My phone rang. "Hey Fat Head! How ya doin'?" the rasping New Jersey accent of jack the ripper cut through the pleasant conversation we were having during our picnic lunch on my porch. Chuck was more polite than me. "Hi Jack!" he said cheerily to the speaker telephone.
Well, there's a coincidence thought I, as Jack riepe and Chuck made the sort of polite small talk that chokes me up. It would have been good to have had riepe there in person but Chuck and I had planned to gorge ourselves stupid on the best bread Key West has to offer and riepe would have been a handful to cope with in such circumstances.
My loyal dog nudged my leg for a while and then passed out, full herself of treats and walks and heat exhaustion. We made a mess of the Colez Peace bread which Chuck brought from the restaurant store on Eaton Street http://colespeace.com/ . Country Italian I think it was and it went down just fine with salami and some assorted cheeses from Winn Dixie, Cheddar, Parmesan and Brie and a jar of Boetje's mustard.
One of the great things about living in the Keys is that even though one is a bit isolated from the full range of American Middle Class Mall shopping, no bad thing for a recluse like me, one can still get hold of the foods that have revolutionized American tastes since Julia Child started her campaign decades ago. I did notice that a lot of the more off the wall organics and frou frou middle class products (South Beach granola, Newman's Own cereal for instance) are no longer stocked now that Big Pine is inhabited by troglodytes and assorted primitives...It's nice the snowbirds have gone home for the summer but I miss their finicky shopping habits!
Chuck, being an engineer wanted to see why my refurbished outboard isn't making full power so we sat in the skiff for a while and pondered. Brian the mechanic should be here before the weekend I hope, for a definitive diagnosis.
The 1985 Harley is still running just so, and refreshed by a 27 mile ride out into the boonies Chuck was ready to go home.
So he did just that. A perfect afternoon in the fabulous Florida Keys.
Well, there's a coincidence thought I, as Jack riepe and Chuck made the sort of polite small talk that chokes me up. It would have been good to have had riepe there in person but Chuck and I had planned to gorge ourselves stupid on the best bread Key West has to offer and riepe would have been a handful to cope with in such circumstances.
My loyal dog nudged my leg for a while and then passed out, full herself of treats and walks and heat exhaustion. We made a mess of the Colez Peace bread which Chuck brought from the restaurant store on Eaton Street http://colespeace.com/ . Country Italian I think it was and it went down just fine with salami and some assorted cheeses from Winn Dixie, Cheddar, Parmesan and Brie and a jar of Boetje's mustard.One of the great things about living in the Keys is that even though one is a bit isolated from the full range of American Middle Class Mall shopping, no bad thing for a recluse like me, one can still get hold of the foods that have revolutionized American tastes since Julia Child started her campaign decades ago. I did notice that a lot of the more off the wall organics and frou frou middle class products (South Beach granola, Newman's Own cereal for instance) are no longer stocked now that Big Pine is inhabited by troglodytes and assorted primitives...It's nice the snowbirds have gone home for the summer but I miss their finicky shopping habits!
Chuck, being an engineer wanted to see why my refurbished outboard isn't making full power so we sat in the skiff for a while and pondered. Brian the mechanic should be here before the weekend I hope, for a definitive diagnosis.
The 1985 Harley is still running just so, and refreshed by a 27 mile ride out into the boonies Chuck was ready to go home.So he did just that. A perfect afternoon in the fabulous Florida Keys.
To be standing at the roadside in pure silence watching the sun break through the clouds is one of life's more perfect experiences. The little rain we have had has brought out a fine crop of mosquitoes in the Torch Keys, and the fact that I left a window open in the car while we walked, meant that I had a Mr Bean moment when I got back in the Ford.
I sat there for a moment wondering why there were so many insects in my car and then they started biting and I started thrashing. I might have looked very odd to someone outside looking in, but happily Cheyenne and I were still alone on the road. Like the late great Spalding Gray I try to have a perfect moment here and there and reality always manages to intrude. Fucking mosquitoes.
A waterfront home is a thing of beauty, a comfortable retreat and I enjoy my canal side home a great deal. It is not on the open water which comforts me when the winds reach hurricane force and it is but three quarters of a mile from the Great Trunk Road that connects the Keys. Highway One unhappily does not always look it's best as it passes through our wire hung, neon lit communities.
It was 1979 and I left home in the Spring aiming my Yamaha SR500 at Cape Town from my home in Italy.
I had the Euro-Yamaha with spoked wheels and a plain red/black paint job and no plan on how to repair a puncture, an oversight that leaves me gasping in retrospect. I tried to load canister for gas on home made racks on either side of the bike, and piled my saddle bags and rear rack high with unnecessary crap to comfort my loneliness in the heart of darkness. I carried too many books and not enough tools clearly, but I was 21 and ready for adventure. I found it. 
I bought a chain cover like the one shown above on the profoundly ugly diesel powered MZ whose picture I found on the Internet. It consisted of a black plastic box to cover the rear sprocket and two rubber tubes to protect the chain on it's run to and from the gearbox and the rear wheel. The idea was to keep abrasive sand from chewing up my chain. It worked- until it didn't. The early part of my trip consisted of taking a ferry from Naples to Tunis, crossing to Algeria just as I had done in 1977 on a Moto Morini 350 Sport (I excelled in riding small capacity motorcycles back then) and then turning south to cross the desert, an inhospitable place that Sahara.
The road had been freshly paved to Tamanrassett so the riding was easy. Back in Tunisia, camping in an oasis of date palms and sandy roads I met an intrepid German in a camper van. He was older, grumpy and probably retired with a world war two pension in part, no doubt.
After a week of building up my nerves I cast off from friendly, westernized Tozeur (alcohol was for sale, discreetly in government stores in Tunisia) and I made my way to Algeria In 1977 had got caught up in a riot in Constantine and had found refuge with an Italian engineer who came from my home town and spotted my Terni license plate in the chaos. I spent the night in his home drinking and listening to a city burn. In 1979 everything was quiet, the border was easy and I was soon rolling south. In the picture above I found a shot of some French travelers in a sandstorm, one of the big fears of a motorcyclist there. I never did have that pleasure, luckily for me. The picture below is Agadez, in Niger, well south of the worst of the Sahara and 800 miles from the end of the paved highway. My motorcycle was running fine, and I was doing okay, against predictions.
Mostly my thoughts turn to issues at home, getting the boat running or a new set of rear tires for the car, or some other mundane thing. These days i wonder a great deal about how it is the stock market is going stratospheric even as unemployment has fallen off the radar of the mainstream press. Gold is at $1550 an ounce, the Dow Jones is at 12,800 and the shadow stats site still reports unemployment and under employment stubbornly holding on at around 22 percent.
None of it adds up for me. Japan is forgotten even as they lumber on cleaning up an impossible fiasco, car production is 
I was talking to a police officer the other night who said her hospital bill for a recent surgery was $20,000 and she has yet to get the doctor's bills and the anaesthesiologist's bill and the aspirin bills and god knows what. She packs her lunch to work as does her state law 
I have noticed that running a business consumes inordinate amounts of a human being's time. Vacations are referred to in a rather humorless way as unknown luxuries to people of business, and they seem to have less interest in making money than in the way of life involved in making the money, though that apparent indifference may be a mask. 
The idle and uninformed speculation about what makes someone want to own a business was prompted by the news a couple of days ago that the Green Parrot bar has a new owner. That the new owner has been making noise in Key West for a few years should come as no surprise because for Pat Croce as for so many people with bars and restaurants in this town, one is rarely enough. He it is who retired from some lucrative sports injury business franchise of some sort, I believe and opened a rum oriented bar on Front Street with a museum which subsequently closed, dedicated to pirates. With the piratical focus moved to St Augustine one bar in Key West was not enough...
Usually I find at least once a week that some impatient soul stuck in a line of slow sleepy drivers heading to work in Key West, pulls out to pass, sees my lone headlight and says what the hell and goes for it anyway pushing me to the shoulder. In the picture above, taken from my car as I returned home with a well walked Cheyenne in the back, I was looking east toward Boondocks on Ramrod about where the wreck in the first picture took place. Forty minutes earlier I was completing my commute, and calculating I needed more fuel to get to work and home from my early morning shift to come I stopped at the Shell station at the end of my street. A pick up pulled in and the driver said"Did you see the wreck?" Huh? "A pick up ran into the railings over there..." and sure enough there it was, across from Boondocks. I had been checking out a black Mercedes parked on the street on the opposite side with no lights and fearing a repeat of the earlier maneuver I had been watching to see what it was going to do. So much so I missed the big truck half in the mangroves on my side of the street, where the Mercedes driver had apparently gone to render help. Silly me. 
How the truck, caught in the flashing-by-in-motion-in-the-half-light picture above managed to drive off a very straight chunk of highway I cannot begin to imagine. Unless he was still asleep, drunk, high, texting, suddenly taken ill, arguing with a passenger, or any of the hundred and one things people do as they drive.