we be sure our children were safe? Will this affect their midterms? Why are we even having school? Shouldn’t we all be out looking?

Ken had nearly lost his mind after Phillip and Pete had gone missing. His best friend was dead and implicated in the attempted murder of his own son. Of course, he hadn’t done it, but the wounds were still there. Even now, even after twelve years, Ken hadn’t recovered. But he’d at least made it back to a point of relative peace. His kids grew up, no one else vanished, Aisha and he were finally doing well. Until Saturday. It was like his entire world had been held up by a straw foundation and this was the one gust of wind to take them all down once and for all.

With one raised hand, Ken silenced the whispers. He stared out to his friends and neighbors, all with children who they loved, who they feared for. For god’s sake, the man was just a principal! What could he possibly do to lie to these people? To tell them everything would be alright? He wasn’t his father. Somehow Abel always had a handle on situations like this, a way to calm everyone down while keeping them in line. Ken never felt comfortable wielding that kind of power. He knew it was his legacy, and he tried to be a pillar for the community, but it was days like this that Ken remembered why he’d denied joining the Council for so long.

“I know y’all have a lot of questions about the recent disappearance.” His eyes drifted over to Linda’s face. He was surprised she was even here. He wanted to reach out and tell her it would all be okay. They had found Pete after all, hadn’t they? He wasn’t sure if that information would help or hurt at this point. “Unfortunately, I know about as much as anyone here. I will say, we’re doin’ everything we can to keep your kids safe. Y’all know I keep an eye on ‘em as much as I can, even when they’re not on school grounds. We’re working with the Sheriff’s department for added security, but most of that will be going towards the elementary school. I hope you understand.”

Vaguely, Ken wondered if anyone could see the heartbreak in his eyes. He tried hard to mask it, and had been trying for over twelve years, but it was days like this that he wasn’t sure it mattered. But he had to try. Every person here, every person in town, every member of his family looked to him for the answers. They always had.

And now he had nothing to tell them.

With a rough cough, Ken cleared his throat and let his eyes fall down to the stack of papers in front of him. Tests and papers and fundraising carnivals all seemed so useless tonight. Tonight, when an eight year old boy sat somewhere alone, freezing, afraid. If he wasn’t already – Ken stopped himself at the thought. They would find Brian. They had to.

The man sighed and looked up to the room full of parents. “Okay ya know what? How about we call this meeting done and get out and try to find that little boy?”

ANYTHING ELSE?

Ken heads up the PTA. Originally he had taken up the job when his kids were in kindergarten as a way to bond with them and the other parents (and to keep an eye on everyone involved), but he’s found that he loves it more than most of the parents. He runs the meetings with an iron fist, and you best be sure you’re on good behavior if you’re in attendance.

Overzealous with rules, Ken has always been a stickler for things being done the proper way. Even as a kid, he religiously read the rules for every board game, much to the chagrin of his brothers. Eventually, Ken learned he had to be authoritative if he wanted his siblings to play by the rules rather than make them up as they went along. This turned into one of his biggest traits in his adult life, much to his kids’ (mainly Mary’s) dismay.

Ken and Phillip had monthly fishing and camping trips. While he knew Phillip mostly craved the trips as a chance to get away from his family life, Ken never felt the need to be away from Aisha. He would have happily invited her along if Phillip didn’t make it completely clear they were to be “boy’s only” outings. What Ken mostly enjoyed was cracking open a few beers and enjoying the silence of nature, and of course, bonding with his best buddy.

He deeply regrets his infidelity. He was drunk, Aisha and he had bickered, and he wishes with everything he is that he could take it back. Not only is he madly in love with his wife, Phillip was his best friend. It’s the one regret he has in life, and while he’s ordinarily a very stand up guy, this is one secret he would take to the grave. He can’t even imagine how hurt Aisha would be if she ever found out (though plot wise, this would create so much drama I would LOVE for the secret to come out).

Along the lines of being drunk, despite it being a mistake, Ken doesn’t regret the birth of their latest son in the least. Not only has it brought him and Aisha closer together after years of turmoil, but it’s brought life back into Ken. With Mike and Mary grown and having lives of their own, Ken feels needed by his family again in a real way.

With the kidnapping of the Goode boy, Ken is more overprotective than ever before, even going so far as to reach out to his twins on a daily – if not hourly – basis. He’s terrified of history repeating itself and doesn’t know what he would do if one of his own children was taken.

Sees himself as unshakable and unbreakable, or at least he tries to be. Since Phillip’s passing, Ken is finding it harder and harder to be the rock for not only his family, but the entire town. There is a part of him that blames himself for Phillip’s death, though he refuses to acknowledge it. Due to this, he’s tried to find solace in a variety of vices, most commonly in gambling.

Ken has a hard time being around Pete. It’s been so long, but every time he looks at the kid all he sees is his father and all the birthday parties, all the father’s days, all the Christmases that were stolen from them.

[daddyconfessions]

daddy’s journal: 1/26/19

Saturday January 26, 2019

6-bars text and said she was on her way. She should have been in the hotel already, in the elevator on her way up, pulling into the parking at least, not leaving the house.

Sugarbabies stay being late.

After 30 min ordinarily I’d just cancel. I had spent too much on the hotel tho 😂😂. That and the moscator I was sipping had me lit. I had the curtains wide open.....dark skies and bright city lights from nearby buildings shown in.

I’d met 6-bars about 3 months prior. I had been attracted to her SA profile because one side of her head was shaved off. The other side was a full head of weave that fell well past her breast. Her look intrigued me. Refreshing. SA was marred with half the girls being wanna-be  Kylie Jenner, Kim K., over done eyebrow ass chicks. The other half quiet frankly should even been on SA. Any chick with a wett kitty and some decent head game was trying to sell pussy these days. But I digress.

Our first meet she let me pick her up from her apartment and take her to the hotel. Prior to that we hadn’t discussed money or nothing. She brought the weed too and we smoked while we fucked and got to know each other.

6-bars was new to hoeing. Far from the glam chick I’m used to. She was an aspiring rapper. Soundcloud. She played a few tracks for me while we chilled  tho Migos, City Girls, Post Malone would have been preferred. Instead I suffered through her squeaky voice and weak vernacular as I beat the kitty up. She wasn’t going to be winning any grammy’s soon.

The temptation to just drop her off, give her nothing and never call her again was almost irresistible. Like taking candy from a kid. I knew the sugar gods were watching me and would demand recompense if I didn’t act right. So I ran her a few hundred. Her face lit up like a Christmas tree..She hadn’t expected anything. After that day we had a pretty good little situation for the next 6 weeks. Talked everyday, fucked twice or more a week - sometimes for free.

One day I was driving her to work and asked her to spit some bars. She tried it. Really she did. She was only able to get out a few rhymes before she got stuck.

Fuck it.

I’ll call her 6-bars because she ain’t hit nowhere near 16.

After 6 weeks of bliss she went all hoe on me. Suddenly we could only be together an hour. No head. No kissing. All the latter was extra. She had moved too and now I couldn’t come pick her up. I had to meet her somewhere to get her.

Pimp’s say how you start with a chick is how you end….but you can’t prove that by me. Sugar chicks highly unpredictable. Ain’t a chick out here selling pussy that don’t change up on a trick. How you start is not how you always end...so I gave it an extra week or two before I cut her off.

Surprisingly she blew me up…had that smoke in my messages. I told her I wasn’t interested and when she asked why I told her she wasn’t spending enough time as well as the other intimacy items she’d stopped doing. She said she was ok with doing everything I wanted...for 4 times the amount we had started out with.

Forgive her sugar gods for she know not what she do.

I kept her on curve. She’d likely met some blokes that was giving her big $$$. Probably put her on a pedestal....blew her head up. Gave her confidence. And….like most chicks….she thought she was the best thing that ever happened to me.  She had no idea I was fucking some of the finest bitches out chea. And...well....I was tired of fucking her.

So a month or more went by. She still kept on texting during that time and finally I’d given in after she’d sent a few naughty videos of her playing with her kitty. Fast forward 3 months and I was here now, chilling in the hotel sipping Moscato. I was sure my absence had got her mind right. Half the bottle was gone when she eventually knocked at the door.

6-bars had gone with a full head of weave and dumped the side shaved head. She was a little thicker too. 6-bars was about 5”6, thin, cute face, full lips, nice big natural titties. Her bootie was kinda on her back and made her look a little funny to me. Still I liked her and hated she’d gone all hoe on me.

We talked a bit before disrobing. I tried to kiss her but she just gave me a peck. Then I gave her candy kisses all over while I worked my way down to the kitty. I probed in the dim city light until I felt the tiny stubble under my tongue. I licked softly at first. You know. Get her going. Then I begin to thrash the clit  with my tongue, sending jolts of pleasure through her body.  She opened her legs wide to allow my greater access to the sweet muff. She grabbed the back of my head firmly as I dined on that sweet muff.

When it came time to return the favor, she didn’t reciprocate. I see I still had work to do with her. Bartholomew was hard as a rock. I’d popped some vibranium earlier (i.e herbal enhancements) to get him nice and stiff. With 6-bars being thin, I was able to watch as I parted her brown vulvae with Bart and watched him disappear deep inside her. My sense of feeling took over from the ocular and I closed my eyes and began to beat the kitty senseless.

When she would cum she squeezed me tight with her thighs, wrapped her arms around me and pulled me in deeper inside her before she release her hold. We went through this erotic cycle 3 times before I succumbed to the kitty.

I was going to hit it again.....But to my surprise, she jumped up and began dressing. I protested in vain. She said she would stay longer next time. We talked more as she slowly got dressed. She was planning a big release of her next album.

She was excited about it and had planned a release on Valentine day. She was debating to push the release date back. She felt the project wasn’t ready and that maybe she wanted to do two more tracks. I listened intently, trying not to imagine her whiny voice flowing over some dope track. Even offered some heart felt comments.

It was all bullshit though. Really I just wanted some more pussy. The only music I was concerned about was the sounds of our bodies slapping together for another several minutes which was being denied to me.

She gave me some kisses goodbye and after she gone I was back on my fuck shit. I wouldn’t bother her. I was prepared to spend more. Honestly I was. But I couldn’t give this chick more than I was giving Slim or Lake and the some of other chicks I was fucking. They looked way better.

[i-am-boreddd]

I’m Here For You

Read on ao3

summary: Phil sneaks out every day to see his boyfriend, Dan. What happens when Dan is found stuck in the hospital from trying to commit suicide?

word count: 4.2k

warnings: mentions of depression, panic attacks, suicide

-

Saturday, 1:49 AM

It's been almost eight months since they started dating. They hadn't told anyone though. They had decided to keep their relationship a secret, something only the two of them could enjoy and cherish for however long it lasted, without any of their friends interfering. Or at least that's what they told themselves to avoid the truth behind that decision. They both knew that if they told their parents about them they would get anything but acceptance.

Even though we live in the modern world where a relationship between two people of the same gender would be acceptable, Dan's parents were still stuck several decades of human evolution behind. They were one of those old-school parents who had their son's entire life planned out since the day he was born. Get good grades, go to a good college, marry a suitable woman, have a kid or two. The chance that he might actually not want to follow that plan was out of the question. But to be fair, Dan never really stood up for himself.

Since they started dating, there were several moments when Phil tried to persuade Dan to talk to his parents. Tell them what he wants. But those conversations usually ended up in a fight with Dan claiming that he was pressuring him too much and acted like his parents. So they avoided the subject altogether.

Phil was walking down the street towards Dan's house. Since they couldn't hang out much at school or anywhere public in case anyone got suspicious, Phil snuck into Dan's room at night after Dan's parents had gone to bed. They stayed there talking quietly for hours about everything that could possibly cross their minds until they could see sunlight entering the room through the window, which was the cue for Phil to leave. Even though it was the last thing he wanted to do.

He kept walking and in the distance, he could see the house coming into view. Ordinarily, at this time, the house would be quiet with all the lights turned off except the one in Dan's room. But as he could see the house more and more clearly things seemed different. Very different. Pretty much every single light in the house was turned on, and instead of the quiet calm that usually surrounded the house, Phil could hear the sirens of a police car and saw an ambulance driving away. The loud sobs of a woman were also audible. What the hell is going on? Phil thought. There were people, probably the neighbors, surrounding the front porch. Phil wanted to go ask someone if they knew what happened but since it was almost 2 AM and he wasn't supposed to be here in the first place he reconsidered.  Instead, he moved closer so he could at least hear if someone mentioned what had happened.

He walked a few steps until he could hear the crowd of people murmuring and hid behind a bush. He was starting to get worried that something really bad had happened and it didn't help that he couldn't see Dan anywhere. Where was he? Did something happen to him? No, he's fine. Don't think like that Phil. He told himself.

The murmuring continued as did the woman's sobs. Then his ears started picking up what some of the people were saying.

"How terrible."

"Truly horrific, I can't imagine how big the shock must have been for them."

"I'm surprised his mother is still standing. If it were my child I wouldn't be able to even walk."

"But how could he do this? Did he not consider his parents at all? Teenagers. Always so selfish."

"From what I know he was raised in a perfectly healthy and happy environment with lovely parents who want the best for him so I see no reason as to why he would want to kill himself."

At that, Phil felt everything around him go silent and his heartbeat increasing. The conversation kept going but his mind tuned it out completely not wanting to hear more. Dan? Suicide?  He felt his throat tightening and suddenly he found it very difficult to breathe. He had to leave, he couldn't stay here any longer. He got up and immediately started running. To where he didn't know. He just wanted to be as far away from that house as possible and maybe be able to breathe again.

After running a couple of miles, he stopped, panting. He looked around and he realised he was somewhere a normal person would consider the middle of nowhere surrounded only by a few trees. But for him, this place was more familiar and welcoming than even his own house. This was the place where he and Dan spent the majority of their time together, besides Dan's room. Here is where they would just lay on the ground, look up at the sky and have the most meaningful conversations. They would talk about the future, the universe and why we exist (which Dan loved talking about), Dan's pressuring parents, Phil's fear of being himself, anything. This was pretty much their safety spot which explains why Phil thought of this place when he wanted to leave.

He sat down on the grassy cool ground, his back against the trunk of a tree and tried to get his thoughts in order. His chest felt heavy and he was still trying to catch his breath, partly from the running but mostly from the thought of Dan committing suicide.

He knew Dan was depressed and that he had panic disorder. Phil had helped him go through many panic attacks which were usually caused by Dan's parents. He either held his hand and helped him focus on one thing, that thing being Phil's blue eyes, or talked to him soothingly on the phone in case he wasn't with him. There were also times when Dan was feeling extremely tired and didn't want to do anything but lie in bed all day. And at times like these, he didn't try to force him to get up or try to cheer him up by telling him a bunch of bad puns and jokes. He just lied there next to him holding him tightly showing him that even though he knew he could never completely understand what was going through Dan's head, he was there for him. And as time passed, Phil noticed that Dan's panic attacks became less and less frequent and he didn't lie in bed feeling tired for no reason as often as he did before. Also, he smiled more, especially around Phil. He seemed...happier. Dan had admitted it himself.

All those memories making their way back to Phil's mind made him feel even worse. Then other thoughts, questions would be a better name, also made their appearance. Why did he do it? When we talked yesterday he seemed fine. Did I do something? Is it my fault? Should I have noticed something was off? Did he plan it or was it an overnight decision? How did he do it? If he was feeling some sort of way why didn't he talk to me? Is even alive right now?

Too much. Everything is too much. There were so many questions and they were all unanswered. He didn't know what to do so he hugged his knees to his chest and started crying. His sobs were so loud that if anyone was within hearing distance they would think someone was being tortured. But thankfully he was all alone. His fingernails dug into the palms of his hands until blood was dripping down on the soil. This continued for hours until there were no more tears and the sun was rising. He should get up. His parents will probably wake up soon and when they look into his room and see that he's not there, his mother is definitely gonna freak out. But he didn't have the energy. He felt like a drained battery. He just wanted to lay on the ground and not move for hours. Is this how Dan felt all those times he didn't want to get up from bed? He wondered.

That's what he was planning to do but then he thought, What if he's alive, in the hospital? That thought alone made him get up and start running again.

~*~

Saturday, 7:32 AM

Dan slowly opened his eyes but instantly regretted it, the bright white light was blinding him. Where am I? Am I dead? Did it work? He blinked multiple times until his eyes had adjusted to the brightness of the room. He looked around him and he realised he was in a hospital room. He sat up straight and pressed his hands down the mattress to make sure this was real and not some weird last moment on earth illusion. He started fiddling with the bed sheets and saw the bandages around his wrists. No, this was real. He was alive and breathing. Although his parents were probably relieved, he couldn't help but feel disappointed. He had failed. He hadn't cut deep enough or his parents found him too soon. Either way, he wasn't supposed to be here, he was done with this world, done with his parents' constant controlling. He realised, that at some point they were gonna come into the room, see that he's awake and start asking him questions. He wasn't ready for that. What was he going to say? How was he supposed to explain to them why he did what he did? They wouldn't understand no matter what he would say. The fight they had yesterday confirmed that. They would make their own assumptions, barely listening to what he was actually saying, and force him to go to therapy afterwards. They had done it before.

His breathing started quickening and his hands formed fists which were clutching the sheets. He could feel that he was on a verge of a panic attack. But this time Phil's soothing voice or blue eyes weren't there to comfort him. Suddenly he realised. Phil. What would he think of him for doing this? Would he call him weak? He probably wouldn't even want to see him or speak to him ever again. He knew Phil, a kind considerate person, was too good for him. Dan was just a burden.

Still unable to breathe properly he laid back down on the bed and turned to his right side, his back facing the door. A few tears rolled down his cheek but he didn't bother to wipe them away. Right now, he would give anything to disappear.

~*~

Friday, 8:14 PM

Dan and his parents were having dinner and it was quiet as usual. The only time someone would talk was when his mother asked his father how work was today. They would also ask him how school was and every time he would give them the same answer, "Good." Which was obviously a lie. It's rare for him to have a school day which is simply good, without anything bad happening. If a day is good in the slightest it's either because he has English with Phil and they get to talk by writing on a notebook which was almost full by now or he got another chance to be around Phil. On a normal day, there would be name calling, a few shoves while he was walking down the corridor and things like that. He was used to all that by now, being called a freak while he was putting his books in his locker had become some sort of a routine for him. There were also bad days when a teacher would ask him a question to which he didn't know the answer because his mind was elsewhere which would lead to him having a panic attack which would then lead to people making fun of him more than usual. So overall school for him - even though his grades were fine and teachers described him as a bright student with a lot of potential - couldn't be described as good.

They kept eating in silence with only the sound of the cutlery against the plate surrounding them until Dan's mother brought up a topic that was very familiar with Dan.

"So, I've been looking at some colleges that I think would be a good choice for you. I can show you later if you want." She would show him whether he wanted or not. There was no point in asking him.

Although, whenever they had this kind of conversation all he wanted to do was tell them that he didn't want to go to college, he knew that would be a bad idea so he simply answered, "Sure."

After a few more minutes of silence, his mother spoke again, "I think you should get out more. You never leave that room of yours unless it's something school related. If you go outside maybe you'll meet some new people or maybe some girls." Dan was starting to get annoyed. He could deal with conversations about his future, he was used to those, but when they started talking about him needing to get out more and meet new people then he would prefer the silence.

"Your mother's right," his father said while still chewing on his bite of meatloaf. "I'm surprised you don't have a girlfriend yet. You're a nice young man."

If only he knew he already was in a relationship. Had been in one for the past eight months, just not with a girl. "I'm just not interested dad."

"You say that now but you'll change your mind. Eventually, you're gonna meet a nice girl, get married and have a family, you'll see." Dan sighed in frustration. Why couldn't he just drop it?

"Maybe I don't want to follow your plan, have you ever thought of that?"

"Honey you're too young to know what you want," his mother said. But if I did want a family I wouldn't be too young, would I?

He was starting to get angry. His grip tightened around his fork and he clenched his teeth trying to remain calm. He should just keep eating and act as if nobody ever spoke but his anger didn't make him think clearly. "That's how it is about everything, huh? I don't like it now but I will in the future. I don't want to study Law now but I will in the future. I don't want a family now but I will in the future. I don't like girls now but I will in the future." He didn't realise what he had said until it was too late. He didn't know what to do so he stared at his parents' confused faces waiting for a reaction.

"Dan, what do you mean?" his mother asked.

At this point, his rage prevented him from caring. He had already said this much so he might as well keep going. "The way you want me to feel about girls...that's how I feel about boys." He saw his father's face turn from confused to shocked to angry.

"So you're a faggot?" He flinched at the word. He never liked it, especially when it was used as an insult.  

"Honey, maybe you're just confused." Out of all the things she could have said she chose the sentence that infuriated Dan even more.

"See? That's what I mean! You're not even listening to me." He realised that his voice had raised a bit and that he had stood up from his chair.

"No, my son can't be a faggot!" his father said, also standing up.

His blood was boiling and for the first time in his life, he wasn't thinking. Things were coming out of his mouth without his control. "Well guess what dad, he is. And he also has a boyfriend. He's not, and never was, this perfect son you thought of."

Nobody said anything for a few seconds and then his mom, who still remained calm unlike his father, said, "Dan, maybe because you've never been with a girl is why you think this way."

"Seriously mom? Even if I had been with a girl and liked it I would still be into dudes. But why am I talking? You're not listening. You don't care about what I say, you only care about controlling my life!" Now he was definitely screaming and he was sure the neighbors could hear him but he couldn't care less at this point.

"Don't you dare talk to your mother like that!" His father said, also yelling. "I want you out of my house." Dan's eyes widened with shock, as did his mother's. She clearly didn't expect that either. "You can stay here for the night but tomorrow morning I want you gone. I won't have a faggot in my own home." With that, his father turned around and left the dining room.

Dan was still trying to grasp in his mind what had just happened. He didn't know what he expected but he definitely didn't think he would be kicked out. He glanced at his mother who was staring down at her plate, which still had food in it, speechless. He waited for a few seconds for her to say something but with silence as her only answer he turned around and headed towards his room. But only after he closed the door behind him did the events of what had actually just occurred dawn on him. He had come out to his parents and instead of approval, he got his mother telling him he was confused and his father calling him a faggot and telling him to be gone in the morning. He shouldn't have said all those things. He shouldn't have talked at all. If he had kept his stupid mouth shut none of this would have happened. What have I done? Where was he supposed to go now? He can't go to Phil's house, this is not his problem to carry.

Millions of thoughts kept rushing through his head. Thoughts that he should've considered before he opened his mouth and blurted out everything. What if people at school found out? They already treat me like shit so what will happen if they find out that I'm also gay? Will no one else, now and in the future, accept me? Why would they? I don't deserve acceptance. It was hard to breathe. What will happen when Phil finds out? He'll think I'm a loser for not standing up for myself more. He sat down on the floor, his back against the door. Why is my life so messed up? Why am I so messed up? Am I overreacting? If I am then why can I not breathe properly like a normal person? Maybe because I'm not a normal person. Everything's too much. I'll never be good enough for anyone. I'm just a basket case. Everyone will be better off without me.

This continued for hours until he couldn't stand the chaos in his head any longer. He glanced at the clock on his bedside table. It was past midnight, his parents probably asleep. Nobody would hear him. He had made his decision. He was too exhausted of this life to continue any longer.

~*~

Saturday, 11:07

Phil was waiting in the hospital's waiting room with a cup of coffee, his fourth one today, in his hand. He had been here for three hours and they still wouldn't let him see Dan. He understood that Dan was probably not in the mood for talking after what happened and his parents would probably want to see him first. But he had only seen his mother, who managed to stop crying, not his father. Phil had called his own parents to tell them that a friend of his was in a car accident so he had to leave. Thankfully, they believed him.

He saw Dan's mother pacing up and down the room looking distressed. He thought that he should probably go up to her and tell her that he's Dan's friend so maybe he could finally go see him.

He got up, still holding his coffee, and walked towards her. "Hello, um, are you Mrs. Howell? Dan's mom? I'm Phil, his friend from school."

"Oh, hello. Dan never mentioned you, but then again I never asked him." She looked sad. Why wouldn't she, her son almost died. But besides sorrow, her face was also filled with regret. As if she wished she had done things differently.

"I'm really sorry about what happened. Have you seen him yet? Do you think I can?" he asked.

"Yes, I talked to him. Didn't go very well. But maybe talking to you, since you're his friend, will make him feel better." she answered. "Come on, I'll show you where his room is."

~*~

Saturday, 11:13

Dan was desperate for a few hours of sleep. But every time he closed his eyes his brain would remind him of the conversation he had with his mother when she came to see him. It's easy to say that it wasn't pleasant, but at least his father wasn't there to make things worse. So he just stared at the ceiling doing nothing.

Then he heard the sound of the door opening and his head shot towards it. It was probably his mother again wanting to ask more questions. He was right, it was his mother but she wasn't alone. He could see the familiar tall figure of a guy with straight black hair. Phil. His eyes widened with surprise and he sat up straight on his bed. His mother said something he tuned out before she left which meant him and Phil were alone. Dan couldn't look him in the eye he was too ashamed, although Phil didn't move his gaze from him.

"Hi," Phil said. Dan didn't answer and stared down his hands, fiddling with the bed sheets. "Can I sit?" he asked.

Dan nodded, "Okay."

Phil sat down on the chair next to the bed which was previously occupied by his mother. Phil kept staring at him but Dan kept avoiding eye contact.

"Can you at least talk to me?"

"What do you want me to say?" What was he supposed to say? He was clueless

"I don't know, something."

He didn't answer.

"Dan, why did you do it?" His eyes were burning but he didn't want to cry in front of Phil so he kept fiddling with the bed sheets. "Did something happen with your parents? I didn't see your dad here," Why would he be here? He stated it perfectly yesterday that he didn't want to have anything to do with him anymore. "Did I do something?"

At that, Dan finally looked at Phil, who surprisingly didn't look angry or disappointed at him. "Of course not! Why would you think that? You did nothing wrong. I'm surprised you even want to see me right now."

"What are you talking about? Why wouldn't I want to see you?"

"Don't you think I'm weak for doing this?" He said, motioning to his bandaged wrists.

"I never thought you were weak, on the contrary, you're one of the strongest people I know," he said with his usual soothing voice. "But would you mind explaining to me what exactly happened so I can understand?"

And Dan told him. About the fight with his parents, about him coming out to them, about his father kicking him out of the house and his mother not saying anything. About everything that had occurred the previous day. Some tears rolled down Dan's cheek but Phil wiped them away with his thumb. And at some point, while he was talking, Phil interlocked his hand with Dan's and squeezed it gently, forcing him to stop fiddling with the sheets.

When he was done, Dan felt a weight lifting from his shoulders. He had said everything and Phil didn't interrupt him once, he just listened and didn't judge him.

"You should've come to me. I've told you before that if something happens I will always be there."

"But it wasn't your problem."

"Hey," Phil gently grabbed Dan's chin making him look at him in the eye. "If it's your problem, it's my problem too, got it?" Dan nodded, his hand still in Phil's grip.

Dan couldn't hold back any longer. He started crying. "I'm sorry." Tears were now flowing down his face without control. He then felt Phil letting go of his hand, sitting on the bed next to him and putting his arms around him, holding him tightly. Dan was clutching onto Phil's shirt and the tears kept coming.

Phil moved his hand up and down Dan's back, comforting him. "It's okay. You're okay now. Things are gonna be fine. Even if they don't seem like it now, they will be I promise. I'm here for you and I won't be going anywhere."

Phil's words made Dan cry even harder. He definitely didn't deserve him. But if Phil wanted to leave he would have done it. Maybe he will in the future but for now, all he cares about is being here with Phil, his arms around him telling him things are gonna be fine.

And for the first time in a while, Dan had hope.

[drscotcheggmann]

Virtual or Reality: Would We Ever Want to Live Out Our Greatest Video Game Adventures?

Imagine the scene. Saturday afternoon. Sun shining. Pitch freshly cut, like a great green carpet. The whistle goes and the ball zips across its surface as the early game passing gets going, the players probing and always looking to open up space. Then a midfielder suddenly cuts inside with a sudden burst of pace, leaving his defender for dead. He spreads the play out to the wing, the ball is fizzed into the box and the forward, having peeled off his marker, jumps into the air primed to strike. Not a header but an exquisite back heel mid air which catches the keeper off guard and soars into the roof of the net. The scorer wheels away towards the crowd, fists pumping and lapping it all up. The stadium is rocking. This is a true story. It actually happened. I scored that goal. Well, at least my team of 11 pixelated footballers controlled by my dexterous thumbs scored it during a recent session of Pro Evolution Soccer. Could I score a goal like that in reality? I'd have to be picked for the team first. My High School football coach's words of 'Can you not even pass the ball, son?' are still ringing in my ears. But while I'm not the best footballer in actual reality, I am in an alternate reality. A fucking good one too. Suck those eggs, Mr Skimin! The fact is that I play Pro Evolution Soccer because I have no hope of doing half the things in real life that I can do on a virtual pitch. It's for this exact reason that we often like to immerse ourselves in virtual worlds. Not only is there an element of escapism at play as we try to briefly divert our attention from the stresses or monotony of everyday life. But also in video games we can often experience and accomplish things which we would ordinarily not be able to do. But a wider question is whether we would actually want to do some of the things we enjoy in video games in real life. It's very easy to say yes. Of course, scoring flamboyant goals as a top footballer week in week out, left foot, right foot, headers, free kicks, cheeky dinks over the keeper, showboating around defenders, playing to the crowd and all for £200k+ per week. If you enjoyed it and were damn good at it, who wouldn't want to do that? But not all jobs nor all video games involve skilfully hitting balls into nets. Video games often put us in precarious and not altogether appealing positions and so if given the choice in real life, would we really want to participate in some of the activities that video games are so good at entertaining us with? Imagine this for example: You get up each morning and pull on your dungarees, shiny black shoes and don your monogrammed cap. You feel underused and under appreciated as even though you're fully qualified to fix pipes and stop leaks, your day job consists of smashing boxes, sometimes boxes that are not easy to reach too and boxes which sometimes have something wonderful inside or sometimes are just plain empty. Everything requires precise jumping and timing. Have you ever tried to jump any distance in dungarees by the way? Hardly the most practical wear for intense physical activity! Luckily there are costume changes, some of them cool, some helpful in getting the job done, some plain humiliating. But at least gloves come as standard to protect against the blisters popping up from repeated box smashing. Then there are the fireballs, spikes, critters and gaping holes, all common hazards in this line of work. And of course there's the reason you're doing all of this in the first place: the princess who just won't stay saved. But you go about your work always with a smile on your face and that irrepressible sense of optimism, even though you know you're doomed to repeat this existence in various forms from now until the end of time. Ok, this is an overblown and ridiculous example as there isn't anything quite like this in real life. The reason we play this particular game (it was Mario, by the way) isn't because we want to be able to do what Mario does in our own lives. Despite the obstacles, dangers and pitfalls, Mario is escapism in its simplest form: fun! Danger often begets fun in video games, no matter how serious that danger may be: a Goomba slowly dancing its way towards you or an axe wielding demon hoping to mash you to bloody pulp. Danger is a huge factor in what makes video games challenging and exciting. But imagine experiencing the danger of a video game scenario that would be entirely plausible and just as dangerous were it to play out in real life.... Imagine this one: You are a highly skilled US government special forces agent. You have been tasked with infiltrating a high security nuclear weapons development facility in the most remote part of Alaska that has been seized by a band of international terrorists. Before we go on, a few things. Well, no actually you're not a highly skilled US government special forces agent. Solid Snake is a highly skilled US government special forces agent. You're just pretending to be one. Heaven knows why the US military big wigs asked you to do this. That's what happens when you post a few Metal Gear Solid gameplay videos on YouTube. Ok, so you managed to make it through to the first boss without getting spotted once. And then didn't get hit at all by Revolver Ocelot. And then boasted about it online. To the world. And someone high up in the military, the ACTUAL fucking military caught wind of it all and thought 'Let's get him on board for the next big one! He looks like he knows what he's doing...' But it's fine because you recently did a speed run of Metal Gear Solid, found all the best weapons and made it out with only some light scratches and a few third degree incendiary burns so you're sure it'll be the same if not better for real. Anyway, the government doesn't actually send people in solo. That's just in movies and video games. Right? Oh, they do send in solo agents. Fuck. Right, ok. As the door of the helicopter slides open, fighting against the strength of the blizzard winds, you step off the helicopter, the snow swirling around you. Your feet hit the powder with a crunch. Dense pine forest surrounds you. The facility is 2 miles to the North. Fuck sake, they could've parked closer. And to add insult to injury, you haven't even packed a hat, scarf and gloves. You look in the bag you were handed by a member of the support team before touching down. This is your bag. Not anything military issue. Bound to be something useful in here. Bottle of water (that's now fucking frozen), an egg and onion sandwich (to knock out the dogs), toilet roll (I don't remember Solid Snake ever needing the toilet), the Metal Gear Solid strategy guide and a t shirt (a fucking t shirt in this weather) with 'I love Metal Gear Solid' emblazoned across the front. Suddenly a telephone starts to ring. The whole thing could be over before if it's begun if you don't stop that phone ringing! Then you realise. It's not a phone. The ringing is in your head. Your ear. You put your index finger to your ear like you've seen Snake do before. Wrong ear. You try the other one and a stony voice crackles before becoming clear. 'Colonel?' 'Colonel? Who said I was a colonel? Just listen Snake.' 'Snake?' 'No, we can't call you that. Can't risk a lawsuit from Konami and Kojima. They're both fond of that sort of thing. Wait, we'll call you....Drake. Wait no, that's been done too.' 'Fake?' 'That'll do. Ok, Fake. Listen. Your espionage skills are renowned the internet over. So this should be like a training exercise for you. Good luck. Let me be clear though, Fake. If you are found and intercepted, the US government will deny any knowledge of your existence. Keep the t shirt close to hand. If you are caught, hopefully they will suspect you as nothing more than a giddy stealth action fanboy rather than a highly lethal government weapon. But I'm forgetting who I'm talking to. We've seen the speed runs. Those terrorists won't know what's hit them! And if you die in combat, well, you die. Game over, no continues. This is not a game. This is the best game of all: life. Now go shoot some terrorists! Out!' You begin to walk. The first steps of a two mile hike to the objective. About an hour later, as you break the trees and approach the link fence, you're suddenly aware that your feet are soaked through, calfs burning and blisters pressing against the soles of your shoes. A deer moves out of a clearing toward the fence, suspiciously eying what is beyond. You can see human shapes, black against the fading light moving across a dimly lit helipad, their patrol paths crossing with seeming regularity. A brief flick of a flashlight attached to an automatic weapon as the patrolling guard turns and retraces his steps. That man has a gun, a real fucking gun. That actually shoots. With bullets. Maybe it's not real. Maybe they're just decoys. A money saving measure in these tough economic times. But you've never seen that in a video game before. Unlikely. But what you have seen countless times is how to breech a perimeter fence. There's usually a conveniently placed hole, drain or ventilation duct somewhere close by. Or some footholds conveniently highlighted by a different coloured paint that stands out from the rest of your surroundings. As if they wanted you to find them. But there's nothing. There must be some mistake. Do all of these terrorists not know that you're here to take down their facility? You'd think they would make it easy for you. As you contemplate your next move, you spot the deer again. On the other side of the link fence. Fucking Bambi is better at this than you! You retreat to the safety of the trees, hugging their edge, until a guard post with a manually operated barrier appears in the middle distance, marking an entrance into the facility. Quick, your binoculars. But you haven't packed binoculars. You reassure yourself that there will likely be some lying around in a spot just when you're about to enter a new area in which you'll need to see really really far. This isn't really really far just yet so you decide to get a bit closer. It looks like it's unmanned, for the moment. You reach the window. An oil lamp burns on a desk covered in various paperwork and a clipboard. A mug of fresh coffee stands steaming on the cluttered surface, having made a ring stain on a document marked 'Classified'. Maybe you should take this though. Files like this are always left lying around in plain sight in video games. You thrust it into your bag without pausing to read. You look around, your brain starting to whirr into gear. There's bound to be some sort of weapon in here too or a map of the whole area. Ah ha! (Did Snake ever say Ah ha?) There's the map, pinned to the back wall. Covering the whole of the back wall. No one will notice that's missing! As you unpin it, you can't help but wish you'd paid more attention during ordinance survey lessons in High School geography. The map unpinned, the next challenge is: how the fuck do you fold it neatly so that it fits in your bag? You frantically try one way; it doesn't fold neatly. Another way; no luck. Yet another way. 'Fold you mappy piece of shit, fold!' Did you say that out loud? Or are the approaching footsteps you now hear thanks to your excessive map rustling? Snake never shows any shame in hiding and it's about time that this whole scenario started to follow the Metal Gear Solid playbook! What would Snake do? Snake would be smoking a cigarette with one hand and tapping walls to the tune of William Tell with the other, sending guards running in circles. You're not quite there yet. 'Look around! Think outside the box......BOX! You spot a sturdy looking cardboard box with some unrecognisable script block printed on the side. 'Fuck outside the box, I wanna get in the box!' The box is sitting next to five or six others, all sealed with thick tape. Either prepared to be shipped out or not yet unpacked. Your box though.....is empty. You quickly climb in. Snake uses the box to move unseen. But you just want to stay unseen. You close the flaps of the box over your head the best you can and wait. The footsteps draw closer. At the door. At the desk. Feet away. A handheld radio crackles into life, the guard confirms all is clear and clips it back into his belt. A diesel engine rumbles into earshot, brakes squeak and a heavy door slams shut. Your heart is racing and just about jumps into your mouth as the guard's foot slams into the side of your box. You can hear boxes above and beside you being shifted. There is someone else in the room. Heaving breathing and panting as boxes are lifted, passed out the door and dumped onto the back of the diesel vehicle with a thud. Then the last chinks of light are extinguished as the cardboard flaps are sealed shut above your head, the squeak and tear of the tape muffled behind the cardboard and then you feel yourself rising. The guard swears at the weight of the box and laughs as his mate's knees buckle slightly under your weight as he hands you over. He steadies himself and you are dumped onto a hard metal surface. The engine purrs into life again and you begin to move. 'This is a result!' you think to yourself. You've seen Snake do this before. A clever ploy to get to the heart of the facility without snapping a single neck (or your ankle). But want you didn't realise was that written across the box, in strange lettering was the word "Владивосток" - Vladivostok. You hear the drone of a jet engine. You are lifted and dumped one last time. Heavy doors closing as you feel the weight of the earth vanish beneath you. Oh well, this certainly never happened to Snake before but every cloud, and all that. A new life in remotest Russia, learn the language, live off the land, settle down. All you can do is begin to sob in the darkness of your box as you rue the day you ever posted those cocky playthrough videos online. I'll stop there. You get the point (even if I have taken a few poetic liberties here and there). I reckon if you did try a Metal Gear Solid type scenario like this, it wouldn't be quite as bad as I have painted it. You'd probably be dead before making it to the fence. Quick and painless at least. Still not as far as the deer though. But while I jest, loss of life is actually nothing to take lightly, even if it is only pixels we're talking about. I know people who struggle to play particular games as they feel they are often forced into scenarios where they have to kill people and feel that they would quite simply rather not. I admit the first time I loaded up Battlefield 1 multiplayer, I did wonder if we should be finding any sort of entertainment in a virtual depiction of the most bloody war in history. Whether I should be pleased to have just bludgeoned this mass of pixels in front of me to death with a spiked club or run ReBeLwARrIoR888 through with a bayonet to the sounds of bloodcurdling virtual screams. And I'm sure others felt the same. For these people, their respect for human life in reality cannot be easily separated from their feelings towards virtual beings. And I applaud them for it. The pacifist's path, with the use of sleep rendering choke holds and tranquilliser darts, has become a more prevalent one in games like Metal Gear Solid and Deus Ex. But games have not always been so open to cater to all tastes. Perhaps the most shocking and memorable example of this was the very short mission 'No Russian' in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, in which the player is seemingly forced into partaking in a terrorist attack on an airport filled with civilians. Although the game makes you think you have to walk on the predetermined path through the departures lounge gunning down everything that moves, you actually don't need to fire a single bullet to finish the level. But that is never made clear. I admit, I started shooting as I thought that by not shooting, I would not be allowed to progress. When the smoke had settled and the blood has stopped flowing, I honestly felt sick at what had just happened. The controversy this level provoked prompted a patch whereby the level could be skipped, which was at least something. But by telling players that 'the following level contains disturbing material' and then asking if they want to play it or skip, I'm sure the curious side of human nature got the better of many. Me for one. There have been many and will be many more times I pick up a gun in a video game but never have I wanted to put one down quicker than after that. I'm not often forced into feeling like this for pixels but it was precisely because this very thing could occur in real life (and has, coming from Northern Ireland where the country is only just emerging from the bloody legacy of terrorism) that I felt so sick. And if anything, society is now much more acutely aware of the threat of terrorism than ever before; as I write this, Manchester is trying to pick itself up from a suicide attack on a pop concert, claiming the lives of children. Children! And as a man with children now myself, I now view senseless video game violence and real world atrocities very differently than I once did. Whereas before I would've just opened fire on anything and everything (since it's just a video game, after all) and would've been just as appalled by an attack like Manchester as I am now, I now see things like this, be they virtual or real, and think 'what if my boy was ever caught up in something like this?' I wouldn't say my parent chip impedes my enjoyment of video games and or how I go about everyday life but it does make me think. It's for this very reason that I still can't bring myself to play 'That Dragon Cancer'. I know I should, just to on some level feel what those poor parents went through but I just can't. Maybe one day. A question lingers: How would I view this Call of Duty mission had I played it for the first time today? I think had this Call of Duty mission been released today, well.... perhaps thanks to the very fucked up world we live in, it maybe wouldn't have been released today. This Call of Duty level remains the biggest example of something that, it goes without saying, I would never want to experience in real life, at either end of the gun but conversely something which I had absolutely no taste then nor have any taste now for experiencing in a video game either. So far there have been a lot of examples of video game experiences that we would not want to live first hand. But are there any that we really would? Well, although the world seems to be becoming an increasingly intimidating and gloomy place, the release of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has puffed new life into me. It has made me reevaluate my perceptions of how beautiful the world and everything in it really is. Setting out with the greatest sense of wanderlust imaginable, cooking in the outdoors, living off the land, running through tall grass that parts as you go, getting caught in rainstorms, watching the sun rise and fall on the horizon, climbing hills, standing atop a mountain and gazing in every direction as far as the eye can see. These are all things that I hate the thought of....in reality, not being the most outdoorsy type. Or certainly did until I dived into Zelda. A game in which spending two hours doing very little except cook a few meals, discover two new species of fish and wrangle a wild horse feels like a triumph. Now I might actually consider spending the weekend walking up a hill and stopping for lunch under a tree rather than traipsing around a retail park before diving into McDonalds for a Big Value Meal. There's so much life in Zelda and so many possibilities, much like, well... life itself. Even the box art hints at the treasures that lie within: Link standing on a plateau, the world sprawled in front of him. He's looking over his shoulder at you as if to say 'Are you coming?' And it doesn't stop there; the inside cover depicts Link scaling a sheer cliff face, moving ever upwards. The sky really is the limit with this game. And while I admit that from time to time I do worry about the state of the world my boy will be growing up in, I am also wholeheartedly looking forward to introducing him to the world of video games. My wife is not so thrilled at the prospect though. I think she has visions of me trying to teach a six year old how to escape a six star wanted level in Grand Theft Auto or how to aim the sniper scope slightly above a target's head to account for bullet dip. But while Zelda is pure to its core, there is violence and danger: battling Bobokins with swords, pikes, axes, twanging bowstrings, setting things on fire and triggering explosions. But really is this violence? Come on now. Even the combat in Zelda is pure, good and true: no blood, no dismemberment; there is as much threat in the combat as a child running around in the back garden swinging a plastic sword. It's just honest, swashbuckling action with enemies disappearing in a puff of smoke. No looting dead bodies for items; items drop and their retrieval is greeted with a fanfare. You can't help but smile. And this is exactly what I hope I will be doing as I watch my son get lost in Zelda's world of endless possibilities for the very first time. Witnessing the pure joy on his face. But if the joy of virtual nature has its effect I sincerely hope my son and I will make it out the front door too, put the controller down and live some of Link's adventures: be it a walk in the woods one day, a hike up a hill, cooking a skewer over an open fire or running around slashing at imaginary Moblins. This is something I would most definitely want to live and all born on the back of a video game. I sincerely hope that we see more of this. Developers giving us experiences that give us a sense of achievement and fulfilment to such an extent that it gets us out into the world to chase similar experiences for real. I may never become a Premiership footballer, infiltrate a terrorist base or go over the top on the front lines. I've never been more ok with anything in my life than I have with that. But I can cook a sausage and climb a hill. And will look forward to doing so with my boy and whoever else wants to join. Virtual and real worlds are not so far removed as we might think: both are best enjoyed with others. So who's coming? God bless you, Zelda!

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Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’

Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’ Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’ http://www.nature-business.com/business-among-the-ruins-of-mexico-beach-stands-one-house-built-for-the-big-one/

Business ImageThe elevated house that the owners call the Sand Palace, on 36th Street in Mexico Beach, Fla., came through Hurricane Michael almost unscathed.CreditCreditJohnny Milano for The New York TimesMEXICO BEACH, Fla. — As they built their dream house last year on the shimmering sands of the Gulf of Mexico, Russell King and his nephew, Dr. Lebron Lackey, painstakingly documented every detail of the elevated construction, from the 40-foot pilings buried into the ground to the types of screws drilled into the walls. They picked gleaming paints from a palette of shore colors, chose salt-tolerant species to plant in the beach dunes and christened their creation the Sand Palace of Mexico Beach.They also installed an outdoor security camera. Its video footage became the only view of their property as Hurricane Michael thundered ashore last week, the most intense storm recorded in the history of the Florida Panhandle.The camera showed a horrifying tunnel of gray fury worsening by the hour as Dr. Lackey, a 54-year-old radiologist, stared helplessly from more than 400 miles away at the corner of his roof.“It would buck like an airplane wing,” he said from his residence in Cleveland, Tenn. “I kept expecting to see it tear off.”But it didn’t. When The New York Times published an analysis of aerial images showing a mile-long stretch of Mexico Beach where at least three-quarters of the buildings were damaged, Dr. Lackey saw his sand palace still standing, majestic amid the apocalyptic wreckage, the last surviving beachfront house on his block.“We wanted to build it for the big one,” he said. “We just never knew we’d find the big one so fast.”The story of how the sand palace made it through Michael while most of its neighbors collapsed is one about building in hurricane-prone Florida, and how construction regulations failed to imagine the Category 4 monster’s catastrophic destruction.Florida’s building code, put into effect in 2002, is famously stringent when it comes to windstorm resistance for homes built along the hurricane-prone Atlantic shoreline. But it is less so for structures along the Panhandle, a region historically unaffected by storms as strong as the ones that have slammed into South Florida.After Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 beast, ravaged Miami-Dade County in 1992, new construction in the southern portion of the state was required to withstand 175-mile-an-hour winds. In the coastal Panhandle counties affected by Michael, the requirement is lower, for 120 to 150 miles an hour, and the rules for certain kinds of reinforcement have applied to houses built more than a mile from shore only since 2007. Many of the residences and businesses rubbed out by Michael in Mexico Beach were far older; rebuilding them to conform to the new code will be expensive, and could price out some of the working-class people who historically have flocked to Mexico Beach.Mr. King wouldn’t say how much it cost to fortify his beachside home, which public records show has been assessed for tax purposes at a value of $400,000. One estimate in Forbes in 2012 put the cost at more than $30,000 to implement an array of hurricane-proofing measures that include some of those advised by the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety.ImageThe house, built of reinforced concrete, is elevated on tall pilings to allow a storm surge to pass underneath with little damage. Dell Medford, left, helped Russell King, one of the owners, clear away debris and inspect the house.CreditJohnny Milano for The New York Times“Every time something like this happens, you have to say to yourself, ‘Is there something we can do better?’” Gov. Rick Scott told reporters, as public officials were called upon once again to examine the state’s building standards.“When I saw this hurricane’s wind speeds, I knew: You could only hope there would not be too many fatalities,” said Charlie Danger, a retired Miami-Dade building chief who crusaded for stricter windstorm codes. “It pays to rebuild structures that withstand something like that. You minimize the loss of life — and the loss of infrastructure. If you lose the infrastructure, you lose everything.”Dr. Lackey said he and Mr. King, who jointly own the Mexico Beach house, did not even refer to the minimum wind resistance required in Bay County. They built the sand palace to withstand 250 mile-an-hour winds.The house was fashioned from poured concrete, reinforced by steel cables and rebar, with additional concrete bolstering the corners of the house. The space under the roof was minimized so that wind could not sneak in underneath and lift it off. The home’s elevation, on high pilings, was meant to keep it above the surge of seawater that usually accompanies powerful hurricanes.“We’re thinking that we need to build a house that would survive for generations,” Dr. Lackey said.“I believe the planet’s getting warmer and the storms are getting stronger,” said Mr. King, 68, an attorney. “We didn’t used to have storms like this. So people who live on the coast have to be ready for it.”Though the family had the relief of knowing their house, which they rent out when they are not using it themselves for vacations, had remained standing, Mr. King needed to see for himself what damage the hurricane had done. He left Tennessee at 4 a.m. Saturday and drove his dark blue Ford F-150 pickup south for more than seven hours — far longer than the trip would ordinarily take, because of closed roads and recovery-crew gridlock — to reach his property at the end of 36th Street.The siding that had wrapped around a stairway providing access to the elevated house was gone, and so were the stairs. But that was by design: The family’s architect used breakaway walls that would tear free without ripping off any more of the structure. Now there was just a gaping hole and part of a handrail, leaving the five-bedroom, five-bathroom house accessible only by ladder.Up climbed Mr. King, awed by the fact that the structure had otherwise suffered only a little water damage and one cracked shower window. Even their in-home elevator appeared untouched.“We can clean this up in a month,” he said. “But other folks, I don’t know. Look at what these people suffered.”The duplexes next door were wiped out. Three homes across the street were leveled down to concrete slabs. A fourth house, standing but with much of the roof and some walls caved in, was being searched by a rescue team; two renters were unaccounted for, according to Mr. King. That house, too, he said, had been built with hurricanes in mind.“It was supposed to be a fortress like this,” Mr. King said, staring in disbelief.He said he previously owned a house on 42nd Street that still had watermarks in it from Hurricane Opal, the 1995 storm that until a few days ago had been a local benchmark for powerful cyclones. From his deck, Mr. King pointed: “It was down there, and it’s gone.”ImageThe house was designed to withstand much stronger winds than state building codes require in the Florida Panhandle.CreditJohnny Milano for The New York Times“That’s the famous Mexico Beach pier,” he added, nodding toward a few decapitated wood pilings sticking out of the water.Up 36th Street, north of U.S. Highway 98, the main drag, more small houses had survived the wind but were gutted by the water, even though they were several blocks inland from the beach. John Hamilton spent a weekend afternoon shoveling dark muck out of the house belonging to his sister-in-law, Sandra Richards, and her husband, Jeff Richards, who live in Eufaula, Ala., but have vacationed in Mexico Beach for decades.Paper towels in the highest kitchen cabinets were soaked. Fans on the ceiling, more than eight feet up, were caked in mud.“I can’t believe I’m not just crying my eyes out,” Ms. Richards said as her sister, Laura Hamilton, used a broken piece of door as a dustpan. “It’s incomprehensible.”Mr. Richards noted that the couple built the house with hurricane-resistant windows in 2004, after the new statewide code went into effect. “Look at the windows: They’re all here,” he said. “If the doors had held, we probably would have been all right.”“All those Mexico Beach houses that were built in the 1970s, they’re gone,” Ms. Richards said.Dr. Lackey said much of the small town’s charm came from its older houses and relative lack of overdevelopment, compared with bigger tourist destinations further west along the coast. Over the Fourth of July holiday, which Mexico Beach celebrated with fireworks at the pier, Dr. Lackey’s 5-year-old son, Keaton, learned how to snorkel off the beach in front of the house.“There was a Subway — that was the one franchise eatery in town,” he said. “There was no traffic lights. It was nicknamed ‘Mayberry by the Sea.’”Mr. King said he assumed Michael would spare the town, as other hurricanes had done.“I said, ‘It’ll veer off. They always do. They go to Cancun or someplace,’” he said.As the storm took aim, though, their most recent renters brought the patio furniture indoors and oversaw a specialist hired by Dr. Lackey and Mr. King to seal the doors the day before landfall — the sort of measure Dr. Lackey readily acknowledges may be unaffordable for most people during an emergency. The renters ate at a beloved local seafood restaurant, Toucan’s, and then evacuated from town.“They were probably the last people to eat there,” Dr. Lackey said of Toucan’s, which did not survive.A few days after the storm, the inside of the sand palace, immaculately decorated, remained surprisingly cool, a feature of its concrete walls. Mr. King said he hoped recovery crews from the Federal Emergency Management Agency could benefit from using their standing structure.“If FEMA wants the house, they can have it for a few weeks,” he said. “I’m not going to complain about nothing.” Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/14/us/hurricane-michael-florida-mexico-beach-house.html |

Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’, in 2018-10-14 22:42:33

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Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’

Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’ Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’ https://ift.tt/2q0lEYB

Business ImageThe elevated house that the owners call the Sand Palace, on 36th Street in Mexico Beach, Fla., came through Hurricane Michael almost unscathed.CreditCreditJohnny Milano for The New York TimesMEXICO BEACH, Fla. — As they built their dream house last year on the shimmering sands of the Gulf of Mexico, Russell King and his nephew, Dr. Lebron Lackey, painstakingly documented every detail of the elevated construction, from the 40-foot pilings buried into the ground to the types of screws drilled into the walls. They picked gleaming paints from a palette of shore colors, chose salt-tolerant species to plant in the beach dunes and christened their creation the Sand Palace of Mexico Beach.They also installed an outdoor security camera. Its video footage became the only view of their property as Hurricane Michael thundered ashore last week, the most intense storm recorded in the history of the Florida Panhandle.The camera showed a horrifying tunnel of gray fury worsening by the hour as Dr. Lackey, a 54-year-old radiologist, stared helplessly from more than 400 miles away at the corner of his roof.“It would buck like an airplane wing,” he said from his residence in Cleveland, Tenn. “I kept expecting to see it tear off.”But it didn’t. When The New York Times published an analysis of aerial images showing a mile-long stretch of Mexico Beach where at least three-quarters of the buildings were damaged, Dr. Lackey saw his sand palace still standing, majestic amid the apocalyptic wreckage, the last surviving beachfront house on his block.“We wanted to build it for the big one,” he said. “We just never knew we’d find the big one so fast.”The story of how the sand palace made it through Michael while most of its neighbors collapsed is one about building in hurricane-prone Florida, and how construction regulations failed to imagine the Category 4 monster’s catastrophic destruction.Florida’s building code, put into effect in 2002, is famously stringent when it comes to windstorm resistance for homes built along the hurricane-prone Atlantic shoreline. But it is less so for structures along the Panhandle, a region historically unaffected by storms as strong as the ones that have slammed into South Florida.After Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 beast, ravaged Miami-Dade County in 1992, new construction in the southern portion of the state was required to withstand 175-mile-an-hour winds. In the coastal Panhandle counties affected by Michael, the requirement is lower, for 120 to 150 miles an hour, and the rules for certain kinds of reinforcement have applied to houses built more than a mile from shore only since 2007. Many of the residences and businesses rubbed out by Michael in Mexico Beach were far older; rebuilding them to conform to the new code will be expensive, and could price out some of the working-class people who historically have flocked to Mexico Beach.Mr. King wouldn’t say how much it cost to fortify his beachside home, which public records show has been assessed for tax purposes at a value of $400,000. One estimate in Forbes in 2012 put the cost at more than $30,000 to implement an array of hurricane-proofing measures that include some of those advised by the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety.ImageThe house, built of reinforced concrete, is elevated on tall pilings to allow a storm surge to pass underneath with little damage. Dell Medford, left, helped Russell King, one of the owners, clear away debris and inspect the house.CreditJohnny Milano for The New York Times“Every time something like this happens, you have to say to yourself, ‘Is there something we can do better?’” Gov. Rick Scott told reporters, as public officials were called upon once again to examine the state’s building standards.“When I saw this hurricane’s wind speeds, I knew: You could only hope there would not be too many fatalities,” said Charlie Danger, a retired Miami-Dade building chief who crusaded for stricter windstorm codes. “It pays to rebuild structures that withstand something like that. You minimize the loss of life — and the loss of infrastructure. If you lose the infrastructure, you lose everything.”Dr. Lackey said he and Mr. King, who jointly own the Mexico Beach house, did not even refer to the minimum wind resistance required in Bay County. They built the sand palace to withstand 250 mile-an-hour winds.The house was fashioned from poured concrete, reinforced by steel cables and rebar, with additional concrete bolstering the corners of the house. The space under the roof was minimized so that wind could not sneak in underneath and lift it off. The home’s elevation, on high pilings, was meant to keep it above the surge of seawater that usually accompanies powerful hurricanes.“We’re thinking that we need to build a house that would survive for generations,” Dr. Lackey said.“I believe the planet’s getting warmer and the storms are getting stronger,” said Mr. King, 68, an attorney. “We didn’t used to have storms like this. So people who live on the coast have to be ready for it.”Though the family had the relief of knowing their house, which they rent out when they are not using it themselves for vacations, had remained standing, Mr. King needed to see for himself what damage the hurricane had done. He left Tennessee at 4 a.m. Saturday and drove his dark blue Ford F-150 pickup south for more than seven hours — far longer than the trip would ordinarily take, because of closed roads and recovery-crew gridlock — to reach his property at the end of 36th Street.The siding that had wrapped around a stairway providing access to the elevated house was gone, and so were the stairs. But that was by design: The family’s architect used breakaway walls that would tear free without ripping off any more of the structure. Now there was just a gaping hole and part of a handrail, leaving the five-bedroom, five-bathroom house accessible only by ladder.Up climbed Mr. King, awed by the fact that the structure had otherwise suffered only a little water damage and one cracked shower window. Even their in-home elevator appeared untouched.“We can clean this up in a month,” he said. “But other folks, I don’t know. Look at what these people suffered.”The duplexes next door were wiped out. Three homes across the street were leveled down to concrete slabs. A fourth house, standing but with much of the roof and some walls caved in, was being searched by a rescue team; two renters were unaccounted for, according to Mr. King. That house, too, he said, had been built with hurricanes in mind.“It was supposed to be a fortress like this,” Mr. King said, staring in disbelief.He said he previously owned a house on 42nd Street that still had watermarks in it from Hurricane Opal, the 1995 storm that until a few days ago had been a local benchmark for powerful cyclones. From his deck, Mr. King pointed: “It was down there, and it’s gone.”ImageThe house was designed to withstand much stronger winds than state building codes require in the Florida Panhandle.CreditJohnny Milano for The New York Times“That’s the famous Mexico Beach pier,” he added, nodding toward a few decapitated wood pilings sticking out of the water.Up 36th Street, north of U.S. Highway 98, the main drag, more small houses had survived the wind but were gutted by the water, even though they were several blocks inland from the beach. John Hamilton spent a weekend afternoon shoveling dark muck out of the house belonging to his sister-in-law, Sandra Richards, and her husband, Jeff Richards, who live in Eufaula, Ala., but have vacationed in Mexico Beach for decades.Paper towels in the highest kitchen cabinets were soaked. Fans on the ceiling, more than eight feet up, were caked in mud.“I can’t believe I’m not just crying my eyes out,” Ms. Richards said as her sister, Laura Hamilton, used a broken piece of door as a dustpan. “It’s incomprehensible.”Mr. Richards noted that the couple built the house with hurricane-resistant windows in 2004, after the new statewide code went into effect. “Look at the windows: They’re all here,” he said. “If the doors had held, we probably would have been all right.”“All those Mexico Beach houses that were built in the 1970s, they’re gone,” Ms. Richards said.Dr. Lackey said much of the small town’s charm came from its older houses and relative lack of overdevelopment, compared with bigger tourist destinations further west along the coast. Over the Fourth of July holiday, which Mexico Beach celebrated with fireworks at the pier, Dr. Lackey’s 5-year-old son, Keaton, learned how to snorkel off the beach in front of the house.“There was a Subway — that was the one franchise eatery in town,” he said. “There was no traffic lights. It was nicknamed ‘Mayberry by the Sea.’”Mr. King said he assumed Michael would spare the town, as other hurricanes had done.“I said, ‘It’ll veer off. They always do. They go to Cancun or someplace,’” he said.As the storm took aim, though, their most recent renters brought the patio furniture indoors and oversaw a specialist hired by Dr. Lackey and Mr. King to seal the doors the day before landfall — the sort of measure Dr. Lackey readily acknowledges may be unaffordable for most people during an emergency. The renters ate at a beloved local seafood restaurant, Toucan’s, and then evacuated from town.“They were probably the last people to eat there,” Dr. Lackey said of Toucan’s, which did not survive.A few days after the storm, the inside of the sand palace, immaculately decorated, remained surprisingly cool, a feature of its concrete walls. Mr. King said he hoped recovery crews from the Federal Emergency Management Agency could benefit from using their standing structure.“If FEMA wants the house, they can have it for a few weeks,” he said. “I’m not going to complain about nothing.” Read More | https://ift.tt/2EmXrFT |

Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’, in 2018-10-14 22:42:33

[blogwonderwebsites]

Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’

Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’ Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’ http://www.nature-business.com/business-among-the-ruins-of-mexico-beach-stands-one-house-built-for-the-big-one/

Business ImageThe elevated house that the owners call the Sand Palace, on 36th Street in Mexico Beach, Fla., came through Hurricane Michael almost unscathed.CreditCreditJohnny Milano for The New York TimesMEXICO BEACH, Fla. — As they built their dream house last year on the shimmering sands of the Gulf of Mexico, Russell King and his nephew, Dr. Lebron Lackey, painstakingly documented every detail of the elevated construction, from the 40-foot pilings buried into the ground to the types of screws drilled into the walls. They picked gleaming paints from a palette of shore colors, chose salt-tolerant species to plant in the beach dunes and christened their creation the Sand Palace of Mexico Beach.They also installed an outdoor security camera. Its video footage became the only view of their property as Hurricane Michael thundered ashore last week, the most intense storm recorded in the history of the Florida Panhandle.The camera showed a horrifying tunnel of gray fury worsening by the hour as Dr. Lackey, a 54-year-old radiologist, stared helplessly from more than 400 miles away at the corner of his roof.“It would buck like an airplane wing,” he said from his residence in Cleveland, Tenn. “I kept expecting to see it tear off.”But it didn’t. When The New York Times published an analysis of aerial images showing a mile-long stretch of Mexico Beach where at least three-quarters of the buildings were damaged, Dr. Lackey saw his sand palace still standing, majestic amid the apocalyptic wreckage, the last surviving beachfront house on his block.“We wanted to build it for the big one,” he said. “We just never knew we’d find the big one so fast.”The story of how the sand palace made it through Michael while most of its neighbors collapsed is one about building in hurricane-prone Florida, and how construction regulations failed to imagine the Category 4 monster’s catastrophic destruction.Florida’s building code, put into effect in 2002, is famously stringent when it comes to windstorm resistance for homes built along the hurricane-prone Atlantic shoreline. But it is less so for structures along the Panhandle, a region historically unaffected by storms as strong as the ones that have slammed into South Florida.After Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 beast, ravaged Miami-Dade County in 1992, new construction in the southern portion of the state was required to withstand 175-mile-an-hour winds. In the coastal Panhandle counties affected by Michael, the requirement is lower, for 120 to 150 miles an hour, and the rules for certain kinds of reinforcement have applied to houses built more than a mile from shore only since 2007. Many of the residences and businesses rubbed out by Michael in Mexico Beach were far older; rebuilding them to conform to the new code will be expensive, and could price out some of the working-class people who historically have flocked to Mexico Beach.Mr. King wouldn’t say how much it cost to fortify his beachside home, which public records show has been assessed for tax purposes at a value of $400,000. One estimate in Forbes in 2012 put the cost at more than $30,000 to implement an array of hurricane-proofing measures that include some of those advised by the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety.ImageThe house, built of reinforced concrete, is elevated on tall pilings to allow a storm surge to pass underneath with little damage. Dell Medford, left, helped Russell King, one of the owners, clear away debris and inspect the house.CreditJohnny Milano for The New York Times“Every time something like this happens, you have to say to yourself, ‘Is there something we can do better?’” Gov. Rick Scott told reporters, as public officials were called upon once again to examine the state’s building standards.“When I saw this hurricane’s wind speeds, I knew: You could only hope there would not be too many fatalities,” said Charlie Danger, a retired Miami-Dade building chief who crusaded for stricter windstorm codes. “It pays to rebuild structures that withstand something like that. You minimize the loss of life — and the loss of infrastructure. If you lose the infrastructure, you lose everything.”Dr. Lackey said he and Mr. King, who jointly own the Mexico Beach house, did not even refer to the minimum wind resistance required in Bay County. They built the sand palace to withstand 250 mile-an-hour winds.The house was fashioned from poured concrete, reinforced by steel cables and rebar, with additional concrete bolstering the corners of the house. The space under the roof was minimized so that wind could not sneak in underneath and lift it off. The home’s elevation, on high pilings, was meant to keep it above the surge of seawater that usually accompanies powerful hurricanes.“We’re thinking that we need to build a house that would survive for generations,” Dr. Lackey said.“I believe the planet’s getting warmer and the storms are getting stronger,” said Mr. King, 68, an attorney. “We didn’t used to have storms like this. So people who live on the coast have to be ready for it.”Though the family had the relief of knowing their house, which they rent out when they are not using it themselves for vacations, had remained standing, Mr. King needed to see for himself what damage the hurricane had done. He left Tennessee at 4 a.m. Saturday and drove his dark blue Ford F-150 pickup south for more than seven hours — far longer than the trip would ordinarily take, because of closed roads and recovery-crew gridlock — to reach his property at the end of 36th Street.The siding that had wrapped around a stairway providing access to the elevated house was gone, and so were the stairs. But that was by design: The family’s architect used breakaway walls that would tear free without ripping off any more of the structure. Now there was just a gaping hole and part of a handrail, leaving the five-bedroom, five-bathroom house accessible only by ladder.Up climbed Mr. King, awed by the fact that the structure had otherwise suffered only a little water damage and one cracked shower window. Even their in-home elevator appeared untouched.“We can clean this up in a month,” he said. “But other folks, I don’t know. Look at what these people suffered.”The duplexes next door were wiped out. Three homes across the street were leveled down to concrete slabs. A fourth house, standing but with much of the roof and some walls caved in, was being searched by a rescue team; two renters were unaccounted for, according to Mr. King. That house, too, he said, had been built with hurricanes in mind.“It was supposed to be a fortress like this,” Mr. King said, staring in disbelief.He said he previously owned a house on 42nd Street that still had watermarks in it from Hurricane Opal, the 1995 storm that until a few days ago had been a local benchmark for powerful cyclones. From his deck, Mr. King pointed: “It was down there, and it’s gone.”ImageThe house was designed to withstand much stronger winds than state building codes require in the Florida Panhandle.CreditJohnny Milano for The New York Times“That’s the famous Mexico Beach pier,” he added, nodding toward a few decapitated wood pilings sticking out of the water.Up 36th Street, north of U.S. Highway 98, the main drag, more small houses had survived the wind but were gutted by the water, even though they were several blocks inland from the beach. John Hamilton spent a weekend afternoon shoveling dark muck out of the house belonging to his sister-in-law, Sandra Richards, and her husband, Jeff Richards, who live in Eufaula, Ala., but have vacationed in Mexico Beach for decades.Paper towels in the highest kitchen cabinets were soaked. Fans on the ceiling, more than eight feet up, were caked in mud.“I can’t believe I’m not just crying my eyes out,” Ms. Richards said as her sister, Laura Hamilton, used a broken piece of door as a dustpan. “It’s incomprehensible.”Mr. Richards noted that the couple built the house with hurricane-resistant windows in 2004, after the new statewide code went into effect. “Look at the windows: They’re all here,” he said. “If the doors had held, we probably would have been all right.”“All those Mexico Beach houses that were built in the 1970s, they’re gone,” Ms. Richards said.Dr. Lackey said much of the small town’s charm came from its older houses and relative lack of overdevelopment, compared with bigger tourist destinations further west along the coast. Over the Fourth of July holiday, which Mexico Beach celebrated with fireworks at the pier, Dr. Lackey’s 5-year-old son, Keaton, learned how to snorkel off the beach in front of the house.“There was a Subway — that was the one franchise eatery in town,” he said. “There was no traffic lights. It was nicknamed ‘Mayberry by the Sea.’”Mr. King said he assumed Michael would spare the town, as other hurricanes had done.“I said, ‘It’ll veer off. They always do. They go to Cancun or someplace,’” he said.As the storm took aim, though, their most recent renters brought the patio furniture indoors and oversaw a specialist hired by Dr. Lackey and Mr. King to seal the doors the day before landfall — the sort of measure Dr. Lackey readily acknowledges may be unaffordable for most people during an emergency. The renters ate at a beloved local seafood restaurant, Toucan’s, and then evacuated from town.“They were probably the last people to eat there,” Dr. Lackey said of Toucan’s, which did not survive.A few days after the storm, the inside of the sand palace, immaculately decorated, remained surprisingly cool, a feature of its concrete walls. Mr. King said he hoped recovery crews from the Federal Emergency Management Agency could benefit from using their standing structure.“If FEMA wants the house, they can have it for a few weeks,” he said. “I’m not going to complain about nothing.” Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/14/us/hurricane-michael-florida-mexico-beach-house.html |

Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’, in 2018-10-14 22:42:33

[algarithmblognumber]

Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’

Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’ Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’ http://www.nature-business.com/business-among-the-ruins-of-mexico-beach-stands-one-house-built-for-the-big-one/

Business ImageThe elevated house that the owners call the Sand Palace, on 36th Street in Mexico Beach, Fla., came through Hurricane Michael almost unscathed.CreditCreditJohnny Milano for The New York TimesMEXICO BEACH, Fla. — As they built their dream house last year on the shimmering sands of the Gulf of Mexico, Russell King and his nephew, Dr. Lebron Lackey, painstakingly documented every detail of the elevated construction, from the 40-foot pilings buried into the ground to the types of screws drilled into the walls. They picked gleaming paints from a palette of shore colors, chose salt-tolerant species to plant in the beach dunes and christened their creation the Sand Palace of Mexico Beach.They also installed an outdoor security camera. Its video footage became the only view of their property as Hurricane Michael thundered ashore last week, the most intense storm recorded in the history of the Florida Panhandle.The camera showed a horrifying tunnel of gray fury worsening by the hour as Dr. Lackey, a 54-year-old radiologist, stared helplessly from more than 400 miles away at the corner of his roof.“It would buck like an airplane wing,” he said from his residence in Cleveland, Tenn. “I kept expecting to see it tear off.”But it didn’t. When The New York Times published an analysis of aerial images showing a mile-long stretch of Mexico Beach where at least three-quarters of the buildings were damaged, Dr. Lackey saw his sand palace still standing, majestic amid the apocalyptic wreckage, the last surviving beachfront house on his block.“We wanted to build it for the big one,” he said. “We just never knew we’d find the big one so fast.”The story of how the sand palace made it through Michael while most of its neighbors collapsed is one about building in hurricane-prone Florida, and how construction regulations failed to imagine the Category 4 monster’s catastrophic destruction.Florida’s building code, put into effect in 2002, is famously stringent when it comes to windstorm resistance for homes built along the hurricane-prone Atlantic shoreline. But it is less so for structures along the Panhandle, a region historically unaffected by storms as strong as the ones that have slammed into South Florida.After Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 beast, ravaged Miami-Dade County in 1992, new construction in the southern portion of the state was required to withstand 175-mile-an-hour winds. In the coastal Panhandle counties affected by Michael, the requirement is lower, for 120 to 150 miles an hour, and the rules for certain kinds of reinforcement have applied to houses built more than a mile from shore only since 2007. Many of the residences and businesses rubbed out by Michael in Mexico Beach were far older; rebuilding them to conform to the new code will be expensive, and could price out some of the working-class people who historically have flocked to Mexico Beach.Mr. King wouldn’t say how much it cost to fortify his beachside home, which public records show has been assessed for tax purposes at a value of $400,000. One estimate in Forbes in 2012 put the cost at more than $30,000 to implement an array of hurricane-proofing measures that include some of those advised by the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety.ImageThe house, built of reinforced concrete, is elevated on tall pilings to allow a storm surge to pass underneath with little damage. Dell Medford, left, helped Russell King, one of the owners, clear away debris and inspect the house.CreditJohnny Milano for The New York Times“Every time something like this happens, you have to say to yourself, ‘Is there something we can do better?’” Gov. Rick Scott told reporters, as public officials were called upon once again to examine the state’s building standards.“When I saw this hurricane’s wind speeds, I knew: You could only hope there would not be too many fatalities,” said Charlie Danger, a retired Miami-Dade building chief who crusaded for stricter windstorm codes. “It pays to rebuild structures that withstand something like that. You minimize the loss of life — and the loss of infrastructure. If you lose the infrastructure, you lose everything.”Dr. Lackey said he and Mr. King, who jointly own the Mexico Beach house, did not even refer to the minimum wind resistance required in Bay County. They built the sand palace to withstand 250 mile-an-hour winds.The house was fashioned from poured concrete, reinforced by steel cables and rebar, with additional concrete bolstering the corners of the house. The space under the roof was minimized so that wind could not sneak in underneath and lift it off. The home’s elevation, on high pilings, was meant to keep it above the surge of seawater that usually accompanies powerful hurricanes.“We’re thinking that we need to build a house that would survive for generations,” Dr. Lackey said.“I believe the planet’s getting warmer and the storms are getting stronger,” said Mr. King, 68, an attorney. “We didn’t used to have storms like this. So people who live on the coast have to be ready for it.”Though the family had the relief of knowing their house, which they rent out when they are not using it themselves for vacations, had remained standing, Mr. King needed to see for himself what damage the hurricane had done. He left Tennessee at 4 a.m. Saturday and drove his dark blue Ford F-150 pickup south for more than seven hours — far longer than the trip would ordinarily take, because of closed roads and recovery-crew gridlock — to reach his property at the end of 36th Street.The siding that had wrapped around a stairway providing access to the elevated house was gone, and so were the stairs. But that was by design: The family’s architect used breakaway walls that would tear free without ripping off any more of the structure. Now there was just a gaping hole and part of a handrail, leaving the five-bedroom, five-bathroom house accessible only by ladder.Up climbed Mr. King, awed by the fact that the structure had otherwise suffered only a little water damage and one cracked shower window. Even their in-home elevator appeared untouched.“We can clean this up in a month,” he said. “But other folks, I don’t know. Look at what these people suffered.”The duplexes next door were wiped out. Three homes across the street were leveled down to concrete slabs. A fourth house, standing but with much of the roof and some walls caved in, was being searched by a rescue team; two renters were unaccounted for, according to Mr. King. That house, too, he said, had been built with hurricanes in mind.“It was supposed to be a fortress like this,” Mr. King said, staring in disbelief.He said he previously owned a house on 42nd Street that still had watermarks in it from Hurricane Opal, the 1995 storm that until a few days ago had been a local benchmark for powerful cyclones. From his deck, Mr. King pointed: “It was down there, and it’s gone.”ImageThe house was designed to withstand much stronger winds than state building codes require in the Florida Panhandle.CreditJohnny Milano for The New York Times“That’s the famous Mexico Beach pier,” he added, nodding toward a few decapitated wood pilings sticking out of the water.Up 36th Street, north of U.S. Highway 98, the main drag, more small houses had survived the wind but were gutted by the water, even though they were several blocks inland from the beach. John Hamilton spent a weekend afternoon shoveling dark muck out of the house belonging to his sister-in-law, Sandra Richards, and her husband, Jeff Richards, who live in Eufaula, Ala., but have vacationed in Mexico Beach for decades.Paper towels in the highest kitchen cabinets were soaked. Fans on the ceiling, more than eight feet up, were caked in mud.“I can’t believe I’m not just crying my eyes out,” Ms. Richards said as her sister, Laura Hamilton, used a broken piece of door as a dustpan. “It’s incomprehensible.”Mr. Richards noted that the couple built the house with hurricane-resistant windows in 2004, after the new statewide code went into effect. “Look at the windows: They’re all here,” he said. “If the doors had held, we probably would have been all right.”“All those Mexico Beach houses that were built in the 1970s, they’re gone,” Ms. Richards said.Dr. Lackey said much of the small town’s charm came from its older houses and relative lack of overdevelopment, compared with bigger tourist destinations further west along the coast. Over the Fourth of July holiday, which Mexico Beach celebrated with fireworks at the pier, Dr. Lackey’s 5-year-old son, Keaton, learned how to snorkel off the beach in front of the house.“There was a Subway — that was the one franchise eatery in town,” he said. “There was no traffic lights. It was nicknamed ‘Mayberry by the Sea.’”Mr. King said he assumed Michael would spare the town, as other hurricanes had done.“I said, ‘It’ll veer off. They always do. They go to Cancun or someplace,’” he said.As the storm took aim, though, their most recent renters brought the patio furniture indoors and oversaw a specialist hired by Dr. Lackey and Mr. King to seal the doors the day before landfall — the sort of measure Dr. Lackey readily acknowledges may be unaffordable for most people during an emergency. The renters ate at a beloved local seafood restaurant, Toucan’s, and then evacuated from town.“They were probably the last people to eat there,” Dr. Lackey said of Toucan’s, which did not survive.A few days after the storm, the inside of the sand palace, immaculately decorated, remained surprisingly cool, a feature of its concrete walls. Mr. King said he hoped recovery crews from the Federal Emergency Management Agency could benefit from using their standing structure.“If FEMA wants the house, they can have it for a few weeks,” he said. “I’m not going to complain about nothing.” Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/14/us/hurricane-michael-florida-mexico-beach-house.html |

Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’, in 2018-10-14 22:42:33

[magicwebsitesnet]

Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’

Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’ Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’ http://www.nature-business.com/business-among-the-ruins-of-mexico-beach-stands-one-house-built-for-the-big-one/

Business ImageThe elevated house that the owners call the Sand Palace, on 36th Street in Mexico Beach, Fla., came through Hurricane Michael almost unscathed.CreditCreditJohnny Milano for The New York TimesMEXICO BEACH, Fla. — As they built their dream house last year on the shimmering sands of the Gulf of Mexico, Russell King and his nephew, Dr. Lebron Lackey, painstakingly documented every detail of the elevated construction, from the 40-foot pilings buried into the ground to the types of screws drilled into the walls. They picked gleaming paints from a palette of shore colors, chose salt-tolerant species to plant in the beach dunes and christened their creation the Sand Palace of Mexico Beach.They also installed an outdoor security camera. Its video footage became the only view of their property as Hurricane Michael thundered ashore last week, the most intense storm recorded in the history of the Florida Panhandle.The camera showed a horrifying tunnel of gray fury worsening by the hour as Dr. Lackey, a 54-year-old radiologist, stared helplessly from more than 400 miles away at the corner of his roof.“It would buck like an airplane wing,” he said from his residence in Cleveland, Tenn. “I kept expecting to see it tear off.”But it didn’t. When The New York Times published an analysis of aerial images showing a mile-long stretch of Mexico Beach where at least three-quarters of the buildings were damaged, Dr. Lackey saw his sand palace still standing, majestic amid the apocalyptic wreckage, the last surviving beachfront house on his block.“We wanted to build it for the big one,” he said. “We just never knew we’d find the big one so fast.”The story of how the sand palace made it through Michael while most of its neighbors collapsed is one about building in hurricane-prone Florida, and how construction regulations failed to imagine the Category 4 monster’s catastrophic destruction.Florida’s building code, put into effect in 2002, is famously stringent when it comes to windstorm resistance for homes built along the hurricane-prone Atlantic shoreline. But it is less so for structures along the Panhandle, a region historically unaffected by storms as strong as the ones that have slammed into South Florida.After Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 beast, ravaged Miami-Dade County in 1992, new construction in the southern portion of the state was required to withstand 175-mile-an-hour winds. In the coastal Panhandle counties affected by Michael, the requirement is lower, for 120 to 150 miles an hour, and the rules for certain kinds of reinforcement have applied to houses built more than a mile from shore only since 2007. Many of the residences and businesses rubbed out by Michael in Mexico Beach were far older; rebuilding them to conform to the new code will be expensive, and could price out some of the working-class people who historically have flocked to Mexico Beach.Mr. King wouldn’t say how much it cost to fortify his beachside home, which public records show has been assessed for tax purposes at a value of $400,000. One estimate in Forbes in 2012 put the cost at more than $30,000 to implement an array of hurricane-proofing measures that include some of those advised by the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety.ImageThe house, built of reinforced concrete, is elevated on tall pilings to allow a storm surge to pass underneath with little damage. Dell Medford, left, helped Russell King, one of the owners, clear away debris and inspect the house.CreditJohnny Milano for The New York Times“Every time something like this happens, you have to say to yourself, ‘Is there something we can do better?’” Gov. Rick Scott told reporters, as public officials were called upon once again to examine the state’s building standards.“When I saw this hurricane’s wind speeds, I knew: You could only hope there would not be too many fatalities,” said Charlie Danger, a retired Miami-Dade building chief who crusaded for stricter windstorm codes. “It pays to rebuild structures that withstand something like that. You minimize the loss of life — and the loss of infrastructure. If you lose the infrastructure, you lose everything.”Dr. Lackey said he and Mr. King, who jointly own the Mexico Beach house, did not even refer to the minimum wind resistance required in Bay County. They built the sand palace to withstand 250 mile-an-hour winds.The house was fashioned from poured concrete, reinforced by steel cables and rebar, with additional concrete bolstering the corners of the house. The space under the roof was minimized so that wind could not sneak in underneath and lift it off. The home’s elevation, on high pilings, was meant to keep it above the surge of seawater that usually accompanies powerful hurricanes.“We’re thinking that we need to build a house that would survive for generations,” Dr. Lackey said.“I believe the planet’s getting warmer and the storms are getting stronger,” said Mr. King, 68, an attorney. “We didn’t used to have storms like this. So people who live on the coast have to be ready for it.”Though the family had the relief of knowing their house, which they rent out when they are not using it themselves for vacations, had remained standing, Mr. King needed to see for himself what damage the hurricane had done. He left Tennessee at 4 a.m. Saturday and drove his dark blue Ford F-150 pickup south for more than seven hours — far longer than the trip would ordinarily take, because of closed roads and recovery-crew gridlock — to reach his property at the end of 36th Street.The siding that had wrapped around a stairway providing access to the elevated house was gone, and so were the stairs. But that was by design: The family’s architect used breakaway walls that would tear free without ripping off any more of the structure. Now there was just a gaping hole and part of a handrail, leaving the five-bedroom, five-bathroom house accessible only by ladder.Up climbed Mr. King, awed by the fact that the structure had otherwise suffered only a little water damage and one cracked shower window. Even their in-home elevator appeared untouched.“We can clean this up in a month,” he said. “But other folks, I don’t know. Look at what these people suffered.”The duplexes next door were wiped out. Three homes across the street were leveled down to concrete slabs. A fourth house, standing but with much of the roof and some walls caved in, was being searched by a rescue team; two renters were unaccounted for, according to Mr. King. That house, too, he said, had been built with hurricanes in mind.“It was supposed to be a fortress like this,” Mr. King said, staring in disbelief.He said he previously owned a house on 42nd Street that still had watermarks in it from Hurricane Opal, the 1995 storm that until a few days ago had been a local benchmark for powerful cyclones. From his deck, Mr. King pointed: “It was down there, and it’s gone.”ImageThe house was designed to withstand much stronger winds than state building codes require in the Florida Panhandle.CreditJohnny Milano for The New York Times“That’s the famous Mexico Beach pier,” he added, nodding toward a few decapitated wood pilings sticking out of the water.Up 36th Street, north of U.S. Highway 98, the main drag, more small houses had survived the wind but were gutted by the water, even though they were several blocks inland from the beach. John Hamilton spent a weekend afternoon shoveling dark muck out of the house belonging to his sister-in-law, Sandra Richards, and her husband, Jeff Richards, who live in Eufaula, Ala., but have vacationed in Mexico Beach for decades.Paper towels in the highest kitchen cabinets were soaked. Fans on the ceiling, more than eight feet up, were caked in mud.“I can’t believe I’m not just crying my eyes out,” Ms. Richards said as her sister, Laura Hamilton, used a broken piece of door as a dustpan. “It’s incomprehensible.”Mr. Richards noted that the couple built the house with hurricane-resistant windows in 2004, after the new statewide code went into effect. “Look at the windows: They’re all here,” he said. “If the doors had held, we probably would have been all right.”“All those Mexico Beach houses that were built in the 1970s, they’re gone,” Ms. Richards said.Dr. Lackey said much of the small town’s charm came from its older houses and relative lack of overdevelopment, compared with bigger tourist destinations further west along the coast. Over the Fourth of July holiday, which Mexico Beach celebrated with fireworks at the pier, Dr. Lackey’s 5-year-old son, Keaton, learned how to snorkel off the beach in front of the house.“There was a Subway — that was the one franchise eatery in town,” he said. “There was no traffic lights. It was nicknamed ‘Mayberry by the Sea.’”Mr. King said he assumed Michael would spare the town, as other hurricanes had done.“I said, ‘It’ll veer off. They always do. They go to Cancun or someplace,’” he said.As the storm took aim, though, their most recent renters brought the patio furniture indoors and oversaw a specialist hired by Dr. Lackey and Mr. King to seal the doors the day before landfall — the sort of measure Dr. Lackey readily acknowledges may be unaffordable for most people during an emergency. The renters ate at a beloved local seafood restaurant, Toucan’s, and then evacuated from town.“They were probably the last people to eat there,” Dr. Lackey said of Toucan’s, which did not survive.A few days after the storm, the inside of the sand palace, immaculately decorated, remained surprisingly cool, a feature of its concrete walls. Mr. King said he hoped recovery crews from the Federal Emergency Management Agency could benefit from using their standing structure.“If FEMA wants the house, they can have it for a few weeks,” he said. “I’m not going to complain about nothing.” Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/14/us/hurricane-michael-florida-mexico-beach-house.html |

Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’, in 2018-10-14 22:42:33

[blogparadiseisland]

Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’

Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’ Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’ http://www.nature-business.com/business-among-the-ruins-of-mexico-beach-stands-one-house-built-for-the-big-one/

Business ImageThe elevated house that the owners call the Sand Palace, on 36th Street in Mexico Beach, Fla., came through Hurricane Michael almost unscathed.CreditCreditJohnny Milano for The New York TimesMEXICO BEACH, Fla. — As they built their dream house last year on the shimmering sands of the Gulf of Mexico, Russell King and his nephew, Dr. Lebron Lackey, painstakingly documented every detail of the elevated construction, from the 40-foot pilings buried into the ground to the types of screws drilled into the walls. They picked gleaming paints from a palette of shore colors, chose salt-tolerant species to plant in the beach dunes and christened their creation the Sand Palace of Mexico Beach.They also installed an outdoor security camera. Its video footage became the only view of their property as Hurricane Michael thundered ashore last week, the most intense storm recorded in the history of the Florida Panhandle.The camera showed a horrifying tunnel of gray fury worsening by the hour as Dr. Lackey, a 54-year-old radiologist, stared helplessly from more than 400 miles away at the corner of his roof.“It would buck like an airplane wing,” he said from his residence in Cleveland, Tenn. “I kept expecting to see it tear off.”But it didn’t. When The New York Times published an analysis of aerial images showing a mile-long stretch of Mexico Beach where at least three-quarters of the buildings were damaged, Dr. Lackey saw his sand palace still standing, majestic amid the apocalyptic wreckage, the last surviving beachfront house on his block.“We wanted to build it for the big one,” he said. “We just never knew we’d find the big one so fast.”The story of how the sand palace made it through Michael while most of its neighbors collapsed is one about building in hurricane-prone Florida, and how construction regulations failed to imagine the Category 4 monster’s catastrophic destruction.Florida’s building code, put into effect in 2002, is famously stringent when it comes to windstorm resistance for homes built along the hurricane-prone Atlantic shoreline. But it is less so for structures along the Panhandle, a region historically unaffected by storms as strong as the ones that have slammed into South Florida.After Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 beast, ravaged Miami-Dade County in 1992, new construction in the southern portion of the state was required to withstand 175-mile-an-hour winds. In the coastal Panhandle counties affected by Michael, the requirement is lower, for 120 to 150 miles an hour, and the rules for certain kinds of reinforcement have applied to houses built more than a mile from shore only since 2007. Many of the residences and businesses rubbed out by Michael in Mexico Beach were far older; rebuilding them to conform to the new code will be expensive, and could price out some of the working-class people who historically have flocked to Mexico Beach.Mr. King wouldn’t say how much it cost to fortify his beachside home, which public records show has been assessed for tax purposes at a value of $400,000. One estimate in Forbes in 2012 put the cost at more than $30,000 to implement an array of hurricane-proofing measures that include some of those advised by the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety.ImageThe house, built of reinforced concrete, is elevated on tall pilings to allow a storm surge to pass underneath with little damage. Dell Medford, left, helped Russell King, one of the owners, clear away debris and inspect the house.CreditJohnny Milano for The New York Times“Every time something like this happens, you have to say to yourself, ‘Is there something we can do better?’” Gov. Rick Scott told reporters, as public officials were called upon once again to examine the state’s building standards.“When I saw this hurricane’s wind speeds, I knew: You could only hope there would not be too many fatalities,” said Charlie Danger, a retired Miami-Dade building chief who crusaded for stricter windstorm codes. “It pays to rebuild structures that withstand something like that. You minimize the loss of life — and the loss of infrastructure. If you lose the infrastructure, you lose everything.”Dr. Lackey said he and Mr. King, who jointly own the Mexico Beach house, did not even refer to the minimum wind resistance required in Bay County. They built the sand palace to withstand 250 mile-an-hour winds.The house was fashioned from poured concrete, reinforced by steel cables and rebar, with additional concrete bolstering the corners of the house. The space under the roof was minimized so that wind could not sneak in underneath and lift it off. The home’s elevation, on high pilings, was meant to keep it above the surge of seawater that usually accompanies powerful hurricanes.“We’re thinking that we need to build a house that would survive for generations,” Dr. Lackey said.“I believe the planet’s getting warmer and the storms are getting stronger,” said Mr. King, 68, an attorney. “We didn’t used to have storms like this. So people who live on the coast have to be ready for it.”Though the family had the relief of knowing their house, which they rent out when they are not using it themselves for vacations, had remained standing, Mr. King needed to see for himself what damage the hurricane had done. He left Tennessee at 4 a.m. Saturday and drove his dark blue Ford F-150 pickup south for more than seven hours — far longer than the trip would ordinarily take, because of closed roads and recovery-crew gridlock — to reach his property at the end of 36th Street.The siding that had wrapped around a stairway providing access to the elevated house was gone, and so were the stairs. But that was by design: The family’s architect used breakaway walls that would tear free without ripping off any more of the structure. Now there was just a gaping hole and part of a handrail, leaving the five-bedroom, five-bathroom house accessible only by ladder.Up climbed Mr. King, awed by the fact that the structure had otherwise suffered only a little water damage and one cracked shower window. Even their in-home elevator appeared untouched.“We can clean this up in a month,” he said. “But other folks, I don’t know. Look at what these people suffered.”The duplexes next door were wiped out. Three homes across the street were leveled down to concrete slabs. A fourth house, standing but with much of the roof and some walls caved in, was being searched by a rescue team; two renters were unaccounted for, according to Mr. King. That house, too, he said, had been built with hurricanes in mind.“It was supposed to be a fortress like this,” Mr. King said, staring in disbelief.He said he previously owned a house on 42nd Street that still had watermarks in it from Hurricane Opal, the 1995 storm that until a few days ago had been a local benchmark for powerful cyclones. From his deck, Mr. King pointed: “It was down there, and it’s gone.”ImageThe house was designed to withstand much stronger winds than state building codes require in the Florida Panhandle.CreditJohnny Milano for The New York Times“That’s the famous Mexico Beach pier,” he added, nodding toward a few decapitated wood pilings sticking out of the water.Up 36th Street, north of U.S. Highway 98, the main drag, more small houses had survived the wind but were gutted by the water, even though they were several blocks inland from the beach. John Hamilton spent a weekend afternoon shoveling dark muck out of the house belonging to his sister-in-law, Sandra Richards, and her husband, Jeff Richards, who live in Eufaula, Ala., but have vacationed in Mexico Beach for decades.Paper towels in the highest kitchen cabinets were soaked. Fans on the ceiling, more than eight feet up, were caked in mud.“I can’t believe I’m not just crying my eyes out,” Ms. Richards said as her sister, Laura Hamilton, used a broken piece of door as a dustpan. “It’s incomprehensible.”Mr. Richards noted that the couple built the house with hurricane-resistant windows in 2004, after the new statewide code went into effect. “Look at the windows: They’re all here,” he said. “If the doors had held, we probably would have been all right.”“All those Mexico Beach houses that were built in the 1970s, they’re gone,” Ms. Richards said.Dr. Lackey said much of the small town’s charm came from its older houses and relative lack of overdevelopment, compared with bigger tourist destinations further west along the coast. Over the Fourth of July holiday, which Mexico Beach celebrated with fireworks at the pier, Dr. Lackey’s 5-year-old son, Keaton, learned how to snorkel off the beach in front of the house.“There was a Subway — that was the one franchise eatery in town,” he said. “There was no traffic lights. It was nicknamed ‘Mayberry by the Sea.’”Mr. King said he assumed Michael would spare the town, as other hurricanes had done.“I said, ‘It’ll veer off. They always do. They go to Cancun or someplace,’” he said.As the storm took aim, though, their most recent renters brought the patio furniture indoors and oversaw a specialist hired by Dr. Lackey and Mr. King to seal the doors the day before landfall — the sort of measure Dr. Lackey readily acknowledges may be unaffordable for most people during an emergency. The renters ate at a beloved local seafood restaurant, Toucan’s, and then evacuated from town.“They were probably the last people to eat there,” Dr. Lackey said of Toucan’s, which did not survive.A few days after the storm, the inside of the sand palace, immaculately decorated, remained surprisingly cool, a feature of its concrete walls. Mr. King said he hoped recovery crews from the Federal Emergency Management Agency could benefit from using their standing structure.“If FEMA wants the house, they can have it for a few weeks,” he said. “I’m not going to complain about nothing.” Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/14/us/hurricane-michael-florida-mexico-beach-house.html |

Business Among the Ruins of Mexico Beach Stands One House, Built ‘For the Big One’, in 2018-10-14 22:42:33

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When Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham got a call from someone claiming to be David Bowie, he thought it was a friend pulling a prank. He didn’t know he was about to be launched into a yearlong collaboration on a musical involving space aliens, mariachi bands, and an imaginary trove of unreleased songs by Bob Dylan. Here, for the first time, is the story of their unfinished show—and what it’s like to work alongside a bona fide pop genius.About ten years ago, I was on a train leaving New York City when I got a call on my cell phone.“Hello,” the caller said. “Is this Michael Cunningham?”“This is David Bowie. I hope I’m not calling at an inconvenient time.”“Whoever you are,” I said, “this is a really cruel joke.”It was surely the work of a friend, I thought—someone close enough to know that I’d listened to Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs approximately 10,000 times each when I was in college and that still, with college far, far behind me, I listened to Bowie at least once a week. That person might even know about my youthful attempts to look like David Bowie, which I maintained even though a pale, skinny kid walking the streets of Pasadena, California, in a bad (very bad) red dye job and a Ziggy Stardust T-shirt did not seem to read “rock star” to anyone but me. The prankster who was calling me, pretending to be Bowie, might have known that I’d been, essentially, waiting for that call for almost 35 years.The caller said, “No, really, it’s David. How are you?”And suddenly, it seemed possible that this was David Bowie, if for no other reason than I couldn’t think of anyone I knew who could manage such a convincing imitation of that particular dulcet, nuanced—and profoundly familiar—voice.I believe I said something like, “Oh well, hello, David. What a nice surprise.”This was during a bit of a lull in Bowie’s career. After his album Reality came out in 2003, he didn’t release any new music for a decade. In 2004, he had a heart attack. For the rest of his life, he was beset by health problems, including the cancer that would eventually kill him.When he called me, though, he was looking to start a new project, a musical. I’d write the book, he said, and he’d write the music. He didn’t go into detail over the phone, but we made a date for lunch in New York the following week.I confess that, after David clicked off, I felt ever so slightly…altered. I was someone who’d gotten a call from David Bowie. That teenager with the inept dye job, the one prone to singing “Space Oddity” in the frozen-foods section of the supermarket, had not vanished, after all. He had only been hibernating over the past several decades.For our first meeting, David chose a perfectly good but unextraordinary Japanese restaurant in the West Village. When I arrived, he was already seated with the lovely woman who’d been his assistant for decades. He introduced her and told me he admired my books. I told him I admired his music.I did not fall prostrate. I did not weep. I did not tell him that a number of his songs seemed to have worked their way into my DNA. Which was more to David’s credit than it was to mine. He was remarkably adept at managing the fact that he was David Bowie and you were not.After we’d exchanged a smattering of small talk, I asked him if he had anything specific in mind about the musical he’d like us to work on. He admitted that he was intrigued by the idea of an alien marooned on Earth. He’d never been entirely satisfied with the alien he’d played in the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth. He acknowledged that he’d like at least one of the major characters to be an alien.I was intrigued by aliens, too. I’d just written a novella about alien immigrants who came to our world in droves because their planet was not at all the spired futurescape we like to imagine but, rather, a realm harsher and more desolate than the most hellish places on Earth. The aliens were only mildly surprised to learn, once they got to Earth, that they were despised and discriminated against and could only get jobs so lowly no earthling would take them.And there was, of course, my own adolescent sense of myself as a marooned alien, with just David B. for company.Aliens? Sure, I could do aliens.I asked David if he had any other ideas. He promptly underwent a brief paroxysm of what I can only call English embarrassment, which differs from the American variety. American embarrassment generally involves shame and arises out of an identifiable act or an ill-considered remark, whereas the British are capable of being embarrassed about being embarrassed. And about every foolish act ever committed by anybody. I, for one, have always found it sexily endearing.David reluctantly told me that he imagined the musical taking place in the future. The plot would revolve around a stockpile of unknown, unrecorded Bob Dylan songs, which had been discovered after Dylan died. David himself would write the hitherto-unknown songs.It was not what I’d been expecting. Yes, David had recorded “Song for Bob Dylan,” for the album Hunky Dory, in 1971, but that was a song about Bob Dylan; it wasn’t a song supposedly written by Bob Dylan.Who could write a convincing fake Dylan song? Well, okay, that would be David Bowie, if anyone, but who (including David Bowie) would want to? And how would the actual Bob Dylan feel about that?I, however, said nothing about any of this. I expressed no surprise at all. No problem: an alien and some recently unearthed Dylan songs.David fell into a second fit of embarrassment and hesitantly said he’d been thinking about popular artists who are not considered great artists, particularly the poet Emma Lazarus, who wrote “The New Colossus.” That’s the poem inscribed inside the base of the Statue of Liberty, the one that includes the lines “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”What, said David, are we to make of a poet taught in few universities, included in few anthologies, but whose work, nevertheless, is more familiar to more people than that of the most exalted and immortal writers?I agreed that it was an interesting notion, although one that had never occurred to me.As we left the restaurant, David’s assistant said, “I know I don’t have to tell you to keep this project a secret.” To which I replied, “Do you really think a musical about an alien, a dead Bob Dylan, and the work of Emma Lazarus is an idea someone is likely to steal?”I’m not averse to risk—a writer can’t be—but I do, ordinarily, tend toward that which seems, at the outset, at least potentially coherent.Speaking of coherence: A few days after our initial meeting, David called to tell me he’d forgotten something. He’d be pleased if mariachi music could be incorporated, mariachi music being under-appreciated outside Mexico.I told him I’d do my best.We spent the next few months working together. I managed, in rough form, the first third of the book of a musical that did, indeed, involve an alien, Emma Lazarus, and a mariachi band. I hadn’t yet figured out a way to work the undiscovered Dylan songs into the plot.David proved to be enormously intelligent, to be kind and generous and affectionate. It wasn’t long before I stopped obsessing about the fact that I was writing a musical with David Bowie.How starstruck, after all, can anybody feel after the object of one’s veneration says, early on, without a trace of irony, that he was excited to start a new project because: “Now I get to do one of my favorite things. Go to a stationery store and get Sharpies and Post-its!”Yes, the Space Oddity, the Thin White Duke, was excited about picking up a few things at Staples.When he first came to my apartment, he particularly admired (of all things) my collection of white rubber doll shoes, culled from flea markets over the years. I hadn’t set out to collect anything so arcane. I just kept finding, in bins full of discarded toys, these sweetly innocent miniature little-girl shoes, none of them bigger than my thumbnail. They were no big deal to me.David, however, loved them. That, as it turned out, was how David’s vision worked. He homed in on details and worked his way into the bigger picture by way of its specifics.He underwent, in my mind, a process I suppose I’ll call humanization. I increasingly understood that the actual David Bowie was a genius with a questionable haircut, a devotion to Post-it notes, and an instant enthusiasm for a dozen pairs of tiny white shoes lined up on one of my bookshelves.Still, as weeks turned into months, I couldn’t entirely shake my sense of him as a member of a species similar to, but slightly different from, mine. It remained difficult, sometimes, for me to concentrate on our work—for me to be a genuine collaborator—in the light of David’s sheer brilliance.My final evolution from worshipful fan to true partner was completed, unexpectedly, on a Saturday in May, when we, looking for someplace quiet, went to work in his studio, a suite of immaculately white rooms. Near the entry stood a number of archival boxes, neatly stacked, reaching from floor to ceiling. David nodded casually at the boxes and said, “They’re archiving my old costumes.”“They” would prove to be curators from the Victoria and Albert Museum, preparing for the 2013 exhibition David Bowie Is, which would draw enormous crowds in London and, subsequently, travel all over the world.I didn’t know that then. I imagined, vaguely, some underground vault where rock memorabilia was kept until history had rendered its verdict as to who mattered more and who less. And David would never have said, “My old costumes are being archived for a show at the Victoria and Albert.” He wouldn’t. He was modest. He was innocent of pretension. I still have no idea where the rock star came from, how this sweet slip of a man could summon him up.There was, however, a moment, that day in his studio, when I came upon the original painting that had served as the cover for his 1974 album, Diamond Dogs. It depicts a feral-looking Bowie, gazing straight out with an expression of louche intensity, naked to the waist, backed by two…big blue women? It’s hard to tell.I know how hard it is to tell, because I stared at that album cover, stoned, for at least a hundred hours, and possibly more.I was standing before the painting, which had been casually placed on the floor, propped against a wall, when David came and stood beside me.“Hello, this is David Bowie. I hope I’m not calling at an inconvenient time.” “Whoever you are,” I said,“this is a really cruel joke.”Here was that English embarrassment again. I’d more or less figured out by then that David was slightly disconcerted by his own success. Or—and this seemed more probable—perhaps he felt about the rock-star version of himself the way a man might feel about a reckless, magnetic brother. He loved his brother but also felt overshadowed, and slightly abashed, by his brother’s more extreme excesses and all the attention they garnered.I said to David, “We should say this, just once: I’m a homely German princess married for political purposes to an English king, and to our surprise, the marriage is working out.”He squeezed my elbow, and we never talked about it again.David started coming up with brief passages of music, on a piano or synthesizer, when we were at his place. I’d never been in the presence of a talent like his, not at the first moments of composition, when he was just noodling around, trying things out. What he “tried out” was already, instantly, lush and complex and heartbreaking. I’m sorry I can’t reproduce it for you. It was never recorded.The songs were undeniably beautiful but had what I can only call a dark buzz of underlayer. They had urgency. They were gorgeous and also, somehow, ever so slightly menacing.Music was a language David spoke fluently. If he thought of himself as a genius, he never let on. If anything, he seemed surprised that most people can’t just sit down at a piano and produce riffs, without plan or practice, that were already possessed of soul and depth and (in our case, anyway) a rinsing whisper of melancholy.We kept moving forward. My doubts never vanished completely, but they diminished after I heard David’s early improvisations on the musical interludes. It began to seem that we were producing something—maybe not something good, but something with cogent ideas and momentum and real characters.We were almost halfway through our first draft when David’s heart trouble recurred. This time he needed surgery, immediately.As I wrote my way into the story, it seemed right that the alien, who has assumed human form, falls in love with a woman from Earth. They reach a point of intimacy at which he feels he must show her his true form, which is quite different from the mildly handsome guy in his 30s she thinks she’s been dating.Let’s just say that the sight of her new lover’s actual appearance is…challenging for the young woman.I read that passage to David over the phone. The next day he phoned me back and played me a few minutes of music he’d composed for the scene. It was, unmistakably, a fucked-up, slightly dissonant love ballad.And we both knew immediately what I’d suspected when I wrote the scene. The woman could bear the sight of her lover’s true form. She would come to love what she’d once have called a monster, who appeared to her in the form of a man.She would, in fact, stay with him, though she’d say something along the lines of “Honey, if it’s okay with you, let’s stay mostly with the earthling version, okay?”That seemed organic and inevitable only when I heard the discordant love song David improvised for them.We were almost halfway through our first draft when David’s heart trouble recurred. This time he needed surgery, immediately.Our musical was put on hold. We never revived it.The death of a project is often difficult to diagnose. David was so weak for so long. Maybe our ardor cooled over all that time—maybe we lost faith in the lunatic disparities we were trying to render intelligible. Maybe David didn’t want further contact with a reminder of what had become a dark and frightening time. Maybe he just didn’t want to tell me that he’d been losing interest even before the illnesses struck, that my sensibility wasn’t quite edgy enough for him. He was the kind of person who’d have had trouble saying something like that.After his surgery, we saw each other once or twice, e-mailed occasionally, then e-mailed less and less. He released a new album in 2013, The Next Day, and began working on his final album, Blackstar. Neither of us ever mentioned the musical. A silent understanding had somehow been reached, and with it, a reluctance on both our parts to refer to that which was no longer in our future.I did put the white plastic doll shoes into an envelope and left them with his doorman while he was convalescing. He e-mailed me his appreciation.That may have been our last exchange. Our next-to-last exchange.Years later, I was passing New York Theatre Workshop, an Off-Broadway theater in the East Village, and saw a poster for an upcoming production: Lazarus, with music by David Bowie, directed by the Belgian director Ivo van Hove.Oddly enough, I wasn’t upset. Seeing the poster, realizing that David had gone ahead with another writer, was a little like running into a lover from the deep past, on the arm of his new lover, and finding that you ceased to miss him so long ago that you felt nothing but happiness for him. You had, after all, once been happy together, and your parting, while not painless (what parting is?), had left no permanent scars.I e-mailed David that night, told him I was glad to see that our project had not only survived but evolved, said I’d like to come to the opening. He told me he’d like that, too.The Lazarus at New York Theatre Workshop resembled David’s and my musical only in that it centered on an alien. Much of the score was songs from David’s previous albums, and the few new ones were nothing like the riffs he’d come up with for himself and me. It wasn’t quite clear, at least not from the production, where the title Lazarus had come from, or anyway, not clear to anyone but me.After the show ended, I waited for David in the theater. When he emerged from backstage, he was barely recognizable: almost fleshless, eyes huge in his head, breathing labored. It was as if he’d aged 30 years since I last saw him.We embraced briefly—I could tell that I had to treat him gently—and he said he was sorry but he had to sit down.We sat together in two theater seats. I told him I was glad our idea hadn’t just vanished. He nodded. I took his hand. He squeezed my hand in response. After a moment, a woman came to escort him out of the theater.Knowing David, however briefly, taught me about how certain works of art—not to mention certain principles of physics, certain laws of nature, certain methods of healing—start out sounding implausible.I admit to occasional fantasies back then, on the days when David and I were really cracking it open, when we nailed that line of dialogue or found the perfect chord, about the potential success of our endeavor. I confess that I imagined sitting anonymously among a transported audience, watching the show and also watching the audience’s responses, which was a show in itself—theater as reaction to theater.Given those extravagant hopes, David’s and my crackpot project is probably better as a fantasy, unrealized. Some endeavors are not meant to be finished. Some of them reach their zenith before the final results are in.I’m not deeply saddened, then, by the demise of David’s and my Lazarus. It’s not so bad to be left with my old dreams about what it might have been. All those unlikely elements—from mariachi music to Emma Lazarus, not to mention the unlikely elements that were David and me—might have ignited the sparks of greatness when they collided, but it’s far more likely that our musical would have been…interesting…a bold experiment… You know.I do wonder if David thought about it at all, during his final weeks. There’s something slightly…unsettling, to me, about David’s having been so keen, even for a short while, on something that not only vanished but never really fully appeared.And so, I’d like to try to finish the unfinishable.Please—if you’re willing—imagine a wildly ambitious work of musical theater in which all the elements have somehow fallen into place and meshed into a theatrical experience stranger and more beautiful, darker and funnier, more moving, more transcendent, than anyone, including its creators, had any reason to expect. Art is always a gamble; it’s just that some gamblers play for higher stakes than others.If you, if some of you, are willing to close your eyes and envision a musical that thrills you (even if you never go to musicals), would you do so now? If you’re able to add, in whatever form you choose, an alien or a rock star or Emma Lazarus writing give me your tired, your poor, or a strain of mariachi music, all the better.That’s not required, though. It’ll be enough, it’ll be more than enough, if you just sit quietly for a moment and conjure something that’s profound and humorous, sad and hopeful—something that might inspire a new generation of dreamy and peculiar boys and girls stuck in Pasadena, or any un-Bowie-like place.Because even shows that actually get completed, even shows that are genuinely significant, are blueprints for something ineffable, supernal, impossible to achieve; something we can imagine but cannot fully articulate; something that pierces us and transforms us and renders our lives larger and just a little more clearly illuminated than they’d been before.Ready? Are you hearing it, seeing it? Don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense. It should merely be what’s most beautiful to you, what’s most moving and true. It should be what you’re hoping for, every time a curtain rises.Michael Cunningham’s novels include ‘The Hours,’ ‘Specimen Days,’ and ‘By Nightfall.’ ‘A Wild Swan,’ a collection of stories, was published in paperback in October 2016.This story originally appeared in the February 2017 issue with the title “Stage Oddity: David Bowie’s Secret Final Project”.Watch Now: Speaking of waiting-to-be-finished musicals, listens to Lin-Manuel Miranda sing the beginnings of a Donald Trump musicalMORE STORIES LIKE THIS ONE

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