The Answer To My Persistent Question

Robert said he wanted to see Calvary which surprised me as a movie about the effects of child abuse among the Irish of County Sligo, about which I know only what William Butler Yeats taught me in English Literature classes taught by monks who approved heartily of his Irish Catholic Romanticism. However the movie Calvary did not seem to impress Robert much, though I found it completely absorbing despite its decided lack of romantic underpinnings and the harshness of the subject. Robert and I then talk boat repairs which was much more up his street, and my boat, the object of our post movie conversation remains not totally functional. Grr.

 But I did get to wile away some time on Duval Street before the movie so I took a walk, as you do, waiting for Robert to show up and it was perfectly lovely downtown. September traditionally gets a bit tedious as one waits for summer's heat to break but this year we have been enjoying low humidity and strong breezes in between the total humidity of drenching downpours. That people complain of summer heat in Florida baffles me; what on Earth do you expect? Snowflakes?

 The four hundred block of Duval Street is in ferment presumably getting ready for winter tourism and the ever more closely impending chaos of Fantasy Fest set to culminate this year on October 25th, I think. I always have to work Fantasy Fest and this year it's my regularly scheduled weekend so I won't make much overtime but if I survive the week with mys ense of humor intact I will be happy. Life in Paradise:

 Fast Buck Freddie's is a blank canvas waiting for CVS to work it's magic. I wonder if they will keep the planters out front that serve as a work bench and display case for the palm weavers and their acolytes? 

 This is slow season for vendors, and its said in key West that to prove your worth as a shopkeeper or waitperson you have to be able to set aside enough in the fat months to see you through the no sales lean months. Like September.

Lots of standing around waiting to lure customers in from almost empty sidewalks. The various chambers of commerce report higher than expected visitor numbers this summer, up ten percent they say, whatever  that means exactly. I figured as much judging by the endless stream of traffic on Highway One all summer long...

 The city of Key West is back up to strength the newspaper tells us with the City Manager almost forgetting to tell the city commission he had hired a second assistant city manager, again.  As odd as it may seem Manager Scholl has started a tradition of needing two assistants to run this town of 23,000 people. He was recently reappointed to the top job after the city commission fired his predecessor, a survivor of two years in the top city manager's  job. Then, instead of initiating a search and using the city attorney to fill in temporarily, the commission adopted the Mayor's proposal and -no search needed - the old manager was quickly rehired. Very efficient, and now both assistant slots are full again so its full steam ahead. A search for the assitant city manager's job apparently was not necessary either.

I guess this is a good time of year to refresh the building that houses La Concha hotel because if you are going to close a sidewalk September is a good time of year to hope that pedestrian in the street won't get run down as they side step the construction.

I have been noticing the new twin trash/recycle bins downtown so one might hope that the concept of recycling will take root. However the whole garbage contract between the city and its haulers has been up in the air in the strangest possible way. The city, under the old city manager, put the expiring garbage contract out to bid in the usual way. City staff recommended the lowest bid but the city commission overrode them and voted to continue with the same company, at greater public cost. The cost estimates at first suggested a large rate increase coming up but that news didn't go over well. And here's the odd part. 

 Histrionically  Key West can't recycle for love nor money. Recycle rates as a percentage of the waste stream have hovered around 7%. Then suddenly last year the rate tripled to 21% after the city reduced garbage pick up to once a week. Amid dire predictions of health hazards and overflowing smelly garbage cans, the sky failed to fall and everyone apparently decided it was better to recycle. Weird huh? Well, never one to lose an opportunity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory the city commission in a moment of inspired brilliance decided to restore the twice a week pick up. Thus increasing the contracted costs and hopefully reducing recycling all at once. Luckily the massively increased cost of the not-contracted twice weekly pick up may have scotched that plan for now, but what the point was of putting the waste contract out to bid in the first place is completely unclear. Perhaps just to fool those not paying attention into imaging the fix wasn't in? It worked, the election came and went with no change in the city's leadership. Meanwhile the idea that bars should recycle their millions of bottles and cans is laughably invisible to the Southernmost City.

Key West is a miracle town, made possible b y an impossibly gorgeous climate and a display of botanic artifice that proves Nature is better equipped to survive here than the human brain. No matter what grotesque choices humans make this town is protected by an unbeatable tourist oriented combination of  attractions: permanent sunshine, blue skies, turquoise waters and lush greenery. So the money keeps coming in and he commissions best efforts to waste it still leave the city in decent financial shape. Talk about a gift from the Gods! Petroleum reserves might be more lucrative but its hard to be sure.

Fashions trickle down to Key West slowly and the latest bicycle fad is inexplicable to me. I read a short article in Bicycling magazine about fat tired bicycles and they say they are only really effective in snow and peculiar frosty "groomed" trails. Key West is nowhere mentioned oddly enough because they are showing up all over town where people gather to chat in the shade:

 Just don’t get too excited about using a fat bike for everyday transportation. Explorer Mike Curiak has ridden thousands of miles on them and plans to use one on a 700-mile expedition to the Northwest Passage this summer. “Fat bikes take me places where people haven’t been, where normal bikes couldn’t go,” he says. But he’d never consider one for conventional trails. “An $800 hardtail with a suspension fork will ride a million times better,” he says. 

Still, there’s plenty to love. Fatties have extended the riding season through winter in the northern half of the United States and, in towns with groomed snow trails, the bikes are becoming as popular as cross-country skis. In Minneapolis, where Surly is based, enthusiasts have created a race series. And shops everywhere are finding that the bikes’ unique ride entices novice riders, drawing new riders to the sport. 

 I'd rather be sitting on a towel waiting for Godot in 90 degrees than planning a bike trip on a  snowy "groomed trail" which sounds peculiar at best and uncomfortable most likely, in some polar region Up North.

I came out of the movie, chatted with Robert and crossed the street to find my Vespa ET4 had picked up a blue and white clone. Except it wasn't, it was a creditable attempt at a  Vespa-lookalike by Kymco, a well known Taiwanese ( thank you Dennis!) brand of scooter. Apparently the Like 50 also comes as a 200 which I think might be quite a decent scooter were the need to arise, as it were. Kymcos have a deservedly stellar reputation for quality and reliability.

 Sometimes the devil gets in me and I ask a stupid question in response to the rote questions asked at the point of sale. In a lot of establishments the question "Can I get you anything else?" is frequently offered, pro forma, by a bored sales person or an eager "up seller" hoping to do the company right by encouraging the punter to spend just a little more. These kinds of questions tend to aggravate me in a mild way because the pursuit of sales at all costs is such an omnipresent fact of life in our permanently connected world. So when I am at the Tropic Cinema which has a really pleasant space in which to hang out, even if not seeing a movie, I  enjoy dealing with the volunteers, many of them witty educatedAnswer to Life's Persistent Questions retirees, selling tickets or food and drink. You haven't really seen a movie until you've done it sharing a bottle of wine in public, in the dark in my opinion. Anyway I got a soda to wash down Calvary and the woman at the counter asked me is I wanted anything else. The devil got in me and I asked for a slice of happiness. Bless her, she smiled sweetly as she passed me my change. 

Best answer I ever got. 

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A Mad Walk

I'm not completely sure what happened to me yesterday but when I got home after my third long night of work in a row I loaded Cheyenne into the car and drove back to Key West. I was primed not to go to sleep just yet and I wanted to stretch Cheyenne's legs as they only get exercised chasing smells in the Big City. I was quite surprised how energetic I felt. Mind you as we slowly approached the Southernmost City in the middle of a long line of crawling commuters it occurred to me it might be quite a damp walk as I saw piles of black rain clouds amassing over Key West.

I was quite proud of myself as in addition to collar and leash for Herself, plastic bags for community welfare and my camera disguised a phone I also remembered to take my New England umbrella, purchased in Portland, Maine last summer. It was a vacation impulse purchase to ward off their version of summer, which consisted of cold rain and strong biting winds. Maine is too robust for my tropical constitution, but I was pleased to note the brolly did a first rate job under the paltry warm rain falling dismally on Key West. Cheyenne was so glad to be in the city she ignored the water completely.

We strolled past the new West Marine building on Caroline Street, a vast mausoleum dedicated to the very 20th century proposition that boating requires spending money on lifestyle accessories. I saw the dude poring over his computer screen in the shipping office and I reminded myself I was never much good at retail even at West Marine where I fed my boat with parts purchased consuming my every pay check, it seemed like.

Chickens. I am not fond of Key West's free range foul. They are noisy and scratch dirt everywhere and are so used to people they are developing a bad habit of panhandling. Cheyenne frightens them a bit so they tend to stay away but she has zero hunting instincts and ignores them completely. Later in the walk one chicken was not so lucky as some bloody fool was walking his young dog not only off leash but without a collar. The chicken ducked and zigged but the dog was in hot pursuit while his spaced out owner walked off in the wrong direction. Cheyenne was blissfully unaware of the Chicken Death Drama so my attempts to rescue the wretched bird were stymied by my canine anchor, but as it was a delivery driver was moved by the squawking to rescue the bird from the playful pit bull. As it was the dog owner slapped his dog as though the animal were to blame for his insouciant stupidity and the chicken stalked off wet with dog spittle but none the worse for wear. "He's just playful" the idiot dog owner told an incredulous world. I told Cheyenne she was lucky she had me to protect her from idiocy.

I don't know why, but Cheyenne loves the Caroline Street corridor. I take her elsewhere in the city and she gets out of the car, looks around, walks a block and then goes back to the car hauling me along behind. I have learned to yield to the inevitable and we go straight to Caroline Street directly and she wears herself out happily in this place.

Luckily I keep seeing things that appeal to my eye, I ran into Doug from This Week On The Island and we exchanged notes on the progress of summer and all seems to be well with our worlds and our dogs. Doug is tired of the hotel construction underway across the street from his house and I lamented with him that parking will get really interesting with 96 rooms and 36 spaces.

Then I found what used to be Key West Trip Advisor's most popular restaurant, Garbo's Grille, a form of food truck which used to be parked on Greene Street and did a land sale business, so imagine my surprise when I found myself strolling past the familiar truck now parked on the Simonton Street side. At first I figured it was abandoned but then I looked again and it seemed to be set up for business with the flower pot decorations.

For a short while there the skies cleared as the sun came up and I hoped for another glorious sunny start to the day. I pondered the anniversary September 2nd, much celebrated of the first swim across the Straits of Florida. 64 year old Diana Nyad has been lionized for her 52 hour achievement which I do find a bit odd. I mean by that she is not the first to swim from Cuba to Florida as a 22 year old Australian woman swam across in half the time in distant 1997 but she was inside a shark cage made of wire. At the time Nyad congratulated her limiting herself to telling the press that such cages were "controversial" as she well knew having used one such in another swim in 1978, she said.

On last year's attempt, her fifth Nyad made the crossing without a cage, so not even the most malicious could say she was in any way "towed.". Which seems to have catapulted her into the limelight and the league of winners. Susie Maroney, the upstart doesn't rate. I think it enough to imagine being 64 and swimming a hundred miles in any direction and living to tell the tale. That seems like an ample record.

Aside from all that Nyad's epic swim seems to have done nothing to ameliorate Cuban-American relations, which would have been a nice outcome. With all that done Nyad now is going to walk across this country, not for the sheer pleasure of the stroll but to"raise awareness" of obesity in America. Like we aren't yet sufficiently aware. I like Webb Chiles' attitude toward the business of "raising awareness" this taken from his blog of his latest and sixth round the world sail:

 

Bill in England sent me some links about two men attempting to break the record for sailing an open boat around Britain. I didn’t know there was one. 78 days seems slow to me. Baring mishap, they should do so easily.

However, I am going to criticize them. Not for making the attempt; but for claiming they are doing so to raise money for a charity. That the charity—a very worthwhile one—is so uptight it has disavowed them is irrelevant.

Sail because you want to sail. No pretense or pretext needed.

 

 

"No pretense or pretext needed" are words to live by in this age where everyone is amusing themselves under the guise of being virtuous. On the subject of virtue I saw the parking lot guy at the Pier House staffing his post at the parking lot entrance off Duval Street. His foot in a cast, no pantywaist sick leave for him. Naturally I view sick leave as humanitarian but I am in a minority among stoics.

And then the rain started, as we passed the front of the Customs House and I started steering my still eager panting Labrador back toward the car a dozen long blocks away. We took refuge under an awning so that Cheyenne could catch her breath and we could stay somewhat dry. Not that rain is terribly cold here this time of year but it isn't hot either. So we sat and watched the rain come down, Nature's attempt to clean the city.

I love the sturm und drang of summer in the Keys, wild thunderstorms making celestial light shows, illuminating thunderheads in ethereal pinks and purples, piles of clouds in the sky illuminated like flickering Chinese lanterns. Sudden gusts of wind, palm fronds swishing like surf on a pebbly beach. Sudden catastrophic floods of water from the sky. The greatest show on Earth:

And then it's all gone and summer returns, as temperatures wick back up from the mid 70s to the mid 90s. I love that it rains in the heat of summer and not on frigid, short, gloomy winter days. Rainy season in summer is glorious.

One thing I did notice on my way home...the Boulevard didn't flood! Success! I needed to get home to bed, to sleep, sweet oblivion. My dog was exhausted; mission accomplished.

Big white clouds puffing in under bright blue skies. Heat and humidity as is proper down here about now. Here comes the sun! Ah, Florida!

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Flying Eggs On Coffin Night

The last couple of nights at work have been filled with calls from incandescent citizens complaining about hordes of young people rampaging through New Town egging homes and cars and people. That's when we dispatchers put our heads in our hands and groan in unison: "Coffin Night" which can persist over several days. Two years ago police officers found the coffin early on, as we shall see below. This year, no such luck, so far, so the egging goes on. And on.

--------------------------------------------------from September 6th, 2012-----------------------------------------

The  real meaning of Coffin Night in Key West is a Conch mystery shrouded in darkness and illuminated only slightly by the knowledge that coffin night is a form of celebration of the start of Homecoming at Key West High. Coffin night is not a school activity and no adult would be caught dead supporting it. yet it is a preternaturally Key West tradition, as local as a Cuban mix sandwich or a civic leader riding a scooter around town. It is unhappily Coffin Night this week and the eggs are flying.

The senior class hides a small coffin they build for the occasion and the junior class has to run all over key West looking for it. Coffin Week involves a variety of other activities but the hunt for the coffin is the highlight. The problem is that egging is also a highlight of the hunt and young people all over Key West's New Town neighborhood can be spotted hauling quantities of eggs to throw at people and vehicles. It sounds funny but it can be overwhelming, I heard of one passerby copping more than 50 eggs in a pelting. Raw eggs do terrible things to car paint and a vehicle parked overnight without the owner spotting the offending yolk can lead to an expensive repair to restore the paint. People get annoyed by egg throwing.The background to this madness goes back to a football tradition. Apparently seniors celebrated their team's invincibility by making a coffin at the start of the season and represented that superiority by building a coffin in which to bury their opponents. Then the Juniors took it upon themselves to try to steal the coffin to annoy the seniors. In the struggle to secure the coffin eggs became the weapon of choice, and so the tradition grew and has become enshrined at Key West High School. Coffin Night is a Conch activity like no other, it is reserved to the New Town half of the island and thus is invisible to the great mass of drinkers on Duval in the hours of darkness.

And in case you were wondering this year a responsible adult found the coffin in the early hours of Tuesday morning, not soon enough to end the madness which got wild enough that the traditional homecoming bonfire has reportedly been cancelled. That would be the bonfire designed to ceremonially burn the symbolic coffin.

That should have stopped the egging but I guess the kids had stashed a large quantity of eggs and I further suppose they can't actually eat all their ammunition. And so it goes.

Why I Ride A Motorcycle

The  need to ride a motorcycle is almost impossible to explain to a non rider. In a world where comfort and convenience and separation from the natural world are all exemplified by the automobile, a thinking human that chooses to sit out in the weather unprotected on an inherently unstable machine equipped with power to spare but no rider protection is a choice impossible to explain rationally. So when I came across this superb essay by another member of the Iron Butt Association, one who rides further faster more efficiently and more often than I do, I wanted to share his words from his website because he expresses what I usually feel on two wheels more eloquently than I have ever managed.

Samuel Liles is well known apparently in the world of the Iron Butt Rally, a ride that I suspect is beyond my abilities or my desire to ride, and he combines intellect, emotion and riding ability and puts it all on the page like this. For those who think motorcycles are dangerous...stupid...pointless...this essay is for you. If you read this and understand because you sail...fly....rock climb...bicycle...dive...spelunk...collect stamps...whatever excites you, then you understand. If not, don't worry, motorcycles will never take over the world, happily for all of us.

Production notes: I have added the photos from my albums because readers expect pictures on my blog. Liles provides few in his essays and in this case he offers none. I did as required on his site, and raised my fist and shouted (to the astonishment of my colleagues) "Hack The Planet" and I have linked his copyrighted work. If you have never heard of the Iron Butt Association consider reading about them. I have done their two shorter rides and found them entirely manageable. I like slow touring and exploring as well if not more, but riding to a time and distance requirement has its excitements and thus is worth doing from time to time I think. Enough of me, read the essay and marvel:

Why I ride

by Samuel Liles • July 19, 2014 • 0 Comments

I ride motorcycles to live. I am neither afraid nor endeared to the rest of the world. I am me and when I ride my motorcycle I get to be a little bit more me. Sometimes I am rude and crude and I get smacked around for it. Sometimes I am elegant and gentlemanly and I am rewarded for it. In the end when I am riding the motorcycle I am me. I don’t ask permission from anybody else to do this. I don’t ask forgiveness for turning a precious resource like dinosaurs into my form of fun. This is an activity about me. It is selfish, it is personal, and when I do it I know that I am better before, during and after the ride.

Riding a motorcycle and why I do it is personal. It is a part of who I am and who I have been for nearly 40 years of my life. I feel closer to that thing that connects me to reality and in some ways I feel removed from the place other people think is reality. I travel short distances, long distances, and intermediate distances. The noise of the road is drowned out by the screaming banshee of the worlds evil being torn from my skin in a blistering heat of righteousness. I listen to music with a new sense of wonder, I connect to the moment of a narrative I have created, and I see a future clearer for having given up the confines of a dead vehicle.

As the world rushes toward self driving cars I feel the physical sense of locomotion through my feet, hands and posterior. I shift, move, adapt, overcome, consider, calculate, role, move, and adjust to the moment. The road unfolds with majesty and grace, the trail of dirt and hard scramble unveils the future, the terror of darkness holds my soul enthralled in cones of light reaching towards my humanity. I see the world as a thread and woven fabric of physical, social, and emotional artifices.

I have suffered for this “sport” and “lifestyle” called such by those who can see the sweet but not taste it. I have broken bones, shed layers of skin, been bruised, torn tendons and ligaments and crushed my flesh when others have reached into my reality to remind I am only mortal. If I am mortal and fear the facts of that statement I am bound to live and not die slowly on a trip not of my own choosing via a mode of transportation I do not control to a destination I can not define. What is death to living that way?

I ride to feel the world pass by and see myself rushing into it. I want to see more and like a glutton I can never get enough of the vastness of a planet I will only see a small part of. I want to experience, feel, touch, and taste the wonders of the world I was born into. There is an aliveness to the motorcyclist who holds the totality of the experience in a moment, day, or life and can know the awesomeness of that experience. In the space between heart beats the senses tense ready to spring upon the next moment. Much as the moments of the world pass by my life on a motorcycle.

It is merely a motorcycle, a conveyance between two places, a silly gimmick, a machine of no consequence, and an objectification of masculinity to many. It is the place I share some of the warmest, fondest, and most romantic moments with my wife. It is the device that brought together each of my children to see another side of the world and experience the joy of being. It gave me the skills to reach into my tepid and despicable day-to-day grind and find a little joy as I shed the excess and enjoy the rest.

It is just a vehicle. A two wheeled vehicle. It is just a motorcycle and I am a motorcyclist.

Tons of reasons to ride a motorcycle.