Pompeii

You grow up in Italy. You own a motorcycle, enjoy travelling on it, and you are able to ride it anywhere in the country. History is your favorite subject in school and you live just three hours from the most famous and perhaps most important historical excavation ever made. So you ride south and take a peek. Not if you're me you don't; instead you wait 50 years to make your first trip to Pompeii. Well, at long last I can knock that off my list of things to do.Giovanni and I took off on our respective motorcycles for two days away from the burdens of his family in Terni to cruise the famous Amalfi coast, south of Naples. As we pored over maps, we electronic illiterates, I made the case to see Pompeii, the Roman city buried in volcanic ash in the AD 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Giovanni was dubious, "we only have two days," he shrugged, but I was determined. My whole trip to Italy was only ten days long and I had already spent plenty visiting my sisters; Giovanni had been rounding up errant children who were failing exams or crashing their cars and we both needed a break from other people. I happened to pick a particularly wet and cold June to visit central Italy, with downpours every afternoon and temperatures in the evening dropping to around fifty degrees which made for some rather teeth chattering riding for this tropical motorcyclist. Giovanni suggested we ride south to seek the sun, a proposal I enthusiastically seconded. We rode like hell on the appropriately named Autostrada del Sole, Sunshine Freeway, which is rather less romantic than its name. It does wind through the hills of central Italy in an entirely charming way but the authorities have installed a whole panoply of electronic tracking devices to keep tabs on speeders (wot, me?). The older models are gray boxes parked at the side of the road with a warning sign which causes all traffic to slam on the brakes simultaneously to pass the autovelox at the regulation 80 miles per (130 km/h). The newer version are overhead cameras which measure average speeds between cameras set at intervals of about ten miles. Which is great if you stop for a quick lunch (prosciutto and mozzarella and asparagus risotto)......and a coffee of the espresso variety of course. On those stretches where we weren't stopping for lunch we took to ducking onto the emergency shoulder to pass the cameras as Giovanni had heard they couldn't photograph your passage and measure your speed along the shoulders...It is the Italian way, just as I had to relearn to lane split wildly and get used to cars that actually pulled over to allow us to pass on narrow winding roads. I love riding in Italy.Giovanni the cardiologist is an inveterate smoker so we frequently get to stop and talk when we take our rides. He carried the luggage on his fully equipped R1200RT BMW while I tailed along on my minimalist, rented K1200R, wild machine of a reputed 170 horsepower and the ability to hit 60 miles per hour (100km/h) in less than three seconds from a standing start. It was quite a startling ride, let me tell you, smooth as anything but ready to leap forward with just the slightest twist of the wrist. We flew down the freeway at speeds I'd rather not mention, slowing dramatically to ride the shoulder past the overhead cameras. What a weird way to travel, a knight in armor afraid of ray guns...You'd think I'm old enough to know better, gray beard and all. Like hell, I'm on vacation. Then we had to lane split an accident and watching Giovanni maneuver his massive saddlebags past lines of inching trucks gave me palpitations. Almost as much as my own efforts to crawl past the rows of tightly packed vehicles. jostling to get to the head of the five mile line. All this work got us to the sunshine of the Bay of Naples and we enjoyed every second of it. More of that later.

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Pompei was swamped by burning hot gases and a storm of ash and pumice that reputedly buried the city 35 feet deep, so suddenly that the city was preserved intact with many of its citizens entombed. Two thousand years later Pompeii is a perfect reconstruction of Roman life, with graffiti preserved on walls alongside business advertisements, and political slogans. There is such a wealth of architectural history to uncover the Italian government is overwhelmed and much of what was buried at Pompeii and surrounding cities is yet to be uncovered. I found my walk through the city every bit as fascinating as I had expected. Narrow alleys:

Wide streets (with raised sidewalks very similar to street designs I've seen across Central and South America):

We got to see extraordinary Roman villas (whose floor plans were reproduced at the old Getty Museum in Malibu), including one a guard unlocked for us as a favor. Giovanni the sweet talker has that effect on strangers. We got to wander on a private tour:We saw household artifacts, including a mirror, still on the wall which in turn still shows its original decorations:And crisp clean frescoes decorating the walls, as fresh as the day they were buried:The state of chaos at Pompeii is exemplified by the fact that any villa not being worked on is open to the public, unsupervised. Visitors get to wander in and out at will, all streets are open except those closed off for safety reasons, and if you want to wander across a superb example of a two thousand year old Roman floor, go ahead, track sand and grit at will...I was amazed by the freedom we enjoyed and appalled by the cavalier lack of protection for these priceless artifacts:Giovanni shrugged saying Italy has too many monuments to be able to take care of them all. Nevertheless he was as stunned by the living past as I was, and he had been here once before in his dim and distant past: Pompeii has become a magnet for stray dogs who live happily amongst the ruins, taking their ease, ignoring passersby:Romans kept dogs in their homes as well, as evidenced by a famous mosaic in an entrance way to a house in the city. This mosaic seems at risk to me, considering the rain puddle obliterating the words printed across it's base: cave canem, or "Beware of the Dog" a phrase any modern home owner can identify with!There was so much in Pompeii to be seen, and we were lucky as it was June and the number of visitors was relatively small. I managed to get pictures of empty streets, and away from the stadium and forum and open air market we found empty streets and visitor-less vistas. It was enchanting.

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Giovanni was determined to find Pompei's most famous house, the lupanare, or main brothel ( in a city that reportedly boasted about two dozen, most for locals located above taverns). The "wolf house," reputedly built to serve visitors to the city, had ten tiny little rooms with stone beds, apparently designed for short people to grovel on:

And around the walls in the main corridor the owner painted little frescoes to help remind the customers what they had come to the house to do:I find it rather odd, to imagine the customer locked in the embrace of a prostitute, forced by failure of memory to hop off the (short) bed to duck out into the corridor to check one of the little scenes to help remind him what he's there to do. The Romans were humans too I guess, though forgetting how to ride a bicycle, as it were, seems excessive . They liked to eat out apparently as evidenced by the cafeterias lining the main shopping street:

The terracotta rings were filled with embers to keep plates of food warm for sale to passersby. We saw advertising on the walls, impossible to photograph owing to plastic sheets screwed over them to preserve them(at last!), as well preserved indeed as the day Romans walked by. There was a bakery:

And of course modern interference of the Italian state. Need electricity? No problem, screw a rusty support into the ancient Roman walls and run a wire:I left Pompei after a short couple of hours, my head filled with the wonder of it all. And there at the Porta Marina I spotted some other lucky souls slipping in just before closing time to get their first glimpse of ancient Rome. And as they strode up the ramp to the arched gateway into the city I snapped a picture of them and those famous reds of Pompei, the frescoes as fresh and exposed to the weather as ever:

Outside Pompei we avoided most of the touts selling all the crap you can imagine a tout would offer for sale outside the Roman city, though I did pick up a few wolfish souvenirs for my deadbeat colleagues at home, and we got back on our motorcycles and prepared to ride. The good old days were perfectly fine I'm sure but I just can't imagine how much money and effort it would have cost to house 170 horses. And here I was riding that many all by myself without a care in the world. I am an entirely modern man, when all's said and done.

Oh To Be In Florida

I'm in the Florida Keys again, though naturally there will be pictures of Italy to follow and I still have pictures to write about from my New Mexico trip so it will be back to Anywhere-But-Key-West-Diary for a while. So, as we run headfirst into summer, a few pictures of clouds, The Road, The Bonneville and salt water to recognize the pleasure inherent in being home again.

"Oh to be in England, now that April's is there!" were the words of the poet Robert Browning of whose work I am quite fond. I like summer in the Keys, its a time of mellow fruitlessness, calmer winds warmer waters less traffic. It's the time of year when I sit back and see if I can run the entire commute to work at close to sixty miles per hour (100km/h) if I feel like it and close to 50 miles per hour (80 km/h) if I don't. Highway One is my oyster and I ride under the umbrella of sun and clouds.

Sometimes the clouds turn black and threaten rain, and that's when an alert Bonneville rider checks the windshield wipers of oncoming cars to see if they show traces of rain. That's when one stops and wraps oneself in plastic waterproofing for the imminent downpour. Florida rain is a wondrous thing, refreshing and sparkling as a glass of iced San Pellegrino mineral water, it cools the air from 90 degrees (35C) to 75 (28 C) and then moves on leaving the world shiny and clean and the air crisp and sparkling with ozone. Its the first time in my life I have learned to enjoy rain as a viable alternative to sunshine.Let's not fool ourselves. rain clouds threatening the Publix parking lot can be a nuisance too, and I like sunshine all day every day as often as I can get it. Indeed the Keys have a much more benign summer climate than one might expect. Unlike mainland Florida ( and mainland Ohio from what I'm told) the oppressive humidity factor in the Keys is much more bearable. Of course this factor is very subjective but as far as I'm concerned I'd rather be here in the summer than say Fort Myers or even Miami. Cement and asphalt reflect lots of heat, buildings block breezes and the closer one lies to the sea the better chance one has of enjoying even a modest sea breeze.It's still boiling hot in the keys in July and August and air conditioning remains critically necessary, not least to keep dampness and humidity from eating books clothes and bedding...but summer is entirely bearable in my biased opinion. And here's the secret: summers are great.The summers are not so great for those that live and work in the tourist trade, though there are more and more weekend festivals and celebrations to keep the money flowing. Also the summer months are a good deal less dead than they used to be thanks to families visiting with their broods during school vacations. Its more of an ebb and flow nowadays as opposed to the good old days of "season" and "off season" which led to far more widespread financial desperation in a tourist economy.

On my days off I like to sit out and swelter, read and brood, and watch the clouds. When I've broiled enough I go indoors and chill in the air, or take the boat out and swim and start again. The workaday world at 24 degrees north latitude is for the most part the usual air conditioned indoor office life that doesn't brook sweaty armpits. There are outdoor people and you'll see them lurking in shade wherever they can find it. I like the heat; but I work nights in an air conditioned police station. I never said summer is a barrel of laughs for outdoor workers. I used to be one and I know.

I used to run boats as a commercial captain out of the Hilton Marina, as it used to be known. That was the time people in the city complained about too many cruise ships and now we have less and the city is losing half a million dollars a year in reduced revenues from fewer port calls. I used to crouch in whatever shade i could find in those days, waiting for the passengers and sucking down Gatorade as fast as I could. I still enjoyed the summer! I'm a glutton for heat and humidity and bright white sunlight.I was riding in to work my last night before I took off for my vacation and I spotted a youth on a Pennsylvania registered sportbike. He had it nicely equipped for travel with soft bags over the passenger pad and the fuel tank and he crouched like a tiger as he rode.I sat up straight on my old man's ride and followed at a sedate pace, enjoying all the view I am lucky enough to see each day, bridges and sky and mangroves as usual. I caught up to him when the school bus stopped all traffic for a rug rat crossing and asked him if he was having fun. He looked startled. Poor boy.I took a picture of the Big Coppitt boat ramp with the Bonneville last winter when a cold front had me wrapped up like a babe in swaddling clothes to deal with the 65 degree temperature (18C). At the beginning of June the scene was a good deal warmer, the waters bluer and the clouds big and puffy and white. And there was one of Key West's Elvis impersonators waiting for a fish to bite. No sign of a peanut butter sandwich.

There is that 800 pound gorilla in the back room during summer's bounty in the Keys, and no doubt we will hear more than I'd like about the 2008 Hurricane season in the Southwest Atlantic and Caribbean basin. As I write Belize and Nicaragua have mopped up from the first downpour of the summer brought on by Tropical Storm Arthur. Typically early and late storms develop in the Western Caribbean where the ocean waters are warmer at the beginning and end of summer. By the calendar the hurricane season goes from 1st June to 30th November, though I measure the season by the temperature of the water. When its 80 degrees the water is warm enough to fuel hurricanes as they travel over it.Hurricanes feed the imaginations of people everywhere, in the same way that people hold alligators in horrified fascination. The way I see it, lots of people live in tornado alley and dozens die every year and they also enjoy the pleasure of shovelling snowdrifts for six months of the year. If my house collapses like a pack of cards in a direct hit I'll change my tune, but for now this is as good as it gets.

After A Year

This is the Vespa GTS that inspired this blog:Key West Diary started out June 13th 2007 as Key West Vespa, (hence the banner picture, taken the day before motorcycles and scooters were...banned from the Key West cemetery) a blog inspired by other riders full of the joys of their rides and as an antidote to the screaming, mutual rage and contempt that are exhibited on web forums (fora?) across the Internet. I had already learned as most of us do, that curiosity, self deprecation and irony are transmuted into anger and sarcasm on these open forums and I for one didn't want anything to do with them. So last year at about this time I started thinking about keeping a diary. One day, with no word to my wife or anyone else I took up the name Conchscooter, given to me by some unremembered Internet Forum, and started writing my own thoughts down, on the Internet rather than on paper because one does things electronically these days. I started it because it was dawning on me that for the first time in my life I was feeling settled, and such a feeling was a novelty for me so I wanted to record it. I sold the Vespa and bought the Triumph but the blog soldiered on needing a new name. This is not a Vespa:

Writing about motorcycling seemed too limiting so pretty soon the blog wandered away from a strictly motorcycle format. With my history as a journalist this business of writing about oneself doesn't come easily to me, and I find it uncomfortable writing about my inner dialogue (like this), as though my life were a subject suitable for a stage drama, so I decided to create a blog that would represent what I go looking for when I wander the Internet seeking images and information about places. If I were wondering what the Keys were like what would I want to see on the Internet? I asked myself, and how would this search reflect my own life, as a proper diary should? Working a desk job that requires long periods of quiet time between moments of sheer bedlam allows me lots of time to write many entries and this blog has evolved into an almost daily affair- an affair I've managed to carry on without offending my wife by not ignoring her, nor offending my bosses by choosing to ignore them, and like a good dinner guest I avoid politics and religion. There needs to be one corner in all our lives that isn't there to wind us up and get us agitated. I chose a muted color background, no links to interrupt my musings (though I don't mind links in the comments as they are something others cannot live without it seems) and no advertising. And no "people vexatious to the spirit" as the Desiderata put it when I was a schoolboy. This is not a place for competitive assholes. They can write their own blogs or find one of those forums to express their rants.

I enjoy riding my motorcycle and I have enjoyed riding ever since my mother bought me a Vespa when I was a 12 year old kid. Riding has combined my desire to travel for fun, with my need to travel for all the mundane reasons most people are locked into owning cars. The road just looks more interesting from the seat of a motorbike, especially when the road is winding through the Florida Keys.

College Road

And now we see gas prices continuing to rise relentlessly, a fact that comes as a surprise to many consumers who spend more time contemplating Brittney Spears' underwear than Peak Oil statistics. What I find surprising is that there are still large SUVs on the road with new tags, people are still out buying vehicles that manage just 15 miles to the gallon (6 kilometers to the liter). I'd say get out on two wheels and ride like hell but for people who aren't used to motorcycles the prospect is not appealing. Motorcycles engender fear and perhaps the fear is justified for people with no experience of riding. Historically societies have moved from foot power to two wheels and into four wheels as national prosperity increases. Its a lot to expect from people to ask them to suddenly accept that gas isn't going to get cheap in the future and they might start considering a future with less creature comforts. I enjoy the motorcycle, and my pleasure in relative simplicity, no cellphone, no radio, no Ipod, no coffee on the road, no nothing but the joy of the ride, couldn't come at a a better time in terms of the economy and the environment. I cannot claim that I ride for environmental reasons, I am just lucky that a means of transportation that gives me pleasure is also less burdensome overall on the environment.

Highway One, Cudjoe Key

When we talk about riding a two wheeler the first subject that non riders bring up is fear. To balance fear of dismemberment with some good news we riders bring up the economics of riding as though a motorcycle might "save you money." I am of the school that suggests that true commuting economy comes in the form of a small car, a SmartCar, a Yaris an Aveo or the like, which make better economic sense than a motorcycle or even a belt-hungry and tire hungry scooter. My 70 mile per gallon Vespa 250 (25 kilometer/liter) needed new tires every 3500 miles and a new belt every 6,000 miles and I do over 15,000 miles (25,000 kilometers) a year. The Triumph is much less parts intensive but it only gets about 43 miles per gallon (16 km/l) - no better than a boring little box car... and motorcycle tires don't come cheap, and my rear tire needs replacement every 8,000 miles. And I'm outdoors when it rains, which freaks out people who drive cars. "What do you do when it rains?" -"Adopt the fetal position and cry." Boca Chica Bridge

The ride has to be the fun of the thing else it makes no sense. So I can see the dilemma of a middle aged North American confronting $5/gallon gas with a history of taking pleasure driving a large vehicle and meeting someone like me who is astonished that the idea of getting on the road on two wheels induces nothing more wholesome than a panic attack. Then comes the resentment- I enjoy my commute and whistle happily as I fill my tank for a dozen dollars while the fearful SUV drivers watch their gas tank suck down one hundred dollars of fuel that is rising in price with no explanation and no end in sight. Talk about road rage. Boca Chica Road
There are activities that frighten me too, and though I'm not scared of motorcycles I am scared of heights, for instance. Luckily I don't have to commute down rock faces or skydive to work for surely I would get grumpy too...I hate the woods at night, as I live in dread of the nameless horror of all that creeps through the forest after dark, and when they shudder as they contemplate the fearsome risks I face comuting by Bonneville I try to picture myself forced, like Little Red Riding Hood to commute through a dark and nameless forest. Fear is fear, no matter what the cause. Fear this splendid machine? How is that possible!I try to imagine what this blog might look like were I driving around the Keys in a car. It sounds a bit daft to be honest, though perhaps if the car were correct for the context there might be merit. A cute little SmartforTwo perhaps? My wife is toying with the purchase of a $17,000 Cabrio and has her order in for a blue on silver "Comfort" model (naturally. We are Americans!). I'm not sure she will go through with it though I am encouraging her to sell the Nissan and have two convertibles at her disposal, one good for 31 mpg and the other 40. I'm hoping the Bonneville will be good for another 90,000 miles or 6 years before it needs a rebuild:So I here I am a year on, trying to be introspective and pull some thread of usefulness from my diary, a collection of photographs of pretty and not-so-pretty places around my life accompanied by some idle observations. From time to time I get a pang, wondering if I should use the platform to be a zealot for some cause be it political or environmental and the urge leaves me as quickly as it came. Irondad blogs to spread the message that training is a way for motorcyclists to save their own lives, a more worthy message its hard to imagine, invoking skills I don't possess. The Honolulu Blog seems designed to inveigle against mass transit ("I apply mascara as I drive to work.." Argh! The true source of motorcyclists' fear), a purpose that fascinates and confounds me. The Alaskan Blog in my list of links is a chronicle of self flagellation in the face of horrendous weather in the despair of Arctic despond. I read it in horrified fascination. Me? I am still foppishly tootling around, happy in my job, my home, my wife, my life. I apologize if this seems too amateurish, or decadent perhaps, in the face of imminent societal collapse, but my missionary zeal to urge strangers to improve their lives and by extension the world has seeped away. I must be becoming a laid back Islander, Mon. Here, have another pretty picture, the Highway of Life.

What a strange trip this life of mine has become.

Brief Escape

My last repeat broadcast as I hope to be back later this week and normal service will resume. Thank you for your patience: As Key West gets more crowded with people determined to be drunk in public this week, a middle aged man's thoughts naturally turn to places far from home. Ah escape! Even from Paradise! No-especially from Paradise.

Diggy pestered me for another ride earlier this week and we took a few hours to rumble over the Seven Mile Bridge and check out another eatery. This one, like Burdines is on the water, only its on the north side of town, what Marathon residents call Gulf side (as opposed to Ocean side on the south side of Highway One). Diggy has only just had his eyes opened to the possibilities of fleeing his hometown from time to time and he's developing a taste for the wide world beyond Key West.

Keys Fisheries is the place one chooses if one is in the mood to get Fish. They have a massive menu, overdone in length, but they are well known for their lobster Reuben, consisting of slabs of greasy toast with the other white meat nestled inside. As lobster can live up 120 years when not interefered with, I prefer to avoid encouraging their demise. I find the meat tolerable, overly sweet, and that encourages me to not eat them. The fact that lobster live low-key lives, tucked under rocks and not doing much of anything allows me to sympathize with them when they are torn out of their quiet nooks and allowed to suffocate slowly in our dry atmosphere to become human food.

My blackened snapper lived a much shorter life and tasted a whole lot more savory than the poor old lobster in the reuben at the table next door. My companion pronounced the restaurant "ghetto" which is a term I believe of disapproval. When young Diggy eats out he likes table service, not do it yourself which is the low cost theme at Keys Fisheries. But he did like the notion of using a pseudonym to order the food, sometimes a movie star's name , or a figure from history; the day we were there it was song titles:

Diggy took Low Rider, while I, with my search for the political in all statements went with Imagine. The view of the Gulf of Mexico was okay, blocked by a parked Catalina 27 and by the annoying waterfront fence.The fries were declared "not as good as Burdines" by my junior food critic. Next time we'll try elsewhere, always searching for good eats in the Keys.

Well, you gotta do something to justify the ride.

Third Space

I pulled this essay from the archive of 3500 essays I have on this web page. I am feeling nostalgic for some reason and I have been wandering my own history on this page. My daily life in this place is a routine right now that flows from day to day and I am learning to enjoy an apple cart that rolls and does not need to be upset for the sake of it. I am also enjoying looking back since I first started keeping this diary in 2007. So I shall, from time to time, pull up old pictures and old views of where I live. Just because this has always been and will remain a free form page, in my image, where change is always barely out of sight.I do this thing in public libraries, aside from borrow books and videos, that I call Power Reading. I named it after the well known habit of successful people called power napping. A "power nap" is a self aggrandizing way of saying "short nap" which is a way of using two words where one will do: "nap." In essence Power Reading means taking a read out of a book, but not the whole book just a bit of the book. I pick up a book, and dip in, while sprawling in one of the chairs in the reading area. If I like it I skip to the end (non fiction is best for power reading) and when I am bored I put the book down and try another title, selected at random. I get to peruse tons of books like this and have learned to feel less desperate as time goes by about the number of books still left for me to read as I slide ever closer to oblivion. Even our modest library on woodsy Fleming Street, South Florida's first public library seems overly filled with unread tomes: So there's this writer dude sitting in a hot tub with some friends and a bunch of strangers and he says he thinking about putting together a list of the best places to live but the only problem is he can't think of what the criteria should be. Much discussion apparently ensues among the occupants of the star lit tub (I remember this bit quite well, I think) and finally one of the nude bathers comes up with a truth that the writer grabs and runs with. The Third Space. That's the criteria for the best place to live.

Anyway I was spending a happy part of one day several years ago power reading in the library and I came across a book with an unprepossessing title, something like Ten Best Places to Live, and you will have to forgive the hegemony but naturally "best" referred to places in the US. I generally avoid books with lists in the title, but because I was power reading the obnoxious title obliged me to pick up an unlikely candidate: power reading is about broadening the mind after all, not filling it. Thus I learned about the necessity of public spaces. One of my current favorite Third Spaces is inside the Tropic Cinema, our three-screen Art House complete with bar/coffee shop/candy counter: The book with the crappy title introduced me to this grotesque notion of the Third Space alluded to above. The idea is that your First Space is your home, and your Second Space is your place of work, and these spaces can also be social centers to some extent. But the Third Space is where the social life of the community is on display and available. In other words if you think about places you might like to live you will find they offer vibrant and attractive Third Spaces. The dull, worn out communities don't.

This concept resonated with my wife and I because we were contemplating settling down "for a while" or pulling up our anchor and sailing on. One of the things we found wanting in Key West in 2000 was, we realised, decent Third Spaces. Key West had lots of them, but they were drinking holes. People gathered in bars and drank until they were attractive enough to take home. We asked ourselves, where are Key West's Third spaces? The White Street Pier perhaps... ...a place from which to watch the sunrise or even the sunset, far from the crowds at Mallory Square (which is too commercial and touristy to be a proper Third Space).

The little southernmost city has developed a few that aren't focused on alcohol.Weirdly enough I like Starbucks, which is embarrassing but its one of the few places that offers tables with a view on Duval Street to allow comfortable people watching. As is obvious in these pictures shot today this is definitely low tourist season in Key West.

Voltaire Books calls itself the last independent bookstore, and it offers a welcoming environment to sit and read and think: What used to be the only independent bookstore in town has competition now and thank god for that. The workers at Voltaire smiled when I remarked how nice it was to have a store with friendly people operating it. "We hear that a lot," they said. And yes I have heard from visitors who buy quite a few books here that Island Books is a perfectly pleasant place to shop. We don't frequent all our possible Third Spaces, some I enjoy more than my wife does of course, but there are quite a number of public gathering spaces, that we visit from time to time. Some get too much attention from our residentially challenged population, which rejoices in the mild weather of 24 degrees North latitude, but my attitude is to share the spaces with them and not yield my pleasure to their bullying and if they do bully me, the scruffy hobos who are threatened by middle class disdain, I stand up and say enough and make them yield to my demand for space. Public spaces are open to all, dressed in pressed designer labels or in reeking cerements or anywhere between.

"Drug Free Zone"...There's some governmental wishful thinking for you.

Aside from the Third Space concept every town has gathering points that are advertised as such, places that host events designed to bring people together, like theaters for performances, or even parks for outdoor events, but Third Spaces are simply places where people go and meet people, friends, acquaintances or neither, and chat.

Some people say Key West is going too mainstream, or too upmarket or too glitzy and that may well be the case. For my part I hang on to the bits that please me, and I find I rejoice in the wealth of Third Spaces that the town is, by accident or design, creating. I shall protest, futilely, if money and urban planning submerge or derail the process, but the ways of deliberate destruction are as forceful and more direct than the simplicity and beauty of accidental creation and my protests will fall on deaf ears. So the other lesson of the Third Space is don't get attached because change is inevitable, and not always for the better.