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Weather: Mostly sunny with a chance of showers and thunderstorms. Highs in the lower 70s. Chance of rain 30 percent. Monday Night: Partly cloudy. A slight chance of showers and thunderstorms in the evening. Lows in the upper 50s. Chance of rain 20 percent.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- Tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
The Flagler County Commission meets at 9 a.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 E. Moody Boulevard, Building 2, Bunnell. Access meeting agendas and materials here. The five county commissioners and their email addresses are listed here. Meetings stream live on the Flagler County YouTube page.
Palm Coast Charter Review Committee Meeting: The city’s committee, appointed by the City Council to propose revisions to the city charter, meets at 6 p.m. at City Hall, 160 Lake Ave. The committee is made up of Patrick Miller, Ramon Marrero, Perry Mitrano, Michael Martin and Donald O’Brien. The meeting is moderated by Georgette Dumont, an independent moderator and the Director of the Master of Public Administration program at the University of North Florida. The meeting is open to the public and includes a public-comment segment.
The Beverly Beach Town Commission meets at 6 p.m. at the meeting hall building behind the Town Hall, 2735 North Oceanshore Boulevard (State Road A1A) in Beverly Beach. See meeting announcements here.
Nar-Anon Family Groups offers hope and help for families and friends of addicts through a 12-step program, 6 p.m. at St. Mark by the Sea Lutheran Church, 303 Palm Coast Pkwy NE, Palm Coast, Fellowship Hall Entrance. See the website, www.nar-anon.org, or call (800) 477-6291. Find virtual meetings here.
Byblos: The mailman delivered the third volume of Joan Didion’s works in the Library of America edition, her last writings, including The Year of Magical Thinking, the 2005 memoir that won the National Book Award and that requires deep familiarity with stoicism to read: she writes of losing her husband John Gregory Dunne near the end of a life spent writing about loss and trying not to lose. Think of that sliver of Flagler County shoreline, with all its beauty and fragility, with all its unstoppable erosion, as a metaphor for Didion’s life. I am not sure if I’ll ever be ready to read that book. It’s like Proust’s Remembrance, the last book from whose early pages I read aloud to my mother as her mind was going the way of the shoreline. I cannot bring myself to read it, even though I know, from having read those pages, that it is one of the most sublime books ever written. Every page, every line floored me. You get that in much thinner drabs from Didion, though it’s not fair to burden anyone with Proust as a standard. His prose was inhumanly otherworldly. Didion’s is so grounded, at times so crushing with its unforgiving clarity, that it creates its own gravity. The volume also includes Political Fiction, a collection of pieces she wrote for the New York Review of Books, and that I usually clipped (I still have several of them in their original format, sleeved against decay). It includes pieces on the Clintons, on Newt Gingrich, on Democrats in 1992, just before they retook the White House, and the essay on Bob Woodward’s The Choice, appropriately titled “Political Pornography,” which reminds me of Patricia Lockwood’s fabulous “Malfunctioning Sex Robot” takedown of John Updike. Didion on Woodward: “This disinclination of Mr. Woodward’s to exert cognitive energy on what he is told reaches critical mass in The Choice, where not much said to the author by a candidate or potential candidate appears to have been deemed too insignificant for inclusion, too casual for documentation.” There are a few other Didion memoirs, and her “Notes on the South” and “California Notes.” Didion died two days before Christmas in 2021.
—P.T.
The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
November 2025
Flagler County Commission Morning Meeting
Beverly Beach Town Commission meeting
Nar-Anon Family Group
Palm Coast Charter Review Committee Meeting
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry
Sheriff Staly 50th Year Celebration
Flagler Beach Library Writers’ Club
Flagler Beach Planning and Architectural Review Board
Palm Coast City Council Meeting
Bunnell Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry Evening Hours
Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town,’ at Limelight Theatre in St. Augustine
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
For the full calendar, go here.
A traveler in the rural South in the summertime is always eating dinner, dispiritedly, in the barely waning heat of the day. One is a few hundred miles and a culture removed from any place that serves past 7:30 or 8 p.m. We ate dinner one night at a motel on the road between Winfield and Guin. The sun still blazed on the pavement outside, and was filtered only slightly by the aqueous blue-green Pliohlm shades on the windows inside. The food seemed to have been deep-fried for the lunch business and kept lukewarm on a steam table. Eating is an ordeal, as in an institution, something to be endured in the interests of survival. There are no drinks to soften the harshness of it. Ice is begrudged. I remember in one such place asking for iced coffee. The waitress asked me how to make it. “Same way as iced tea,” I said. She looked at me without expression. “In a cup?” she asked. The waitress in the place in Guin trailed me to the cash register. She was holding a matchbook I had left on the table. “I was looking at your matchbook,” she said. “Where’s it from.” I said it was from Biloxi. “Biloxi, Mississippi?” she said, and studied the matchbook as if it were a souvenir from Nepal. I said yes. She tucked the matchbook in her pocket and turned away.
–From Joan Didion’s “Guin,” in South and West (2017).
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