Memories And Mental Gymnastics

Triumph Bonneville 900, circa 2008, Key West Florida.

Benelli Tornado 650, Italy's answer to the Bonneville, with my adored dog Sandy, Italy 1979.

Six months ago I started wondering who was reading this blog if anyone, and I got Sitemeter which I use as a modest free tracking service (currently carrying an ad opposing nukes in Iran. I'm waiting for the ad supporting nukes in Iran! Who are these people?) and to my astonishment this site gets an average 230 visits a day, 6,000 a month, which since April adds up to just over 31,000. Despite Jeffrey's insistence this blog is still just my outlet for the many rambling streams of consciousness cluttering up my brain. Taking pictures of daily Keys living tends to relieve the pressure, in some inexplicable way. I am astonished by these numbers that have been creeping up on me. Who on earth are all these people?BMW K1200R on the road to Spoleto, Italy. Rented one very wet and cold June 2008.

Determined motorcycle beginnings, I was a helmetless risk taker even then. UK circa 1960.

I have noticed that Canada went to the polls this week and re-elected Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper's party. They started their parliamentary campaign five weeks ago and it was all be done by Wednesday breakfast time. We in the United States are grinding along into the final three weeks of our year long saga and things are getting unpleasant. I must confess I am hugely amused by the signs I see photographed at Republican rallies (I don't have television) denouncing Obama's socialism. This is the same week our Republican Administration announced a plan to nationalise any banks needing Federal reassurance! You just know Marx Lenin and Engels are sitting up in their dusty coffins clapping loudly! A field day for an Ironist, a dreadful day for the United States as markets continue their inexorable slide and trust remains evanescent.

My grandfather's shooting parties and elaborate picnics. Umbria, Italy circa 1950.
Chris' less elaborate picnic, on a bicycle camping trip from our English Boarding school. 1971.

There is a move afoot in the Keys to change the name of the new airport terminal, from McCoy to something else. A recently completed court case found Monroe County guilty of not properly protecting the workplace of a female assistant to County Commissioner Sonny McCoy. The county has been fined $48,000 after a trial that saw McCoy not deny the charges that he was grossly sexually explicit in his office ("Guess who I had sex with in Paris, last week?" Juvenile boasting it sounded like to me), he just seemed to think the woman liked it. McCoy's daughter wrote long letters to the newspapers attacking the victim and justifying the naming of the terminal for her deceased mother, a very decent woman no doubt about that. However, unhappily for that line of defense Sonny McCoy had a bust of his own head, not his late wife's, commissioned to adorn the almost completed, McCoy Terminal. One fine suggestion in the Citizen's Voice was for him to put it in his living room.

Mellito wondering what mess my overpowered superbike was going to get me into.Italy 1979.His son Giovanni sheltering from a downpour with me, Terni Italy 2008.

The stock markets around the world, were moving back up the long steep hill they tumbled down over the past week. I was afraid to wonder what would happen if the latest bank bail out schemes offered around the world didn't boost confidence. I was not encouraged by the IMF boss, the gravelly voiced Frenchman enunciating the notion that we faced systemic financial meltdown, (what, I wondered as I listened to the radio, does that even mean?). Even though I am not depending on the stock market for money I am convinced it is the bell weather of our economy, as a visible expression of trust and faith in the system. The question sliding round my brain is: where does the government get the money to cover it's multi-trillion obligations? Printing is the only answer I see and that inevitably leads to devaluation of the currency. I fear we shall see more sleight of financial hand in the months ahead and more economic shenanigans to evade this unhappy truth. Might as well face it now: we the little people are going to get screwed one more time. At least one more time to cover for the absence of oversight of the financial wizards who are too smart to be left to their own devices. I hope my vegetables grow splendidly, and edibly, as a hedge against inflation. My castle was my home at Morruzze. Fifty rooms with the oldest from the 12th century.800 square feet dating back to 1987. I'd much rather a canal instead of a wine cellar.

I attended a memorial yesterday for Cheryl Heinlen who died this month at the age of 56, which seems altogether too young to me, as I head towards my 51st birthday. Cheryl had grown more isolated leaving one to wonder if she was driven by her desire to write, alone, or whether she was isolated and depressed. Thus she slipped into a coma alone, discovered in her apartment just in time for her to die at the hospital. To our astonishment a friend of ours through whom we had no connection to Cheryl announced she too was going to Finnegans Wake and there we met. It's hard to tell people how small the world is when you live in Key West. Connections are more like spider webs than railroad tracks. Not least because we ran across Josh and Lisa in the bar by coincidence, so while I went to work, my wife spent the evening with them... I find the ties encouraging in these bleak times, and they permit me to hope for a better, more intimate, post-consumer future. Not I hope fed by memorial services but by the desire to simply be together.My sister Liz, 60, the happy farmer's wife and grandmother. Umbria Italy 2008.57 years ago she is the twin on the left. Neither has ever left home making me the wanderer.

I have no idea what prompted this flood of reminiscence, other perhaps than Cheryls's death. But here it is, make of it what you will. Not exactly Key West but a crooked path here!