Life And Death

They  found a dead body floating off Mallory Square last weekend. According to the newspaper some poor bugger working on the barge spotted the man floating alongside his work site.  

I wasn't thinking about that when I walked Rusty through Mallory Square as I have had the weekend off work and I hadn't yet read the paper. I just liked the view and the eternally hopeful angler. No idea he was dropping his hook where the poor guy died.

It turns out the man who drowned was a well known street performer and he got a long obituary in the paper. And then this rather impromptu and touching memorial popped up on Duval Street:

All around life goes on and I couldn't help but think about the juxtaposition of the daily banal routine, including me wandering around with dog and camera while the life of someone who contributed so much to life here was suddenly extinguished.

But there are still plenty of people to look at on the street.

Rusty started pointing. Either a dog or a tricycle was coming...turned out it was something else he wasn't used to: a man on crutches. We had a laugh when the guy hopped up to the corner and started petting my startled dog.

Rusty got into the spirit of the walk when he found a squashed Kilwins ice cream cone. I rather envied him the delicious vanilla Kilwin but I wasn't tempted to fight him for it.

I posted this picture on Instagram and labeled it Key West dystopia - broken bicycle and zombie chickens.

And around the corner the Green Parrot was getting refreshed for another day.

The banality of the routine made me extra glad to be alive.

Rusty At Night

It was  really early in the morning when I was off. I slept soundly woke up suddenly and said let's go for a walk and my Carolina Dog was ready to go, so we went. 

The home depicted below, slightly eccentrically designed as happens in Key West, is stuck in my mind as Carolyn Gorton Fuller's  home even though the "Bottle Lady" as she was known died in 2010. She got the nickname from her artistic habit of building a wall out of bottles and later out of mirrors when the bottles got damaged.

Key West looks  great by night in my opinion. Then I look up and there's Dusty sitting in the street waiting patiently for me.

What these danglies are I don't know but they are dangling impressively outside the new  sexton's house at the cemetery.

No cars, no traffic on Passover Lane at 5:30 in the morning.

Bill Butler Park:

Approaching Elizabeth Street on one of my favorite alleyways in Old Town. This one is a cement walkway from Bill Butler Park:

Decorative motif:

Then when the day got light (Rusty likes to walk a lot) I saw a motorcycle in a scooter parking spot. Seems about right to me. I was surprised how specific the sign was.

And so home to bed.

Things I See

Rusty doesn't feature in these pictures because even though I was walking him of course my attention was distracted. First up: Imagine renting a house with a  yard filled with political signs.  I checked this one out on Eaton Street (noisy no view and too close to Duval Street) and it was lined with signs including one that said it was not just for rent but it was already rented. I guess the new tenant won't be muddled when it comes time to vote. Normal business practices don't apply in a town desperate for housing.

A new home will be going up on this mud pile.

I was quite surprised to see such optimism in a  town where the planning department and the Historic Architecture Review Commission conspire to derail many plans. Persistence and money will win the day I suppose.

This next one I loved, oh ironic bliss! It's the women's club on Duval Street in the three hundred block. Clearly it would be wrong to deface the historic fence with another trashy plastic sign but it's okay for the club to hang their own ugly plastic sign on the historic tree. Young women of substance in this town join Zonta, so I'm told,  to do Good Works for the Less Fortunate. The women's club used to feature prominently on the late Conch Color society gossip magazine before it's founder died.

I wanted to ask him how his staph infection was doing but he didn't seem to be in the mood to entertain small talk. Places to hobble, people to see.

Total man nudity was a popular choice for fashionable attire that morning on Duval Street. I was tempted to strip as well but Rusty counseled common sense.

And talking of construction The Bull was getting a  substantial upgrade. The balcony is a good place to watch the Fantasy Fest  Parading Around of Middle Aged Nudity at the end of October. It's never too early to plan..

Here you can apply for one of the three jobs you will need to sustain life in your Key West life.

Did  I say no pictures of Rusty? I lied here he is at La Quinta resting comfortably. I was playing around with a new iPhone app called Color Splurge. Silly free fun or advertising-free for 99 cents.

Growing Curry In Italy

My wife said I should call my sisters after the recent earthquake struck Amatrice and surrounding villages in Central Italy. I sighed. People always call when a hurricane hits Florida and I guess I shouldn't be impatient with the geographically challenged but Tampa isn't Key West and Amatrice isn't where my sisters live. So I compromised and called my childhood buddy and riding companion Giovanni instead. For the first time, he said, I was scared by the strength of the earthquake. It was a strong enough shake that he wondered if everything was going to collapse and Terni where he lives is an hour from the nearest damage in neighboring Norcia. Hum, I thought. Perhaps I'd better call my sisters.

The damage is truly spectacular and four years ago when Giovanni took my wife and I riding through the mountains in that area the earthquake damage from years before in L'Aquila wasn't anywhere close to being repaired. These poor bastards hope to get their homes back in two years but I think they are hopelessly optimistic. It's a horrid mess, but I knew my family was fine as my sister's kids, much more computer savvy, had said as much...on Facebook. So I called anyway and using a calling card it only costs me four cents a minute.

My conversation with my sister almost never got round to the earthquake as it happens. My sister was much more taken with village news, who died and how the kids are doing and all that. She extracted a promise that I would be visiting next July so by the time she mentioned the earthquake in passing it was apparent she had felt nothing. There we are then.

However it turns out their bed and breakfast is doing well all summer long. She and her husband of fifty years (below) have moved into a smaller apartment they built on their land and they rent out the farmhouse. Cerqueti Link The idea is that their sons are less keen on raising animals like their father and they are branching out into hospitality along with raising crops and making olive and all that more traditional stuff.

You can see why, as cows take daily maintenance morning and evening. When I'm on vacation I enjoy riding the tractor down to the stable and enjoying the company of cows for a while but as a twice daily chore...I emigrated to California when I faced that choice.

Life is pretty traditional in the countryside there as it is everywhere and like most places in the world younger people are moving away to the cities to make money and all the usual stuff. My memories of life in the country do not reflect modern life there at all now that the villages are depopulated and no one wants to stay down on the farm.

So when I asked my sister how the farming was going she said the boys have tried something new, they are growing coriander. Good lord I said do you even know what that is? Well no she said but its a very delicate crop. They have to harvest it very carefully because if any of it gets crushed it ruins he crop. What on earth possessed them to grow the main spice in Indian food I asked astonished. The whole bed and breakfast thing shocked me a couple of years ago and now the farming is branching out from traditional wheat and olives and beef.

Well my sister said wheat you can hardly give away and someone said coriander is very expensive but it turns out its really complicated to grow. Have you ever eaten it? I asked her. Not really she said. Italian food is delicious of course but my father only ate English meat and two veg and Italians when I was a kid ate delicious home made food so I never got to eat "ethnic" foods regularly until I got to California. Indian, Mexican, Chinese were all utterly unknown in my part of Italy. That was me fifty years ago helping to herd pigs:

So to hear my sister is growing coriander is rather similar to hearing the pope had a religious conversion. Change doesn't come easily in the Umbrian mountains, or perhaps I should say it never came fast enough when I was a kid. But as they also say "The past is another country, they do things differently there." Sure as hell do, so now I'm hoping maybe there will be Indian food on the menu next July. Fat chance and home cured pork will just have to do. 

Just A Category One

Hurricane Hermine isn't over yet, but I wanted to record some thoughts about this tropical storm that skirted Key West bringing just rain and wind and struck the panhandle of Florida forcing storm surge into land. In Florida one homeless guy has been killed by a falling tree so as usual damage to property easily outweighs loss of life compared to earthquakes tornadoes and landslides. Cedar Key got a nice trashing from this "modest" hurricane:

I'm not in Cedar Key right now so I got these images from news outlets on the Internet and the lesson for me is that no hurricane is minor. The National Hurricane Center rates storms by sustained winds and Category Three moves up to the category of Major Hurricane but even 80 miles an hour, sustained is a lot of wind, even if it isn't sustained at 115 mph.

Hurricanes lose strength over land by Hermine is expected to bring rain and wind to the east coast and ratchet back more strength in time to give the Outer Banks a good blow and perhaps bring damage to New Jersey and New York. That's the true power of a hurricane, even a modest category one that drops back to being just a tropical storm over land. Hermine dropped an estimated five inches of water in a  few hours on the Gulf Coast. Check out this picture below and ask yourself how you'd feel watching waves roll past your home in the middle of the night with shrieking winds:

And the clean up after a storm is a pain in the ass. Power will probably be out and so will insects in force. It will be hot and sticky and drinking water will be as warm as the proverbial bucket of warm piss. Manual labor will be the order of the day and you will be lacking sleep and composure. 

And all this if the storm doesn't increase in intensity in the last hours before landfall and perhaps the tide is higher than anticipated so flooding will be worse and on and on. I don't envy them Up North as they deal with all this. So the question is: what do we do in the Keys when hurricanes threaten? We sit back and watch the rest of the country get trashed. So far...But in the event don't underestimate the strength of the storm.

Caroline Paved

One really needs to take time sometimes to enjoy the good bits.and seeing Caroline Street paved is nice. This street used to be rippled and dented so badly you could barely ride a motorcycle sedately down it without being bounced out of the saddle.

There's a reminder of the piteous state the street was in:

Breakfast and the newspaper at Harpoon Harry's. Fond memories fro me from the years before I worked night shift. I don't think I would switch to days just to enjoy bacon and eggs in the morning.

History is everywhere:

Rusty garnering attention:

Talking of riding Caroline Street I spotted this guy around the block enjoying James Street, fully prepared with a helmet and everything:

I quite like palms coated in Christmas lights in the season but I was quite surprised to see some leftover lights sill hanging on:

I posted this on Instagram. Don't have a cow, drive one.

I've dumped out of Facebook. I find the social pressure of being asked to pray think or post comment agree or like just too much. Besides people keep re-posting instead of showing off their own pictures. I find Instagram much more soothing. All original pictures, no comments necessary. 

Finnegans Wake is undergoing one more transformation. I met the owner, a middle aged white guy, nice enough but he had trouble articulating the menu precisely of  a retired Surfer's Bar and restaurant. It's quite extensive and one hopes it is well done: Lucy's Link 

I suppose it's no coincidence this place is also the second restaurant in a chain originating in New Orleans. The ill fated Backspace was the same and I wonder if there is a connection. I did point out to this owner that he at least isn't fighting that squabble all over again. Finnegans is gone and that's that.

We shall have to see if this new attempt can hold it's own. Joe's Place went away. Back on Caroline and the former PT's and a bunch of other thin gs is now empty again. As is the rather passive aggressive bike parking sign in a hedge with no rack:

The street after all the construction looks glorious.

So will the JDL's Big Ten, former PT's former...blah blah blah spring back to life soon?

The gravel lot has been formalized at 908 Caroline into a tour bus parking lot. Tour buses get little respect in Key West as they bring people from Miami for the day and those people like cruise ship passengers are not viewed in the same favorable light as overnight visitors. 

Repaving looks good. I'd like to see more around town. Smooth streets, not more condos. My kind of construction.