Tiring My Dog On And Off Love Lane

I am not a fan of Facebook. I have an account, I think, but I find it intrusive to a degree that irritates me, and yet it is also a space that doesn't allow for reflection or extended thoughts.others disagree with me, billions of people actually like Facebook.

I tried Instagram too until I discovered it was overrun by Facebook and he they wanted to make money off the pictures submitted to the service. That got my allergies running rampant so I dumped Instagram.

I like my own page on the Web, my place to despoil my pictures, my ruminations and my memories. It is not an easy thing for people to maintain a web page it seems, a arrangement that I find relaxing and thus self perpetuating. Love Lane Jack used to keep a rhyming blog, a page unique among the unique, a thing of particular interest, a mish mash of pictures and politics and blasphemy all mixed in with insight and humor. above Solaris Hill .

The page is gone, left for dead on the electronic battlefield of ideas and in its place Jack has forged ahead on the dreaded Facebook. Whatever works I am sad to say, but I miss the ribald irreverent thought provoking poetry on the new page. (2) Love Lane Jack

Life goes on and so does my eleven year old Labrador.

I thought of the following picture as a study in white, the peculiar lengthened Conch cottage, added on as money and desire allowed. Not exactly McMansions!

A vast spacious empty lot, devoid of parked cars except the elderly and still bright scarlet Alfa Romeo Spyder.

The idea of one human family gets a tad bit frayed around the edges from time to time but I did like humor the sticker posted over a defaced No Trespassing sign.

This cheerful dumpster sits in Fausto's paking lot, to cheer up grocery customers. Faustos Key West | Home

This sign caused me to chuckle. Oops! Scaring off the customers won't work!

My sense of humor causes me to enjoy irony even in death, that most fearsome affliction of even the faithful. Death comes to us all but Trespassing on it is frowned upon at Key West's largest funeral home. From time to time of course I have to call out the on duty undertaker when police officers come across a body. No matter how ungodly the hour the voice answering the undertaker's phone is always a voice of a man wide awake, calm, and ready to help. I have great admiration for undertakers, they deal with people in terrible shape and they do it superbly.

The Federal Building on Simonton Street is lovely in its limestone magnificence and then your eyes are drawn to the ghastly security measures that demean the beauty and solidity, as though this were a fortified foreign legation not a customs and court house dispensing the Law.

This lovely grassy knoll is a few blocks from the Federal Building. In point of fact it is across Lazy Way Lane from Schooner Wharf Bar.

The former model home for the proposed development by a group of failed local investors has been torn down to make ready for a new hotel. Oh well, the open space will be nice as long as it lasts.

I frequently come across dog walkers who fear an encounter with my happy Labrador. Dogs are the gods of frolic but so few of their owners know it. En garde!

Gecko, anole, or miniature iguana. You decide.

An elderly Cuban dude rolled up on a bicycle while my dog was rooting around in his bicycle parking spot and I was busy taking a picture of yet another pair of abandoned shoes. Where do they all come from, I ask myself?

The Cuban dude smiled as I reeled in my errant dog. At first I thought he was, as everyone is, afraid of my hound. Instead he kept smiling at her happy face, parked his bike and sloped off into his house. Cheyenne and I went back to Love Lane to find the car.

Key West Diary: Love Lane

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Walking On Water

You don't have to go far in Key West to find dramatic seascapes. This one I took facing west from Truman Waterfront, looking across the Navy Basin towards the harbor.

The skies are usually blue around here, unless it is threatening sturm und drang thunder lightning and rain.

I enjoy the play of sunlight through the wispy cotton wool overhead and I spend too much time peering overhead as I go about my business down here.

The old coast guard cutter Mohawk has long since departed the seawall, dragged to Sanibel Island to be sunk unceremoniously to attract divers to the Lee County coast. It was got rid of to make way for a marina planned for the area now stymied by a firm no thanks by the US Navy which controls access to the waters of the Navy Basin. All that's left are these deck guns painted the same shade of gray, incongruously decorated with a bottle of fabric...softener? Most unwarlike.

One day not too long in the future the city wants to have a pedestrian boardwalk running the length of the waterfront, from Fort Zachary Taylor to the south, to Trumbo Road to the north. I look forward to it. At the moment the waterfront is a bit chopped up, with large hotels like Ocean Key dominating the waterfront skyline.

Mallory Square's bricks retain some of the old ambiance of a working waterfront, marred by high visibility clothing and the ubiquitous rehydration device, bottled tap water. High Viz is highly fashionable but curmudgeons like me wonder why anyone expects others should see them when thy are out enjoying themselves. High Viz is a cult requirement among novice motorcyclists . I figure it's up to me to pay attention, not to expect bored drones in cages to notice me. Try telling that to a devotee of fluorescent yellow.

Old Key West is always celebrated, but always as a way to pander for dollars. I like history because the past is a guide to the present. It makes sense of life the way religion works for believers.

On the subject of history Key West has its own Wall Street:

When I'm answering 911 calls I wish each building in Key West had a sign like this. The a swer to my inevitable question: Where are you? would come easily...

The answer to the question of where Cheyenne is at any time is: usually rooting around in the bushes.

I am always surprised by how much clutter occupies the lives of the residentially challenged, overflowing bicycles and shopping carts abound in Key West.

Some kind soul donated a snack to my dog. And not even hidden in the bushes.

The pause gave me a few minutes to compose some pictures through the Mallory Square railings.

This guy on the walkway was enjoying a morning in Key West a d we came abreast of him I gave him a cheery good morning. He looked startled. I guess men in pink Crocs are looking for sex wherever he comes from. Glad I don't live there or my life would be extra complicated.

Every morning Key West is ready for the tourist influx.

The Westin:

Once the boardwalk is complete there will be lots of places to amble and stop and look and think.

Not that you can't do that right now.

I was looking idly at the Cusotms House Museum windows, enjoying their beauty when I oticed the photo. Hmm, homo-erotic art? Really? Ah, Key West has an image to keep up.

Key West and its feral cats. They are smarter than a lot of people because they aren't scared of Cheyenne.

And then we come back, by way of Truman Annex to the Navy Basin and the seawall that separates it from the Westin Marina.

Amazing views.

My Key West; everyone's Key West, there for the viewing.

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Key West Labor

Well, the Memorial Day holiday came and went and around here that event was marked by a  great many people coming to town and spending money. In other parts of the country I am told people now have social permission to wear white as it is now officially summer, a season that ends on Labor Day a few months hence.

Therefore it seems to me that as we go into summer, a season that will be all too brief for the poor unfortunates who live in the snow belt, perhaps we should look forward to the great September Holiday marking the end of it all and take note of Key West labor. Above we see a gardener, quite possibly a transplant from somewhere cold and nasty like, say Wisconsin doing good work in the garden of a Key West attraction I still have yet to check out. Below we see work in progress, figuratively speaking, at a gate to Truman Annex knocked into the middle of next month by a car driver who apparently got lost or didn't see it or something. I don't know if the gate won but neither came out of the encounter well as I recall from the newspaper.

Its a stretch as far as being work related, but it seemed to me the cyclist was on her way to work. Telegraph Lane is not on the recommended tourist routes around Key West  and near Duval Street, but it does serve people who work in bars and the strip club  known as The Red Garter.

Above we see the worker on the best set of wheels one can have in Old Town stopping for a chat on the way to work. That is one of the best aspects for many people of working in the tourist trade in key West. After a while no one is a stranger and the low pay, lack of benefits and long hours are compensated for by the camaraderie of the workforce. I liked the Employee of the Month parking space, below, seen in the rear of the Hard Rock Café, and then finding out the employee in question rides a scooter and no one raises an eyebrow. In Key West scooters are wheels, not status symbols.

Silly me, I stopped to say good morning to this guy, an engineer in a former life who now threads spools for an embroidery company. I don't know how it happened, I blame Cheyenne who poked her nose in, but he started talking and didn't stop for fifteen long minutes as he expounded on his philosophy of life about the Federal Reserve, Debt and imminent economic collapse of everything (including presumably the embroidered cap market). Which is why I prefer not to get into conversations, monologues actually, with strangers. Not that I disagreed with him necessarily but it was a cascading waterfall of words and I nearly drowned.

The restaurants of Key West require all the usual maintenance but only if you walk early enough will you will get to see the elusive common-or-garden lesser known Key West worker. I find it ironic I have the most enjoyable, stable job of my life in a town where stable work is by definition an anomaly unless you are the person hiring the workers. Perhaps this guy is the employee of the month at Hard Rock? Who knows...I photographed him as we walked out of the courtyard in front of the Red Barn theater.  

There is a little alley off Simonton, actually there are several it turns out, but this one is less of a  street and more of a driveway. The business is one of long standing, Monroe County Glass and Mirror that operates almost out of sight in this courtyard. You'll see their trucks all over town. Glass is a fragile thing I'm told, and most probably mirrors are too.

Delivery trucks are supposed to be off Duval by noon and this one had hours to go before the deadline. I have come to feel rather dubious about restaurants that buy food from bulk suppliers considering all the weird stuff we read about adulterated foods world wide.

Somebody has to clean the outside of Sloppy Joe's and it happens to be him, suddenly aware of a large pig in a fur coat near his vulnerable ankles. 

 And then there are those whose job it is to sit around and slowly watch the day unfurl.

 That sort of defines me, considering I work nights when most people sleep. Roll on Labor Day.

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Minimalist Recycling

The paper had reported recently that recycling rates in the Keys had shot up from seven percent to 27 percent. Which number must be Keys wide because a more recent article mentioned a rate in the city of Key West of barely ten percent. There seems to be a culture of willful turning away in Key West sometimes that makes it seem as though connections with the outside world are as tenuous as they may have been in 1828 when the newly founded city depended on the shipping trade for word of trends and tastes across the waters. I read the city of Madison, Wisconsin's Recyclopedia and I was astonished: Wisconsinland: Study It I was astonished by the tedious nature of it, but also by the embarrassing lack of education on the subject in the Southernmost City.

The city has made half hearted efforts to get people to recycle and some public recycling bins have appeared around town but it turns out the big obstacle to recycling is the color of the bins. I kid you not. Trash cans are green, thus:

Household recycling bins have yellow lids and the newspaper quotes city Commissioner Clayton Lopez as a brave pioneer in accepting and using these yellow-topped bins to recycle his household waste. The new bins we are promised, will be blue. Well that's a relief I'm sure.

The real insurmountable problem is a lack of education on the part of leaders and a lack of interest on the part of followers. Single stream recycling it's called but it doesn't necessarily mean mixing recyclables and food. Take a look in any recycle bin and see how little the concept is understood. Does this mess below count as part of the ten percent?

My understanding is that plastic bags gum up the recycling machines and should be put in the trash. Also bagging slows the ultimate separation of recyclables. None of this poses a problem to people in Key West who throw whatever in whatever recycling bin and call it good and give themselves the wrm fuzzier for doing their bit. Some radicals argue recycling does nothing to reverse the wasteful over use of natural resources and it's just a feel good program for wasteful consumers. Who am I to argue? I don't know the intricacies of the issue but it seems to me we have to start somewhere and recycling should be the first step on a long path toward more mindful use of the natural treasures of our only habitable and therefore exploitable planet we call home. For some people it's all or nothing; I am not one of those.

The city has even put out public recycling bins around town, and that's a step in the right direction. However if they came with instructions it would be better for recyclers of good will. I don't know of any recycling program that accepts pillows, in Seattle or Madison they might disown me for such ignorance but in the Keys we are still struggling with the concept of proper recycling being a common good. A few years ago an entrepreneur tested a bottle crushing recycler for bars and restaurants, the major sources of reusable glass in the city. All the employee had to do was drop a bottle in the $5,000 machine which would crush it to powder reducing space consumed by empty bottles and putting the powder back into circulation as a potential future bottle. Brilliant, no? Rejected of course by Key West bars that happily fill the city with empty smelly bottles by the thousand. That rejection has led the lazy and uncommitted to argue that recycling their modest twelve packs is a wate of time. Fair enough I suppose, yet I would privately hope for better from my neighbors. Where we lead the bars and City Commissioner Mark Rossi will eventually follow. He owns the ten bars inside the Rick's complex and has about as much commitment to sustainability as anyone in authority in this city. He should be out front, for this city has done him proud over the years.

Let's face it, drunks drinking on the streets will have grave difficulty recycling. We can find them having difficulty controlling their bladders on city streets and people's yards so what to do with their bottles and cans will likely be beyond them. So our public recycling containers end up looking like this:

Some people prefer to put their household surplus on the streets, often the subject of my photos, which could be construed as art or recycling I suppose, yet...

...in this town so close to our struggling oceans, to North America's only still living reef, a town likely to be drowned by climate change or whipped to matchsticks by hurricanes of increasing severity it seems odd to me that something as simple, as fundamental as basic as recycling, is simply out of reach. When I lived in Northern California I never felt up to snuff, I always felt a little behind the politically correct curve whether it was on foreign policy, feminism or the waste stream. In Key West some days I feel like a positive pioneer, far out ahead of the field. And that thought saddens me, as I know I don't know much.

I clean my containers, cut up my cardboard and keep any styrofoam (they still sell coffee in unrecyclable styrofoam ferchrissakes in Key West!) and plastic bags out of the boxes I use. I don't even find it that hard or taxing, but I've been doing it for years. Thirty years ago I remember a friend telling me about eccentric New Zealanders required to clean and crush cans before committing them to the waste stream. How odd I thought! Never imagining it would fall to me to do the same. I was also sceptical when a well meaning friend told me aerosols destroyed the atmosphere, but that too came to pass and be changed. Perhaps one day leaders around here will remember their grandchildren and act to do what's right, what may help, what may require discipline and thought in a culture devoted to neither, at least superficially.

Years ago while visiting a Key West friend I remarked on the trash In the bushes and the gutters when I lived in a town even then devoted to private recycling plans in the community. Oh he said, this is a transient town filled with tourists and no one has a commitment. Wrong I thought at the time and still do. Yet that belief butts up against a community dedicated to not just not recycling, but screwing up the little we do have that tries to work in that direction. If it's proper place is in doubt, toss it in the trash and leave recycling to the odd few of us who want to give recycling a proper chance.

This is the week my 34 year old Vespa goes to Pennsylvania to be "recycled" and restored into a re-creation of my youth. Thanks to my wife for supporting this endeavor that ended up costing more than it's worth. This fall I hope to commute on my P200 and as I ride I shall think of it as the ultimate and most fun expression of the reduce, reuse, recycle ethic of the 21st century. Well, a little bullshit is allowed surely isn't it? I'll ride my elderly two stroke 230 pound lump of metal at 65 miles per gallon and call it recycled alongside the brand new SUVs and massive pick ups that sport bumper stickers advocating "energy independence." In the end we do what we want and damn the consequences, let's be honest.

 

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