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It’s another weird and terrible week in Tampa Bay—except this time Jim Cantore is here.
On Monday afternoon in Tampa, the skies are gray, but outside of the shrill of a circular saw at the neighbor’s house, and the hum of drills at the one next to it, it’s hard to tell that the second-storm-of-a-century in 11 days is moving towards our neck of the woods. Creative Loafing Tampa Bay goes to press tonight, a day early and a few pages lighter, in the hopes of keeping delivery drivers out of harm’s way—and to give our staffers a chance to ready their homes and families for Hurricane Milton (I believe you have my stapler, please). When this note hits stands Tuesday, our region will likely be bracing for another life-changing blow, even heavier than the one it took days prior.
Everyone reading this knows a handful of people who lost pretty much everything except their lives to Helene. Milton could very well put us in the same boat, with our names on a GoFundMe page, and our eyes crossed after spending hours working through FEMA and insurance websites all while literally wringing what’s left of our lives out on debris-filled streets.
For now, we watch Denis Philips and hope for a change of fortune.
And in the immediate aftermath there’ll be a lot of information about where to get help and relief; we’ll share that on cltampabay.com for as long as we’re still online. But there’ll be misinformation floating around, too, along with plenty of bad actors and worse AI clogging up your relatives’ social media feeds; we’ll skip all that.
In the coming weeks, months, and maybe even years, we’ll wonder what we could have done differently. Ben Montgomery’s column on p. 15 asks one of the toughest questions around; our "Don't cause another emergency" cover applies after the storm and for generations to come. But for now, we’ll all do the best we can, and we’re going to take care of each other, too.
Last Sunday night, a CL contributor texted to say that their family was loading up their mom and headed for Valdosta, possibly Atlanta or Charleston after that.
“Got friends there,” he wrote. “Be safe!” I replied, “Godspeed.”
And that’s what I hope for you, too. With any luck, your friends at CL will all still be here, ready to do the hard work of getting back up. It’ll be tough to ignore how we got here, but if and when it starts to feel better—let’s not forget how tough we all are, and what got us through.
Talk soon.
HATS OFF: Shady Hills little leaguers offering post-Helene comfort.
Marching on
Photos by Dave Decker
Last Saturday, as the world approached the one-year anniversary of the Hamas attack that killed nearly 1,200 people and kicked off Israel’s now 12-month assault on Palestine, activists gathered in downtown Tampa to protest the Israeli government’s escalating war on Lebanon and its ongoing war on Gaza. The conflict in Lebanon—which Israeli officials say is to combat the influential Shia Muslim political party and armed group Hezbollah—has already killed at least 2,000 people, including at least 127 children, according to Democracy Now, which also reports that Israelis are now protesting Benjamin Netanyahu’s “never-ending war” against Hamas. Reuters says “Israel’s ground and air campaign in Gaza has killed more than 41,500 people, with the majority of identified victims being women and children.”See more photos via cltampa.com/slideshows.—Ray Roa
“Unlike the air assault of a head-on hurricane, sea level rise takes a lifetime to notice.”
How long can we live here?
A walk on the beach after Hurricane Helene forces an unbearable question.
By Ben Montgomery
Take a walk with me down what’s left of our blue-ribbon beaches once more before they’re gone, here at the end of the hottest summer in all of recorded human history.
The timing seems right—Wednesday, Oct. 2, a week since Hurricane Helene pushed some four feet of seawater across these barrier islands, a day after local officials reopened bridges over the Intracoastal. As we walk, a smattering of storms are coalescing around the Gulf of Mexico. One will become Hurricane Milton and draw us into its cone, but that’s days away, so no worries, not yet. Let’s just walk and see what we see. Bring water, my friend, irony be damned. It’ll hit 93 Fahrenheit again today, more than eight degrees above average here. Better than Phoenix, which will set a new daily record at 113, the hottest in the city’s history. Fort Myers will set a heat record today, too, at 94—same as San Francisco. Remember when October meant sweater weather?
Let’s take the byway across and meet Clearwater Beach at the traffic circle, which has been scraped almost clean of the hundreds of tons of sand Helene spread. Dozers plowed it aside, so S Gulfview Boulevard is a sand canyon now.
Like the more than 300,000 people who moved to Florida last year, the sand isn’t local. Calling it renourishment, we pay to have it shipped in every six years. With more hurricanes pounding the coasts—like Idalia last year, and Ian the year before—keeping the sand on the beach is getting harder and more expensive.
Like housing around here, sand, it turns out, is in short supply. A 2022 UN report notes that global demand for “sand resources” has tripled in the past 20 years, to around 100 trillion pounds a year—roughly 35 pounds per human per day. Much of it goes to building—adding landmass to coastal cities, and also for cement used to build roads and bridges, like the six-lane byway we just crossed. We shore up what increasingly violent nature tries to tear down.
So intense is the hunger for sand, Ed Conway writes in “Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization,” that an illicit trade has sprung up, with so-called sand mafias bribing cops and politicians and killing civilians. Pinellas County sources its
sand from sand mines and bay bottoms, so you might never see the dark side.
Look there, on the ground near the fourstar JW Marriott Clearwater Beach Resort and Spa: a dead seahorse. This is the first I’ve seen outside the Florida Aquarium.
Researchers say a local population is clustered in seagrass beds around Egmont Key, the island in the mouth of Tampa Bay that’s disappearing by the day because of sea-level rise.
What’s the use now, when it’s just a matter of time before it happens again?
But sea level rise is boring. Unlike the air assault of a head-on hurricane, sea level rise takes a lifetime to notice. Even so, it’s at the center of the picture of climate change. And we’ve all gotten comfortable with the idea that it’s just a thing that will happen.
COLUMN
At barely 200 acres, it’s half the size it was
The water around Tampa Bay has risen by more than seven inches since 1950, increasing high-tide flooding five fold, and it’ll rise much faster in the next 30 years. The physics are easy to understand. Warming ocean water expands, pushing the water level up. It also melts the ice sheets at the poles, which contribute more global water. And as that water from the northern ice sheets
RIGOR MORTISED: Bring water, my friend, irony be damned.
70 years ago—our canary in the coal mine.
My friend Jack lives there. He’s a Tampa Bay harbor pilot, guiding the big ships to port. The walls of his lovely old stilt home hold blackand-white photos of the neighborhood that used to occupy the key. The vast majority of those homes are long gone.
Jack’s house was buckled by Helene, water nearly to the doorknobs. Last I heard he didn’t plan to salvage it.
enter the Atlantic, it slows down currents like the Gulf Stream—a measurable occurrence— causing water to pool differently in places like the Gulf of Mexico.
These three interrelated events have compelled scientists, academics and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to predict that sea levels are likely to jump another 10-12 inches in the next 30 years, much faster than they’ve risen over the last century.
This should make you uncomfortable. If it doesn’t, if you’ve already come to accept and expect the inevitability, maybe this will: the scale of devastation the rising seas will unleash will be something like extended nuclear war. ***
We were warned. Time and again we were warned.
We were warned in 1953—71 years ago, the first mention of “global warming” I could find in an American newspaper—when the New York Times reported that “industrialized, urbanized man has poured unprecedented quantities of carbon dioxide” into the atmosphere, causing the planet to heat up. No longer could New Yorkers ride in a horse-drawn buggy across the Hudson River in wintertime.
We were warned in 1969, when United Press reported that our carbon emissions would “destroy life in the oceans and alter the earth’s climate by raising temperatures.” Climatologists back then said we had just a few decades to act. The headline in newspapers across the country was, literally, “Scientists warn human race.” Boomers kept booming.
We were warned in 1979, when the World Climate Conference told us that the poles were melting. “There is a real possibility that some people now in their infancy will live to a time when the ice at the North Pole will have melted, a change that would cause swift and perhaps catastrophic changes in climate,” the story opened. I celebrated my first birthday that January. I am now 46.
Rachel Carson warned us in “Silent Spring.” Al Gore warned us in “An Inconvenient Truth.” Elizabeth Kolbert warned us in “The Sixth Extinction.”
We were warned. We were indifferent. We went on driving. We went on eating meat. We went on clear cutting forests and burning fuel.
We left our motors running while we waited in long lines in front of schools to pick up the children, and now they will live with the consequences, our severe thunderstorms and hurricanes and encroaching coastlines. The best of us made adjustments. The worst of us said it was all bullshit.
Let’s keep walking.
***
Over Clearwater Pass, the sandhills give way to the trash canyons of affluent Belleair Beach and Belleair Shore. So much stuff, nice stuff, stacked on the curbs. These are fresh piles, not continued on page 17
yet picked through or picked up. Much of it is serviceable utilitarian stuff like leather chairs, table lamps, wicker baskets, and it makes you wonder when we became so superabundant. In his book “So Much Stuff: How Humans Discovered Tools, Invented Meaning, and Made More of Everything,” archaeologist Chip Colwell quotes an estimate that the average American household possesses 300,000 things—so many belongings that we pay to keep piles of it in storage units.
You can’t help but think about wealth here. The homes are huge. A few of them have already been completely cleaned, as if the hurricane never happened. Hard not to wonder what material progress these folks contributed to build here, and why here, given the ever-encroaching shoreline. Are we simply enamored with Atlantis?
It stands to reason that no place is a “climate haven” anymore, like poor Asheville learned, but maybe the Montana mountains would be a more secure place to store valuables. At least the insurance might be more reasonable. What is the cost of it all, anyways? What is the trade-off? How long before the shambled insurance market in Florida breaks once and for all? We can actually get close to an answer now when it comes to changing climate. Every degree Celsius of warming costs a temperate country, like the United States, about one percentage point of Gross Domestic Product, David Wallace-Wells reports in “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.” The world would be $20 trillion richer at 1.5 degrees than at two degrees warmer. “Turn the dial up another degree or two and the costs balloon—the compound interest of environmental catastrophe,” Wallace-Wells writes. “3.7 degrees of warming would produce $551 trillion in damages.” Total worldwide wealth today is around $454 trillion.
Five years ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists found that nearly 311,000 homes in the United States—one in every eight in Florida—would be at risk of chronic water inundation by 2045, a timespan no longer than a mortgage. By 2100, the number would be more than 2.4 million properties underwater. How and why we continue to insure some homes is beyond me. Some of my smart friends who saw Tampa’s Davis Islands underwater last week think that the very idea of disaster insurance is unsustainable.
Anyhow, that’s all money. The human toll is horrifying. A team writing in the journal Nature Climate Change puts 150 million lives— or 25 Holocausts—in that same half-degree gap, between 1.5 degrees and two degrees Celsius. Unless we make dramatic changes, our children will bury these dead.
Dramatic change seems distant as we walk past the burned out husk of a Tesla, which presumably caught fire during the flood.
“Three quarters of a century since global warming was first recognized as a problem, we
have made no meaningful adjustment to our production or consumption of energy to account for it and protect ourselves,” Wallace-Wells writes.
“If the next thirty years of industrial activity trace the same arc upward as the last thirty years have, whole regions will become unlivable by any standard we have today as soon as the end of the century.”
That was five years ago.
Walks are supposed to make you feel good, but today is different. Maybe it’s the crazy number of police SUVs cruising up and down still-sandy Gulf Boulevard.
a sleeper sofa. An unopened eight-pack of waterlogged Bounty paper towels.
Snowy plovers dart into the surf around a window-unit air conditioner, which brings to mind Dr. John Gorrie, who was a physician treating yellow fever patients in Apalachicola in the middle of the 19th century. “Nature would terminate the fevers by changing the seasons,” he is reported to have said, and he laid the groundwork for modern air conditioning, that double-edged sword.
COLUMN
Maybe it’s the rats that scurry from trash piles as we pass. Maybe it’s the “YOU LOOT WE SHOOT” sign someone leaned up against a pile of waterlogged homegoods.
Maybe it’s the heat right now, or the fact that we just read that it’s a law of physics that for every degree Celsius increase in temperature,
Heat death sounds terrible. It starts with dehydration. Your skin gets red as your body sends blood outward. Internal organs begin to fail. You stop sweating. You get confused and combative. Then comes the lethal heart attack.
We would not live here without air conditioning, but ACs and fans now account for 10% of global electricity consumption. Wallace-Wells
air is able to hold seven percent more water vapor—meaning heavier rainfall and bigger, stronger hurricanes.
WFLA Chief Meteorologist Jeff Berardelli reported last month that this was the most oppressive summer on record in Tampa; 90 days with a heat index of 100 degrees Fahrenheit or higher, beating 88 days in last year.
reports that demand is expected to triple, or perhaps quadruple, by 2050. “According to one estimate, the world will be adding 700 million AC units by just 2030,” he writes.
“Every minute is an emergency”
Whatever it is, I’m losing hope. Let’s hop over to what’s left of the beach.
***
Hurricanes have a way of redistributing our stuff, and here we find it, much of it made from plastic and half-buried now in imported sand. Scattered among the dead blowfish and stone crabs and rotting, putrid pen shells are recycling bins, water pistols, kayaks, mini fridges,
The terrible trade-off is that by making the inside cooler and more comfortable, we make the outside even hotter. When the thermostat is set to 69, it’s easy to forget what we’re doing.
“Someday, perhaps not long from now, the inhabitants of a hotter, more dangerous, and biologically diminished planet than the one on which I lived, may wonder what you and I were thinking or whether we thought at all,” William T. Vollmann writes in “No Immediate Danger,” the first book in his “Carbon Ideologies” series. “Of course, we did it to ourselves. We had always been intellectually lazy, and the less that was
asked of us, the less we had to say. … We all lived for money, and that is what we died for.”
Anyhow, the sun is about to set and we’ve only made it to Madeira Beach. Let’s put a sleeping bag atop a strip of Tyvek here by the sand-duned public parking lot and go for a swim.
***
It’s quiet out, save the chugging of the huge generator outside the Speedway across Gulf Boulevard. The stars are brilliant, perhaps because this stretch of barrier island is still without power. I drape my clothes over a piece of rebar in the crumbled wall between parking lot and beach and head for the water, careful not to step on any nails.
It’s a shockingly short walk.
I’ve lived here almost 20 years, but I don’t really love the beach, to be honest. I’d prefer roaming around Big Cypress or the shady Green Swamp over dragging all the requisite stuff into the sand and sitting on a chair in the sun. I’d rather watch a turtle glide along the bottom of the Aucilla River than take in a sunset on the Gulf. I’d much rather swim in gin-clear Homosassa Springs, where I can see my feet, than wade into this big Mississippifed red-tide bathtub after dark, naked.
The beach is a little like church in that respect. Sometimes you have to go.
Even so, I have some beach memories that choke me up. My kids loved it. When he was an infant, my bare-bottomed son fell down facefirst and came up with a mouthful of sand. We laughed, and he saw us laughing, so he did it again, and again, and now, 15 years later, I’m laughing and crying.
I appreciate the beach. At the same time, I wonder why we even built things out here. Looking toward shore from the shoulder-deep water, it all seems so tenuous and short-sighted. Maybe we should’ve left it to the shorebirds. Jeff Goodell makes that case clear in 2017’s “The Water Will Come.” He says Miami is a “modern-day Atlantis,” and the science backs it up. That city is fucked.
Sea level rise is not a direct threat to human survival, like nuclear war or pandemic. Early humans had no problem adapting to rising seas—they just moved inland. But we modern humans have built so much along the coasts. Houses and offices and restaurants and roads and airports, and that makes us all vulnerable.
And what matters now is not necessarily the amount of rise, but the rate of rise. If water comes slowly, no big deal. It sucks but it’s mostly manageable. But, in the past, the seas have risen in dramatic pulses that coincide with the sudden collapse of ice sheets. “After the end of the last ice age, there is evidence that the water rose about 13 feet in a single century,” Goodell writes. If that were to happen again, it would be catastrophic. We would be refugees, most of us—millions of us fleeing cities like Tampa and St. Petersburg, leaving behind billions in real estate and infrastructure. Madeira Beach
GUILTY AS CHARRED: Dramatic change seems distant.
“We have an uncanny ability to forget this shit.”
would be the ocean floor. We’d all have to move to Lakeland or something.
Never in the earth’s entire recorded history has there been warming at anything like this speed. By one estimate, it’s about 10 times faster than at any point in the last 60 million years. We’re getting closer to that nightmare.
Let’s try to sleep now, on our Tyvek mattress. Maybe things will be different in the morning.
***
Wake up, friend. Continue this walk for a few more miles, if you would. Blisters are temporary. Let’s make it to the southern tip of Pass-A-Grille so we can look out over the water and toss this rigor mortised seahorse back toward his home at disappearing Egmont Key.
The morning sun brings out the clean-up crews in day-glow vests and work boots. They carry rakes and brooms and speak in Spanish. The sun slides up over a pile of trash outside a hotel on St. Pete Beach and it is topped by a waterlogged coffee-table book featuring upon its cover a contented-looking polar bear. DON’T CAUSE ANOTHER EMERGENCY, flashes a sign in the middle of Gulf Boulevard. Too late, I think.
it is because we have chosen that punishment, collectively walking down a path of suicide,” he says. “If we avert it, it is because we have chosen to walk a different path and endure.”
I am not crying.
COLUMN
Every minute is an emergency. Every minute, the average American emits enough carbon to melt enough ice to add five gallons to the oceans, David Wallace-Wells reads in my earbuds.
“If we allow global warming to proceed and to punish us with all the ferocity we have fed it,
We pass the Postcard Inn and the tower with the spinning restaurant on top. We step over all manner of human waste—trash cans and carpets and blankets and five-gallon buckets and the gulls fly overhead and the snowy plovers hustle through Vaseline-colored seafoam.
Some retirement-aged zombies emerge in the dawn, baffled, like we are, at the expanse of the refuse and the stench of marine death on one of America’s best beaches. An American
flag flaps in the wind near the rows of giant middens at the south end of Pass-A-Grille as men in hardhats site-survey nearby. I don’t want them to see me throw the seahorse into the water.
It occurs to me that it’ll take no time to clean all this up. I’ve seen it before, every big storm since Katrina. We have the knack and machinery and fuel for getting things back to normal quickly. We have an uncanny ability to forget this shit. I overhear someone saying something about organizing a beach clean-up on Facebook. I wonder if they’ll all drive here. The roads are already open.
It occurs to me, too, that this is the new normal. Another storm brews now. Another will follow. And another.
BLINDED BY THE LIGHT: We have the knack and machinery and fuel for getting things back to normal quickly.
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Polls stormed
DeSantis OKs voting changes in wake of hurricane.
By Mitch Perry/Florida Phoenix
Aday after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order allowing supervisors of elections in 13 counties affected by Hurricane Helene to make changes to voting procedures, representatives of civil rights and voting rights groups said last Friday that he needs to go further.
Earlier last week, the Florida Supervisors of Elections (FSE) sent a letter to the governor warning that “a significant number of early voting sites and polling locations have been damaged or otherwise rendered unusable, a significant number of voters have been displaced, and a significant number of poll workers may be unavailable for the foreseeable future.”
DeSantis responded with an order similar to one he signed almost exactly two years ago after Hurricane Ian leveled parts of Southwest Florida.
His new order suspends the statute prohibiting election supervisors from moving a voting location or designated ballot “intake station” (also known as a drop box) to another site less than 30 days before the election; waives the requirement that poll workers can only be hired if they are registered voters in the same county in which they will work the polls; and allows voters’ requests to send mail ballots somewhere other than the home address they had on file.
The 13 counties listed as being affected by Helene are: Charlotte, Citrus, Dixie, Hernando, Hillsborough, Lee, Levy, Madison, Manatee, Pasco, Pinellas, Sarasota, and Taylor.
However, the civil and voting rights groups, which include the NAACP Florida State Conference, the ACLU of Florida, All Voting is Local, and Common Cause Florida, have sent a letter to DeSantis, Secretary of State Cord Byrd, and Division of Elections Director Maria Matthews with additional requests, starting with adding counties to receive the waivers.
Those new counties are Columbia, Franklin, Gilchrist, Hamilton, Jefferson, Lafayette, Leon, Suwannee, and Wakulla.
“While Executive Order 24-212 includes counties flagged by Supervisors of Elections who have expressed needs, this broader list of counties is more likely to reflect the needs of all impacted voters,” they write. The other requests they have are these:
Voter Registration
• Extend the voter registration deadline from Oct. 7 to Oct. 15.
• Apply the extension statewide “as many voters are likely displaced and now located in a different county from that in which they are currently registered.”
Vote-by-Mail
• Direct supervisors of elections in all affected counties to accept telephonic and written (including email) requests for a VBM ballot to be mailed to an address other than the voter’s address on file, with requiring the voter to complete the Statewide Vote-by-Mail Request Form.
• Direct supervisors to send VBM ballots via forwardable mail such that displaced voters who have provided a forwarding address to USPS do not need to request a new ballot.
• Allow supervisors in affected counties to expand their use of drop boxes, both in quantity and location as disaster recovery efforts progress.
• Extend the deadline for voters to request a VBM ballot be mailed to them from Oct. 24 to Oct. 26.
Early Voting
• Advise supervisors to accept VBM ballots that are returned in taped or damaged envelopes.
• Allow supervisors in affected counties to conduct early voting every day beginning Oct. 21 through Election Day, Nov. 5, and provide financial support if necessary.
• Extend mandatory early voting hours in affected counties from 8 hours to 12 hours per day throughout the early voting period and provide financial support if necessary.
county to cast their ballot at any of these sites regardless of the precinct they are assigned to, or allow supervisors to set up super-voting sites where all residents can vote county-wide on election day.
ELECTIONS
Early voting in Hillsborough and Pinellas: Oct. 21-Nov. 3. Election Day: Tuesday, Nov. 4
• Require supervisors in affected counties to prominently highlight and post any changes to early voting sites on their websites and on social media and assign staff or post clear signage at the closed sites.
Election Day Polling Locations
• Allow supervisors in affected counties to extend voting or early voting sites through 7 p.m. on election day and allow any voter in the
• Require supervisors in affected counties to prominently highlight and post any changes to election day polling locations on their websites and on social media and assign staff or post clear signage at the closed locations, to ensure voters are informed about where to cast their ballot in addition to notice requirements set forth in 101.71(2), Florida Statutes.
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and X.
RESTAURANTS RECIPES DINING GUIDES
Small and mighty
St. Pete Ferments’ Sarah Arrazola talks Florida flora, ‘slow food’ and new retail storefront.
By Kyla Fields
As a longtime vendor at popular markets throughout The ‘Burg, St. Pete Ferments owner Sarah Arrazola never really planned to open an in-person, retail space for her variety of locally-sourced fermented products.
But after receiving news that the production space she leased in Gulfport was sold this summer, the opportunity to rent a brick and mortar in downtown St. Pete quickly presented itself.
Arrazola was given 75 days to relocate, and with the help of fundraising efforts from the St. Pete community and loyalcustomers alike, she was able to sign a lease by the end of the summer.
the Indie Flea and Saturday Morning Markets in St. Pete, giving Arrazola the chance to purvey a variety of kombucha, kimchi, sauerkraut and other Florida-focused ferments directly to her customer base.
In addition to these “usual suspects” as Arrazola describes, there’s a few more hyperlocal and seasonal options like her homegrown green papaya dills, which are now available at the new brick-and-mortar.
OPENINGS
St. Pete Ferments grand opening
St. Pete Ferments’ new storefront, which it shares with local honey producers Queen and Colony, is located at 326 Dr. MLK Jr. St. N and in soft opening phase. A grand opening shindig is slated for next Thursday, Oct. 17.
Next Thursday, Oct. 17. 326 Dr. MLK Jr. St. N, St. Petersburg. stpeteferments.com
While SPF is gearing up for another fall market season, Arrazola is also giving herself time to focus on the shared retail storefront. It provides a new space for future workshops, educational events and serves as a produce pick-up location for local farmer Will Crum on Thursdays.
For now, the part-retail part-production space is open from 2 p.m.-7 p.m. on Thursdays and 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, although Arrazola tells Creative Loafing Tampa Bay that these hours may expand in the future.
With an increasing number of out-of-towners and high rises populating her hometown of St. Petersburg, Arrazola finds comfort in her small-scale business, wildly fermented products, and close relationships she’s made with local farmers and fellow small business owners.
“I want this new space to continue my efforts in breaking down gatekeeping within our smallscale food production space…the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve realized that we should all be making efforts to create alternatives to the industrialized food system and antiquated grocery model,” Arrazola explains. “I think trying to break down those walls and be more community focused is going to help us all in the long run.”
The new brick and mortar space also allows SPF to sell its fresh tempeh—a fermented soy protein—as well as a variety of educational books about beekeeping, urban farming, fermentation, brewing mead, Florida horticulture and more.
Just a few workshops happening this fall cover the topics of kombucha, kimchi and the popular koji, where attendees will learn about the “myceliated mat of molded grain which is foundational to Japanese fermentation.”
“We should all be making efforts to create alternatives to the industrialized food system.”
Over the years, she’s also taught folks how to make their own hot sauces, tonics and natural sodas— constantly showcasing the endless possibilities of local flora and wild fermentation.
“Whether you’re a hobby fermenter or a chef that wants to maximize flavor, I hope that everyone can use different applications to their fullest potential,” Arrazola says. “I encourage folks to really use what’s in season and be sensitive to what’s growing around them.”
storefront—Arrazola is content with the size of her small business and isn’t interested in expanding any time soon.
“I have no interest in our products being sold somewhere like Whole Foods because that scale of production would inevitably change the products at some point,” the St. Pete native says. “I’m very comfortable making a living doing what I like doing. I get to not only support my local growers and farmers, but I get to know them as people, neighbors and friends.”
St. Pete Ferments sources all of its produce from Pinellas County purveyors like Little Pond Farm, Clearwater’s Life Farms and Greens n’ Things Urban Farm, among others throughout the greater Tampa Bay area.
product filled with gut-friendly bacteria and tons of flavor.
“Foodie” trends and influencer-promoted products come and go, but the natural process of fermentation has been around for about as long as human civilization itself. Arrazola and her small business are not reinventing the wheel, but applying these ancient techniques to the Sunshine State’s bountiful botany that she grew up surrounded by.
“I’m not here to tell people what is healthy or how to be healthy…the point of focus for St. Pete Ferments is seasonality, technique, texture and flavor,” Arrazola explains. “And if it happens to be good for you on top of that, then you know, that’s a bonus.”
Launched in 2016, SPF has made a name for itself by being a consistent vendor at both
And with 30 wholesale accounts that span the greater Tampa Bay area—alongside the annual market season and its brand new
By wildly fermenting these locally-grown fruits and vegetables, Arrayola is letting naturally-occurring microbes transform fresh produce into a longer-lasting, crunchy and tangy
Head to @stpeteferments on Instagram for the latest updates on its upcoming market schedule, operating hours, seasonal offerings and more.
LET’S GET FUNKY: Sarah Arrazola has no interest in seeing her product at Whole Foods.
Shored up
Beloved community hub Indian Shores Co ee needs help after Hurricane Helene.
By Riley Benson
For 17 years, Indian Shores Coffee has been a staple in the community by bringing together two things people love most: coffee and music. But, severe flooding from Hurricane Helen left Indian Shores Coffee inoperable. The gut-punch news is devastating because the shop at 19221 Gulf Blvd. is much more than another place to get coffee.
Indian Shores Coffee is a lot like the glue of the city with community-building events, like their famous open mic nights.
After the storm, now Nashville-based country singer Leon Majcen—who’s filmed videos in the town—said the shop was the first place he ever sang for anybody. “Had it not been for their open mics and the people there, I doubt that I would’ve pursued this songwriter thing as hard as I did,” he added.
Majcen, like many others, spoke on the significance of the company in the wake of Helene’s damage and asked for others to support Indian Shores Coffee’s GoFundMe (link via cltampa. com/food).
The crowdfunding goal is $75,000, and the donations will go towards covering the costs of replacing equipment and repairing structural damage. At this point, it is unknown when Indian Shores Coffee will be able to reopen.—Anthony Ozdemir
O set Sandwich Exchange opens food truck at St. Pete’s Green Bench Brewing Co.
After two years of popping up around St. Petersburg, Offset Sandwich Exchange has a more permanent home in the Edge District. Last Friday, the concept run by restaurant industry lifer John Harrell and his wife Amy DePalma-Harrell opened the window on its food truck parked at Green Bench Brewing Co. (1133 Baum Ave. N) The menu includes five sandwiches, two small plates, a handful of sides and desserts, plus cold brew and drinks.
Offset—one of the Bay area’s best pop-ups—will operate 4 p.m.-10 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays, 11 a.m.10 p.m. Saturdays, and noon-5 p.m. on Sundays. The menu will expand after opening weekend as the operation settles in, Offset Sandwich Exchange told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. Handhelds available last weekend start at $10.95 and included a fried green tomato sandwich, smashburger, plus Nashville hot chicken and BBQ pulled pork sandwiches. There’s also a gochujang-glazed Korean-style fried chicken sandwich available. Offset Sandwich Exchange’s opening menu also has grilled cheese and chicken tender plates. Sides include seasoned fries, sweet potato fries with hot honey, curry coleslaw and banana cheesecake flautas.
More information is available via @offsetsandwichexchange on Instagram.—Ray Roa
Dunedin’s Sonder Social Club will become extra spooky this Halloween season
This fall, Dunedin cocktail lounge Sonder Social Club is getting a big redecoration for spooky season. The local club is currently packed with cauldrons, cobwebs and chilling decor, to serve as a backdrop for Halloween celebrations. The cocktail bar will also introduce a new limited menu featuring fall-themed drinks and food.
“We wanted to give our guests something special this Halloween, the same way we do for the holidays,” said Zachary and Christina Feinstein in a statement. “The Spooky Social Club is going to be a total Halloween takeover. Think of it like Halloween threw up in our bar, just like Christmas does in December!”
In the past, Sonder was known for its other holiday redecorations, such as “Santa’s Social Club” in the winter.
The Feinstein group owns Sonder, as well as The Black Pearl and The Living Room on Main. Sonder Social Club is located at 966 Douglas Ave. Unit 101 in Dunedin.
TikTok-famous dirty soda chain, Swig, is coming to Tampa Bay
Known for viral “Dirty Sodas,” Swig is coming to the Tampa Bay area, reports Tampa Bay Business Journal.
The first location will be at Cypress Creek Town Center in Pasco County, but another is expected to come to St. Petersburg. Lease negotiations are also underway to find more locations in the area.
The chain specializes in making unconventional beverages, like mixing Dr. Pepper with half & half, calling them “dirty sodas.” These fizzy-creamy drinks exploded overnight in late 2021 when Olivia Rodrigo posted a photo holding the cup.
The chain began in Utah and has been popular in the state since 2010, but it wasn’t until recently that it gained popularity nationwide.
Swig is yet to announce an opening date for the Tampa location.
Outback founder and
Chef
Chris Ponte plan waterfront restaurant in Tampa
One of “America’s Best Restaurants” is about to get a neighbor. Two prominent Tampa restaurateurs have teamed up for a second time to create a brand new concept waterfront restaurant.
According to Tampa Bay Business Journal, The still-unnamed concept will open right next to Rattlesnake Point’s Salt Shack on the Bay, which appeared on the New York Times’ 2023 list of “America’s Best Restaurants.”
OPENINGS & CLOSINGS
Bob Bashman, known for founding Outback Steakhouse and PDQ chicken tender shacks across the Bay area, has teamed up with Chris Ponte, who created the Michelin Guiderecommended Ponte in Tampa. The duo previously teamed up in 2022 to open Bare Naked Kitchen, a fast-casual-style restaurant, in South Tampa, The 8,000-square-foot project—which sits near the site of a forthcoming nearly-500 unit apartment complex—will seat more than 300 people, and serve “coastal fare” cuisine, including fresh seafood, TBBJ reported.
Basham is a native of Tampa Bay, as he started his previously mentioned restaurant chains in the area, but is also an active community member in the area. In 2021, he received a $50,000 donation from the Lightning Foundation and the Lightning Community Heroes program, which gave to Boys & Girls Club Foundation, First Tee of Tampa Bay and other local organizations.
On the other side of the globe, Ponte formally trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, France. He currently runs family-owned restaurants throughout the Tampa and St. Petersburg area, like Ponte, Olivia (stylized in all-caps) and On Swann, with his wife and sons.
Basham and Ponte’s new restaurant is currently slated to open in the fall of 2025.
GIVES YOU WINGS: Indian Shores Coffee is a lot like the glue of the city.
LOCAL ART
‘Skyway’ at Sarasota Art Museum Closes Sun., Oct. 27. $15 Sarasota Art Museum, Ringling College Museum Campus, 100 South Tamiami Trail, Sarasota sarasotaartmuseum.org
MOVIES THEATER ART CULTURE
Scenic route
Get schooled at Sarasota Art Museum’s ‘Skyway’ installation.
By David Warner
Imight have gone with one of those “I went to all five Skyway shows so you don’t have to” headlines for this story. But I won’t, because really the headline should be: “I went to all five Skyway shows and now you have to.”
Because if you are even the least bit interested in the local visual art scene, “Skyway 24: A Contemporary Collaboration”—the work of 63 artists and art collectives across five museums—will give you a panoramic view of the scene’s many facets.
And it’s fun. Seriously. There are delights and surprises in all five shows. Visitors also get to experience (or re-experience) the museums, each one its own unique cultural environment. Skyway offers the chance—or maybe the excuse—to take a few weekends out of your life to bask in their glow.
The opening dates of the Skyway shows were staggered over the spring and summer, some launching as early as last May, and the closings are staggered, too. Hurry to Sarasota Art Museum, for instance, because it closes its show Oct. 27. The Museum of Fine Arts in St. Pete follows soon thereafter, closing its show Nov. 3; the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum’s (USFCAM) end date is Nov. 23; the Tampa Museum of Art’s is Jan. 5; and the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota finishes up its Skyway run on Jan. 25.
The third such multi-museum collaboration since 2017, Skyway 2024 was curated by guest juror Evan Garza of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) and curators from the five participating museums. More than 300 applicants responded to an open call to artists from Hillsborough, Manatee, Pasco, Pinellas, and Sarasota counties. The curatorial team rated the submissions, with some artists receiving online studio visits from the local curators.
So what happens if more than one museum wants the same artist? Is there a degree of horsetrading? No, Katherine Pill, Senior Curator Of Contemporary Art at St. Pete’s Museum of Fine Arts. “We all really enjoy working together, so it never gets heated,” she told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.
Each curator made their own decision about how to group the works they chose. Pill chose work that could be integrated interestingly within the
MFA’s permanent collection. Christian ViverosFauné of the USFCAM assembled pieces that rang multiple changes on the theme of landscape. Tampa, Ringling and Sarasota staged their shows in special exhibition galleries without specific themes. But across all five museums you’ll no doubt pick up on visual echoes and trending concerns.
“It’s fantastic when there are themes that run from museum to museum,” said Pill, “themes that visitors can pick up throughout.”
My initial inclination was to give you a detailed description of every one of the artworks in the shows (314 in all, by the count
for dining and other aspects of the exhibitions you might want to check out. We start at the Sarasot Art Museum where it’s time to get schooled.
The Sarasota Art Museum, which opened in 2019 as the anchor of the Ringling College of Art and Design’s south campus, is housed in a former high school. Maybe that’s why its Skyway exhibition docents are so good at educating. Curated by Rangsook Yoon, Ph.D., Senior Curator, Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design
Don’t miss
Samantha Modder, “A Field of Lost Hair Ties” Created with digitally manipulated ballpoint pen and taking up an entire gallery wall and then some, “Field” has the mischievous charm of a children’s book illustration. But it also can be seen as a statement about over-consumption, liberation, and enslavement. (Ask a docent.)
of arts writer Tony Wong Palms, who did an excellent overview for Creative Pinellas’s Arts Coast Magazine). There is so much good work! But the folks at CL, in their wisdom, would not likely stand for a 10,000-word magnum opus.
So what I’ve done here is try to highlight the works in each show that stood out for me or remained in my memory weeks after viewing them, starting with the first two shows closing in October and November. I’ve also included options
Sue Havens, “Motherboard” What do you do when your to-do lists are done? During the pandemic, seeking relief from the pressures of virtual academia, Havens scrunched hers into tiny balls along with other “paper ephemera” and attached them to flattened Amazon boxes in a grid-like pattern that suggests the innards of a computer and the homespun squares of a quilt.
Kirk Ke Wang, “GimGong Road” The signpost outside the Skyway galleries, with its
lacy filigrees in the style of Asian papercuts, looks nothing like a traditional Tampa street sign. But there is an actual GimGong Road in Tampa, named in honor of the Asian-American man who pioneered the cultivation of citrus trees in Florida. Wang seeks to look beyond the GimGong myths, fraught with romantic stereotype, to evoke his life in a huge, riotous painting layered with images of him as a young man surrounded by deities, vines and flowers.
Jill Taffet, “Sentient Beings” Time for another fun game of Ask the Docent. They will show you the app you can use to make the squiggles and blobs in Taffet’s work come alive as paramecia-like organisms, swimming and splitting apart before your eyes.
Tatiana Mesa Paján, “Piedra (Stone)” series Paján’s art practice includes “mini-public interventions,” covering found objects with dandelion seeds and leaving them in public places where the seeds will eventually dissipate. There’s one such “intervention” happening in the gallery (ask a docent to show you where), but its impact fades in comparison to the antique marble heads she has collected, shrouding them with gauzy dandelion-seed veils and showing them under glass — as haunting as death’s heads, at once solid and ephemeral.
Also look for
• Dominique LaBauvie’s “The Forest,” woodand-steel standing sculptures that suggest both fragility and resilience.
• The angry, funny, politically charged fables of Roger Clay Palmer
• Ryan Day’s explosive paintings and his “Swirling Sandbox,” a monumental stack of Styrofoam stones
• Plus works by Kim Anderson, Herion Park, Gabriel Ramos, Rob Tarbell, and Eszter Sziksz
And be sure to
Have breakfast or lunch (or weekend brunch) at the Bistro, a light-filled cafe in the Paul Rudolph-designed building behind the main museum. Order a delicious quiche at the counter and settle down for a little more learning: a mural showing the design history of the classic Thonet chair, a replica of which you’ll be sitting on. Open 10 a.m.-3 p.m. daily.
Look for more Skyway previews in the weeks to come.
Editor’s note: Sarasota Art Museum and the Museum Campus will be closed until Friday, Oct. 11, with plans to reopen Saturday, Oct. 12.
FIND ‘LOST’: Samantha Modder presents a must-see statement about over-consumption, liberation, and enslavement.
Editor’s note: As we went to press on Monday night, Hurricane Milton—scheduled to make landfall on the west coast of Florida on Wednesday—was already forcing the cancellation of concerts across Tampa Bay. We don’t know what the Bay area is going to look like between Tuesday and next Thursday when we’re back on stands again. So we’ve pulled a few concerts that we hope escape cancellation, and included them here. Visit cltampa.com/music for updates, and we hope to be back with good news next week.
SAT 12
Harry Potter Rave Florida Orchestra doesn’t currently have another “Harry Potter” screen-to-stage concert set, but don’t stow away your robes and wands just yet. The second-of-its-kind Potter rave. The Ritz’ own house DJ Pushman will take fans through electronica-fied versions of the film series’ score from all four of its composers. While we’re not sure whether Butterbeer will be served, don’t be surprised if there’s a moment of silence (or a wands-up moment) for the recently deceased Dame Maggie Smith, who portrayed Professor Minerva McGonagall in all eight movies. (The Ritz, Ybor City)—Josh Bradley
C Nick Bredal w/Bauxmonk/Rugawd
As Chooty B, Nick Bredal is well-traveled in the local scene where he lends tenor sax to some of the Bay area’s best bands. This weekend the Tarpon Springs High School and Berklee School of Music product ditches the alias in hopes of taking listeners light years away from Earth. A quintet of heavy hitters backs the 25-year-old for this concept concert where Bredal collects the thoughts from thousands of notes to himself and turns them into a story about Periluna, a world borne after the composer and producer started diving into science fiction like “Blindsight” by Peter Watts and pondering the concepts of self-awareness and consciousness. And while Bredal admits to being under qualified to design a Utopia, he and the band will get lost as they move through charts and the many layers of Ableton, while wielding aerophone, tenor sax, keys, bass, drums and more. “I want the moment to guide us,” Bredal told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay about wanting to give the 70-minute performance space to breathe. “The goal is that we won’t be thinking about any of that by the time we start playing. I hope it’ll still feel very organic, even though it’ll be new textures and new sorts of compositions. We want to let it rip.” (Music Hall at New World Brewery, Tampa)
Wolfgang Amadeus As a poet, Dennis Amadeus is a full-on force on the mic. Now he’s got a band. Wolfgang Amadeus finds
the Growhouse Collective co-founder channeling a lot of his poetic fire into hard-rock (“Rage”), but songs like “First Chance, Last Chance” wear some of the melodic and carefree energy of movies like “Dude Where’s My Car,” too. Amadeus—together with drummer Denny Umphreys, guitarist Zach Katz and DJ Afro Blanco, and Austin O’Neal on bass— stage a live debut where Kyah Robinson and Cozy In the Black play support. (Hooch and Hive, Tampa)
SUN 13
C Samara Joy There’s a lot to love about Samara Joy, a young singer and songwriter from the Boogie Down Bronx with a sophisticated vocal that’s already being compared to Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. The three-time Grammy winner (including Best New Artist in 2023) plays an intimate gig at the Cap, which will be very familiar to at least one person in her band—trumpeter Jason Charos, a Gibbs High School product and Grammy-winner for his work alongside University of Miami instructor Brian Lynch—whose father used to own the historic theater. There’s more familiarity in Joy’s band, too, thanks to more Gibbs alum, tenor saxophonist Kendric McCallister and St. Petersburg alto saxophone and flute player David Mason who’ll all be there as they support a new album, Portrait , due just two days before this show in downtown Clearwater.
(Bilheimer Capitol Theatre, Clearwater)
WED 16
C Peso Pluma Fingers crossed that Peso Pluma gets this show off. The Mexican superstar was forced to reschedule due to a foot fracture, but that’s given fans more time to get acquainted with the 25-year-old’s fourth album Éxodo released in June. The record features two dozen songs that straddle the worlds of regional Mexican music and more hip-hop and reggaeton-flavored offerings.
(Amalie Arena, Tampa)
THU 17
C Clearwater Jazz Holiday: St Paul & the Broken Bones w/Bruce Hornsby & the Noisemakers/Cory Wong/Boney James/Mavis Staples/Tower of Power/ Galactic feat. Jelly Joseph/more Jazz Holiday is leaning heavily into its roots for its 45th anniversary by offering mainstage viewing areas and festival side stages that can be accessed at no-cost. The festival was free for 32 years thanks to corporate sponsors, grants and donations, and Weinberger called the 2024 format “a hybrid, and in a way, reminiscent of those years.” The semi-late addition of Bruce Hornsby, 69, brings more jazz to a lineup that already includes big band (U.S. Air Force Falconaires, playing Saturday), plus Mavis Staples, St. Paul & the Broken Bones,
SAT OCT. 12–THU OCT. 17
Cory Wong, Boney James, Tower of Power, and Galactic with Anjelika Jelly Joseph. (Coachman Park, Clearwater)—JB
Experience Hendrix: Kenny Wayne Shepherd w/Zakk Wylde/Eric Johnson/ Dweezil Zappa/Noah Hunt/Chuck Campbell & Calvin Cooke/Ally Venable/ Mato Nanji/more The last surviving member of the Jimi Hendrix Experience (bassist Billy Cox) used to lead this estate-approved tribute tour saluting one of the greatest
guitarists who ever lived. Cox won’t be at Ruth Eckerd this year, but we still get a plethora of guitar icons that were surely influenced by Hendrix, including Frank Zappa’s son Dweezil, Zakk Wylde (who seems to be popping up everywhere these days), and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, whose captivating Gasparilla Music Festival set earlier this year made you feel better about the rain. (Ruth Eckerd Hall, Clearwater)—JB
C CL Recommends
FABIAN BAILEY
Nick Bredal
On the heels of Hurricane Helene, and staring Hurricane Milton is its beady, bespectacled eyes, Tampa Bay certainly is experiencing some unprecedented shit. Ani DiFranco has an album for that. And you can hear a lot of it when she comes to town next spring.
Over the summer, the 54-year-old American songwriting icon released a new album, Unprecedented Sh!t , where she stepped outside of the norm and worked with a producer, BJ Burton, for only the second time in her career. The Bon Iver and Charli XCX producer charted new territory for DiFranco, who saw her signature vocal get manipulated with effects and filters.
“I really wanted to lean into the power of machines in a way that I never have before, so BJ and I communicating through many layers of them in order to collaborate, seemed apropos,” DiFranco wrote about the process. “This record was made almost entirely by me and BJ alone, bouncing things back and forth.”
While the sound may be new to listeners, DiFranco is still using her voice to speak to the political and social landscape of the world (the lead single is called “Baby Roe,” guys). “We find ourselves in unprecedented times in many ways, faced with unprecedented challenges. So, our responses to them and our discourse around them, need to rise to that level,” DiFranco added.
Jetter w/The Men From Nantucket/ Eleni & the Uprising Friday, Oct. 18. 7 p.m. $15. Brass Mug, Tampa
Church Sessions: DJ Fader w/DJ Sandman/DJ Deacon/DJ Charlie Chase Sunday, Oct. 20. 6 p.m. $12.49. Crowbar, Ybor City
Ybor Horror III: Roxx Revolt w/Discord Theory/Mortal Sons/Breed/Neverless/ Persephone’s Choice/No One Road/ Keep It A Secret Saturday, Oct. 26. 6 p.m. $15 with costume, $20 without. Crowbar, Ybor City
High Press w/Anxiety Attack/Thin Spaces Friday, Nov. 1. 7 p.m. $10. Music Hall at New World Brewery, Tampa
Lauris Vidal (album release) w/Have Gun, Will Travel/The Zaboozays/Lone Wolf OMB/Michael Claytor/Nick Ewing Saturday, Nov. 2. 5 p.m (children’s show) and 7:30 p.m. $20. Crowbar, Ybor City
Fire Light Sunday, Nov. 3. 8 p.m. $10. Music Hall at New World Brewery, Tampa
Party On The Plaza: #NoFilter Saturday, Nov. 9. 7 p.m. $30 & up. Mahaffey Theater Plaza, St. Petersburg
To support the 11-track effort, DiFranco has booked a 29-date tour that includes two Florida dates after the Cayamo Cruise. The gigs in Orlando and St. Petersburg are DiFranco’s first Florida shows in nine years, according to a press release. Tickets to see Ani DiFranco play Jannus Live in St. Petersburg on Sunday, March 9 are on sale now and start at $39.50.
See Josh Bradley’s weekly rundown of the best new concerts coming to Tampa Bay below.—Ray Roa
The United States Air Force Band Airmen of Note Monday, Nov. 11. 7 p.m. No cover. Ferguson Hall at Straz Center for the Performing Arts, Tampa
Doechii Tuesday, Nov. 12. 8 p.m. Sold-out. Crowbar, Ybor City
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HAPPY HOUR AT AMSO
Monday - Friday, 4pm-7pm
Saturday 3pm-6pm
$4, $5 & $6 Liquor, Beer & Wine
$8 Hand-Cra ed Cocktails
Vice grips
By Dan Savage
I’m a gay man in his early-30s who’s into sex stripped down to its most basic elements: tops come in, fuck me, come and go. I’ve moved to a new city. One guy in his mid-20s came over and we had awkward-but-passionate sex like that. We chatted a little afterwards. I went to his apartment to see him a week later, and we did it again. It was hot; we have chemistry. Turns out, he’s also new in town. He’s from a conservative part of the country and says I’m the second man he’s ever had sex with. He’s got a lot of things I look for in romantic partners: smart, cute, soft-spoken, driven, and into his job. The bad part is that he’s in management training for a problematic fastfood company, and while he’s fairly apolitical, he says he will “probably” vote for Trump.
While there are certainly plenty of gay conservatives, I feel like he’s someone who hasn’t seriously given a lot of thought to politics outside of his strong belief in free enterprise. This isn’t someone who thinks a lot about intersectionality, or who has interrogated the way capitalism exploits. He wants to be a good boss. You said once not to fuck Republicans, because they should go fuck themselves. But I feel like there might be something here I can draw out of him. At the very least, his desire for kinky gay sex might make him willing to hear me out about my sharply divergent politics. But I don’t want to entertain someone who just wants his cake (my ass) and the license to eat it (his abhorrent politics), too. But the sex is good, and I like the idea of fixing him. What to do?—Aroused Slut Sees Ultimate Potential
For decades, ASSUP, I have urged sane gay men not to fuck gay Republicans—gay Republicans can go fuck themselves—but in 2015 I singled out one gay Republican in particular that I didn’t want other gay men fucking: Tim Miller, former campaign staffer for John McCain, former spokesman for the Republican National Committee, and at the time of my tweet, communications director for Jeb Bush. Seeing as Tim is no longer a Republican (but still a gay man), and seeing as my position on fucking gay Republicans hasn’t changed (just say no), I thought Tim might be able to offer you an unbiased answer. Despite my having urged other gay men not to suck Tim’s dick (without effect, it seems), Tim graciously agreed to weigh in. His response follows… Yo ASSUP. As a former Republican who Dan once tried to cockblock on account of his political views—unsuccessfully, I might add (very unsuccessfully)—I appreciate where your head is. Your instinct is downright humanitarian. It’s in line with the message Barack Obama delivered at the DNC convention. No, not the dick joke, the part where he said, “Everyone deserves a chance, and even when we don’t agree with each other, we can find a way to live with each other.” And here you are giving this hate chicken middle
manager a chance to live in you! It’s a beautiful instinct really. Who knows, with your vice grip on his dick, maybe this young gay conservative might blossom into a coconut-pilled podcast host who eviscerates any MAGA moron that dares cross his path like yours truly.
On the other hand… It’s 2024, not 2014. Donald Trump attempted an insurrection. He’s currently advancing a racist conspiracy about Black immigrants abducting and eating house pets. He is a worthless shart stain with no redeeming qualities or virtues and that’s been abundantly clear to anyone with a brain for at least nine years now. Being for Trump at this point... it’s not exactly the same as just mindlessly supporting Thom Tillis. It’s an act of active malice or supreme stupidity.
So, like you, ASSUP, I’m torn. Not a great quality in an advice columnist, but unfortunately for you Dan passed your question off to a substitute.
I guess my ruling comes down to a practical calculation. If he lives in a swing state, hold your hole hostage until he pledges to support Kamala. We can’t fuck around with so much on the line. If he doesn’t live in a swing state, well, give it a few more whirls, at least until he reveals himself to be intentionally awful.
my wrath), you should gently draw this man out about his politics (and his fast-food preferences) after he unloads in you. (There’s no better time to get someone to, um, interrogate the way capitalism exploits.) If thinking a little more deeply about his vote is the price he has to pay to keep unloading in you—if he knows he’s going to have to defend the indefensible when he sees you again—he may wind up voting for Kamala Harris along with you and me and Tim and all the other gay men out there with their heads screwed on straight.
You’ve got a little less than three weeks to fix this guy, ASSUP, so we’re gonna need you to douche daily and spend as much time in this man’s apartment—and on this man’s dick—as you can between now and Nov. 5. Your country is counting on you.
Tim Miller is the author of “Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell.” Follow him @timodc on Twitter and @timmillergram on Threads.
I’m incredibly lonely and I miss her.—Mothers Experiencing Sensitive Situation
I think you should reach out to your friend— let’s not slap the ex-friend label on her quite yet—for your kids’ sake, MESS, but also for your own.
You were extremely close until about two months ago, MESS, when your friend made a choice that dredged up painful memories and struck at the foundation of your initial connection: you bonded over being jerked around by the same terrible man at the same terrible time and now she’s seeing him again But you miss your friend, MESS, and your kids miss their friends. So, again, for your sake and theirs, I think you should reach out to her.
SAVAGE LOVE
Who knows what could happen, right? After all, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for, maybe your hole has the change he seeks.—Tim Miller
I wanna thank Tim — both for responding to your question and for eviscerating MAGA morons five days a week on The Bulwark’s flagship daily podcast—and I wanna officially lift my fagwa against his dick: gay men everywhere can suck Tim’s dick without incurring my wrath.
I also wanna expand a bit on something Tim said: can your hole—can anyone’s hole—change a person? While I think some people are too far gone for hole (or pole) to save (you can’t fuck the Nazi out of someone), some people don’t ever think critically about political beliefs instilled in them by rightwing families or churches until challenged by someone they’ve just fucked and wanna fuck again. The combination of sexual attraction, limerence, and oxytocin—the “love hormone” that floods our systems during really good sex—can open a person up in surprising ways. While it took the nomination of Donald Trump for Tim Miller to see the GOP for what it was (and Tim has gone on to do amazing and important work in the fight against Trump and Trumpism), for other former gay Republicans it was something a guy said during their refractory period—that magical moment when both minds and asses gape open—that made the difference. So, you have my blessing, ASSUP, to keep fucking this guy. But to assuage your guilt (and avoid
I’m a woman in my early-40s, in what has always been an ethically non-monogamous marriage, with two middle-school kids. It’s my exfriend’s/lover’s birthday today. My husband met her on Tinder, and we connected over the fact that we both survived a relationship with the same manipulative, controlling, abusive asshole. Our relationships with him—without our knowledge—were overlapping. He’s a “Dom” only in that he was willing to use BDSM to mindfuck us both, constantly bending the concept of consent. He lied to and deceived both of us every step of the way. Top-level Dark Triad dude. My relationship with him almost broke my family apart. My exfriend said she has also hit the lowest point in her life because of him. Over the last three years, we helped each other heal while developing a small fun supporting tribe. Our kids became friends, we spent all our weekends together, went on camping trips, helped each other with house repairs. It was idyllic. Sex became a part of our relationship on her initiative. I made it clear that I didn’t want sex to be the main focus of our relationship. She agreed, but it soon became clear that she needed more from us—me and my husband both—than we could deliver. My focus was on the kids, hers and ours, and I always opted for activities that involved our families, while she preferred adult fun.
Then one day she told me she got back with the asshole. I was in shock. I felt betrayed. I could only tell her I couldn’t be in her life if he was her life, too, and to get back to me when he was out of the picture.
I haven’t heard from her in two months. Our kids miss their friends. I also feel bad for her, and I feel a need to help, but I need to maintain my boundaries. My husband cares too, but he’s extremely busy with his startup, so doesn’t really have the bandwidth. How should I navigate this? Should I reach out for the sake of all kids?
Maintaining our boundaries is important, MESS, but sometimes we need to revisit and revise our boundaries. You don’t have to pretend to approve of what your friend is doing—you can and should express your disapproval when you first meet up to talk—and you don’t have to let Mr. Dark Triad back into your life. But hearing from your friend about why she let him back into her life might give you clarity about what to do next. If she’s back in Mr. Dark Triad thrall and makes excuses for him, you won’t want your friend back in your life the way she was before. But if you completely cut her off—if you refuse to even let your kids get together—you’ll be doing Mr. Dark Triad a favor, MESS, as you would be isolating your friend and there’s nothing an abuser wants more than to isolate his victim.
But it’s possible she isn’t in this thrall. A friend of mine once dated a guy who was a pathological liar. (He was in the CIA, he wrote for the Washington Post, his father owned the Dallas Cowboys.) My friend was in love with this guy and they were about to move in with each other when my friend came to his senses and dumped him. I was mystified six months later when they got back together. I felt better after talking to my friend: he wasn’t serious about this guy anymore—he was no longer in his thrall—and he was now able to take from him what he wanted (the sex was amazing) without taking him or anything he said seriously, as he no longer regarded him as a potential life partner. He didn’t have to pretend to believe his lies anymore and, more importantly, he didn’t have to defend his lies to his friends.
Now that your friend knows she can’t believe anything this man tells her—now that she knows he’s a manipulative asshole—he may not have the vice-grip hold on her that he once did. If she’s able to enjoy the dick (and the D/s) without being made crazy by his lies, getting together with this guy may not be putting her sanity at risk the same way it once did, even if it is—at the momen — putting your friendship at risk.
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NOTICE OF PUBLIC SALE Pursuant to Section 715.109, notice is hereby given that the following property will be offered for public sale and will sell at public outcry to the highest and best bidder for cash: a 1987 SNAD mobile home, VIN LFLSP1AH177013658, and the contents therein, if any, abandoned by previous owners Renee Louise Muchler and Bob Muchler on Friday, October 18, 2024 at 9:30 a.m. at 18811 Cayman Drive, Hudson, Florida 34667.. ICARD, MERRILL, CULLIS, TIMM, FUREN & GINSBURG, P.A.
Alyssa M. Nohren FL Bar No. 352410 2033 Main Street Suite 600 Sarasota, Florida 34237 Telephone: (941) 366-8100 Facsimile: (941) 3666384 anohren@icardmerrill.com smenasco@icardmerrill.com Attorney for East Lake Landings MHC
NOTICE OF PUBLIC SALE Pursuant to Section 715.109, notice is hereby given that the following property will be offered for public sale and will sell at public outcry to the highest and best bidder for cash: a 1979 TWIN mobile home, VIN T2395847B and the contents therein, if any. abandoned by previous owners Kenneth Hastie and Shirley Hastie on Friday, October 18, 2024 at 9:30 a.m. at 10720 Poplar Street NE, Lot 70, St. Petersburg, FL 33716.. ICARD, MERRILL, CULLIS, TIMM, FUREN & GINSBURG, P.A.
Alyssa M. Nohren FL Bar No. 352410 2033 Main Street Suite 600 Sarasota, Florida 34237 Telephone: (941) 3668100 Facsimile: (941) 366-6384 anohren@icardmerrill.com smenasco@icardmerrill.com Attorney for Pinewood Co-Op, Inc.
63 Laid-back
64 Great “Three R’s” report card? 65 Retired boomer? 68 Roughing It writer 71 Sen. Barbara Boxer’s predecessor * 77 Düsseldorf “darn it”
Antlered animals
Andean animals 82 Dr. Evil’s little clone
Stupid *
Spot early on?
Realistic prefix?
The Bard’s Athenian
McCoy, to Kirk
Controversial Siberian *
Indiana’s is “Restart Your Engines” *
Ill-fated queen
Just learning about
Hindu title
Bagpipers’ caps
Tiki bar handout
Toastmaster
Joyful shout *
Old expression of admiration (and the key to this puzzle’s theme)
Smelter input
More pretentious
Male mallards
Tough guy’s usual remark after meeting an all-American girl 120 Fixes, as a button
German steel city 122 Jumper cable connection points DOWN 1 The exGovernator’s ex-wife
Full-price payer
Brimming 4 It has its limits
State on I-5: abbr. 6 Introduction to masochism 7 Flat sign? 8 Oklahoma oil town
Early Briton
Pharaoh’s cross
Pres. appointee
O’Neill-title verb
Tirade prelude
El ___ 15 Rather high, pricewise 16 God, to Gide 17 Paralegal, for ex.
Go well together
Ghosts writer 23 Epps of House
Boy seen as a tune is whistled
Making long strides 32 S ___ Sam 34 Deliver ___ (send reeling) 35 With 111 Down, crazy as a loon, in the Crazy A Saloon 36 Four-wheeled pain in the pocketbook, perhaps 37 Kick out 38 Horne and Olin 39 “Nuts!” 40 “The list goes on,” briefly 41 Words of shock, in a play 42 Worst place? 43 Little boys 44 Bleach-blonde betrayers 45 Extreme 46 “___ be 21
