Just the roof, please

When one’s business is named “Just So-and-So”…..”Just Cakes” perhaps, or “Just Rivets”, it would seem to imply that said business has made such an art of, say , cakes or rivets, that they’ve abandoned all other pursuits to ensure that their cakes or rivets are the cream of their respective crops.

Unless you’re in the South. Jacksonville, as we’re discovering, IS the South, unlike the rest of Florida, which is a giant beach town. Even the parts that aren’t on the Beach. Jacksonville is more accurately thought of as belonging to southern Georgia, and I mean that in the worst possible sense.

In the South, naming your business “Just So-and So”…for the sake of argument, I’ll say “Just Roofing”…means that you’ve so screwed up every other endeavor that you’ve only one endeavor to screw up. Like roofs. Specifically, our roof. Our historic pressed-tin roof that the city would only allow us to replace with another pressed-tin roof, which was supposed to be complete before we even moved in yet wasn’t even BEGUN until two weeks AFTER we’d moved in, and was supposed to be completed in four days but wasn’t NEAR completion for four weeks, and now may or may not be complete – we’re not sure because the city has halted all work permits issued to our roofer, Dill, and if we want the roof to be put on correctly we’ll have to hire another company to rip the whole thing off and start from scratch.

I suppose we should have taken a bit more notice when the crackerjack carpentry team next door kept ridiculing the progress Dill was making on our roof, or when they reported that Dill’s helpers were sitting up on the roof smoking pot every time Dill left the site. But it wasn’t until water poured from the attic into our upstairs hallway that we really started to suspect that something might not be kosher. Then when the city inspector walked up into the attic, whistled under his breath, and said “Oh, shit”. Oh, and of course, when we found out Dill’s State license had been suspended since March, with no one ever bothering to tell the city. Things like that really start to pique one’s interest.

Other than that, the neighborhood remains…interesting. We attended Jacksonville’s recent Gay Pride Festival with some neighbors we met at the neighborhood dog walk. Granted, Jet and I may be a bit biased, as the last Pride Festival we attended jointly was in San Francisco….but fifty middle-aged people milling around a street corner while a lonely DJ blasts music in their ears doesn’t say to me “gay”, “pride”, OR “festival”.

Jet and I have been traveling across the river to the tony part of town to do our shopping, except in the direst of emergencies, like when we wake up on Sunday morning and have no coffee. It was just such a Sunday morning recently, and I dashed down to the local Stab-n-Save to grab a can of Folger’s, arriving just in time to witness the after effects of a homeless person taking a shit right in the middle of aisle ten. Not the coffee aisle, thankfully.

Contrast this with events on the other extreme, like the well-dressed white couple that drives by our house in a golf cart, both of them holding full goblets of Merlot, announcing that they’re “snooping things out”. I don’t even know what that means. But I like to think I’m a little smarter than to drive the streets with an open container of liquor in a slow-moving vehicle. That’s just asking for trouble.

Oh, and did I mention I’m forty? What am I supposed to do now?