Insomnia In Key West

Love unrequited robs me of me rest;

Love, hopeless love, my ardent soul encumbers;

Love, nightmare-like, lies heavy on me chest,

And weaves itself into my midnight slumbers...

I usually sleep the sleep of the just, anywhere anytime, when I feel like sleeping, standing lying or sitting, I close my eyes, turn off my brain and start to snore and drool almost at will. To hear people tell of insomnia is to hear a foreign language for me. And yet the other night it happened...to...me! I was tossing and turning, just as William Schenk Gilbert wrote in his Nightmare song from the operetta "Iolanthe." The Lord Chancellor isn't doing well and he breaks out into song describing his failed attempts to sleep and the incoherent dream that followed when he did finally get some shut eye:

When you're lying awake with a dismal headache

And repose is taboo'd by anxiety,

I conceive you may use any language you choose

To indulge in, without impropriety;

For your brain is on fire, the bed-clothes conspire

Of usual slumber to plunder you:

First your counter-pane goes, and uncovers your toes,

And your sheet slips demurely from under you;

Then the blanketing tickles, you feel like mixed pickles,

So terribly sharp is the pricking,

And you're hot and you're cross, and you tumble and toss,

'Til there's nothing twixt you and the ticking.

 

I woke up a perfectly happy sleeping hound, and it was cold enough she had chosen to curl up on her bed not her usual spot on the cooler wooden floor, and together we took a ride into Key West at about 4:30 in the morning, a cool windy day but not boasting temperatures in the fifties that were scheduled the next day.

When you get some repose in the form of a doze,

With hot eyeballs and head ever aching,

Your slumbering teems with such horrible dreams

That you'd very much better be waking;

For you dream you are crossing the channel, and tossing

About in a steamer from Harwich,

Which is something between a large bathing machine

And a very small second class carriage,

And you're giving a treat (penny ice and cold meat)

To a party of friends and relations,

They're a ravenous horde, and they all come aboard

At Sloane Square and South Kensington stations.

The highway was gloriously empty of course and we made good time to the city where I decided to park near the former waterfront market and let Cheyenne choose the way. We were utterly alone with the night and the wind and the few lights burning here and there. Bars must close by four each morning so the drunken hordes had left already.

And bound on that journey, you find your attorney

(who started this morning from Devon);

He's a bit undersized and you don't feel surprised

When he tells you he's only eleven.

Well, you're driving like mad with this singular lad

(By the by, the ship's now a four-wheeler),

And you're playing round games, and he calls you bad names

When you tell him that ties pay the dealer;

But this you can't stand, so you throw up your hand,

And you find you're as cold as an icicle,

In your shirt and your socks (the black silk with gold clocks)

Crossing Salisbury Plain on a bicycle.

I take great pleasure in fiddling with my Android camera and with no one around I let Cheyenne wander at will and while she sniffed I took pictures. It was most relaxing, playing with the settings and wasting film by deleting pictures that didn't please me. I love digital pixels, easy come easy go! They are not the best tool to seek immortality but there again eternity seems a bit long drawn out to me, only having ever experienced it in doctors' waiting rooms.

And he and the crew are on bicycles too,

Which they've somehow or other invested in,

And he's telling the tars all the particulars

Of a company he's interested in;

It's a scheme of devices, to get at low prices

All goods from cough mixtures to cables

(Which tickled the sailors) by treating retailers

As though they were all vegetables:

The city looks quite different at night, a difference enhanced by the use of black and white pictures or using the monochrome setting in the camera, or sepia tints. So many choices! The parking garage that in daylight looks like a cement lump here looks different.

 

 

The Half Shell was still displaying blue and white colored lights to celebrate the recently completed (hint hint) season.

You get a good spadesman to plant a small tradesman

(first take off his boots with a boot tree),

And his legs will take root, and his fingers will shoot,

And they'll blossom and bud like a fruit tree;

From the greengrocer tree you get grapes and green peas,

Cauliflower, pineapple and cranberries,

While the pastry-cook plant cherry brandy will grant,

Apple puffs, and three corners, and banburys;

The shares are a penny and ever so many

Are taken by Rothschild and Baring's,

And just as a few are allotted to you, you awake

With a shudder, despairing...

Conveyances in Key west can be as simple as a bicycle with a bathtub trailer. Quite brilliant I think every time I see it.

And this is pioneer lo the fishing retail trade we are told is a man named Booty Singleton and fondly remembered by friends and families and commercial fishermen. The cold brought to mind the well known phrase involving brass monkeys (Wikipedia to the rescue) when looking at his bronze statue.

I liked the juxtaposition of the modern and terribly useful plastic bucket on the deck of the revered "tall ship" which is a common name for these boats but is not really a maritime name at all. A Barque or a square rigger or some other thing never much considered by the sellers of advertising...

The docks at five in the morning are quite evocative I think, a place for dark deeds and derringer do. Or just me and my dog ambling.

It was windy. Really.

You're a regular wreck

With a crick in your neck,

And no wonder you snore

for your head's on the floor

And you've needles and pins

From your soles to your shins,

And your flesh is acreep

For your left leg's asleep,

And you've cramp in your toes

And a fly on your nose,

And some fluff in your lung

And a feverish tongue,

And a thirst that's intense

And a general sense...

...that you haven't been sleeping in clover;

But the darkness has passed, and it's daylight at last!

The night has been long, ditto, ditto my song,

And thank goodness they're both of them over!

Above we see the slow pace of construction of the interior of the old Waterfront Market that is to become a brew pub some day, perhaps soon. And below someone curled up like a dog trying to keep out the cold.

Windy enough that night that trees fell over, which won't impress people Up North covered by the worst freeze in 200 years. That's why I have not mentioned our tribulations in the land where 60 degrees seems frigid. Where snow falls and water freezes explaining that sixty degrees in the damp windy Keys feels so much colder cuts no ice as it were.

Cheyenne had a thoroughly good time and covered my face in kisses for she is an expressive dog. Then she breakfasted and passed out while I got ready for work.

It was a cold ride back to my job but I don't think she spared me a thought as this Labrador never suffers from insomnia.

 

Seattle G&S The Nightmare Song 1997 - YouTube

Key West on Dwellable

 

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Embargo Mambo

The was a story in the paper about a plane that took off from Key West and thirty minutes later the twin engined private plane landed in Havana. Embargo be damned. It is a source of growing frustration for people other than me who want to be free to visit friends and relatives in Cuba that we still have the preposterous embargo in place. It's an anachronism, a left over from a bygone era and it serves no purpose. Except...

As usual some few people make money out of it while others make political hay. There is as a vociferous group of Cubans in Miami who style themselves exiles as their parents fled Cuba after Fidel Castro installed himself in power and decided to take a turn toward Communism. It's an emotive subject but it grows increasingly weird to me, as the Cuban émigrés have made excellent lives for themselves in the US, as a community they prosper and their children are assimilated into all the opportunities the US offers (and Cuba never did) and yet they insist the wrongs of sixty years ago must be righted today and at the expense of the American people who have hosted them so lavishly and generously.

Fidel Castro's description of the exile community isn't so far off the mark, he calls them the Miami Mafia, and they rule by intimidation. The reason the embargo endures toadyism because of their cohesive political votes and the balance ofpowerthey hold, or used to hold, making Florida an important swing state. Piss off the Cuban émigré community and you lose The Sunshine State, they say. Fundamentally that's why the embargo exists today. There's no arguing with the fact that some Cubans lost everything in the revolution of 1959/60 but Casto won power by self sacrifice and determination, two qualities not apparent among his Miami foes who spend a lot of time complaining and demanding the US government pull their chestnuts from the fire of their own making. They didn't choose yo home back to Cuba to fight for what was theirs, and now they want the bystanders to keep fighting for them. For my part I feel more strongly about China taking US jobs and selling us crap than I do about Cuba's version of Communism.

At one level I would like to be able to jump on a commercial plane for lunch in Havana, or roll my motorcycle on a high speed ferry from Stock Island to arrive in Mariel three hours later and go for a ride in the mountains of Cuba. All of which sounds lovely but at some level frivolous. However the embargo prevents US companies from trading with Cuba, hotel chains from developing resorts there where Canadians and Europeans now rule, and our farmers from selling food there. The embargo creates vortexes of inanity when foreign ships have to plan their itineraries to avoid offending either country, and all this because a few Cubans living the good life in Miami think revenge is their's not the Lord's.

 

And let's be honest the embargo makes life unnecessarily harsh for people living in already harsh conditions in an impoverished communist state. Mind you looking at how people live in impoverished capitalist states friendly to the US, think Honduras, life ain't so terribly grand for them either. But Cuba is made extra dreary by the embargo. And then there is the very obvious fact that anytime anything goes wrong in Cuba, which it often does we are told, they simply blame the Yanqui Capitalists across the water. In short the embargo deprives us of money, it deprives them of hope and daily necessities and it strengthens the hand of the Cuban government and their repression. Pretty smart huh?

But wait, because people are also making money off this imbecilic fiasco. That would be because some few cracks in the embargo's facade have appeared over the years. It is possible to get a special exemption from the US Treasury department and travel to Cuba for cultural, journalistic and religious reasons if you want. The Miami Mafia controls the means of access, special charger flights now scheduled from Miami, but their services are specially sanctioned so they have no competition and prices therefore get jacked up. You can peruse travel websites looking for deals. Besides all of that I would still like the opportunity to ride the mountains of the Sierra Maestra, eat realCuban food in Cuba and do it all legally and above board. Access to Cuba would cover the major shortcoming we find in the Keys: no interesting roads to ride!

So I found it to be a delicious double irony reading about a plane full of unnamed local one percenters taking off for Havana, defying prohibition as it were, and getting front page treatment. Who they were and what they did on arrival we know not. But there used to be active trade between Cuba and Key West of fruit exports and tourism, not always of the most salubrious kind Little wonder American mobsters got seriously pissed off when Cuba was lost to Communism and they lost their brothels and casinos. It is no small irony today that sex tourism is reviving prostitution in Havana as Cubans, desperate for foreign currency sell themselves to opportunistic visitors.

While we have the chance to jet set there, they have no chance at all to visit us in turn unless that is they fly a plane and deviate north, or have influential friends, or the skills to build a raft and risk life and limb for a chance at a full life over here. And that is the final and most lasting disgrace of the stupid embargo; it helps push Cuban citizens, fed up with life on their politically dingy island into the remorseless waves of the Gulf Stream in order to come over here to enjoy those daily treats we take for granted, like food, freedom and credit card debt. If the Cuban exiles in Miami cared about anyone or anything in this mess other than lining their own pockets they'd end the embargo before one more life is lost in a raft. And if President Obama finds his backbone before handing his office over to Hilary Clinton perhaps he will sign a piece of paper and end it himself. But I doubt that will happen.

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Sculpture Key West At The West Martello

I may be stereotyping here just a it so color me a cultural Imperialist but I'm pretty sure most of the people sunbathing on Higgs Beach earlier this week had no idea there was an art exhibit right next door in the old brick fort. Perhaps my opinion is supported by the quantity of beachgoers versus the handful of people inside the fort, or perhaps they spent their morning enjoying the flowers and sculptures, and by the time I got there on my lunch break they had all finished with the artwork.

I like the West Martello Tower, a 19th century brick coastal fortification designed by an Englishman of that name. There are two in Key a West along the southern shore bad this one is rather less well preserved than the East tower near the airport, which houses a museum. The West Martello Tower houses the Key West Garden Club, which gives it a rich tropical air.

This tower is much closer to the Fort Zachary Taylor state park, also home to a fort at the southwest corner of the island. As the West Martello was unoccupied the artillery soldiers at Fort Zachary amused themselves by using it for target practice. The 19th century canons did a fair bit of damage to the Martello Tower and townspeople used the bricks for their own building projects. The military housed soldiers here in the Spanish American war and used the fort as a radio base in World War Two. In 1947 the Navy handed it over to Monroe County and instead of levelling it they gave it to the garden club in 1949 and there they still are overlooking the Straits of Florida, and as it happens the White Street Pier.

It is a lovely spot and it is free, though they do ask for a donation, whatever that might be. I like this place a lot.

Some idiots like this place so much they profess their love in graffiti.

There are indigenous plants in the fort and other weird looking plants as well.

God knows what they think of these in Timor but I like them a lot.

Anyway the sculptures: Adam Russell's watchmen:

Justin Long's long winded It's better to burn out than fade aweigh.

These brilliant creepy Shadows by Liliana Crespi in crotcheted wire were my favorites.

They were creepy too but very effective and thought provoking I thought.

Darryl Lauster's Homage to Brancusi in porcelain.

John Martini's A Blakean Tale in welded steel. To me it looks like it was inspired by Munch's Scream but Blake had plenty of nightmares of his own.

Every annual sculpture exhibit seems to have a piece or two dedicated to exploring circular shapes and this year we have this, Semi Circle 1 by Simran Johnston.

I've photographed local sculptor Bill Lorraine's pieces previously at the Studios of a Key West, and here I took picture of Man Looking Up. This one puts me in mind of Easter Island.

Gran-ANT by Craig Gray in steel concrete and granite. I was thinking about the movie Mant set in Key West starring John Goodman.

Eric H Trofkin created steel tubing in the form of Communications Vine. They put it in the perfect spot.

Ursula Clark's Palm Goddess was to my mind a much richer sculpture when seen in three dimensions. A photograph doesn't do it justice. It has height and a "full figure" with lots yo attract the eyes all around. In the picture it looks a bit like a paper cut out.

I have missed out a bunch of stuff on display and I guess that means I will go back. Or better yet if you are in Key West before April go check it out.

I really like this place. Check a few random pictures.

 

 

 

 

 

Yup. It really is worth a visit, anytime of year.

Key West on Dwellable

 

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