Stormy Weather And A Palm

Dawn over Marathon, and I was standing in one of my favorite places in the Lower Keys overlooking the old Bahia Honda Bridge.



It's been windy for so long I was quite surprised the waters were that flat.



It never did rain but as daylight seeped across the seascape the thick dark clouds looked decidedly menacing.



Little wonder this is one of my favorite spots along the Highway between the Seven Mile Bridge and Key West.



It is an iconic palm from any angle.



The abandoned pump station still stands guard over the old 1942 water pipe installed by the Navy to bring water to the far flung World War Two Base in Key West.



And my dog took a break up the hill, keeping an eye on my welfare from behind some cover.



We keep an eye out for each other, Cheyenne and I.


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Evacuations And Quality Of Life

The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity was recently created by the state's governor, the one with the lowest popularity poll numbers in the history of these things, and those numbers seem likely to sink further in the Florida Keys.



The new state agency has come out in favor of lots more development in the Keys reversing a trend supported by the former Department of Community Affairs which used to try to slow down development in the Keys, an area of special state concern.



The idea is that state bean counters are supposed to figure out how many people can get out of the Keys in the hours before a hurricane lands and wrecks everything and that number is supposed to limit how many residential and commercial units can be built in the islands. That seems a sensible and simple enough formula to determine how much ravaging can be done on these small lumps of rock.



But it turns out those sneaky bean counters have figured out a way to ignore reality and realign things to the needs of developers. They now say lots of people don't evacuate from the Keys so we can assume lots won't and the highway won't be as clogged so we can build more and not worry.



Well that's a theory. It will be interesting to see what happens when we get one of those once a century category five direct hits when everybody does evacuate. There will be lots of recriminations afterward.



I remember when I lived in California winter storms would cause mud slides and homes would be washed away. The destitute occupants would announce proudly they would rebuild in exactly the same spot. Good job fellas, that way you know you will wash out again sooner or later.



Sooner or later is the defining paradigm of natural disasters. Sooner or later... The other amusing note comes from the governor's office once again, the ministry of magic.



There is this insurance company in Florida, publicly owned called Citizens and it was formed because free market capitalists declared Florida too risky and they all buggered off. So we got a state owned insurance company that has done quite nicely and has amassed, against the odds, sufficient billions to cover us for assorted hazards and all without wasting a red cent on a dividend or executive bonus.



Guess what? Free market capitalists observing the dearth of hurricanes for the past few years now want to get their hands on that cash cow and are asking Governor Cretin to disband Citizens. And I'm pretty sure he will because we elected a public servant who never saw a public service he believed in.



I wish North Dakota were a more benign place to live. They have no banking or loan crisis in North Dakota, they have a publicly owned bank. Almost as good as publicly owned home insurance.
Mind you this blog would look pretty silly: Bismark Diary indeed.

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As You Like It

I am one of those people who finds that he enjoys a challenge yet once the challenge is met I prefer to move on and try something new.




I am an atheist, which in the US these days is a political statement, but I mean it simply as a statement of fact. I believe the pursuit of meaning, the hope of life everlasting is futile and disperses energy best consumed in the pursuit of the best possible daily reality. I like the Buddhist notion of "mindfulness" that is to say attempting to pay attention to the value of each passing minute.




Which, like most religious precepts is almost impossible to follow precisely, because if religion were easy it would be senseless. The difficulty is part of the charm. Nevertheless I do try to live each day mindfully, and each day I fail, I remain determined to try again when I rise the next day.




After four and a half years and 2500 essays I felt I had figured out the blogging thing. I wanted a new challenge so I went into partnership. That the partnership has failed is my fault not Chuck's and I am forced to take responsibility for the failure of the other web site because I had to recognize I am a one man band not a partnership. I wanted to view blogging as an activity and I wanted to try to increase the difficulty of the activity to increase the challenge.




Instead I find my blog actually is my diary. I can go back and read an essay and use that tiny little window into the past to remind myself of a time in my life. I found myself drawn to my old diary for pleasure and to my new website less and less and apparently I was not alone. This site gets as many hits after a month of inactivity as the new website where I was blogging daily.




That reinforced my feeling that this space is different and special because it is particular. My space is mine because it's mine. Here I can meander in my own garden of ideas and make no excuses to anyone or for anyone. I have a quality rarely found on the pages of the Internet, an old fashioned quality that I like very much in myself.




Ironic detachment requires me to take observer status and try to see the unintended humor in daily life. I have the awkward attribute of being able to see two sides to any story, a quality that makes me unsuitably inclined to a career as a police officer. Ironic detachment is a fine quality I have discovered, in a police dispatcher. It is just too bad I cannot tell the stories here that cross my desk every work night. Irony is a very helpful tonic when forced to listen to endless stories of human misery night after night and then seek a solution to the intractable.




Ironic detachment requires the observer to have the ability to laugh at himself. When I was a reporter I grew up in the shadow of the old school dictum that a reporter's job is to "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted" and some days I like to do the same here. On other less moody days I see myself as a clown on the stage of life, Mr Bean failing in the simplest of daily tasks, and better yet observing my fellows in doing the same.




It doesn't always work yet sometimes I find people recall with perfect clarity an essay I wrote and posted just to fill the space. It's impossible to tell who sees what richness and value in which space. This is my space as eccentric and uncertain as am I. The lesson is learned: this is my home. Welcome to my space on the infinite web, a place that could fairly be described in Shakespeare's "As You Like It" suitably enough as "a poor thing but mine own" quoted below in a discussion of virginity, it turns out, not penmanship.

God 'ild you, sir; I desire you of the like. I
press in here, sir, amongst the rest of the country
copulatives, to swear and to forswear: according as
marriage binds and blood breaks: a poor virgin,
sir, an ill-favoured thing, sir, but mine own; a poor
humour of mine, sir, to take that that no man else
will: rich honesty dwells like a miser, sir, in a
poor house; as your pearl in your foul oyster.

I hope Key West Diary can occasionally yield a pearl from foul oysters.

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I'm Back

This is a test. Key West Diary resumes forthwith. I have been gone too long.

Cheers

Conchscooter.

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That's All Folks

This was the very first entry in my blog, a joke told to me by my buddy Robert, when I rode a Vespa 250 GTS and this blog was called Key West Vespa.

Day One June 13 2007
This dude dies. There's a promising start for a blog. Well, anyway he dies and goes to heaven. St Peter meets him at the Pearly Gates and says:
"We have choices nowadays in Heaven. You get a free trial period in a choice of places. In your case you get to try out the celestial sphere up here, or you get to spend the rest of eternity in Key West.
Day one, among the clouds sipping ambrosia, tinkling the odd harp, lounging around chatting of this and that with the hosts of heavenly angels.
Day Two, our hero gets sent down to Key West to check out the scene. He starts the day with a proper breakfast at Turtle Kraals, fresh eggs, strong coffee, crisp bacon and a view across the Key West Bight Harbor. Then he heads to the beach at Fort Zachary for a swim, a read in a hammock under the pines and a leisurely bike ride back to civilisation for a refreshing smoothie on Duval Street while checking out the passing scene.
After a lunch on the beach at Salute restaurant he takes off from Smathers Beach dangling from a parachute, whips round the harbor and back on land takes in a ride across town to Half Shell raw bar for oysters and a frosty.
In the evening its back to Duval and a night of drinking and carousing.
St Peter barely has to ask.
"Dude," our Hero says, panting from his exertions in Paradise, "its gotta be Key West for me." Nodding gravely St Peter puts him down for eternity in Key West.
Our hero drops off to sleep under a freshly laundered sheet, a fan swirling slowly round above his head.
He awakes in a lather of sweat, the sound of hungry female mosquitoes fills his ears. His lip is swollen from a nighttime mosquito feast and his ears are filled with gritty sand.
"Hey!" A voice roars and the sound of cracking whip fills the air." Get up you lazy bugger! Work! Get to work!"
"Hey, I'm spending Eternity in Paradise!" comes the indignant protest.
"Yeah, yesterday you were a tourist. Today you're a local."

So there we have it. I'm not completely sure how to say goodbye because after all there I will be tomorrow to greet the new year at http://thekeywestlocal.com/ but in the meantime let me say thank you for following this blog and I hope to hear from you on the other side tomorrow. It has been fun and I can't say better than that.

Keep well. do good work and enjoy New Year's Eve with the hope of good things to come next year.

Solares Hill 2008

So here we are, the last day of Key West Diary and I couldn't let my beloved blog fade away without some pictures of the iconic hill in the middle of the city that I am pleased to call home, even though I live in the suburbs.
There are people that delight in thinking Florida is flat which in point of fact is not true at all. Solares Hill, a couple of blocks east of Duval Street is variously reported to be between 14 and 18 feet above sea level. I take the middle ground and call it sixteen feet (about five meters in new money) which is, I think, a good height for a hill to be. For instance if you were planning a fishing trip on your bicycle and came this way, west on Angela Street, you could free wheel a block:There is another hill in Key West, on Elizabeth Street near Eaton, and it, though unnamed is labeled by the presence of the Hilltop Laundry. But Solares Hill takes pride of place, by virtue of the fact that this is Key West's own Mount Everest, the top, the highest peak of all. You may even see people climbing the hill without the aid of supplemental oxygen. These hardy souls looked like visitors staying at Courtney's Place located on the South Col, just off the Hill itself:Solares Hill isn't a straight climb. The road dips on its way up from City Hall at the corner of Simonton Street:What makes this place odd is that in a town notorious for labelling every little non event in its tumultuous history, the highest point gets no marker. Here there is no souvenir stand, seashell vendor or tout with postcards. For the ardent labeller it is a do-it-yourself spot, and in that spirit I label this Key West's tallest house, the home with the front porch highest above the lapping waters of the Straits of Florida, one short mile to the south:It could as easily be this imposing home across the street:But I prefer the more modest Conch proportions of the little white house with it's sky blue trim and every time I pass I salute it as Key West's highest foundation.

The other thing about Solares Hill is that it comes from nowhere and leads nowhere. It is just another street, another way to get out of town, and once you pass the crown of the hill the street levels off:It becomes, momentarily, a modest little plaza that is actually an intersection where four roads join. At night the pink house with the drooping cantilevered extension looks quite a bit different, more imposing perhaps and a lurid shade of yellow in my viewfinder:The lights in the distance mark Angela and Simonton Streets, the bright lights of downtown, but up here on the hill where every breath costs a climber effort, the lay of the land is much more peaceful, by day......and by night:In that last picture I caught the trifecta of Key West wheels; the convertible, the scooter, and the shopping cart, something for everyone. From the intersection one can turn left onto Elizabeth and head towards the Fleming/Southard corridor, or keep going straight, down the hill towards the cemetery:Or, if turning right one gets to freewheel a little bit back towards Truman Avenue and the main street out of Key West:Or you could be like me and wander the hill at 4:30 in the morning and find a bunch of little alleyways, evocative and secret that I shall have to come back to check out in the cold light of day. I keep thinking I know this town and then there is a fifty yard strip of cement lined with laundry, sleeping cats and tile decorations that make a liar out of me. How provoking.