Thanksgiving

Im Abendrot- Evening's Glow

Through want and joy we have walked hand in hand;
We are both resting from our travels now, in the quiet countryside

Around us the valleys fold up, already the air grows dark,
Only two larks still soar wistfully into the balmy sky

Come here and let them fly about; soon it is time for sleep
We must not go astray in this solitude

O spacious, tranquil peace, so profound in the gloaming.
How tired we are of travelling – is this perchance death?

( Joseph Eichendorff )

In Im Abendrot, at the line “can this then be death,” Richard Strauss quotes the Transfiguration motif from one of the tone poems that made him famous, Tod und Verklärung (“Death and Transfiguration”). Strauss wrote in 1894 about Tod und Verklärung: “The hour of death approaches, the soul leaves the body in order to find gloriously achieved in everlasting space those things which could not be fulfilled here below.” On his deathbed, Strauss said: “Dying is just as I composed it in Tod und Verklärung.”

Thanks to my wife for learning to understand me and the patience to put up with me and the promise to be there at the end. It's been an excellent trip. Long may it last.

Dry Tortugas Thankfully

As you read this I hope to be with half a dozen or so friends settling into a campsite at the Dry Tortugas National Park. The house, the vegetable garden and the Bonneville (without the ignition key!), are in the care of a house sitter and for four glorious days and three cool nights we will be under canvas somewhere here.
The blog will have to soldier on without me, as will Key West PD until I get back on the Saturday afternoon ferry and rush off to my uniform waiting for me in my locker when I take up the reins of civilized life once again. I am very happy to be escaping the bonds of civilization for a few days, and I very much appreciate this ideal wilderness we have just 70 miles (110 kilometers) from Key West. At Fort Jefferson there is no food, no water, no cell phones, no nothing very much unless we load it on the ferry.
The weather forecast advises us a cold front is about ready to hit the Keys and we can expect rain in squalls with wind and cooling temperatures, possibly into the mid 60s at night (17C). We have a supply of extra blankets and red wine to fight off frost bite. As you might imagine, with half a dozen women in the party we will leave nothing to chance. Last May I was a pack mule getting our modest heap of stuff from the ferry to the campground.To those that wish it, I hope you get all the snow, yellow leaves and changes of season you can stand. To those forced to stand in line in airports, or in traffic jams on freeways, felicitations, I'm sure your families appreciate the sacrifice. To riepe, I apologize in advance for the posts the next few days which will look exactly like normal but I won't be available to be your whipping boy. Tell your bud in Alaska that if God and I were on speaking terms I'd be asking for a Government Writer's Program like the WPA had, for Christmas. Failing that perhaps we can ask China to annex us to Hong Kong and send us Cuban doctors to take care of our health needs. Remember: They may have a perfect welfare safety net in Norway but they don't have seascapes like these: Till next time then, I'm off to find a campsite and eat turkey on my very own, more-or-less private, desert island. Happy Thanksgiving Everybody! (Even Canadians who've hogged the turkey and had theirs in October, greedy guts).

Cudjoe Stumble

Last spring my colleague Noel told me of some adventures he had with friends on all terrain vehicles on Cudjoe Key. (Cudjoe is pronounced Anglo style: Kud-joe, not Coo-joe or even Coo-hoe, just so you know).It had been my ambition to check out the trails, but summer intervened, season of heat humidity mosquitoes and standing water. I decided November was a good time to check this place out, as the rains have dried up and one has to hope the mangrove bogs have too. The trail looked promising at the start, with a nice big red diamond marking the end of navigable pavement.
I paused to allow the ibis to do their foraging... ...and took off down what promised to be a simple enough exploration. The trail was hard packed, quite possibly an old planned development that never happened, and left behind a usable roadway. The bicycle coped just fine though I was tempted to ditch it. The problem with cycling the backwoods is that you are essentially using a vehicle and it demands your attention. The benefit is that you get where you are going faster, which, as benefits go, isn't much good if you are just out for a ramble. Pink Crocs haul you along just fine if you are walking.I have heard some people marvel at my audacity wandering the woods of the Lower Keys, as they fear rattlesnakes, and my defense that I have never met a rattler therefore they don't exist cuts no ice for them. Too bad because these areas are a great place to go for a walk, especially mid week at midday when no one else is around.
Besides, I am not out to chase, kill or harass snakes so I figure they will mind their own business if I walk with my eyes open. So far so good.

And then naturally we met our first impediment, standing water. This particular trail is pretty close to tidal waters on the edge of the island so I guess it is more prone to flooding. At first I planned to ride on through ( and wash the bicycle at home with copious amounts of fresh water), but a glance up the trail revealed the awful truth.This wasn't just a puddle, this was a state of mind. All I could see was a trail of water disappearing into the horizon. I surrendered. It wasn't the ride I had intended, but I got to enjoy a morning out, and as it's only five miles from my house I will have to come back later in the winter, deeper into the dry season, to see what other trails may poke their heads above water.

Going Rouge

I found this video on Huff Post. I do not believe it is a Saturday Night Live spoof, though perhaps it should be. On the one hand it is funny, and perhaps people who watch television have been exposed to this kind of stuff more than I have, and it may well be old hat to them. On the other hand it rather freaks me out. These are people who believe without evidence, and the same kind of conspiracy theory nonsense came from my side of the aisle as George Bush came down to the end of his second term- that stuff about martial law and an end to elections and all that. The endless lack of faith in the US Constitution and that binds us all together.

But beyond the general, unanswerable malaise expressed by these inarticulate Sarah Palin supporters, what we hear in this video is the voice of belief over empiricsm, the certainty of knowing without knowledge, the yearning for an America that never was, that has been promoted by the banksters and the traders and the clever operators who have traded these people's real work in factories, in sweat shops and mills and sold them a fantasy instead and sent their labor to the cheaper markets of the Far East. And now they lose their hold on reality because if they look reality in the face their America was taken from them by Americans and replaced by a bunch of false idols. What a nightmare. And the President isn't going to toss these yeast people (see J H Kunstler) a life belt. They drown in the rust belt of their dreams.

Call me a dreamer but this video summarises for me why I am ashamed of what our leaders, all of them, are doing to this country. Look into the eyes of these true believers and ask yourself if anyone really gives a shit about what they want or care about or believe in, be it nonsense or not. I don't think Sarah Palin cares anymore than President Barack Obama has shown any sign of giving a toss about them. I wouldn't have a clue how to reassure them that they can ever have America back, because as I go off for yet one more overtime shift at my secure job, I have no idea what the future holds for any of us, except that Goldman Sachs doesn't have anything good planned for us, that is for sure. And what do you suppose Sarah Palin's relationship to Wall Street might be?

Stark Poverty

Try this on for size: fifty million Americans in the last year have struggled to get enough food. Half the children in the United States during the course of the next year are expected to need food stamps to eat. Last year Goldman Sachs paid corporate taxes at the rate of one percent and this year is on track to show a record profit, and of that, nearly 17 billion dollars has been set aside to pay bonuses.

Do I sound like an old line Marxist if I suggest this gross inequality is unacceptable? I can assure you I am not a Marxist, but I am convinced no possible good can come of this state of affairs. Our President is doing nothing to rein in the banksters, we have spent tens of trillions of dollars, more than double the amount needed to pay off every primary home mortgage in this country, and we have a growing population of desperate, permanently unemployed workers. The number of unemployed is bound to increase.

In the third quarter of this year home foreclosures hit almost one million. More and more of us average joes are losing our homes, our jobs and with them our health insurance. meanwhile our Senators are debating how to screw us out of affordable decent health care coverage. The sort of coverage they enjoy as a matter of course. How is this possible?

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Well, I suppose it's possible because too many of us still hope that everything will work out, that the American Dream will get back on track, that things will start improving soon. There are ten state sin the US that are considered to be on the verge of bankruptcy and it gives me no joy to note that Florida is one of them. This is a state that has no personal income tax and relies on sales taxes and property taxes, both of which are in precipitous decline. It is no wonder then, that the Sunshine State is on the verge of imploding. This is a state with a part-time legislature (!) that meets for a few months at the beginning of the year. In the legislature's absence the Governor and his elected cabinet run the state. From them we have had no peep that there is trouble on the horizon. Come on down! The winter sunshine is lovely!

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So what are we to do? Well, gun stores are reporting massive sales and ammunition is flying off the shelves. I don't count that as an encouraging sign of the things to come. I keep thinking about that TV show called Dark Angel, in which the creators depicted a United States laid low and devastated by a mysterious electronic pulse. People lived shambolic Third World lives scraping a living under the watchful eye of jackbooted security police and robot guards. The lucky ones fled to Canada...

Happy Thanksgiving, is the phrase of the day and I suppose it means something for those of us with jobs, homes and health insurance. Everyone else? Good luck.

Watson Lane

This is another of those lanes that lead north off Truman Avenue toward the cemetery, and it's not really a lane because Watson cuts right across the middle of Key West for several blocks. However this small chunk between Truman and the cemetery fits my description of a lane...

The lane is peppered with signs of Awful Warnings thanks in part to the presence of the gruesome strip club nearby. They use the red cage sometimes to stick a scantily clad woman inside to prance around as a form of advertising.

No parking for lechers around here apparently. Aside from all the parking issues Watson Lane has some quite evocative little homes in this stretch. They reminded me of mountain cabins I have seen in Northern California or the Pacific Northwest:

With some fairly large multi unit dwellings in the key West style:

It was while I was standing in the middle of the lane pondering my next picture a woman walked up to me and, were this the fantasy of a humor writer she would have lifted her shirt and ordered me to take a peak. Instead this was real life and she asked if she could help me.

"Do what?" I replied, puzzled. Then she nodded her head and asked if I had come from the property.

"No," I said, "I'm not overly fond of Teasers." No, she clarified, asking me if I had come from the house. Which I found to be a weird question as I was obviously standing in the street holding a camera, albeit a small one. I had no burglar bag or any place to hide the loot.

"I'm taking pictures," I said as though the camera wasn't self explanatory. "I like to take pictures of my home town recording it as it changes." Humph she grunted, "I haven't seen you around." Probably I wanted to say, because I don't attend many of the tea parties you do, it's not that I don't exist! But she wandered off and I got back to the business at hand, which I may add was not burglary. Not in the middle of the day, with a camera in my hand in a photogenic town littered with tourists taking pictures. One has to respect people's right to be paranoid I suppose.

And here we have a fine example of that rare species the Honda Ruckus 250 scooter. They achieved cult status in the brief period they were imported. Personally I've never seen the attraction of the Big Ruckus or the 50cc version, lacking as they do, even the most rudimentary storage or weather protection.

I found the "lane" to be quite delightful, all trees and wood and shafts of sunlight.
This was some sort of outdoor garage or carport tucked in under the trees.

This was the source of the mid street controversy, a picture taken from well outside the boundaries of the house.And here across the street another cabin covered by greenery:

I thought the arrow pointed in the right direction for all of us, in the end:

And just to cheer you up here's a nice tree:

I enjoyed Watson.