Thanks Be To All, And An Alligator

Call it irony but the Florida Keys this week are being ravaged by a solid cold front bringing rain, high winds and night time temperatures close to sixty degrees as we celebrate The Fall Holiday. What the hell I thought, I've got lots to be glad about so I assembled a few pictures from my store of who knows how many pictures in my picasa files and figured I could share these with those of you sneaking away from family gatherings to consider how life might be in Key West today. Pretty much like it is wherever you are I guess.

Cheyenne is in the Florida Panhandle with my wife so the home has been empty all week which has been rather weird. My wife and I communicate because we are human and we made the decision for her to go and be with friends; Cheyenne, who cannot talk or text, just saw me drive away after I dropped her off with my wife for the trip Up North. I've said plenty about Cheyenne on this page so let me just say she is doing well despite my benign neglect that shocks the more attentive dog owners in our stress filled world, and remember she came from the pound because someone else didn't want her. Why buy a dog when you get lovely animals for close to free from your local shelter? Does Cheyenne look like damaged goods to you?

Even in the Keys, even here life is a bunch of compromises and though I get to ride every day the ride is a trifle limited. One highway, flat straight and unvarying so I do my daily riding here and take to the road for mountains purple majesty whenever I can. I'm grateful for my sister in law in Asheville home to many winding roads, and my great rides last September in the Dolomites. This time of year all those lucky sods who get to ride in the most beautiful places all summer long have to put their machines away. I don't. I like riding even during the rain or a cold front. And I'm not alone on the road at least when the sun is shining.

I am not fussy either, I like riding slowly and I like riding fast and I even enjoy riding my wife's scooter, as I wait for my own P200 to come home from the restorer's shop. Gratitude to my wife for indulging my absurd nostalgic two stroke desire when she lets me ride her more modern Vespa as I please:

Sand sun and gentle ocean swells are the chamber of commerce view of life in the Keys. Throw in lots of alcohol and the sybaritic eating out lifestyle and you have nothing that remotely resembles daily living in the Keys. Funny that, life here doesn't live up to the sales image.

However let me point out that life is good here in the Lower Keys, it just isn't what you think it is. It's a mixture of work, always important if you don't have a private income, and time to yourself. Work is tough because this is a tourist economy and jobs aren't careers. Careers in the Keys are already taken by people who grew up here or got here before you did. How I found the best job of my life in Key West I cannot rightly say, but I work for the government which is the only other option in the Keys. If you're a welder you could open a welding shop...but then you come up against the high cost of living and cut throat competition from established business. Low quality housing, high rents and out of town millionaires buying up the best housing stock is not a pretty picture if you live in a McMansion Up North and want to trade snowdrifts for this:

The great thing about Key West is not just the waters but it's also the resources in town. It's a by product of the weather but in winter poets and musicians and actors and artists like to get a paid vacation in the sun and the city bustles with cultural events. The seasons here are marked as much by the tenor of public events as much as by the changes in temperature.

Our jobs have turned into a source of pleasure and accomplishment in our lives. It's not that work has taken us over but my wife loves her new adult education job and her boss seems to value her. My boss values me and for the first time in my life I have no desire to quit and move on. Next year marks ten years at the police department. How lucky is that?

We are both grateful for our union membership, health insurance, defined benefit pension plans and the prospect of social security and Medicare (single payer, finally! Ten more years!) if the one percent don't manage to steal that too. I have positioned myself as well as I can with a job that I hope can never be outsourced to India...

In my job you hear people being profoundly nasty, the inhumanity of humanity is in evidence in 911 calls, believe me. And then I remember how lucky I am. I send them help, no matter how nasty they are, and I get to ride home to my real life. And when I'm out and about I see all those people who didn't curse at me last night living lives like mine, meditating on the value of the timeless simple things in life.

I am grateful for the flat waters and astonishing seascapes I see every day in these islands, colors and shapes that most people in our high stress society get to see on magazine covers.

For your amusement I include a picture of everyone's favorite fearsome Keys dinosaur. You'd be astonished how many people live in fear of snakes sharks and alligators, monsters under the bed, an attempt to make the excessively civilized little islands grow in stature by virtue of their danger. People constantly warn me of the danger of rattlesnakes when out walking Cheyenne but they are simply story tellers as their fears keep them far from the dangers of which they speak. That snakes exist there is no doubt but of all the predators in these islands humans are the most rapacious.

But food for humans is better when prepared in. A coffee shop...When I first encountered Caribbean food I was surprised by the lack of flavor in Latino countries, simple meat rice and beans and not much flavoring the way Mexicans cook by contrast. British Caribbean countries used curry and fried pastry in a creditable imitation of being stuck in the 1950s. Cuban food in Key West is full of fat sugar and salt and caffeine. What's not to like? I'm grateful this tiny town turns it out by the ton. I live here so I can only eat it sparingly but here it is and I am grateful for it:

I get to live where other people want to vacation. I know, everyone hates tourists, but these people bring the money that fuels the city. Tourism has changed since the crash, and that was inevitable. Tourists are older, more respectable and employed. Everyone else gets to stay home. Thank your corporate bankers and their derivatives. I miss the good old days of wild spending and optimism as grateful as I am for my job and my small place in this society. The benefit of the graying of tourism is there are fewer drunks being rowdy around the city of a winter's night, but the trickle down effect is trickling less abundantly.

When you live in the Keys one thing that gets confusing is how much seasons Up North change. In the Keys in winter cool weather and rain come and go and t-shirts remain the informal wear of the vacationer. We know its cold Up North because more people show up on Duval Street suddenly. People make fun of us because we say that sixty degrees is cold. It is cold here and if you are ever here when a cold sea breeze is blowing and the air is damp and you have no heat in your room you will feel cold. I've seen it happen over and over again. People from Up North look surprised and say, hmm it does feel colder than sixty degrees does at home.

Key West is also home to gross bad taste. It gets tiring watching people let everything, literally, hang out, but like getting yelled at on the 911 line observing this side of human nature reminds me to be grateful that I live here. Diversity is a pain in the ass, let's face it, learning to cope with other people's quirks and absurd beliefs, but the fact is my firm conviction looks like a nutty belief to you, and because we live in a nation built on a set of laws, not a common culture, we have to learn to get along. And Key West is a great place to learn the lessons of tolerance. If this guy walked your Main Street dressed like this would he draw no attention at all?

I like seeing mountains and I like riding them but sea level is where I feel best. I hear people remark that dry heat is better than high humidity, but I know the feeling of straw like hair and brittle finger nails in the dry air of the mountains. I loved riding up to Passo Giau last September, huge gratitude, but when the time comes to get home to sea level I feel no lingering regret.

Unlike Italy, which abides by EU requirements, I like having the choice to ride without a helmet and I treasure this Florida choice, the only thing that makes me remotely grateful to Republicans. I wear it most of the time but sometimes I don't. I grow weary of the need for absolutes in a world which is ruled by uncertainty and I would rather choose for myself. Whe. I remember reading a comment by a scooter rider who was toying with the idea of coming to Key West and renting a scooter to add to her life experiences but was out off by fear of looking weird wearing riding gear in a town where such behavior is hardly ever indulged. It seemed such an odd position to take I have never quite forgot the story.

I am grateful for the chance to do something good with this stupid blog. I get messages from people trapped just like me by the spiraling failures of our New World Economic Order except they aren't here and wish they were. I have gone out of my way not to sell out, not to pander and not to talk down to anyone who reads this page. The one time I was persuaded to change I found myself in a strait jacket. Never again. Writing my daily essays is not an act of pure altruism, it benefits me to record my days, to express myself and to have this electronic page on which to do it. Ah gratitude, you start to bore me so let us end it here.

Happy Thanksgiving wherever you and your dog and your motorcycle may be.

Live every day as though it were your last for one day you are sure to be right.

Key West on Dwellable

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Key West Homes

Real estate in the Keys is supposedly getting more expensive again. One can only wonder about such "news" considering how well packaged information is all around us. I saw this façade held in place to create an illusion of restoration for a house which will be, to all intents and purposes new.

Key West has lived through uncountable cycles of boom and bust since it was formally founded in 1828 and the story is told of how in the Great Depression a plan was mooted to give up and evacuate the islands where eighty percent of the population was "on relief." Since the 1960s when the Navy cut back and the city plunged into another depression, real estate has fueled a rise in the city's fortunes, and tourism has created a web of connected jobs and business and attractiveness.

A small sub tropical island filled with exotic vegetation, a large collection of preserved wooden homes and a near perfect winter climate has to attract people with money. I believe modern communications have enabled the continuous interest in this little town in the Gulf Stream. If you read the hundred year old newspapers when the railroad came to town you will read comments opposing the railroad connection as it would change the fundamental isolation of the island, for the worse they feared.

Prior to Flagler's railroad arriving in January 1912 you could take a boat out of Key West or drive a winding dirt road and a collection of wooden bridges and take two long ferry rides, a very long all day affair to get to Homestead if you even had such an exotic thing as an automobile. The train took seven easy hours to get to Miami in comfort for anyone with the modest price of a ticket. I'd say things changed a bit in sleepy Key West!

When I first came here it took five hours on my Vespa to ride the old two lane highway built in 1938 on the old railroad bed and bridges. In 1981 Key West was the back of beyond. The internet brings the world to one's door for business and pleasure. Satellites brought TV for those that watch the infernal box, and a new modern highway built in 1982 puts Key West within three hours of Miami for a determined attentive driver who knows the road. Modern planes fly in and out despite the short runway and mail and package services offer overnight delivery even from here, on the fringes of reality. To live in the Lower Keys today is to be integrated into the electronic world of North America. You can run your business from a winter porch here as well as you can from Up North. Most of the time anyway; sometimes lack of reality intrudes long enough to make type A people a little frustrated!

Gay men were attracted to a navy town in the fifties when the love that dare not speak its name needed outlets out of the mainstream of public consciousness. That period led to an appreciation of the physical beauty of the crumbling Old Town. Conchs were delighted to sell up and buy modern comfort in ranchers in New Town. The era of openly gay Key West was born, but the beautification of Key West pulled in straight money too. Nowadays Key West is pricing itself out of the Youth market, gay or straight. Old white people with money can still afford million dollar part time cottages and they come in droves now, making winter time Key West resemble Boca Raton and Royal Palm Beach more than one might like.

Soon the empty palace shown below will reopen for a few blessedly short weeks, the car will be uncovered and part two of the well heeled life will resume for the coldest months. This is not the Bohemian craziness of literature that intrigues the modern day visitor, the seekers of an alternative life style fueled by Art and alcohol and student digs and altered consciousness seeking a new and better way to reinvent the wheel. Key West today demands a well regulated life for long term working class residence.

If I were young I'd still choose California as I did 30 years ago, the Golden State still leads the world in innovation and youthful energy. Perhaps I might prefer a center of exuberant study, Austin with its amazing music scene and oil endowed university, or New Orleans and it's truly particular culture, or Boulder and it's Great Outdoors, or New York for true lack of affordability combined with excitement and opportunity. Key West simply costs too much and offers too little to the young and ambitious.

Key West still attracts young people of course, but the restless kind seeking a break from reality, sailors and bar staff, a nice break year, safe in the US making a small living instead of hiking the Andes or taking trains round Europe.

I think I have one of the best jobs going in Key West and clearly I am not alone. Our turn over rate has pretty much stopped as no other work offers the combination of pay and benefits of police dispatch a high stress job in a town determined to be laid back. Of course not many people can work in a 911 center it turns out, it takes peculiar talent apparently, but I am the oldest dispatcher at 56, the other dozen employees range from 45 to 25 roughly, and our latest trainee is in her 30s married no children and shocked by the high cost of living compared to life in Chicago. The youngsters mostly have family support in town but overtime is highly sought out to support life in Key West.

My own love affair with Key West has been been one of those slow fuse entanglements that has grown on me. For a lot of people one visit ignites a desire to live here that will not be denied whether or not it is ever fulfilled. For my wife and I settling in Key West was a long drawn out decision, as my wife had deep roots in California and I too had found a decent life in Santa Cruz, a town that in those distant days was more weird and more stimulating than most, so a move to Key West was not made in an effort to escape boredom. We sailed into town tired after two years traveling with a need to make money and a desire to return overland to the Golden State whence we had set out on our catamaran.

But we landed here in the boom years and jobs were abundant, optimism was burning up the city and yes, the weather was delightful! My wife the attorney had always wanted to try teaching and so desperate were they in Key West for a professional willing to trade affordable living for good weather she grabbed a job, her arthritis hurt less and we sold our California home. Now we live in a millionaire's playground and gentrification has left us working people far behind. Wealth inequality in the US is real and growing and affecting all of us, though we pretend to ignore it.

You know Key West is special because the more you try to define its charms the further they skip away. Climate change is finally being taken seriously by some radical types like scientists who suggest most of the Keys could be drowned in fifty years. Not surprisingly in our short term culture the idea that sea levels may rise mightily in a few decades is pretty much ignored in daily life here. Sure, we make uncomfortable jokes about rising seas but real life goes on. And helicopters will lift the part timers out of here at the last minute and take them to their compounds on higher ground. Gentrification continues of course along with the graying of a funky little seaside town with perfect winter weather, lovely architecture and astronomical prices.

Key West on Dwellable

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Tourist Life In Key West

We are told that the largest number of visitors in the Keys congregate in Key West and over the course of a year this eight square mile island accommodates 2.5 million of them; this in a town four miles long with a resident population around 23,000.

The state of Florida is celebrating the five hundredth anniversary of the landing of Europeans in the state, not at Plymouth Rock but in the Flowery State where St Augustine prospers today, the city that has been continuously occupied by Europeans longer than any other in the country. They brought no Thanksgiving myth because they knew they were here to enslave and despoil and take home wealth to the greater glory of God. These weren't religious fanatics ejected from their homeland for extremism and heresy, the Spaniards were the point people of a new business model for the New World. And according to the rather silly one line reminders of the Great Florida Anniversary they brought beef steaks to the new world according to our local grocers, in the spirit of early Spanish commercialism.

"Steaks come from Spanish cattle brought by conquistadors..." To me the message is cryptic at best, but this is a modern world, where reading thinking and disagreeing is old fashioned and time consuming when time is everything, they say. Has anyone else noticed these pennants and wondered who wrote them and where do they get their facts? They are all paid for by commercial outfits and they are as brief as tweets so perhaps we should enjoy them for their color and festive appearance, not their facts as presented. I'm pretty sure steaks do not still come from conquistadors.

The newspaper recently printed the conclusions of a report claiming nearly two million people have made use of the Heritage Trail in its current fractured form. It sounds incredible to me taken at face value, especially as I can't figure how they reached the number. I mean, do I count if I pull over at Mile Marker 13 on my way home from work and walk onto a Flagler bridge to take a picture of the dawn over the mangroves? Is it a second visit if Cheyenne and I check out the bike path/ fishing bridge onCudjoe Key later that afternoon? And who took the time to count me? If I don't count, why not?

The state has been keeping a close eye on the state of our fair city and while they are in counting mode they also calculate about 850,000 people came to Key a West last year on cruise ships. One third the number of users of the mixed bike/pedestrian Heritage Trail. Supposedly they bring billions of dollars to the City which would multiply by billions more were the city to encourage mega massive cruise ships to stop here. Even so I doubt they will number as many as the users of that blessed trail.

With all this money floating around you'd think business people in this city could afford to fly flags rather than cerements but apparently not. This particular example of Old Glory didn't seem to express any particular personal sentiment other than neglect. I wonder why no one bothers to replace it as they do have ceremonies to dispose of worn out symbols rather than letting them wither ignominiously on the vine as it were. Sometimes I feel like we don't put our best foot forward for the visitors who keep Key West, a city with no modern resources, from looking like Detroit.

I have no idea how to be a parent, hence my child-free state but when I observe this kind of multi-tasking my pleasure at being child-free is only reinforced. Sometimes I feel looking after a dog is more than I can manage. Luckily Cheyenne is smarter than most so she doesn't need much supervision and indeed she tends to look after me. She never permits me to smoke, for instance when we are out walking.

These next two pictures are a a Thanksgiving gift for a dude in southwest Florida who has been reading this blog longer than anyone and who indignantly asked for more artwork from the Green Parrot recently.

I hope this suffices Jeffrey.

Cheyenne wanted to know what the pesky rooster was eating. She doesn't chase animals but she does eat scraps.

I'm never quite sure why millions and millions of people come to the Keys. I came to Key West in 1981 by accident looking for a ferry connection that wasn't there, but nowadays you can check everything on your phone and serendipity is vanishing faster than you can enter an address in your phone. Maybe I like traveler's palms because I fancy myself a traveler. Perhaps because they make pretty and exotic any banal wall. Perhaps because there isn't an app for that.

I know the weather is a draw, and snowdrifts would diminish the appeal massively. We considered moving to the San Juan islands but Washington's high standard of living and civility couldn't outweigh the burden of gray skies drizzle and frost. Were I a pot smoker I'd have to say I made a bad choice but I'm not so I get to live under a permanent sun, ride a motorcycle year round and encounter Pickelhaube graffiti.

Key West has its reputation for being Key Weird and that's tough to live up to in a world shared with Bangkok, New Orleans and Berlin. On the other hand Key West's weirdness is a kindly gentle type of peculiarity. It's made in the USA, no foreign languages here or square shaped currency or blatant immorality. Body paint and pasties do not a red light district make.

But this town is filled with myths and stories and even a little history and everyone loves Hemingway, the bigger than life myth maker. His bar, or not his bar depending on which bar you prefer, draws people. Cheyenne doesn't much care for history, she strolls right on by. I like history which gives me hives when people tell talk about piracy and wrecking in the same breath or Hemingway and Tennessee Williams and make up stories. History is never enough, everything has to be boosted.

You know what? Key West is fun. You can enjoy it sober or drunk, as a visitor or as a resident. I took a cruise once to see what that was all about. My wife and I visited Cozumel, Grand Cayman, Jamaica, all starting with a first stop in Key West. Key West was by far the most interesting colorful and varied stop on the route. I say that as someone who enjoyed touring and exploring each stop but has no plans to repeat the cruise ship experience. I wanted to know what it was like and I enjoyed it actually but I have other things to do too.

Maybe those two and a half million visitors have a point. Why not learn to enjoy a small town with architecture, history, myths and stories and a way of life that is hard to replicate in a land of suburban malls, four lane streets and full service economies. In Key West a bicycle serves as a station wagon and your neighbors may not be just like you.

Some people even let their dogs cool off in puddles right there on the street. Key Weird indeed, come on down the weather's lovely, mostly, even if not right now. NWS for the latest weather.

Key West on Dwellable

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