Generic Key West

It puzzles me how my neighbors seem to not notice odd things about how our lives are ordered for us. I wonder how it is Canadians can flood Key West in winter, driving expensive cars, owning or renting homes in some of the most expensive dirt in Florida, and yet they live in a world we cannot afford. To hear the Republicans tell it, Medicare for all would bankrupt the US, like being bankrupted for blowing up Iraq and Afghanistan was a good deal, yet Canadians can afford the dreaded "socialized health care." How does that work? Note they get to live pretty well and if they get cancer they don't bankrupt their families? Or organize bake sales to make a pathetic gesture toward their uninsured neighbors? They aren't clamoring to be forced into the private insurance racket. Weird huh?

This sticker, Slow Down This Ain't The Mainland doesn't do much for me, not least because this part of the world isn't really laid back. The saying originated on Maui where people they say really do live at a slower pace. In the Keys the umbilical cord that connects Key West to Miami generates a mainland attitude. When I'm stuck in traffic on Highway One dawdling behind vacationers enjoying the views I wonder how cool they'd be if they dialed 911 and got a recorded message telling them we'd be answering 911 when we got to work. Try that on for laid back when you get a sudden urgent need for an ambulance or a cop...the other thing I find is that the so-called laid back drivers blow a fuse when you pass them. They don't slow down, pull over and let the worker bees get a move on. No they speed up when you try to pass them and they are about as laid back as a bunch of hornets whose nest just got poked with a stick.

I saw this splendid bonsai and because I was in an enquiring mood I wondered how it is I kill anything I try to grow. And if I don't kill it an iguana will. I tried to keep a bonsai once. It died.

I've photographed these penguins before but it's been a while and they are still cute. They decorate a gate in the meadows.

I really liked these two bicycles. I am not sure if I should admire people who ride color coordinated bicycles or if I should shrug them off because sooner or later they will get stolen or wrecked or something and all that work...call it envy. In the end I am about as useless at landscaping as I am at coordinating my life's accessories. Rust and heavy use is my style.

Here we go, a Key West pick up. If you can stand the crowding and the noise and the dreadful quality of most of the housing you too can live by bicycle and something like this will become your model T runabout.

I drove by the college on day with sunshine and high wispy clouds. I spent six years on and off studying marine bits and pieces in that building. It's supposed to get rebuilt as. A new super modern facility. Idiotically I have a lot of nostalgia for the desperately hot classes of Fall - September in the lab was desperately muggy fiddling with grease and nuts and bolts your feet boiling in protective boots. Yet we had fun.

It's life lived in the fast lane, kind of, not on the mainland.

 

Key West on Dwellable

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A Day Not A Vacation

I took my break in the middle of the night and I went to Duval Street to see what the crowds looked like, hoping the Spring Break fever was finally breaking. The crowds didn't look that big to me, but Saint Paul's looked good so I took a picture of that.

Police officers have some strange innate capacity for work, and they can do without sleep it seems and work longer hours than any civilian I know. I may work for the police but I need my sleep and I need to get away from work and that's hard to do in a Spring Break month. Yesterday I screwed up my post until GarytheTourist got in touch and asked what's wrong. Spell check doesn't seem to work as well for me when I am in a work haze. I have been sleeping but I have not been getting enough time away from the 911 center. So I'm feeling sorry for myself. Sue me.

Actually it's been lovely having Cheyenne to myself when I get home first thing in the morning. She hops into the car like a puppy. The sun is barely rising by the time we hit her walks around 6:45am and for a little while in the dark we wander here and there while she wakes up and I wind down.

I find it not a little ironic that I walk my dog loaded with plastic bags while just a few hours prior I was taking a call from some poor dog walker in Old Town who got back to his front gate to find some drunken twat defecating liberally and liquidly all over the sidewalk. The dog walker was mad as a we then not surprisingly and the defectator ended up in handcuffs. Stuff like this makes me wonder if the prohibitionists weren't right. Alcohol has some really bad side effects.

Meanwhile Cheyenne and I were 38 miles away at Veterans Park alone with a full array of facilities should anyone be taken short.

It is lovely on the water's edge at dawn in your shirt sleeves with nothing much to think about.

I am endlessly fascinating to my dog. Mind you I take enough pictures of her...

If you can't get rid of it, turn it into a tourist attraction, or a piece of public art.

The Cuban chug has become slightly more permanent each visit. Now it has a sign telling you to bugger off in no uncertain terms. Creative use of a road sign.

We had sniffed everything of value out if the little park, Cheyenne and I. Time to go home to bed and leave the beach to intrepid swimmers from Up North.

Spring Break has been unusually aggravating this year because in the recent bout of construction Key West has lost hundreds of cheap(er) hotel rooms and I'm told lots of a Spring Breakers have sought cheaper shared accommodations in Marathon creating daily lines of traffic waddling back and forth at ten under the speed limit. Add to that endless construction to install 200 million dollars worth of sewer infrastructure and I am looking forward to a not too distant future where everything reverts to normal and all this orange stuff goes somewhere else.

More like this, on the Bahia Honda Bridge:

Sleep, lunch, exercise, brief afternoon walk and then it's time to say goodbye to Cheyenne and head back to Key West for another night of intractable drunkeness outside while we try to keep a lid on it from the inside.

Keith said he wanted to order dinner from Kennedy Cafe which plan I resisted for a while. Then my wife sent me an email saying she got an award from the district for being a good teacher, which she is actually, and so I had an excuse to celebrate. I really do like their lamb donner, a sandwich made with Uzbek bread and a creamy sour cream and dill sauce. Keith has their rather boring turkey dinner; why I don't know.

Plus they deliver. I love my job. I get to sit in comfort, or stand as I choose, I don't have to meet or touch anyone and I share the room with two other people with odd senses of humor. Plus Key West has some tasty exotic food.

And thus endeth the cycle. Not exactly like a vacation. But then there are the days off...

 

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Spring Break Lunch Break

Every year the brutal schedule and endless overtime of the endless month that is Spring a Break catches me by surprise. I never went to a four year college but this annual migration of students to beaches and drinking holes is a North American tradition. Living in a prime destination, doing a job impacted all night long by the effects of alcohol and a collective determination to "have fun" at all costs, leads me to wish this migration of Future Leaders of America were abolished.

What a killjoy, I know. But you'd be amazed by how far the effects of alcohol seem to ripple through town. Lunch breaks have been my salvation, a short tide in the cool night air and a walk with my camera, rejoicing that I work taking 911 calls where such minor pleasures are there for me.

Taken around Angela and Ashe Streets, not far from my 911 desk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the end it's worth remembering we are mere specks in a universe of endless darkness.

That, or eternal hellfire. Great, what a prospect.

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Key West Spring Break

I thought this poster at Smathers Beach pretty much sums up this weird tradition of college students getting a week off and spending it drinking in the sun. A Vespa, a babe, and a bottle of wine.

This year they are here in force though by all accounts they are remarkably well behaved. Spring Break court was initially set up to handle minor infractions by dishing out community service punishment to alcohol and public nuisance offenders but it proved unnecessary and they canceled the court.

It hasn't been especially hot but aside from some slight cloudiness and rain it has been quite lovely for the most part and the ocean is supposed to be around 77 degrees which is warm enough for heathen northerners to swim in. I'll wait till it's actually eighty eight degrees, thanks.

I am slightly allergic to crowds so my idea of a perfect day at the beach is more like this:

Of course she can't come on the beach so Smathers is less than perfect in any event:

I wandered down the beach trying not to feel like a dirty old man. As I pointed out to a friend I have reached the age where their mothers look more interesting to me. I never did like children.

A colleague pointed out a new sight on the beach: a stripper's pole. There were no performances in progress while I was there.

Not everyone was in a state of undress. I have no clue what these well dressed people were doing in the mayhem:

Later driving through downtown I stopped at Yebo Island Grill for a delicious couple of Bunny Chow dinners I took home to the wife. They were bread bowls filled with curried chicken topped with slices of banana and were entirely delicious washed down with a bottle of rosé collected on our last trip to the North Carolina wine country. Steve cooking up a storm:

At the corner of Angela and Simonton, my car filled with the fragrance of South African curry, I saw a group of pretty young things charming the pants off the firemen at Station Two, laughing and taking pictures. It looked delightfully small town.

I am really tired from working all the time and I am fed up with the long interminable lines of traffic on Highway One, caused I am told by the lack of hotel rooms this year forcing the well heeled young things to rent space to stay in Marathon. The overtime is nice for the money but I am exhausted from endless nights of work. It's just the way it is this time of year. I'm glad they are all being so well behaved, even as I can't wait for it all to end, the snowbirds to go back North and summer torpor to descend on the Keys, at least until schools get out and families start their invasion.

Key West on Dwellable

Posted with Blogsy