Post Holiday Key West

Thanksgiving is over, long live Thanksgiving! Now it's time for Christmas in the long march to New Year's Day. So we see poinsettias:

Key West in December will look pretty much like it does every other month, except the sun is lower in the sky, and the newspaper headline has an extra letter.

How they make the rent selling everything for five dollars continues to be a mystery.  Nevertheless five dollars continues to be the mantra, through post-Thanksgiving sales and Christmas sales and so forth.

"Gifts of Enchantment" set my mind to thinking. Then I heard the Pelican Poope shop on Simonton Street is closing. I shan't miss the name, nor the gifts of enchantment they sell either. When I think of local business I wish we could also include useful places too. I miss Valladares the newspaper seller on Duval at Catherine.

Not Greece; Kino Plaza.

The city is promising to put 15 local poets in the ground around the city. The first is Key West's poet laureate Kirby Congdon:

I walk on sand
and leave a trail
of footprints,
hard and deep.
The wash of waves
fills my step
in hasty cascades.
Water and sand return,
not quite the same;
the tide, its oceans,
the earth itself
are changed.

          -KIRBY CONGDON

That early morning sun, low in the sky, cast this shutter in bronze.

Duval Street, empty, as we like it, Cheyenne and I.

Let the others shop in a frenzy, we walk, my dog and  and enjoy the cool morning air, on the day after Thanksgiving, when we are still remembering to give thanks.

Giving Thanks

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It used to be a close competition with Fourth of July but as I have aged Thanksgiving has pulled ahead by a long way. Maybe having a fall meal with friends under palm trees while camping at Fort Jefferson swung the pendulum...

...but last year at Jekyll Island in Georgia with Robert and Dolly in formal circumstances wasn't tropical by any means but  it was pretty damned good, let's face it. I'd like to do it again in fact. 

And yes, being able to sit on a beach and maybe even go for a swim if it is exceptionally warm suits me just fine this time of year. 

But this year Layne is in California, freezing her ass off in sub zero temperatures which seems vaguely appropriate as I am home alone and working all hours. And speaking of work, as 911 has to be answered all year round, I don't mind it on a holiday so much but for the fact that the source of all 24-hour Cuban coffee is closed. Grr. One can hardly hold it against Sandy's but still...

I avoid almost all the Christmas blather as Netflix doesn't offer gruesome advertising and judicious use of the  channel button can keep Christmas at bay on Sirius satellite radio. Besides which the weather stays pretty much the same and that I adore. I think Thanksgiving is better  than Christmas because it is a much more low key holiday, no frenzy of gift giving, no stress, just a silly over stuffed meal with friends and a moment to pause and think and be grateful. To me that defines a great day.

 I shall get a Cuban thanksgiving meal at work today which because it has roast pork and plantains among other things I like just fine thank you and I won't be home but that's okay. Cheyenne won't miss me as she will be snoring on a very full stomach and my wife will be sitting around a California fire pit enjoying what passes for nice weather on the West Coast.

This is  good winter weather:

Happy memories for my girl, now too old for such shenanigans so I am grateful she is still with me.

Happy Thanksgiving, hoping you have much to be thankful for...

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Citizens Voice

Oh look at that would you - a cruise ship - which is either a curse or a source of income or both depending on your point of view. And if you have a point of view there is only one place to express it, in Key West.

And once expressed anonymously in the paper your comment is subject to anonymous review, by other people with their own opinions...

 

Some comments are funny or ironic or sarcastic on purpose, others may strike your fancy for reasons that apply only to you. I like the notion that the bike racks are useful for people heavily engaged in yoga. But that's the kind of opinion that divides a city where workers work and visitors have different priorities. All grist for the Voice's mill.

Ah yes, the monied crowd taking over the spaces envisioned for the Rest Of Us. That theme keeps recurring in this narrow and pointed page two column in the daily paper.

Ooh, see why this has to be anonymous? The rich in Key West may not be educated. There's a barb!

This year there were a lot of people who came to Fantasy Fest by bus and left by bus with their food and their coolers. So much so not all hotels were full they tell us. This scenario is what irks some people about cruise ships and now the buses are adding weight to that irritation.

Noise comes up in one form or another in the Voice, motorcycles (I have factory mufflers on mine thanks, stealth = speed in my book) outdoor televisions and rental house parties are sources of anonymous complaint.

If you were thinking living in a confined space with people not yet acclimated to tight living quarters might be fun, perhaps checking the Voice daily might be a good lesson for you. I've lived on boats long enough to learn the basic rules of privacy in exposed living quarters and Conchs are pretty good at it too. But incomers who expect offsets and room to spread out can be sorely disappointed.

"A classier town..." I want to ask Anonymous to define her terms because a lot of people who live here crank up the Model T to go Up North to find proper shopping in malls. This comment below made no sense to me (hence it's inclusion here) but that doesn't mean a thing. The Voice is the Voice and the best thing is it irritates some people to death. Calls to shut down the Voice appear from time to time especially when the comfortable have been afflicted by something said.

I can't think of anywhere that looks less like a giant shopping structure filled to capacity with artificial sights, sounds and merchandise.

Politics rears its head from time to time in the Voice, but unfortunately its usually along predictable partisan lines. This comment "at the risk of sounding liberal" struck me as pretty funny. I guess the conservative half is the beer pong half? You know where I fall as I have no idea what beer pong is.

Or, rather than paying to park why not ride two wheels.

Oh wait, how about this comment? A liberal bastion of boredom? Boredom and politics mixed together. Shall we get personal and decide if liberal bastions are more boring than conservative ones? Packs of phonies we can all agree on, I hope, as it's Key West we are talking about.

Check out the comment above...length of service in Key West is always a precursor to a snobby elitist remark about some damned thing or another. EXCEPT in this case I vote the county deny the race a permit. But I doubt that will happen.

 

Well said!

 

However part of getting and having a life is a well honed sense of civic duty...which includes speaking out! Long live the Citizens Voice.

Ah, the intimacies of small town life. Good job Dana and don't forget next week Mr Cranky might be in the post office ready to slander your good name just as cheerfully. Sic transit Gloria Mundi....

I assure you it's like they say about economists, if you put them all end to end they'd still never reach a conclusion. But it's always the best read in the paper. Now if they could put a humorist back on the crime report, à la Tuell, that would make for real competition when you open the page.

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Riding Key West

I've collected a few pictures some taken recently and some older to remind us all of the chaos that is coming with the winter months.

Helmets in Florida are optional for adults over 21 years of age and in Key West most people take advantage of the law. I don't think its unreasonable in light of the fact that we have no tax payer funded single payer system so breaking your head may very well break your bank, not mine.

Sometimes I ride without a helmet but I rarely ride without gloves or shoes. The fact is people depend on their two wheels, not because they love to ride but because scooters are cheap and efficient so the idea of togging up in armor plate to get to work or the shops or home is far from their minds.

This easy going attitude to riding drives people from elsewhere crazy sometimes. I think there can be a little too much stress on the notion that passive safety is more important than active safety.

Which is not to say these flip flopped riders don't sometimes ride drunk, or get into wrecks and from time to time break their heads.

Tourists on rental scooters are another proposition altogether because they, like their pedestrian compadres tend to treat Key West like Disneyworld- a place where nothing bad is allowed to happen - and where we who live here are extras in the drama of their lives.

Key West makes for a lovely back drop for vacation pictures and the heat even in winter can overwhelm people not used to it. What seems like a fresh humidity-free winter afternoon to me seems cloyingly hot to someone who was in a snowdrift 2 hours earlier.

I like how bicycles and scooters are daily transportation in Key West used to get dogs to the park, groceries home from the shops. I see renters enjoying scooters on their visits, and riding bicycles too but these pleasures they don't take home with them and start a new way of traveling at home.

 

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