A Hobbit And His Dog

The barricade across the path into the pinewood was down, broken not unbolted, as though someone had made a dash for the forest in a desperate attempt at escape. Escape from what I wondered? Never mind, Cheyenne was determined to press on into the black forest of Mirkwood.

The homeless who come down for the winter like to camp out here, but luckily for Cheyenne the are a disorganized bunch and leave enough smells behind to keep her happy exploring their abandoned winter residences. She leads me quite the zig zag walk in her effort to leave no plastic bag unturned.

The more permanent residents of Big Pine come and go too, much to the delight of my dog.

They go, and the leave behind the sum of their lives in a pile of rubble awaiting transport to the dump. And they are Gone.

A short sale and a pile of moving boxes under a tarp. Then they are Gone.

It's the result, among ordinary people of the bank machinations that culminated in the crash of 2008. And from that crash the taxpayers have been paying through the nose to try to make the fraudulent banks whole. In more important news I hear Kim Kardashian's child will go by the name of North West. There are days when I devoutly hope these are The End Times. Luckily we still have Beauty.

I saw the palm tree shadow projected on the trailer like a silent movie, and it was silent because that trailer too will be unoccupied I guess till winter.

Cheyenne led me through the parking lot of the church where I liked the Pauline admonition to park politely. I guess road rage infects church goers too. Let your gentleness be evident to all... Wood elves keep your cool was the message.

I can't make up my mind which of us is the Hobbit and which is Gandalf the leader. She sits, I stand and wait. As one does.

This is either a lawn mower or dinner. I figured it was just a trespasser:

I think it's been a good year for Key deer, they are everywhere and to my untutored eye they look plump and sleek. There have been years when they were tottering around starving on their feet and the admonitions not to feed them were everywhere in the news. Darwinian selection they called it. This year even the mangoes are plump and sleek.

My mango tree is not quite so bountiful, I think it is too well shaded, but my dog on the other hand is plump and somewhat sleek.

Hobbits aren't supposed to be sleek, they were dreamed up before anyone realised that Paris was a person and not a place. Those were the good old days when women had curves and corporations knew their place.

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Cell Free Day

Someone has decided we should all leave our telephones at home today. I don't know about you but my smart phone which I have owned for less than a year has become the Swiss Army knife of daily living for me. The camera and flashlight functions are as useful for me as the phone. I like sending pictures, as though electronic postcards, and checking the mapping function and reading the temperature and forecast. While I dislike surfing the web on the miniature screen I do like reading my novels on my miniature kindle. I'll whip it out (my Android I mean) in a supermarket check out and read a few paragraphs rather than stand there and stare at the back of the customer in front. Call me dependent if you must. But apparently I am an electronic addict, a drone, a slave and I must vanquish my electronic oppressor.

I am not sure how this will go for me today.

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July 4th And Pasquale Paoli

I am fond of July 4th, Independence Day, as it marks a national holiday, yes, but it also represents for me my own liberation and a new life in the New World. So I suppose I could post a picture of the Stars and Stripes and go back to the barbecue but that would be too easy, and let's face it a dreary abdication in the face of another daily opportunity to shake the tree of knowledge just a little bit.

We are told the founders of this nation were geniuses and the documents that emanated from them were masterpieces. No doubt that the incipient new country was lucky to have had such leaders, not least that they were well read. Some of them could read Italian and they were the ones who read a revolutionary document that came out of the small, suppressed island of Corsica. Most Americans know nothing of Corsica, least of all they they owe their founding documents to a revolutionary Corsican thinker and fighter.

The author of the 1755 document published in Corsica was Pasquale Paoli, a man who led the fight against the Republic of Genova, and when the Italians gave up Corsica to the French he fought the French too, to ensure his island would be free. Unfortunately Corsica was viewed as a critical strategic spot in the Mediterranean and the French wouldn't yield. After 15 years of independence the Corsican Republic lost the Battle of Ponte Nuovo and the experiment died. Pasquale Paoli Corsican Independence from Genoa

Get this, Paoli wrote a document that expounded the right of a nation to be happy, that its people deserved to be free and find their own destiny. When I read the original Italian manuscriot in Paoli's home in Corsica I was struck at the time that the document, imitated in so many details by the founders of the new America, read like a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence of world wide fame. I had never heard anyone make the connection between the Revolution of 1776 and the Corsican insurrection of twenty one years earlier.

Corsica is French and it seems nothing much will change that, since French mainlanders have moved onto the island and the native Corsicans find themselves and their language, a form of Italian, buried by France. Not unlike the Conch versus outsider issues in Key West. Paoli's belief in Corsica's essential Italian-ness has been lost to history which rewards the victors. Paoli was a visionary who was two centuries ahead of his time drafting a Corsican constitution gave women property rights and the vote. Paoli was recorded as being a supporter of gay marriage. He wrote that marriage should be open to anyone, small wonder there are rumors that the lifelong bachelor was gay.

I recently read a book that gave me fresh insights into the Revolution that created this country A Few Bloody Noses: The Realities and Mythologies of the American Revolution | Bookreporter.com and I enjoyed how much it made me think, how real it made that struggle, how it argued against the purity of myth and in favor of the messiness of human motives. Yet there was no mention of Pasquale Paoli or his influence on the struggle for freedom in America.

To Sir Isaac Newton they attribute this phrase: If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. Pasquale Paoli was one such unattributed giant.

Happy Independence Day.

For a view of Corsica and their peculiar folk chant:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYThWzI6n_4&feature=youtube_gdata_player

 

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A First World Problem

I showed up to work recently, as one does, and sauntered into the communications center, little suspecting the problem that was going to confront me as I found my way to the refrigerator in the kitchen. The police communications center is staffed 24 hours every single day of course, as people expect someone to answer their frantic 911 calls.  To that end we have a kitchen and a bathroom a few feet from our computer screens to make breaks as short as they need to be if there is a lot of emergency activity. Sometimes you just have to sit on it and hope your bladder will cooperate.  In any event my first  move when I arrive at work is to put my lunch bag in the fridge before settling down for my twelve hour shift.

Except this time when I put my red cooler bag in the fridge I stopped, paused by the sight of something odd on the shelf. Let me say here our work fridge frequently looks like a plastic bag storage locker. I have no clue why but my young colleagues seem to like to stuff the refrigerator with whimsical purchases of foods that would not seem to be entirely suitable as desk top lunches. There are bags with crumbled cheese containers, salad boxes without condiments, elderly packages of mouldy fruit and yoghurt with long since dead use by dates Its as though the youngsters come to work filled with righteous diet intent and promptly ignore the food they bring and order in cooked sugar fat and salt in the American way.

On this occasion I saw an odd looking granola bar. I don't know why the slim brown tube attracted my attention but it did. Hmm I said to myself what odd food is this? Curiosity killed the cat they tell us, but dispatchers have to be endowed with a minimal amount of the stuff to get through the night. So I picked it up, as one does and wasn't I surprised to find out what it was. The  little tube is a single cheese stick holder. It holds one cheese stick. Which is already vacuum sealed into its own plastic bag. You take one securely wrapped cheese stick and slide it, while wrapped into this outlandish outer wrapper.  

It happens to me quite often that when I stumble across some obscure cultural practice, which at work tends to be among the younger generation, what seems to me to be bizarre to everyone else on my shift is perfectly obvious. Oh that, I expected them to say with the practiced boredom of 28 year olds, why that's a cheese stick holder of course! Duh! Frankly I was astonished I could find anything in the fridge. Its as though none of my colleagues have a fridge at home. My lunch comes with me in the insulated red bag which barely finds room in this overstuffed science experiment nightmare of a fridge. Who brings food to work and lets it rot there? And why!? People are weird and people at work are the weirdest!. 

So I walked into the communications room hiding my find behind my back. Any guesses what this is? I say holding my finger across the embossed "Sargento" on the vinyl tube. To my great satisfaction my night shift colleagues waiting to take over the communications center from day shift look at the thing in astonishment. Then my Trainee says with a big grin on face That's mine! She had stumbled across a free offer and sent in for it and was now the proud owner of the only chilled cheese stick outside our work refrigerator. She thought my bemusement was hilarious. I wondered about the world I live in where some people never eat cheese and others among us will only eat it chilled.We lucky few!

In two days I mark my ninth anniversary in this room, a job that is always described as stressfull yet that  I really enjoy after all these years.I like that when I hand over the controls to the incoming shift I am completely done, there is no homework, no loose ends, no report writing such as plagues the officers. When I come in at six in the evneing its all a fresh start. I like the night shift when the police station is empty and I get to spend my days at home alone. Some people thi nk we know everything before anyone else in the city but we don't know much up in dispatch. Its the place where callers call for help and he people we send end up on the scene with first hand knowledge. We never see the ned of the stories. Its an odd disembodied job and I love it. 

And then there is the ride home, into the face of a rising sun, and at home there is a dog and she is expecting a walk, breakfast and a nap with her Dad in that order. And then I com e back itno town for another twelve hours of sifting though the human misery of the eraly morning hours. I hope I have at least another nine years of this in me...

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They Sank The Mohawk

I have never quite managed to get  over my irritation at the Mohawk giveaway to Lee County to make room on the Truman waterfront in Key West for the new marina planned for the area where the old cutter was moored. The USCG Cuuter Mohawk was built before World War Two and served on North Atlantic convoys, a most dangerous profession. To have survived all that and end up sunk anyway seems dastardly to me. This time last year they did the foul deed:

Reader SingingTo JeffreysTune in Southwest Florida sent me a note from the News Press in Fort Myers on the subject so I did a little poking around on the Internet and came up with these rather sad pictures. 90 feet down, 30 miles off Sanibel Island...Its supposed to be a diving attraction in the style of the ship sunk south of Key West. Vandenberg Sinking though I can't imagine going thirty  miles to float around in those rather murky Gulf of Mexico waters...

I was quite fond of the Mohawk and its history. The ship was a superb museum and I enjoyed visiting it greatly. It pains me to think of all this now being nothing more than an aquarium USCG Mohawk.  They told us it wasnt worth $400,000  to refurbish the ship but the final irony is that the US Navy has reclaimed the waters off Truman Waterfront and the upscale marina planned for the seawall that housed the Mohawk cannot be converted into a Spottswood dream marina. All this carnage was for nothing.

The Color Of Day

I held these pictures over from the extra large full moon brouhaha of recent memory. The next morning I went out to the Ramrod Pool because Cheyenne has taken to enjoying a walk here. In the summer she likes short walks with lots of smells and the pool is a popular place with locals who bring their coolers ad their dogs and sit by the water and enjo being in the uncomplicated Keys of decades past.

The dawn light here is remarkable some days which is why you will see far too many essays of this modest spot in my blog.

The sky is enormous and I wonder what it would have been like had the development planned fr this lace gone through. I guess it would have been much like very other canal blasted out of the rock. Instead we lucky few get this wild open space and a deep water pool carved out to Olympic proportions.

My pleasure in the Ramrod Pool isn't shared. Bring Your Own Port-O-Potty Park (true) | Shoestring Weekends Blog which I suppose is just as well.

 

 

 

 

Cheyenne has no problem amusing herself here.

I remembered my repellent though the no see'ums were out in force I got a while t sit and read by the water while Cheyenne did her thing.

It's low key entertainment.

Triumph USA is advertising it's motorcycles by coopting famous people's image...there are those who will go on about lack of "safety gear" and day glow jackets. Presley is selling sex appeal and imminent paralysis riding dressed like that. I wonder how Triumph figures people like me are going to relate to Elvis Presley borrowing Steve McQueen's Desert sled, so called. Oh look who was once seen on a Trumpet...better go out and buy one I suppose.

Beyond the pages of the motorcycling magazine my dog was meditating as always.

Ugly spot, no facilities, stay away.

I prefer solitude, thanks.

 

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