Trailer blogs

I posted to host a blog carnival just as I’m making moves to skedaddle out the trailer park and relocate into downtown, which wouldn’t be so bad if the carnival wasn’t about alternative living. I can just pretend I’m cooped in here still and who would know, right? But I be trippin’ because, first off, I have no money and, secondly, I have no job, comprende? Well, I have a little business but my tax statements are unlikely to impress any landlords enough for them to give me anything but some loose change. Roommates are still out because not only does Thelonius refuse to die but he won’t even age in any discernible way. There must be an decrepit photo of him hidden away somewhere, or else the little killer’s been sucking my blood in the night. I suppose that would make me some kind of felis-desmodus-sapien mutation, and upon quick reflection I have no real problem with that.

I went to Blog Carnival dot com and filled out the hosting form a few fields short of capacity but enough to defeat the pop-up protester from reemerging on screen. I have no idea if anyone will post. You sort of have to go looking on the carnival site to find something so you have to be a little desperate and attention starved in the first place. When I was directed by our professor to submit to a carnival earlier in the semester I couldn’t find anything to do with urban living, never mind trailers. That reminds me; maybe I should go back and add urban living to the tags. That might be too broad a category and could offend park residents in leafier sections of the lithosphere. I’m already have my eye on a couple of interesting ladies like Trailer Park Girl, out of Austin, and Trailer Park Feminist, and will probably invite others especially if nobody submits. Got to get some Brazilian dancers festooned in feathers involved somehow too. But no drunken frat-boys puking on the streets of my trailer park are welcome and, believe me, we got ways of dealing with those fellas in these parts, I can assure you. It’s called prayer. And cursing.

This post is being preempted by an important announcement: I have tried to make this blog one of general interest to trailer enthusiasts, and such, who are drawn in droves to the site for the lowdown on park living and updates on the neighbors. I promise to bring it back up to established levels of depth and insight as soon as the semester ends and I won’t be forced write more than I actually have to say. You see, there are certain exigencies that may surpass the casual reader’s grasp, notably the pursuit of the grade I am trying to get in order to graduate from the Broadcasting and Electronic Communications Department (BECA) at San Francisco State University.
Anyhoo, got to write 750, make that seven-hundred and fifty, words in this post so be patient while I come up with something to say…

Lots to do in school as the semester winds down in a few weeks and my ass will be graduated and once more underemployed, this time with debt I might actually be able to pay off – eventually, and down the line, real slow like. BART all but promised to hire me as a train operator, in fact they offered me the job in the middle of last semester but I was too deep into my classes to accept the position back then. I brought a big box of Krispy-Kremes to the human resources department a couple of months back and, while making friends and acquaintances, I was told the new hiring period was tentatively scheduled for June. The fetching Asian woman who came out of back to talk to me said I would definitely be “in the pool”. This could mean a hiring pool like a hat it might be pure chance I get picked out of. Or it could mean they definitely want me and there is some mandatory safety exercise in which you have to swim for it if the train ever conks out under the bay and the tunnel starts to get soggier and soggier still, likely due to some seismic utterance from Kisin, Mayan earthquake god, ruler of the underworld, and deity of death. (Maybe that’s where they came up with the “kiss of death” thing.)

The trailer park is close to where I would start work in the morning but the proximity of Wendy’s and Walgreens, and all the cultural stature that implies has become a wear on my wheels. The thing is, I have to go all the way into the Mission District to find a suitable café from which to do my work. I can’t take my motorcycle because I’m can’t afford to have a spill while carrying my new laptop and my truck is a pain to park and expensive to run. I’m looking for an apartment within walking distance of a BART station and some kind of urban throng. This will cost me, but I can sell the truck and trailer and maybe have a life. Plus, I took on this stage managing position for a friend’s play, mainly to force me to leave the house once school is over. The theater is downtown and so is a Krav-Maga place I want to re-attend. Downtown is getting more interesting and the crowd in the Mission keeps getting younger and whiter, so there’s that. And there's this:

Mario Del Monaco kills it on Nessun Dorma, the great tenor aria from Puccini's Turandot. The man is hoping to wed a princess who would prefer to chop off his head. I can relate.

Trailer talk

Here are some links and background info on the trailer park phenomenon that's going to sweep the nation just as soon as I move the hell out of here and it becomes cool. By the way, the salute to Idaho photo links to a t-shirt site I found through one of the websites below except I have no idea which one it is anymore and am far too busy in school right now to find it. If any of you readers can figure this out for me you may be eligible for a free tour of my secret trailer location along with one complimentary beverage and an audience with my cat - if he's awake, or in the mood to see visitors.

Some history for students out there approaching deadline (copy and paste).
The Trailer 'Problem': With the Great Depression - an oxymoron, of sorts - home foreclosures began happening at a rate our society would never allow today because we learned back then that unregulated financial markets would be overtaken by greedy investors who would screw the working poor and middle class for the good of the all mighty quarterly return. Anyway, back in those brutally unsophisticated days newly homeless Americans began living year round in what were once nothing more than hardened, domesticated, tents made for vacations out into the country's endless supply of pristine wilderness. These “trailerites" didn't pay real estate taxes and many were considered vagrants, as there were no permanent trailer lots where they could park legally. Within a few years the first trailer parks began to spring up and become an appealing alternative to the dilapidated shacks found within Hoovervilles. Because those trailers were so small, the families would spend a great deal of time outdoors, weather permitting, and violated notions of propriety like a motherfucker. They probably drank,  got loud, and likely included some distant relatives of yours, truly.
Trailer park folks have been taking it on the chin since, even from within. Eminem is one example of a native son who "made it", went on to slander its indigenous culture, then left the old homestead for good not sticking around to offer his sullen example to vulnerable park youths.  Instead, he became a role model for wannabe wiggas across the globe. 

In the news:
Troubled park in legal stew on SoCal rez. 
Conditions of neglect and a plethora of complaints brought Judge Stephen G. Larson himself out to have a look-see at the Duroville park, owned by Cahuilla Indian tribal elder, Harvey Duro. It is mainly inhabited by immigrant farm workers and is in such a sorry state the Judge considered shutting it down but that would only leave the poor park residents homeless, so he is working with Mr. Duro to get him to do the right thing.

Here is an excellent article from a small San Diego county newspaper on efforts to relocate some local park residents into low-income government housing. In the online comment section following the piece, one person writes: "You know who else lives in Orange Grove? There's Rick, the navy vet, who is completely blind and lives off Social Security. There are also Mike and Doris, two formerly homeless people, who finally have a roof over their heads. Doris is on dialysis while Mike just got laid off from his job at a local factory. Then there's Debbie and her two teen age boys she's raising alone. Debbie works for the VUSD in the lunch room. The trailer park holds alot of nice, hard-working people. I know its not much to look at and doesn't fit into Vista's future plans (white suburban tract housing but its home to some great folks. Leave it alone."

This is a brief synopsis of a study on Katrina/FEMA trailer parks by the Urban Institute that exposes the dangers of concentrating the underclass in isolated communities.

Cal State Long Beach's own Dig Magazine has a write-up on a nice park right along Seal Beach. Get your applications in early!

Blog reflections on a trailer park boyhood in west Texas.

Green and expensive trailer like "mini homes" are being made in Canada. Hey, did you know trailer parks are called Caravan Parks in most Commonwealth countries? Well I don't care either.

Making fun of poor folks:
Ugly ones especially get mocked and abused here.

Columbus, Miss., gets a whole page of the treatment on this screed of scorn.

Uneducated fundamentalist types haven't gotten it this bad since H.L. Mencken stalked the plains on "Why Does God Hate Trailer Trash?"

I wouldn't be surprised if this Jolene Baker fella lives somewhere off upper Market. YouTube home-ec trailer tips with a big old wiggy bouffant.

This is the where I got the picture of the Red Neck Mansion photo and I would have liked to have made it into a link but don't believe blogger wants that to happen, not by the likes of me anyway. Click the pic for a bigger version and you can set it up as a down-home desktop.

And finally, American Sexuality traces the origin of the term "white trash" back to Baltimore blacks in the 1820s. Who knew?


This is a scene from the romantic 1981 French film, Diva. The setup is a famous singer who refuses to let her voice be recorded. A young fan sneaks in a mini-studio while some bad guys from a devious record label keep tabs on his efforts. A great bicycle chase ensues, but for the that you have to rent the DVD.
The aria is called Ebben? Ne andrò lontana, from the opera La Wally by Alfredo Catalani, and is sung as Wally prepares to leave home forever. According the the Wikipedia entry, "The opera also features one of the most memorable of operatic deaths, in which the heroine throws herself into a passing avalanche. It is seldom performed because of the difficulty of staging this scene." Yeah, I guess so. Maria Callas does an unbelievable version too but YouTube only offers a slide show. This one will certainly do. Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez performs.

White trash? My ass!!!

The culture of the trailer park is akin to the live aboard crowd in that it is comprised primarily of divorced and separated men. The marina people are decidedly white-collar, middle class, tech guys and insurance agents intermixed with a handful of groovy types preparing for ocean voyages and long stays in ex-pat exotica. Trailer parks tend to be blue collar and passport free; the only parts of the world any of these guys has seen came as a low paid emissaries of the military-industrial complex.

The first time I stopped at a park to do some used-unit shopping, I found people there were anything but trash; these were folks. While this old white dude was giving me the lowdown on a couple of twenty-six footers his Mexican son-in-law was out barbecuing oysters nearby in the tented space between his plot of pavement and the next. Suddenly an adorable little girl appeared and handed up to me a paper plate upon which rested a prodigious example of a formerly offshore mollusk complete with my own fork, a little salsa on top, and a wee wedge of lime on the side. This is not the way we serve ‘em up in New England and it might be a shame considering the scrumptious culinary achievement this was. Granddad told me to be wary of the on-site super who was trying to put a lean on one of the trailers and aimed to stop any prospective buyer from taking it out of the yard. The longer it took to sell the more in arrears the unit's owner would be to the park on his monthly fees and the more the super could make claim, however dubious, on some poor fellow’s property. It had worked in the past for super-man who everyone seemed a bit afraid of and spoke about in hushed tones. As we chatted the granddaughter reappeared to take back my empty plate. Then mister super wheeled up in a golf cart with an American flag on it like some visiting raj and proceeded to ignore me when I walked up to his rolling throne and introduced myself. By the time he bothered to scowl me up and down after learning of my interest in purchasing a trailer and possibly becoming a resident his attitude turned upwards in arrogance and the main thing keeping me from flipping his super-cart over sideways was the reappearance of the little brown-eyed angel handing me a second plateful of bivalve and a smile. I had not even spoken to her daddy yet.

The cheaper place I eventually moved into is a lot smaller and lower key. The youngish woman next door introduced herself after I’d been there a few days and demanded an inspection of my place just as I was getting ready to drive away on a job. She said she wanted to check on her mother who she maintained was being held hostage inside and simply wanted to see if she needed anything. Very calm and pleasant about the whole thing she was even as I tried to explain the place was empty as we stood outside in the sun that morning getting to know one another. It didn’t seem wise to let her think she could push me around by capitulating to her unscheduled prisoner visitation request being as I was new and all and had to establish protocols and boundaries. In the rapid, free verse, soliloquy of non-sequiturs she worked up to I caught some kind of reference to “sexual” and later the landlord said it was fortunate she never made it inside because she could then proceed with all manner of accusations against me.
Sometimes she jumps out of the shadows at night as I’m heading to the laundry room but otherwise her mother, since liberated, was brought in to dissuade her from causing trouble. Although this morning she threw a cup at Willy from across the yard, which isn’t like her, but maybe Willy made fun of her or something, at least that’s what Dolores says and she’s Willy’s girlfriend. They live together with a cat named Shazam and a restraining order she got against Willy a while back when they were fighting more. When he gets out of line again she just has to wave it in his face and reach for the phone and he vanishes like the exhaust pouring out of his beloved Harley. Willy’s a good guy but one thing you might notice about him right on the quick, if you have an eye for this sort of thing, is Willy has done time. But he sure has taught me all kinds of interesting things like different ways to pick combinations and break into my trailer, hot-wire my car, and undo the steering lock on my motorcycle. These adventures make him uncharacteristically enthusiastic.
Dolores is a sweetheart who runs the yard on a daily basis and is into Neil Diamond and witchcraft. Willy is totally devoted to her and told me he didn’t even want to pet my cat out of loyalty to Shazam except that the Thelonius made him. I believe it too. It’s the same with me and the little kitty next door that’s always purring around, rubbing up against my legs, and jumping up so I have to stroke the top of her head or look like some cold fish. And even though Tom, her owner, swore he’d had her spayed she’s looking awfully pregnant again, the little slut. But what male could possibly resist her? Thelonius can, and in the hissiest possible fashion. But that’s just because I paid the vet to do the unthinkable back when the he still trusted me, the poor little muffin...I mean bastard.


This duet, from Bizet's The Pearl Fishers, includes an intro section most recordings leave out. Listen as two old buddies, both fisherman in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), discuss the thing that drove them apart. Guess what that could have been.