Sublime And Ridiculous

I have walked many cities around the world from Calcutta which turned into Kolkata when I wasn't looking to East Berlin which vanished one day in October under a capitalist load of mid winter bananas and multi colored neon advertising. Other cities I have walked have lasted longer and are more conventionally appreciated than Key West. St Paul's on Duval isn't the cathedral at Rheims and La Concha isn't the Hassler Hotel at the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome Luxury 5 Star Hotels Rome, Hotel Central Rome, Hotel Special Offers Rome, Luxury hotel Italy . But Key West is Key West. I'd rather stay at the Eden House than the Hassler anyway. Key West Hotels | Hotel in Old Town Key West | Eden House Hotel, Key West, Florida, 33040

So far Key West has managed to avoid becoming all of a piece. By that I mean this small town is a city that has signally failed to unify it's theme into one story. Real people live here alongside the pirate tourist myth, millionaires come to Key West to slum it in the tropics in a town where chickens walk the streets and drunks vomit in your landscaped yard at four in the morning. And woe betide you if you complain, Key West does not need you and you can return to conformist suburbia anytime.

But if you do you will miss world class sunrises such as Moscow could only dream about. You wouldn't see the charming little antique stores masked by vast spacious modern trucks advertising them in turn.

History is everywhere in Key West. Perhaps this little town lacks the Circus Maximus that Rome treats as dreary useless open space but it has it's signposts to the past abandoned with the same aplomb that Sarajevo pockmarked it's ancient Mussulman souk with unrepaired bullet holes during the recent internecine unpleasantness in that unhappy country.

I am no fan of public chickenry but I far prefer that we celebrate the "former fighting cocks of Cuba" (a chicken myth on a par with the history of buccaneering in Key West). Instead my eye is drawn to the empty beer bottle abandoned on the garden fence. And you thought I was exaggerating when I spoke of passing drunks vomiting in your yard? Alcohol fuels vacations, parties, gallery openings, fund raisers, funerals and anyplace where two or more peope are gathered in anyone's name for any reason whatsoever.

This funky little town produces world class art and literature and on occasion food. It bathes in a climate a few people would kill for. Others think its just too hot but weirdos abound and everyone has a right to enjoy snow and sleet and slush if they so choose. The great joy of walking Key West can be what you make it, treading in the steps of great writers on vacation, pursuing paintings made in the tropics or, if you are off kilter like me seeking out oddities that thrive in the rich loam of creativity that sinks into a heap at the end of the road. For instance do any of us want to know what "unsalted solids" are and which restaurants use such deliciousness in their menus?

Love is always in the air in Key West ad if love falls short one night stands could be the next best thing. Cheyenne is a creature of purity and she pays no heed to sudden infatuations. She struts on by radiating disapproval like a Russian babushka or a Cuban abuella who has seen it all and despairs of the lower impulses of human nature. Cheyenne's admirers are everywhere.

Parked next to Harpoon Harry's we see the full range of sublimity and ridiculousness. This is a town that encourages cycling and yet the newspaper is full of anonymous rants of drivers who argue cycling is perilous and inconveniences rapid travel. Others think scooters are purposeless machines designed to kill on contact and other still argue that driving a sat spacious vehicle the size of a cigar maker's cottage is an absurdity in its own right. That an uncountable number of two wheelers can fit into the space of one truck makes a point, though such comparisons create discomfort.

I was asked what he worst thing about living in the Keys is for me. Because I choose to live outside the city the various frustrations of an alcohol fueled tourist economy bypass my suburban home and for me the limitations of a single highway rate high on my list of irritants. Check out the yards of signage on this business, the place that repairs my electric motors and pumps, they are an attempt to keep order on a disorderly society. I watch tourists cross streets against red lights putting their intoxicated bodies at risk, chancing the destruction of their dust catcher souvenirs under the wheels of an urgent vehicle struggling to leave the gravitational,pull of Duval Street. They think it's Disneyland is he common complaint. Visitors prefer not to treat Key West as a real place.

The climate is lovely if you like heat but humidity, rain, salt air and seawater corrupt more efficiently than the rust and moths of Biblical fame. I am not delicate when it comes to sanitary requirements, I have used toilets in places that would make your hair stand on end at the mere thought, but I cannot understand how the exterior of a store that sells high fructose corn syrup that passes for food can look like this on the outside. Many people come to Key West because it is exotic, they think, but not likely to test their ability to go "native" in some alien culture. A lime of paint and a fresh poster might enhance that belief, you'd think.

The electric bicycle has been around for a hundred years and is just now finding its place in a world running short of cheap energy and long on harmful emissions. Key West, a small flat town of almost Manahattan-like density is perfectly designed for the electric bicycle to make a comeback. This rusting hulk, sinking back to entropy, overgrown by weeds, forgotten and unused, left behind in apparent perfect working order symbolizes for me the hope and the loss that Key West ends up embodying.

"NO"

"NO"

"NO"

So in that case rent a fishing boat and go out and do all the netting you can stand. You just have to,pay for it.

What is so particular to Key West is that one can hardly understand what is sublime and what is ridiculous. The parameters of the world Up North don't always apply here. Sometimes they do but sometimes they don't and you can't tell when they do and when they don't. Is a smart cabin cruiser tied to the tottery wooden dock sublime or is it overkill for a funky former shrimp dock? For me the sky blue, ridiculously bright skiff is sublime, simple functional and easy to run. It would make a terrible place to sleep but a fine place from which to swim. Or net. Or fish.

Key West Is the great leveler, the city where wealth means less than connections. How often do I hear people complain that they paid large sums of money to rent or buy a home in Key West and they shouldn't have to put up with any of the complaints outlined here. Sorry, I want to say but Key West isn't going to change anything unless the people who own the city want it to change. Pay as much as you can afford, but like a new employee promised a better rate of pay "later" expect what you see to remain as long as you also remain in the city. Change does happen but nothing you do say or want will make it happen

Come and spend your time and your money, bring a luxury boat or RV or a pocket of cash or a limitless credit card and enjoy what you can. I love living here, I enjoy the helplessness and the consequent absence of ambition. In this way Key West is truly different from the "mythical mainland" incomers like to talk about leaving behind. Here ambition will get you nowhere, or at best it will get you a one way ticket to Palookaville in the time honored phrase from the Hollywood waterfront. Or possibly a ride out to camp in the lovely and wild Dry Tortugas, the most sybaritic of wild and undeveloped National Parks. No cliffs to climb, no bears to fear, no trails to hike, nothing more strenuous to do than take a gentle swim and a warm seat under a sea grape while the sun goes down. Beer and pizza on the ferry on the way home...

Why Henry Flagler wanted to extend the railroad to Key West is a bit of a mystery. Ostensibly it was to ship winter tourists to the sun and winter fruits from Cuba to New York. Reading between the lines it seems more likely he just had a burr up his butt and needed to satisfy the itch as only an oil baron could. In the event the railway made no money and roused the ire of people who preferred slow complicated access to the outside world by boat. The railroad and it's seven hour connection to Miami would ruin the island way of life they said, preferring to make the trip by bridges and two ferries and a full day's drive at least, to get to the Big City in 1911.

You can buy a piece of paradise, throw up a fence and call it good. You can tell people how things get done Up North and how much better things would be down here if only... But in the end you will just end up pissing people off. If you want efficiency and effectiveness, vision and planning, there are better places to live. If you want to practice letting go live in Key West. A life without ambition really isn't so bad. Sublime or ridiculous? You decide.

Me? My ambition extends to trying to figure out how to grow ivy over a wall like this:

I hope Key West remains a mixture of sublime and ridiculous scenes, that ambition sinks into entropy like the electric bicycle, that somehow this mixture of evanescent hope and down to earth difficulties remains in the same precarious balance into the years ahead. I shall play my part seeking to disturb as little of the loam of eccentric absurdity and failed argumentative development as I can. I shall complain, as one does, yet not expect change or improvement. The next time someone bothers to ask what is the worst thing about living in the radius of Key West I shall say 'sub tropical entropy' and then I will smile and say that's the best thing too.

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Why I Ride

It is in my nature to be excessive. If I have no interest in a thing I can ignore it completely but if something takes my fancy I will pursue it to hell and back. If you think it's tiring for me imagine how wearisome it can be for those around me. My mother got me started on motorcycles when we were lined up to take a ferry o Sardinia one summer and a couple of leather clad motorcyclists pulled onto the ramp in front of us. "One day," my mother said, "that will be you." She also wanted me to learn to play the church organ so the brain tumor that took her life when I was but 14 prevented her from feeling the acute disappointment over my tuba playing, while it also deprived her of knowing that the motorcycle seed planted by her took root. Quite deeply too.

I was acutely embarrassed by my mother's purchase of a bright orange Vespa 50 when I was twelve years old. The legal age for moped riding in Italy is actually 14 so I was slightly ahead of the curve on that, but no amount of embarrassment would prevent me from stealing fifty and hundred lire coins from my mother's purse to fill the tank with two stroke fuel mix. With fuel in the tank, no helmet, no safety gear, no (optional ) speedometer but with a three speed gearbox I took off riding everywhere I could through the mountains every summer vacation. I was born to be a motorcycle traveler. I taught girls how to shift in exchange for a kiss which felt less exciting to me than riding the Vespa so I guess I was an actual nerd which was not at all what my mother had in mind for me.

I guess most people with a motorcycle in their lives view the machine as convenient transport or more likely in North America as a social tool, a way to meet people and not be alone while having fun. For me riding is a solitary pleasure, a way to be able to tell the world I am out of touch, unreadable, off the phone because I am out riding. Sometimes I arrive at work and find a text message from my boss, who, after nine years working with me forgets I'm out of touch between five and six pm on my commute...

In a car the essence is to be removed from your environment, protected from danger and discomfort. The trade off is to sit passively in line and accept whatever traffic conditions dole out to you. Initiative while driving wins social ostracism. Riding a motorcycle is a way not to accept the social compact, it's a way to thumb your nose at the weather, at the poor bloody drivers bored out of their skulls, feeling nothing and hoping for nothing. On a motorcycle you get to feel the rain, the cold, the proximity of indifferent sheet metal and you are exhilarated by it. You arrive as safe and sound and dry as the drones in cages but you earned it. In a world dedicated to the proposition that no corn fed American should feel anything much, least of all discomfort, motorcycles are an easy way, any day to get feeling back in your body. A rider needs no drugs to get high. And speed is not necessarily the buzz, not when you have outgrown your youth. Just being on the road, not necessarily at high speed, is the essence of idling. Scooters can qualify.

I don't know how well the analogy holds up but I compare sailing to riding while steering a cage is akin to driving a power boat. A power boat, cabin cruiser or center console, you drive, while a sailboat is encouraged not driven. A sailboat under sail takes feel and skill, the sails need to be set, the direction of travel is compromise between wave action, wind direction and the boat's ability to balance hull and keel against the other forces. A power boat you steer and it follows the line as directed by the prop. You could  bear in mind the boater's saying that if you want to go from A to B use a power boat boat; if you want to leave A take a sailboat. In the same way a jounrey undertaken by car will get you to your detination where a jounrey on a motorcycle is an adventure, outcome uncertain.  A motorcycle is also ridden by feel with skills learned and practiced where a car is driven. You cannot ride a motorcycle while somnolent or distracted because that is how you die, and riding takes attention. Perhaps that's what makes it cool, I know that's what makes it fun. Even cool people think motorcycles are fun.

Nowadays technology has created a new class of motorcycle for widespread consumption and they call them scooters. The technology is such that the line separating scooters from motorcycles is getting hard to discern. A scooter, roughly speaking has no gears, includes some built in storage has a modicum of weather protection and usually allows the rider to step through the bike rather than swing a leg over to get onboard. Originally these features were intended to encourage women to ride and they did too decades ago before scooters became automatics. Nowadays manufacturers are starting to create automatic motorcycles and some even have built in storage. I read people's comments on forums remarking how easy automatics are to ride as though gearboxes are too complicated for riders to use. In point of fact I believe the fear of the gearbox is what separates riders from drivers. A gearbox is a useful tool for a motorcycle, and should not be feared but embraced as one more skill we riders enjoy mastering. I once read a hardened sailor complaining that modern pretend sailors turn on their motors at the least sign of missing a deadline. She blamed the habit as a development of the automobile and the habit of driving carried over into the poseur world of modern sailing. Cars corrupt was the thesis and perhaps she was right all those years ago. Lyn Pardey still sails an engineless boat out of her adopted home in New Zealand. Lin & Larry Pardey: Newsletters & Cruising Tips | Sailing Newsletters & Cruising Tips

I enjoy the control a gearbox gives and that was one reason I bought a 34 year old Vespa currently being professionally restored. The other reason is pure nostalgia, as the best tour I ever undertook was on a similar machine bought new in New York in 1981 and ridden to San Francisco by way of Mexico (above). I was encouraged to undertake the trip on a Vespa not a Harley by the adventurer and author shown below, Roberto Patrignani photographed in Afghanistan on his way to Tokyo from Italy on a 1964 Vespa adapted to the purpose. His success convinced me the Vespa would make an excellent touring machine, a notion that sounds absurd in the 21st century when motorcycles are specialized and modern tourers are six hundred pound machines loaded with computers and electronics and leave nothing to chance.

I toured much of my world by motorcycle, criss crossing Europe on a variety of unsuitable small cyclones motorcycles, all I had in the 1970s. I rode to Africa twice, once on a 350 café racer with luggage attached as best I could manage. I've crossed the United States several times not only on the Vespa but once I even rode a fully dressed Yamaha with a full Vetter cruising fairing complete with FM radio and speakers to Florida from California. Since my Vespa tour I always try to travel as lightly as possible. It took me a few tours to figure out I preferred riding a lightly loaded bike which is also the best way to avoid breakdowns as it happens, as weight stresses every part of a machine car or motorcycle. I started out worrying too much and trying to carry crap for every eventuality. I came to understand after a while that adventures can happen to you anywhere anytime for any reason. Breakdowns caused by overloading are a pain because the bike is no fun to ride when it's loaded like a badly built haystack. Most places you ride you can buy any odd thing you may have left behind or find you suddenly happen to need. on my Vespa trip in 1981 I had a backpack on the back, a fuel jug and sleeping pad on the front and when I stopped to buy food for a picnic dinner I'd hang it in a sack under the front of the seat. Simplicity was wonderful and I learned my life lesson - less is more and traveling light is more fun.

Some people name their motorbikes as though they are living things. Then they buy stuff to make them more personal then they sell them to make room for a more interesting hobby or perhaps to buy a bigger motorcycle they have suddenly discovered they "need." The fondly named machine is discarded like yesterday's newspaper. I made a name for myself as a traveling sailor when I wrote stuff for sailing magazines. Would-be travelers used to ask me for advice about their forthcoming sailing trips and they wanted to know about the latest electronic machinery. They were invariably disappointed when I advised them not to buy stuff but to take their boats out sailing so they could get to know them and learn to trust their boats and so feel at ease when facing the high seas. Then I said travel light to reduce stress on your rigging and hull and carry less stuff for inevitably it will break on you. They ignored me. I say the same to modern riders though I only say it under my breath as the advice is the same and would be ignored just as thoroughly. All you need to travel by bike is time money and the machine you have, lightly loaded. Oh and the will to actually cut the ties that bind and take off, that's the hardest part. You might want to,load a copy of Jack Riepe's book (above) to remind you of the romance of riding as you find yourself alone and lonely on the road...

I ride because it's fun and because I enjoy it. That it is also useful and replaces a car on my commute is a bonus. I look forward to getting my motorcycle or my scooter out and taking off even if only to run down to the store to buy groceries. I'm glad I lived through the seventies when motorcycling entered the modern era and we knew no better and rode in street clothes and learned not fear falling off. I love riding and miss it every day I don't get to ride. I encourage anyone to give it a go but I don't really care what you do. When I'm riding it's all about me and my nameless machine. How lucky I am to look forward to something as routine as a commute. All thanks to my motorcycle, my flying machine, my magic carpet and thanks to my mother who got me started.

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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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