September is the height of hurricane season in the Northern hemisphere and thus it comes as no surprise that Tropical Storm Gustav is drenching Hispaniola and aiming to hit Cuba next with heavy winds and rains. Maybe Florida will get hit by next weekend which puts me in mind of a bumper sticker that made the rounds in the 2004/2005 seasons of endless parades of hurricanes: Another weekend, Another hurricane.
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It's way too early to know what is going to happen or where Gustav is going to head, so for now we'll bag the speculation and get on with enjoying the Keys. Later, much later I'll drag those bloody hurricane shutters out, again, and stuff everything in the shed, again, and debate the merits of evacuation, again.
Another summer, another hurricane season.
If you are blind drunk and needing somewhere to snooze is that orange sign on the pretty picket fence going to put you off? I can guarantee you it won't. I've taken too many calls from angry citizens who find people passed out in their yards. These No Trespassing signs are everywhere and they disfigure the landscape. And still people continue to trespass. Count trespassing as one reason I don't want to live in the City. For instance a new restaurant opened on Simonton Street recently and the enthusiastic and naive restaurateur thought this was the ideal spot for a sidewalk cafe so he put out tables and chairs, but omitted to nail them down. Next morning they were gone. Talk about trespassing! 
This avalanche of signs gives off an air of futility and desperation. One...more...sign...will keep them out, they seem to say. I doubt it. 
I'm going to bet the bicycle is not Mayor McPherson's but I guess we can let that pass. Every Tuesday evening when the commission meets we have to send a Parking Control Officer into the parking lot to clear vehicles out of the assigned spaces. They get towed and every meeting it keeps on happening. Like I say human behavior ain't going to change, and you'd think No Parking At Any Time would be clear enough. And if it isn't don't call me to bitch about the cost of the towing fee.
This homeowner on Dey Street is lucky enough to have an All American garage with a proper swing up door and everything. Park in front of it and you will get towed. But people still do and they get incensed when they discover the towing fee is somewhere north of two hundred dollars. All day at the Park And Ride is a measly thirteen dollars.
Because I live here I have a few extra curricular "comfort stations" I can use when the need arises, so my consideration of the availability of public toilets is a little biased. Even so, I think Key West does quite well by its citizens when it comes to loos. We have them at all the beaches and more than one park. Its not that hard to make a pit stop in some of the restaurants and a $1.60 Cafe Americano at Starbucks gets you a pleasant walk through the delightful lobby of La Concha to the hotel loo. But those signs are everywhere, like its a helpful thing to make tourists bottle it up, and like No Trespassing signs, they seem a little snippy and unnecessary. 
Not one, but three signs to that effect. The banner across the top is the sign advertising the construction company that is doing good work renovating the offices. The city's actual City Hall is on Angela Street at Simonton, behind the Fire Station. Old City Hall is just the place where commissions and committees meet, downstairs the office space used to be leased to the Marine Sanctuary until they got their new building on the waterfront. Personally I think the big wooden doors would look much nicer without Sturm und Drang signage.
Carlos Rojas advertises himself as a political novice and he has done nothing in the campaign to disabuse us of this notion. However this sign was posted next to a rather tasty Vespa LX50 and he is putting people first. I really like the Vespa but what does his slogan mean? What, for instance, is he putting second? My wife really likes one of the candidates for judge so we have a sign for some poor unfortunate candidate in our front yard (its a dead end road so God knows who will see it). Whether or not you had designs on your son for public office, if you were Mrs Slaton would you call your son Tegan? It must be a nice family name but Teagan Slaton just has an uneasy cadence to my ear. For the sake of family harmony he gets my vote for judge on Tuesday, but really Tegan? Luckily were I in his court, which is unlikely as he would be a family court Judge, he will be known simply as Honorable Judge Slaton. I find parenst to be unaccountable sometimes. 
This sign I liked. It's polite and covers pretty much every eventuality. I thought about standing on the steps to eat, but eating is outlawed, please. You can't sit, thank you, so I moved on. Off Duval, more precisely at the haunted theater on the 500 block of Eaton Street they are less polite:
I think the bill I saw posted on the old box office window which said "Lost Liberty" was about more than a simple lack of freedom to loiter, even though I'm not entirely sure what constitutes "loitering." Perhaps I was loitering by hanging around in the entrance. Was I saved from the sin of idle standing by virtue of the fact I was photographing?
Lost Liberty indeed. Across the street I saw, rather than noticed the Freemason's Hall, as announced by large silver letters:
If the secrets of Freemasonry titillate you Voltaire books next door had just the solution:
All apparently might be revealed if you like that sort of thing.
There are yoga studios popping up all over town, it must be quite the rage because I'm sure if you were to swing a cat, before you were arrested, you would hit at least three on any street corner. With all this yoga going on it amazes me there are enough adherents to go round, but it seems there are: 
I've never really thought of Key West as a very spiritual place, like say Boulder or Taos or Mount Shasta, but perhaps I only see what I expect to see. 
Key West has gone through a lot of street names in it's history and not all of them have survived. This particular one leads me to wonder exactly how long have chickens been roaming the streets of Key West. I went to a wake recently of an almost centenarian, to offer my condolences to his son, and it had shocked me to learn in his obituary that he had worked on the construction of the Overseas Highway in 1938. That road project seems so far away I was amazed that I had met, unknowing, with one of the few people left alive at that time,who were there and saw the road built over the old railraod tracks. 
