Key West 4am

I went to bed early exhausted by my bizarre alarm clock driven lifestyle and then, as the Gods had chosen to use me as the butt for their own inscrutable joke, they woke me up at a decidedly ungodly hour. I had nowhere to go on a Sunday morning while it was still dark and there I was off work for the weekend, and totally irretrievably conscious so I did the only thing a man can do when lying awake at 3:48am staring at the black space where the ceiling should be, thinking about the inscrutable ways of Fate. I took my dog for a walk.

Cheyenne was utterly delighted, after she had shaken herself into full consciousness and was able to appreciate the fact that I was awake and not leaving her behind for once. Such joy could only be rewarded one way.

I took her to Key West, her favorite place to walk and I opened te car door and she hopped out and was lost to me. I put her collar on her, took the leash and my phone/camera and a couple of plastic bags and by the time all that was assembled she was breaking loose toward Truman Avenue. No scent was safe from her enquiring nose.

Let's face it, it was no great hardship to be out in Key West under a pitch black sky, warm air cooled by a gentle breeze that just won't stop blowing this perfect August. There was hardly anyone around now that the bars had closed, forced to close by the four am deadline imposed by the city. The drunks had gone home the workers hadn't got up and it was me and my dog and the odd unlit bicycle and occasional buzzy scooter on the streets. It was all terribly un-respectable being on the streets at that hour.

That being the case we got off the street and I trailed my Labrador into the urban jungle that is Bayview Park. And there I found a monument I hadn't previously noticed. Why? I don't know why I walked past it. Perhaps I had seen it before and not noticed it. Here it is, and I found it interesting because it was dedicated to those who served in Vietnam. And below was the name of one who died in Operation Desert Storm. The poignancy of all this struck home especially hard at a time when yet another overseas war is in the offing as our leaders have now decided that Syria is worth dying for. I didn't believe the Domino Theory then and I don't believe it now. I guess Halliburton is just feeling the pinch with all these Federal cut backs. So off to war we go. Every time.

The joy of walking Key West is to be in a place where nothing is as one expects when walking an American city, crooked houses, narrow lanes and droopy foliage. And then we come across mainstream condos. Weird huh? Pelican Landing has always appealed to me in a funny way, perhaps as a reminder how most people live. I appreciate modern conveniences but I do find modern architecture to be soulless or at least driven to seek eccentricity as a motif for modern buildings. The condo blocks that line Garrison Bight along Eisenhower Drive do a good job of expressing nothing very much. They look out of place here but such structures, and much larger versions line all Florida's coasts.

I always wanted to live in a condo but my wife warned me off them saying my personality wouldn't do well with an owner's association. She's probably right so the fact that they aren't right for me makes we wonder... The perversity of being human.

See, this is the Key West they think of:

Or this, also nicely kept up:

I see pictures but Cheyenne smells smells. It takes a lot out of her running around in the August heat. And it's not that hot at that hour.

We were heading back to the car which we left on Olivia just off White Street and as we ambled along, side by side I heard the sound of a cat purring. Cheyenne heard nothing and kept stumping along. I couldn't believe the cat, it was loud! It was so loud I wondered if it was a piece of jammed machinery, an air conditioner compressor that couldn't compress... or something. I wondered what kind of cat it was, mostly they try to make no noise at all when Cheyenne hoves into view, not purring wildly like a steam engine. I had to investigate. I was a little tentative because I wasn't sure what the hell kind of cat I might have found behind the parked car. It turned out, to my astonishment it wasn't a cat at all. I don't usually shoot pictures with the flash but it was pitch black so I turned on the flash and fired away. This was what I got:

He never even stirred. It wasn't a great picture so I thought about moving in closer for a better view. However on reflection I figured getting a close up shot of a naked sadhu in all his penile glory probably wasn't to anyone's advantage. I left him to his noisy slumbers, gray head propped on his bag and a dried palm frond strategically covering his nether regions. To take our minds off the foregoing let's read a few uplifting bumper stickers.

The next picture puts me in mind of the movie CrissCross (1992 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, which if you've seen it you'll maybe know what I mean...

We left the city behind and drove as rapidly as was legal, home to breakfast and then bed for a nap. It was a good morning, perhaps the Gods knew what they were doing when they woke me up, in the dark and set me on the path of pleasing my dog.

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A Key West Weekend

I am working hard to learn to work during daylight hours. A 911 Dispatch center operates 24 hours of course so for every shift of three dispatchers working during the day there are three of us working nights. For the past five or six years I've worked the six pm to six am shift. Now at the behest of the Captain I'm doing the reverse, and I'm here to tell you it ain't easy. When the Police Department parking lot looks like this my circadian clock tells me I should be abed.

I have to admit I am a bit rusty on daytime procedures which differ quite a bit from night shift where administrative calls are few and drunks fights and car crashes dominate the nightly call volume. Frankly I enjoy trying to unravel the nighttime alcohol fueled lunacy over transferring calls to the vital daytime administrative functions of a unit of city administration, which is one of the functions of a municipal police department. But when the Captain wants us to stretch ourselves and improve our cross-shift efficiency, the only effective answer is to do as you are told and smile while doing it.

In point of fact I am learning to enjoy the...learning process! And there are some discreet advantages to working day shift. I'm sleeping a deeper sleep, partly because I come home exhausted, and have to walk Cheyenne who deeply resents my day time absence and lets me know it until we start our evening walk together. Then I eat dinner and pass out ready to rise to my alarm clock (ugh!) at 4:45 am. I also happen to find myself in town in the middle of the day free to roam for an hour during my lunch break. "Get tickets to the Tropic's special event tonight!" my wife ordered me by text. "Go to the bank and get cash!" was another daytime order. Working day shift leaves me vulnerable to the demands of shared domesticity.

The other fun part of day shift's lunch breaks is being able to wander around and take a few pictures as I go. I get to see Key West for a while and enjoy sharing the city with the week day, day time visitors.

This picture below tells the August story in Key West, a lonely Southernmost Point, in a tourist town where families are back in school and winter escape artists have yet to think about abandoning their northern snow fields.

A post office chicken was out walking her two chicks, one half hidden behind her in this picture as she turned to fend me and my phone camera off her precious charges. Summer or no summer she just wanted to be left alone. So I did just that.

We went, my wife and I to see the world première of an hour long documentary, Plastic Paradise | WLRN coming soon to a PBS station near you, offered for free last Friday night to anyone in Key West ready to show up and celebrate the revival of Tiki "culture" in the US. I am not a Tiki aficionado by any means but it was an interesting movie...

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WLRN (91.3 FM and TV channel 17) has been making a push into the Keys for some time now, and recently replaced a rather feeble pair of translators with a "local station" for Key West and Marathon at 91.5 FM, even though WKWM does nothing more than rebroadcast WLRN's NPR and modest local, Miami based, programming. The TV station personnel were glad to "raise their profile" in Key West which they describe as a desirable destination yet not within reach for them except at special events. You'd think they could drive three whole hours to pay this outpost on the dark side if the moon a visit from time to time if they felt like it. You'd be amazed how many South Florida residents have heard of the Keys but never bothered to visit. such lack of curiosity floors me.

I enjoyed finding out about Polynesian themed restaurants and the people who flee daily drudgery by wearing Hawaiian shirts, eating bland Chinese food (by their own account!) while drinking large complicated rum based drinks out of bizarre shaped glasses. As one person remarked, if they had real Polynesian culture to offer no one would have been interested, except of course for me...nerd that I am. I have never eaten the bland, authentically Polynesian starch called poi and I'd like to before I die.

My wife got hung up talking with women in the bathroom so I moseyed out and stared at the sky through my camera lense. I also watched people inspecting Marilyn Monroe's big white bloomers courtesy of Seward Johnson. It was warm and enveloping and I enjoyed the darkness tinged with blue of the just missed sunset.

As we walked back to our parking spot nearby we passed this flag, a new symbol of opposition to harbor channel dredging plans, except in this case it was upside down which meant I'm not sure what - distress perhaps?

Saturday morning dawned bright and sunny, what else? And I was off duty until my short evening shift Tuesday. It's what I call my short week when I work two days out of the week, opposite my long week when I work six. Cheyenne takes advantage to encourage me to walk her often. Saturday we went to the Bat Tower at Sugarloaf Lodge. Key West Diary: Sugarloaf Bat Tower. Nowadays it sports a growing osprey nest on the roof, as the tower continues its inexorable decay. No one cares apparently.

It was the start of a good weekend at home, at dinner with friends, in between going out walking with she who must be obeyed.

She expects nothing less.

 

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Seward's Folly

The statue in the foreground is admiring the proportions of the figures in the background, and it's all part of the public art display outside Key West's Customs House Art Museum. Sculptor Seaward Johnson calls it "Weekend Painter" and he stands, perpetually, in front of Key West's Customs House.

You might think the Customs House is an oddity of its own in Key West. In the 19th Century it was standard issue Federal design for Customs House, US, for the use of. The fact that it was built of brick, heavy to import to Key West, that the pitch of its roof was designed to shed snow, had nothing to do with it. Canada, Mexico or Cuba, Federal trade revenues were collected in the same style of building.

Now whether or not the bizarre orange folly is improved by Johnson's sculptures is for ypu to decide. You can't miss the embrace at the front, engaged in by a couple slightly larger than life size. The figure to the right is an unremarkable image of a youthful fishing Hemingway while the one in the middle is my dog.

There's the cruise ship in the background and here's the sad tearful farewell in the foreground. One is real, the other isn't.

This guy, in expensive foul weather gear carrying a coil of rope and dragging a sail bag is called "Wharf Rat" a very decorous and proper New England style of sailor. A Key West wharf rat has salty spiky hair, a dazed look in his eye from the weight of his hangover and an a lean leathery tanned body clad only in ragged shorts and weathered flip flops.

Johnson has his own sense of humor, and he exhibits it from time to time in his titles. This next is "Copyright Violator" which you might suppose is a title he might apply to himself. He specializes in making three dimensional representations of famous works of Art while adding his own impish details.

Here's the copyright the "painter" violated, a picture within a picture within a picture.

For corn fed cruise ship visitors this kind of scene has got to confirm, upon their arrival in "exotic Key West" that this town is different. In a country where a few years ago the US Attorney General ordered classical statues covered up as their aesthetic offended his private prudery, it has to come as a shock to be greeted by nekkid wimmins cavorting around a happy lad. I'd have been smiling too had this happened to me at that age, but there we are. Parents cover your children's eyes as you stream off the Disney Magic.

Seward Johnson was born into the tycoon family that sells you baby powder so I'm not completely sure he has much of a clue how the rest of us live. I sort of doubt he worries about getting fired, losing his home or figuring how to pay for a new transmission. His "Lunch Break" sculpture seems to reflect a bygone era, a time when Americans built things and worked in a time when wives stayed home and filled thermos flasks and lunch boxes for their men to take to the mines or factories or railroad. A modern cubicle lunch break never looked like this.

Nor did most break room views look like this:

If you explore his website you may be surprised not only how far flung his works are, but also how Seward Johnson and his work are always out front and in the public eye. Statues that look unique to Key West may not necessarily be precisely that. But they do look like they belong.

He first came to local attention when some of his life sized statues started crowding the southernmost point and that raised some local hackles (including mine, I must admit). Southernmost point | Flickr - Photo Sharing! from javajem's website in 2007. They've now put the simpering family above the entrance to the airport for people walking off their planes to enjoy.

The Customs House has the proper title of Art and History Museum and I like it very much. I go there frequently to enjoy the ambiance of wooden floors and quiet reflection in the high cielinged rooms. I can check up on the real history of Hemingway in Key West, the works of Mario Sanchez and I can also remember the Maine.

That I have to dodge the "Weekend Painter" and little Miss "Yum Yum" always eating her sandwich is no problem when I want to visit the Customs House.

Reflecting on all this statuary and then photographing them takes time and my dog got bored. Time to go, she said by standing up.

One last picture I pleaded, "Holding Out" an elderly shopper not driving but walking.

Yup, no hardship at all to enjoy these eccentric pieces of public art. It was about time I stopped to take a proper look at them and if you decide you ever want to they will be there, stuck in time, glued to the ground, and according to their owners they are to make us think. Hmm!

The Sculpture Foundation : Exhibitions & Leasing

Key West on Dwellable

 

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Morning Thunder

Summer is rainy season, and rainy season is thunder and lightning season.

It's cloudy season when the skies are filled with drama. Frequently you wake to cloudless skies and by the time breakfast plates are washed wind rain and gray skies fill the kitchen window.

And when it all dies down as it does in a hurry the seas go flat and the horizon disappears.

Back on Earth the commuters are rolling every morning but on those days when rain falls or threatens to fall the motorcycles evaporate. I'm not sure why, but it's warm even in the rain and the modest challenge of riding in the wet is rewarded by the clearing skies and sunshine.

Cheyenne isn't that fond of walking in the rain. Shell go out on the porch, look around, and turn back. Suits me.

Rainy season is hot and humid season and we all feel it to a greater or lesser degree.

Did I mention I like the cloud drama of rainy season?

 

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