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Should Gaj make his own thread This poll is closed. |
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| Yes, make a new thread |
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6 | 54.55% |
| No, keep things just how they are |
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5 | 45.45% |
| Total: | 11 votes | ||
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Buckwheat Sings posted:The Villages. From a few pages/a week back, but I gotta post about the Villages. I've been a resident of Canada for over a decade now, but my whole family is back in the States and my last visit to the Villages was back in February 2020, to visit my grandfather (he's in his 90s so not really a boomer, but close enough for the thread). He seemed pretty close to death with cancer, so I figured I should head down asap, especially since I figured this pandemic thing might be a thing and while I didn't see it being as big as it was, I was worried travel might be restricted and wanted to see him before things went real south. I had been there a few times before, when he had his own house (he sold it to live in a condo). It's loving weird and lovely. The only young people you see are the ones working in restaurants/banks. The residents told me they weren't allowed to live in town, and one trip when I went on a liquor run for my granddad's birthday (otherwise they drink only cheap vodka and seagram's seven), my granddad's friend drove me past the lovely prefab suburb that apparently a lot of them live in. They volunteered, I guess before I asked, that people lived and worked there because the locals all paid to have a great magnet school put in nearby, for the kids of the workers. He couldn't understand why I thought that was not the best thing ever. Every street has golf carts lining it. The main reason, according to the dudes my gd knows, to drive cars is apparently to go to a nearby barbeque restaurant or the casino (my granddad is a lifelong poker player and after he dumped his girlfriend he apparently mostly just gambled). His ex-girlfriend was bonkers and super racist, as were a lot of the folks I talked to. We met her at my cousin's wedding, where she found out my future wife was Canadian. Her response to that fact was to ask her if she, as a Canadian, was as upset as she was that America was going to become Sharia law because we let Muslim kids pray in school. I guess maybe she thought America is lenient towards Muslims or something? Anyway, that was back in 2008 and why I first realized Fox News was super brain poison. On a later trip she gleefully told us that the Villages had a higher incidence of STDs than anywhere else in America. On that last trip it was just me and my parents there. The hotel was next to an Applebee's, and as a snobby bartender I was actually kind of delighted to go to a real lovely chain and actually watch the SEC tournament on TV at a bar. Beer was insanely cheap but 20 minutes into the game, around 9, they last called the whole bar and I had to watch most of the second half sober, in my hotel room. A lot of people move there because there are a ton of doctors, but there are actually so many dying old people that care isn't any better than anywhere else in the US. I went to a bank to close out my US account and the associate quizzed me for over ten minutes about the Canadian health care system. Even the younger people there are Fox brain poisoned by osmosis, she was super incredulous that I didn't have to wait weeks for every medical appointment. Anyway, we ended up moving my granddad into my cousin's place in Tampa a couple months later and they were able to get him some quality of life surgery and stuff, even during the pandemic, so he's against the odds still here. I've spent a couple weeks there over several trips, gone to a bunch of terrible outdoor concerts and stuff, and the big takeaway is it must be the perfect place for the people who live there, because it's Hell's Perfect America. Everyone constantly asked me if I thought it was great, like an ancient Stepford sales force.
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Apr 10, 2021 01:17
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 23:48 |
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