Veterans Park

It was too cool to consider going swimming. I am embarrassed to mention temperatures were hovering in the mid 70s but the northeast breeze was cool and wintry and dry and it didn't feel like a day to immerse oneself in ocean water. So I didn't, I stood on the shore and took pictures instead. This is Veterans Memorial Park at about Mile Marker 39 at the south end of the Seven Mile Bridge.Veterans is a good place to bring a picnic and enjoy the view. Like most parks in this small islands, Veterans isn't what you might call expansive but it has all needed appurtenances for a day at the beach. And rules too, including No Nothing Overnight:And there is a magnificent toilet building for your pleasure, which is worth knowing if you are caught short while traveling:You can stroll the beach and take pictures:You can bring a pal on your motorcycle and take a quick turn in the parking lot. These reprobates would probably get loud raspberries from the quaking all-the-gear-crowd Up North who are alternating envious glances at the sunny Keys afternoon on their computer screens, with the gray overcast precipitous day outside their windows, in that delightful time of year known as the all-important "change of season." These guys hitched up their shorts just to give you an extra taste of their summery pleasure:I don't give a fig for changing leaf colors or drooping apple boughs or frosty hedgerows with panting robin red breasts in them. I can't wait for temperatures to get back to normal, the winds to die down a little and give me another week or three of swimming weather before the next cold front puts the final seal on summer.

The waters off Veterans Memorial Park are not too terribly deep and you can wade out on a sandy path between the sea grasses for a good long way before the water covers your knees, so I generally prefer to go to Bahia Honda State Park for swimming.Veterans is nicely set up for families to come out and enjoy the waterfront, with chickee huts, picnic tables and trash cans everywhere, a service of Monroe County Public Works, and very civilized it is too.

The problem with living in the Keys is that you get acclimated to the weather and winter suddenly feels cool and dry when most visitors find the sun balmy and warm compared to what they go through at home. This hermaphroditic metrosexual looked decidedly European to me for some reason. But as effete as he appeared to my sturdy eye he was doing alright for himself, as it turned out.I wondered if perhaps she might not have been his sister, but he took some pictures of her posing in a style that was decidedly odd if they were blood relatives.I hope they enjoyed their visit to the Keys and spent vast sums of money. They certainly seemed to enjoy lounging on the beach as I busied myself taking my pictures. I had a dinner date with my wife and I was buying dinner at the Winn Dixie grocery in Big Pine before she got home so I had to pull my finger out. Here are some more happy memories of the Keys being recorded at the water's edge. You really owe it to yourself to get down here and do the same. Just ignore my moaning about the cold fronts and frosty conditions, because I happen to prefer summer's heat.

It's been a lot hot summer, extra hot in fact, and I've heard from my neighbors who have been longing for relief from the heat. I plan to switch modes too, and as swimming ends cycling begins and walks in the back country become bearable in winter.
I'll come back to Veterans to sit out and perhaps watch a sunset, or, if I get ambitious and can drag myself out of bed early on my days off perhaps I could photograph even a sunrise or two.The great pleasure I do get from this modest change of seasons is that one doesn't have to waste time dreading winter. It's a change, a modest one, but outdoor living is in some ways enhanced, rather in the way people in horrid climates take advantage of snow by skiing and riving snowmobiles and they make the cold their friend. So I do different things in winter when it's cooler than i do in the blast of summer's heat.On the colder snaps in winter I start grumbling about how we need to move further south, Puerto Rico is largely immune to cold fronts as are the US Virgin Islands, but the truth is cold is relative and it doesn't last long in the Keys. On Sunday we were treated to a night time low of 67, by Tuesday the sun was firmly out and the high broke 80 degrees. Now we are in a rough pattern of 78 by night for a low and 85 by day for a high. Delicious.Veterans Memorial park is easy to miss. It's on the south side of the Highway and flashes by like this:Flashes may be a rather inappropriate word because tourists have just come off the Seven Mile bridge at this point so they tend to be rather slow, taking it all in as they rumble slowly by:And there in the distance, to the south, is Ohio Key and it's RV Park overshadowed by a giant Stars and Stripes and the rather less aesthetically appealing rectangular blob that is the useful electronic highway information billboard.A book, a loaf of bread, and a jug of ice cold filtered rain water. And Veterans Memorial Park. Date anyone?

Gini Coefficient

The Gini Coefficient is a mathematical formula invented by an eponymous Italian mathematician in 1912. It is a tool favored by economists to figure out wealth distribution. The map above comes from our friends at Leon Panetta's agency (the current head of the CIA used to be my Congressman years ago. I rate him a Good Guy). I honestly don't understand Corrado Gini's work except through a foggy veil of half understood misunderstandings, but let it be sufficient to note that economists do and they love his graph. We the people need to love the Gini Index as well because it tells us how poor we are. It does it with no regards to politics, the size of the economy or anything else. It's just a bunch of very revealing numbers. The fact that the Gini Index isn't in popular circulation may give you a hint of the irrefutably nasty news it contains.

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If you look at the Mercator projection of the world shown up, and without enlarging the picture note the colors. Yellow indicates a lower Gini Coefficient, places where income is evenly distributed. Gray indicates places with such basket case economies it can't be measured, which is another way of indicating extreme inequality. Blues are more unequal than greens but purples trump everybody else.

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Obviously Southern Africa and Brazil lead the way with China, Latin America and...the US in the same upper regions of peasant inequality. Europe and Canada show the fairest distribution of wealth. Obviously it's important to understand that with these statistics in use comparing the US, minorities will be disproportionately represented in the ladder of wealth, and white middle class people will be bunched further up the curve. However the news gets worse.

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The rate of change in the Gini Coefficient in the US is accelerating. More people are accumulating more wealth at the expense of the many. The white middle class huddling in a corner hoping for relief and the return of the American Dream are being picked off and dumped into tent cities alongside the poor blacks and browns that always live on the margins of our economy.

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Economics is a zero sum game and it's time to accept that. In other words there is only so much wealth to go around. So for every billion accumulated by a CEO on Wall Street there is one less billion to be shared by the rest. Republican supply side economists will try to tell you that wealth is infinite even though common sense should tell you that nothing in life is infinite. They will also tell you that a rising tide raises all boats, such that if corporations make more money, more cash flows to the workers. Not so. Average income levels mean nothing if you have ten people in a company and one makes a million bucks and the rest make a dollar each. The "average wage" would be somewhere around 100,000 dollars each, and obviously in my simplified example that simply isn't the case.

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Even if you believe a rising tide raises all boats ask yourself why your parents could raise a family on one income a generation ago and now even two incomes struggle to do the same. There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that there is something seriously messed up in a system that sees greater and greater income inequality, less purchasing power and increasing insecurity. This isn't just unfair, this is a situation that leads to instability, and ultimately social collapse. And history shows that this is inevitably what happens when income inequality gets out of hand.

A Bit Of Front

One of the reasons I write this blog is that things are always changing around here and I want to record the Key West I know, as it evolves. There are days when change just gets your knickers in a twist and this feeble plastic chain is one such example.The message is unmistakable: no more free scooter parking at the end of Front Street. "In the good old days" (I hate that phrase and it's so common in Key West), you could roll up to the parking lot and roll your powered two wheeler into an approximation of a spot. I asked the attendant and he said it's now only free if you eat at a place on the water, which has always been the rule for cars. It seems that in these straitened times the owner of the lot figured he could rent those two spots out to a couple of cars, which would net him all of what? ...if they aren't parking to go and eat, in which case it's free anyway. Go figure. I know, it's a privilege that becomes an expectation but still. I park the Bonneville here to get half price appetizers at Alonzo's with my wife and now I'm going to have to remember to get a receipt. By the way there is still free scooter parking on the street, if you can find a space, as you can see this place is popular for two wheelers even in the low season. Pedestrians too:

Anyway this blow to my list of not-so-secret parking spaces set me to wondering how much this block of Front Street will change over the next few months or years (or hours even!). So I did what I had to do and whipped out my camera. If you, like me, prefer hotels to the intimacy of bed and breakfasts there are major chains littering the waterfront:
And it seems the services on offer can be fascinating:The Hyatt owns a ton of land in Key West, an entire city block resembling the Berlin Wall attests to that fact. One wonders what unspeakable acts go on behind that impenetrable wall, that bland facade? The other side of Front Street is full of interest, storefronts and the like:I go to Kermit's as I prefer my Key Lime pies without fish.Clothing boutiques...

I am struck by how this piece of Front is cleanly developed like shopping centers anywhere in America.

It's the paradox of small town America in Key West; the family outing: The drinking establishments....
And then there is that funny little anomaly, the Bottling Court. It faces on Simonton Street around the corner but the back entrance always fascinates me, an Arab souk rendered in American:One of my fantasies was to have my own small business, a cobbler's shop by preference where I could mix the smell of shoe leather and glue, like the cobbler in the village of my childhood where I grew up, and I'd want to do it in a business garden like this:I wasn't the only one taking advantage of this quiet corner:
The pleasure I got from the play of sun and shadow, palms and architecture soothed my ruffled feathers from the new pay-to-park fiasco.

Amelia at Simonton

A summery intersection in old town Key West, she's riding south on Simonton, he's waiting for a break in traffic at Amelia Street.I like this stretch of Amelia Street, not least because it is an anomaly.It looks normal enough, houses, cars, two wheeled traffic...Even some elderly political graffiti, which isn't exactly common in Key West, surprisingly enough.And there is of course a nice house or two,in the key west style. I put the Bonneville in front for effect.And there was even a Silly Sing, which makes a refreshing change from the key West staple of "No Trespassing" or "Trespassers Will Be Devoured."These modern town homes are across from the intersection of Calais Lane and Amelia, again more or less in the "Key West style." Very popular that is.No the anomalous nature of this block of Amelia Street comes from the fact that there are still real businesses holding on here.By real, I mean places where people make things and might even get their hands dirty doing so:
Yes indeed this place is one block away from the fleshpots of Upper Duval Street:It's right across the street from the former cigar factory called the Gato Building which is now used for county offices. The county wants to get rid of it and there had been a rumor that they might rent it to the city for a dollar a year,or sell it outright. Which could be good news because the main city offices on Angela Street are in an advanced state of disrepair. I'd hate to have to work in them, especially since they got moldy after Hurricane wilma flooded them out in 2005. Some people wondered if the city might not move it's people here. Instead the plan is to build an eighteen million dollar replacement building on Angela Street and the way the city communicates its plans this one has got lots of people riled up. Anyway the Gato Building ("cat" in Spanish named for the original owner) is sitting there all pretty and everything and possibly even for sale, though the county hasn't put a sign on it. I think it would make a magnificent City Hall but I expect it would take quite a bit of money to adapt it to the city's needs, assuming it's even big enough.Meanwhile across the street is the other astonishing hands-on business, an ironworks and welder's shop:
It was Friday evening when I took these pictures and the workers were going home but this is an active yard during the day.
A few more random shots of this block of Amelia, the heart of Old Town's light industrial neighborhood!

I should have brought a chair and set up camp under this spreading canopy.