Old World Service

 

All too often we feel that modern life denies us the chance to repair things. The truism that we live in a throwaway society only rarely gets stood on it's head. In this case Keys Technology in Kennedy Plaza manages to do just that. They actually repair stuff. How old fashioned.

There's a phone store on Duval that advertises screen replacements for iPhones and I stopped off to see if they also replace glass screens for Androids. My HTC Incredible (silly name for a good phone) got dropped somehow and the screen formed some interesting cracks, but the iPhone store doesn't do Androids and directed me to Kennedy Plaza in New Town. That was where Peter the owner said "...not worth it," after he found out a new screen installed would be $200. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping my phone stays whole until my contract expires in November... Meanwhile he also took a look at our defunct laptop.

The laptop died months ago, the little man inside went on strike and it stopped working. We kind of gave up on the thing and there it sat while we soldiered on with our iPads, my wife and I. I love my iPad, for instance I do all my blogging these days with my phone camera, Picasa and Blogpress through my first generation iPad. However we felt the need for a laptop for certain jobs like printing and desk top publishing and stuff especially for my wife's teaching job so we were casting round considering what to do.

 

I really wanted a Mac as I like working with the iPad, and I am sick watching the little Windows Icon whirling around while the stupid laptop tells me to please wait. Instant start up and no viruses and ease of use have finally turned me to the dark side of computing. Naturally there is a price to pay, around $1300 if I remember correctly while a PC was about half that. We hemmed and hawed and my wife finally said we were going to Best Buy next weekend and getting a PC. Blech!

 

Suddenly my wife had one of those brilliant insights and on a whim we ended up carting along the laptop, long dead, when we stopped by the store in search of the phone screen repair. We didn't hope for much, one never doestheses days when looking for a repair but it went swimmingly well. We were amazed. Never mind the phone can't be repaired economically, the laptop came back within 24 hours with anew hard drive for $214 installed, including taxes. Brilliant.

In these cases of helpful local businesses I worry mostly that the business might close or the owner may get tired of the Keys and seek more remunerative fields elsewhere. So when I find a solid business I hold onto it, tight. In this case he told me with a big grin that business is great after six years in town and he is as busy as he can be and not to worry he has no plans to leave Key West. Yay! I guess the weather must be a factor, for he has a Slavic accent and nowhere east of Eden is as warm and sunny as Key West! That's a good reason to stay, and I am glad business is good for him. He deserves it.

 

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For Pity's Sake!

I originally published this essay in October 2009, but it remains valid this winter when we find the Overseas Highway badly clogged by amazingly slow and inconsiderate traffic, which seems to delight in traveling ten miles under the speed limit and erratically to boot. In Louisiana last year I noticed their signs read "Keep Right Except to Pass" which I think is a clearer sign but Florida's efforts to keep traffic moving also send a simple message. I guess in the end, most drivers' mothers didn't raise their offspring to be considerate, judging by what we see on the four lane stretch of US One just north of Key West...

The wording is pretty simple and you'd think it would be easy enough to understand but this sign gets plenty of noisy criticism the pages of the Citizen's Voice where people think keeping left is a Constituional Right..Obviously it's a sign that comes into play in those areas of Highway One that split into four lanes, two in each direction. This is just south of Big Coppitt. And away stretch the four lanes across the light industrial suburb of Rockland Key, leading to Boca Chica and ultimately Key West. And that's the hump of the exit to the Naval Air Station on Boca Chica.

With the intrepid cyclist pushing on toward Key West:
These signs are everywhere along this stretch of Highway One and are largely ignored.
Traffic joins the highway just like any major freeway intersection on the mainland. And it requires traffic to merge from the right which is another complication for people with lane change phobias...
The thing about "slower traffic keep right" is that the wording doesn't say anything about speed limits or having private citizens enforce traffic laws. Some people like to sit in the passing lane and block people going faster than them which is a superb recipe for road rage. One gets to start envying the able cyclist pedaling along smoothly out of the traffic flow:I spent a fair bit of time hanging out on the shoulder taking pictures: Not everyone gets the concept of staying on the right until you need to pass:I get bored with clusters of cars piled up behind someone passing at one mile per hour faster than the vehicles being passed:

The bridge over Boca Chica Channel into Stock Island has some nice views over the water but it also has unmistakable instructions about keeping right, not that many people pay attention:And even into the area of construction on Stock Island we see the same message repeated.

Funnily enough what works for me is when the slowpokes are ambling along in the passing lane they open up the right lane for passing. I learned years ago in traffic school that 70% of tickets are issued to vehicles in the number one lane (the one nearest the median). I don't know if it still holds true, but I ride like it does. With cars trundling along in the fast lane I get to stay out of sight I hope.By the time I got to Stock Island, taking pictures as I went, the intrepid cyclist was already there.Right lane all the way, from Mile Marker 9 to Stock Island:And here too the signs request that slower traffic....keep right, but It doesn't happen much. At this stage I figure i might as well sit in the right lane and take my time getting to North Roosevelt Boulevard,the main business route into the city:

You've got to figure the Florida Department of Transportation believes in this concept:And in a state that has a law that says if you drive up to five miles per hour over the limit you can't get anything more than a written warning, you could be surprised by the seriousness with which they take the keep right rule:

As far as I'm concerned by all means trundle along in the left lane, all the more room for me where I am harder to spot...

Random Key West

I have to admit I pretty much ignored the recent cold front that blew through town, the first and only real cold front this winter. Skies turned black with heavy, rain filled clouds, winds blew and temperatures dropped. It then rained, for the first time in months, and even after the rain finished and the north winds blew the skies tended to remain overcast. It even felt cold though night time temperatures never dropped below 55 degrees. the front was well announced in advance so I took the time to step outside The house with Cheyenne one evening and recorded the end of the longest warm winter stretch anyone can remember:

Sometimes the colors and bright light of winter just needs to be put on record. That's one way of not being complacent about living here. And fr s e people, Key West is Disney, a fairground attitude best exemplified by tourists stepping off sidewalks into the face of red lights. Then they look upset ad flash angry glances at te car that nearly ran them over. That the car was obeying the green light means nothing to peop,e who think this town is as artificial as Disney's Main Street...And some people like to attach stickers around town. These weird faces were popular for a while but perhaps their author has moved on to more receptive communities:

The welcoming pineapple combined with a Japanese style torii seems overly inviting for an Old Town entrance.

I took Cheyenne to dog beach and perhaps the end of Vernon Street just isn't her cup of tea of perhaps the presence of a boisterous young water dog put her off as she tends to prefer her own company, but in the event we spent a few minutes there and she wandered off much more interested in sniffing the sidewalk in front of Louie's Backyard restaurant next door.

A sidewalk artist was busy. I'm not sure what the protocol is about photographing other people's paintings so I took a generic picture and left it at that:

In my head I was comparing and contrasting the itinerants inter with the itinerant folks who hang out on Stock Island after a night sleeping at the Temporary Shelter:

Small motorcycles are making a comeback in the US, they say, even outside Key West and certainly it seems there are more smaller machines available Han ever. I am not much of a fan of off-road machines as they have tires not designed for road use and their set heights usually leave me unale t reach the ground when astride the saddle.

They make for excellent rides through city traffic, nimble and fast and in Key West, adapted to local usages by creating a useful place to keep a cup of con leché the universal Cuban coffee drink, good any time day or night.

These are my idea of proper wild chickens for Key West, native birds, quiet and delicate and as dedicated to eating irritating insects as any loud messy rooster.

The cause of all the trouble, Cheynne stepping out and enjoying the cool weather:

Though not all dogs feel the need to be terribly energetic:

Happily the cold front is gone and daytime highs in the 80s are reasserting themselves while night time lows near 70 make for perfect sleeping weather. The way winter should be.

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Box Stores In Key West

Every Monday morning I turn to the delightfully titled "Clusterfuck Nation" blog published by Jim Kunstler who lives in up state New York. He has a particularly jaundiced view of modern life which he feels sure is about to implode on the reefs of high energy costs and suburban sprawl, an architectural style which gives him heartburn. I read this week's Monday Morning Essay with a particular Key West perspective, noting the plans for a large strip mall to be built on Rockland Key, a plan whose size is in contention between the county and the developers, and whose occupants are yet to be decided, but whose construction seems to be guarenteed. It is a shopping plan that fits perfectly into Kunstler's nightmare scenario, subtracting from the stores in Key West and requiring driving from this city which is relatively well adapted to cycling and walking (and even modest moped riding!).

Scale Implosion

By James Howard Kunstler

on February 18, 2013 9:06 AM

 

Back in the day when big box retail started to explode upon the American landscape like a raging economic scrofula, I attended many a town planning board meeting where the pro and con factions faced off over the permitting hurdle. The meetings were often raucous and wrathful and almost all the time the pro forces won -- for the excellent reason that they were funded and organized by the chain stores themselves (in an early demonstration of the new axioms that money-is-speech and corporations are people, too!).

The chain stores won not only because they flung money around -- sometimes directly into the wallets of public officials -- but because a sizeable chunk of every local population longed for the dazzling new mode of commerce. "We Want Bargain Shopping" was their rallying cry. The unintended consequence of their victories through the 1970s and beyond was the total destruction of local economic networks, that is, Main Streets and downtowns, in effect destroying many of their own livelihoods. Wasn't that a bargain, though?

Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, WalMart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola. In most of the country there is no other place to buy goods (and no other place to get a paycheck, scant and demeaning as it may be). America made itself hostage to bargain shopping and then committed suicide. Here we find another axiom of human affairs at work: people get what they deserve, not what they expect. Life is tragic.

The older generations responsible for all that may be done for, but the momentum has now turned in the opposite direction. Though the public hasn't groked it yet, WalMart and its kindred malignant organisms have entered their own yeast-overgrowth death spiral. In a now permanently contracting economy the big box model fails spectacularly. Every element of economic reality is now poised to squash them. Diesel fuel prices are heading well north of $4 again. If they push toward $5 this year you can say goodbye to the "warehouse on wheels" distribution method. (The truckers, who are mostly independent contractors, can say hello to the re-po men come to take possession of their mortgaged rigs.) Global currency wars (competitive devaluations) are about to destroy trade relationships. Say goodbye to the 12,000 mile supply chain from Guangzhou to Hackensack. Say goodbye to the growth financing model in which it becomes necessary to open dozens of new stores every year to keep the credit revolving.

Then there is the matter of the American customers themselves. The WalMart shoppers are exactly the demographic that is getting squashed in the contraction of this phony-baloney corporate buccaneer parasite revolving credit crony capital economy. Unlike the Federal Reserve, WalMart shoppers can't print their own money, and they can't bundle their MasterCard and Visa debts into CDOs to be fobbed off on Scandinavian pension funds for quick profits. They have only one real choice: buy less stuff, especially the stuff of leisure, comfort, and convenience.

The potential for all sorts of economic hardship is obvious in this burgeoning dynamic. But the coming implosion of big box retail implies tremendous opportunities for young people to make a livelihood in the imperative rebuilding of local economies. At this stage it is probably discouraging for them, because all their life programming has conditioned them to be hostages of giant corporations and so to feel helpless. In a town like the old factory village I live in (population 2500) few of the few remaining young adults might venture to open a retail operation in one of the dozen-odd vacant storefronts on Main Street. The presence of K-Mart, Tractor Supply, and Radio Shack a quarter mile west in the strip mall would seem to mock their dim inklings that something is in the wind. But K-Mart will close over 200 boxes this year, and Radio Shack is committed to shutter around 500 stores. They could be gone in this town well before Santa Claus starts checking his lists. If they go down, opportunities will blossom. There will be no new chain store brands to replace the dying ones. That phase of our history is over.

What we're on the brink of is scale implosion. Everything gigantic in American life is about to get smaller or die. Everything that we do to support economic activities at gigantic scale is going to hamper our journey into the new reality. The campaign to sustain the unsustainable, which is the official policy of US leadership, will only produce deeper whirls of entropy. I hope young people recognize this and can marshal their enthusiasm to get to work. It's already happening in the local farming scene; now it needs to happen in a commercial economy that will support local agriculture.

The additional tragedy of the big box saga is that it scuttled social roles and social relations in every American community. On top of the insult of destroying the geographic places we call home, the chain stores also destroyed people's place in the order of daily life, including the duties, responsibilities, obligations, and ceremonies that prompt citizens to care for each other. We can get that all back, but it won't be a bargain.

http://kunstler.com/blog/

Key West Architecture

Key West is a small island filled with wildly varied home designs. In my walks around town I happened to photograph an assortment which I then decided to set out here without comment as I have nothing much to say. Some I like, usually the more traditional designs, but over the years I have also developed a taste for the less obviously Key West Conch architecture. I have come to enjoy the clean spare lines of the almost art deco style like that seen in the fourth picture. The following two homes depicted are its neighbors in the Casa Marina neighborhood, and they couldn't be more different!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ugly utilitarian hurricane fencing is almost a required accessory, unfortunately, for many of these homes.

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