Seeking Retirement

I am a man of no hobbies. I don't collect things. I tried lots of the standard approaches to being a male hobbyist, stamps, model trains, metal cars and so forth but none of them worked for me. Boredom and a sense of pointlessness set in rapidly.

The idea of owning things for the pure sake of possession strikes me as bizarre. Partly I suppose because my life has rarely been settled in one place. My father threw out my childhood possessions when I turned 18 and he had sent me to live on my mother's side of the family in Italy, and that act of brutality set the pattern. My English childhood vanished as permanently and completely as if it had been renditioned by the CIA. Of whose excesses I was mercifully ignorant in my youth. From there on I understood completely the references in the Bible to the devastating effects of rust and moths on earthly possessions. Had the Good Book mentioned angry vengeful parents more specifically I might have applied that lesson more effectively in mine own case and saved some of the mementoes of my 1950s childhood. Photographs, text books, note books toys and souvenirs all vanished in that summer of 1975 to make room for a new wife.

So I have never collected motorcycles or stamps or fashions or even artwork, though my wife has retrained me there a little. My one weakness has been books and I have a few volumes that have followed me from pillar to post throughout my 55 years across continents and oceans. Now the kindle incorporated in this very iPad supplants the written page and as much as I struggle not to yield to electrons I see the future of books much as I see the collectible value of old bikes and land line telephones. They become art pieces, not useful daily objects.

My defense against the moths and rust of daily life, the unstoppable passage of time, has been to live as many lives as possible within one lifetime. I am fond of saying I have lived my life backwards, a grasshopper youth experiencing as much as I could, only settling into a pensionable one track career in advanced middle age. I hear my contemporaries discuss hopes for retirement, many of them dashed by the banks and their wild scandals of 2008, but many who retire fear the empty spaces formerly filled by Very Important Careers that left no room for frivolity and satisfaction of Self.

In the golden years when jobs were plentiful and change was easy I lived as many jobs as I could in as many places as I could taking time off to ride a motorcycle over the horizon or sail a sailboat out of sight. It was tremendous fun and I regret none of it. I feel sad when I hear people say they wouldn't know what to do with retirement, a statement that to me smacks of defeatism in the face of all life's possibilities.

What's the point of having the privilege of being born into the First World if you don't take advantage of it?

I don't mean by that to imply we should be predatory or bullying, but we have the privilege of standing still from time to time. We live our lives in peace despite he best efforts of Television "News" to convince us that our neighborhoods are war zones. Many of us live a life on the edge or on the margins, especially those with responsibilities for children in a country that views child rearing as a private burden, not a public joy. I am child free and have never wanted children and when people ask how I managed to live a nomadic existence, I point that choice out as the salient decision in my young life.

For many people child rearing takes precedence over all other among life's possibilities. It's a choice I can barely comprehend, but I don't argue with it, I just avoid it. On my death bed, if I get the chance for last minute reflection, I hope that I will be as assured about the choice as I have been this far in my life, but what my feelings will actually be I cannot of course say. So far, so good.

I am lucky enough I be living a moment in my life where I get time away from work to be a collector, an idler, a wanderer on the margins of life. Like Travis McGee I take my retirement in chunks, a day or two or a week at a time, here and there, during the day not often at night which is when I work long shifts listening to other people's tales of misery. In my time away from 911 I might collect ink pens or beer coasters or commemorative plates. Instead I continue to collect memories and pictures and catalogue them here.

So because I am not a collector, nor a club member nor a golfer I use my pieces of retirement to wander the streets of Key West, and the backroads of the Lower Keys to look at the monuments to humanity and the wild imaginings of Nature and sometimes to take pictures of them.

That's all. I have mixed feelings about electronic books but I have no mixed feelings about electronic web pages. Without the Web my images would have no home. Most of the paper images of our trip over two years from Santa Cruz to Key West by sailboat sit, tidily sorted in albums, never to see the light of day. What's the first thing most people rush to save when their house is threatened? Those very photo albums, irreplaceable repositories of memories, never to be thrown away, never to be renditioned.

I have the web, and picasa, and electronic clouds, mysterious and unknowable electronic repositories of memories, never further away than a click of a computer, we hope, reliant on endless flows of energy, just like life itself. When the energy ends, like life, then darkness. Till then we have pictures of our world around us.

Oh and today is tax day. Good luck. And remember: Conchscooter says paying taxes is your way of paying dues to belong to this fantastic club that is this country. Do it cheerfully and demand the same of our one percent fellow travelers who buy tax loopholes that salaried stiffs will never see.

 

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Dog At Rest

It was a short walk in the afternoon, more of an escape from the house. We drove over the forty foot high Niles Channel Bridge, which apparently is in urgent need of maintenance, and crossed onto Summerland Key some three miles from my house. At the north end of Niles Road on Summerland, Cheyenne got out of the car, stumped around briefly and decided it was too hot for the serious walk I was hoping for.

By the time we got home I lost the will to live just like my dog. I was due to set off for work in an hour, so instead of doing a few chores I settled onto the recliner under the house and pulled out the Aerostich catalogue Home :: Aerostich/RiderWearHouse Motorcycle Jackets, Suits, Clothing, & Gear in the manner of a mentally stunted adult male that might look at women in swimsuits or a woman might check handbags online. It was very companionable.

There is some sort of Venturi effect under the stilt house that makes it the breeziest and thus the coolest spot outdoors in summer right there on the unlovely cement floor. Why is it we get accidentally snug with very little effort just as we have to get up and go away and do something useful?

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Black And White And Color

I am really trying not to overdo the black and white thing, not least because I myself like color pictures. Be that as it may I am learning to appreciate the different view one gets of Key West when the city is seen in shades of gray.

I look back at old pictures of Key West Key West Historical Photos: Historical Fine Art Prints Offered for Sale for instance, among many sites, and when I look at my own pictures the past seems easily reproduced with my puny modern pocket camera. I think Key West was a much dustier town in those days, smaller in size before New Town was built after World War Two. Then I came across this 1967 Land Rover which happens to be for sale. The view from the back reminded me of journeys I took in this exact type of vehicle with my father who owned land in Scotland and liked to drive across the foggy rainy heather covered mountains in an unstoppable all terrain vehicle. I recall it was bouncy and adventurous picking our way on rocky goat tracks miles from anywhere. Not exactly a Land Rover's life in the Southernmost City. Not that I have any reason to buy this machine, either, in case you were wondering, all steel plate and Naugahyde...very butch I'm sure.

Back to the streets and the stark crisp look of Key West under the sun yet free of pigment.

 

 

When I got home I was greeted by a stormy sunset and to take that picture in black and white would have been absurd.

She is too full of character to look right in anything less than blazing color...

Have a good weekend, even while I work.

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The Meadows

If you see these boats parked in the air like this you are on Eisenhower Drive with your back to the Meadows, one of the quieter residential neighborhoods in Key West. My favorite.

It has been a week that has brought death home for anyone reading the obituaries, what with the death of the movie reviewer and the prime minister, deaths heard across the world.

Roger Ebert's death put me squarely in the older generation and I understood this when I noted to a couple of younger colleagues that he had died and they were about as interested in my thoughts about Ebert as they are in my thoughts about computer games (I have no thoughts on that, last time I checked). I remember Siskel and Ebert's TV show even though I had no television in the 1980s, a time when computers were about as portable as refrigerators and a good deal less useful. Nevertheless I managed even though I lived on a boat and read newspapers and listened to the radio and once a week I would seek out a friend with a TV or a bar and I would see what the oracles had to say about the movies.

Siskel and Ebert represented a form of national conciousness that is impossible to imagine today. We live in a world fragmented into tiny slices of opinion and taste where the national movie critics swept us all up into a broad take on the national entertainment medium. Furthermore they wrote for competing newspapers in Chicago. Nowadays cities are lucky to have one paper, and luckier still if the newspaper actually tries to report anything more indepth than advertising copy. Nowadays I watch movie previews at the theater and they quote invisible critics whose opinion is absent from the national consciousness. Nowadays we can check rotten tomato on our pocket phone and get instant access to everything all at once. Preparing to sit down for a thirty minute TV review once a week would be as bizarre as expecting a kid to,live without a smart phone.

Ebert was adapting valiantly to this brave new world with what he hoped would be a media empire for the new generation. It was just his body that couldn't keep up with his infectious enthusiasm. Personally I can't imagine spending half a century doing any one thing let alone finding new words to define and redefine the same plots in new movies over and over again. And being keen to do it week after week. Amazing.

Then there was Margaret Thatcher a prime minister who divided Britain as deeply and as neatly as grand canyon all her own. She grew up formed by particular life experiences that shaped her politics and her bearing in public. She was a mass of contradictions and to listen to people who knew her personally versus those who knew her only through politics is to hear two different leaders described. I was never affected directly by her politics but I saw their effect. She caused huge amounts of pain and suffering for many who hate her to this day, but she also liberated a whole new class of go getters who adore her memory as well they might. The Lady Who Made Greed Look Good | Finance that's an article that reflects my views on her policies.

A lot of leftists thought the Falklands War was wrong but from my perspective she was dead on with that one. I could not imagine wanting to live in those unlovely islands set in the frozen belt of the South Atlantic but those who do love them dearly and they are as close to Celts of one sort or another as one can imagine, though they have the misfortune to sit next to Argentina, a country I am anxious to visit, that is Latin through and through and as unlike the Falklands as its possible to imagine. They aren't Argentine, the Falklands and never have been, and the 1982 invasion of the Falklands was a crutch to support a cruel and illegal dictatorship in Buenos Aires. Thatcher was right to fight back.

On the home front I read this obituary that set me to thinking Why Margaret Thatcher is hard to mourn | Politics | The Guardian

I think where she was strongest was in the simple fact of being a leader, someone with opinions and a desire to set them into motion. All of us today wonder where the leaders have gone no matter where we stand on the political divide. I think that's why Thatcher and Reagan are paired together. Until he lost his mind he too had a political idee fixe and led the nation towards it. That I agreed with neither of them doesn't alter the fact that leadership is a commodity missing in action these days. That their brand of right wing politics looks folksy and middle of the road today is simply the mark of how radical right wingers have become.

Nostalgia aside death always marks a transition and reminds us that we are the next generation in line to die. I lost a couple of friends over the last year, connections to the past that have slipped into oblivion. It's a reminder to forge new ties to the future. I avoid long time residents of the Keys, those people who start a conversation by enumerating how many years they have lived here. I think of Ebert's 47 years of movie criticism, a career he set out on when I was eight years old and I think of all the living I have done in that time. I could have settled in Key West in 1981 but in those pre-internet days Key West really was a fishing village and I had spent too much of my youth living in the boonies. I wanted the bright lights of California... How ironic it is that the Web has made remote living bearable for me, the itinerant gatherer of life experiences.

Nowadays of course, in the aggravating dissatisfaction of being human, I would like Key West to return to the somnolence of that time. The killjoys will point out that jobs were even more scarce and wages were worse etc... But being practical isn't the point. The memory of what was, illuminated by what is, that's the currency of nostalgia.

I like wandering Key West with my phone camera. Cheyenne doesn't always give me the time to spend contemplating my pictures but I do get a chance to spot the occasional oddity. It's a busy town what with the endless tourism and the load of dreams and desires it has to carry on its back daily, but it has quiet corners still, quiet times and opportunities for contemplation.

Key West still looks good, and truth be told I think sometimes Key West looks lot better now than it did. Money keeps wooden homes painted, there are more trees and greener landscaping than I see in pictures from an hundred years ago.

I suspect the future now is as dynamic as it has ever been. There is more open talk of sea level rise but six feet over a hundred years is too far away for immediate impact. For now here it is, green and white and blue, sinking under the weight of cruise ships and plans for more, busy tryingto stay afloat n a world economy sinking faster than the island chain.

Waiting at the end of the road for whatever comes next, for those that live to see it.

 

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Sun And Palms

I got an e-mail from Italy recently and Giovanni, my childhood buddy, reported he took the plunge and got himself a brand new BMW. A motorcycle this time, because he had recently replaced his BMW car with an Audi, as he finds German engineering keeps its resale value better than any other nationality in the field of internal combustion. Life in Italy he reports is dreary, and though he works as much as ever, he's a cardiologist, but the economy is sinking all around him and the weather sucks.He always makes reference to the eternal summer of life in the Keys, conveniently forgetting that roads here are flat and straight and not at all like the rides of our childhood across mountains, through valleys and past heaps of ancient monuments. I envy him the roads he has within minutes of his back door, he envies me this:Or this, when I apply a few fancy alterations contained within the camera and make a different shade of heat. I got home for work last night at 2:30 in the morning and Cheyenne was delighted to see me, unfortunately. I was hoping she would be asleep, curled up on her bed and snoring. No such luck. We set off up the street for a walk wrapped in the warmth of the 75 degree night under skies as black as pitch. Cheyenne wombled off up the street, wandering from verge to verge and back and forth turning the three quarter mile street into at least double that distance before she got to the large smelly dumpsters behind the gas station. We took a turn around the parking lot behind the Tiki Bar and stated the long haul back to the house.

That was when it occurred to me that perhaps the skies to the south had got a little darker than previously. Hmm. We ambled back, some of the urgency had left Cheyenne's pace as there were no delicious dumpster waiting for her at home. She laid down in the street for a while and I spent the time looking out across the salt ponds and the lights of Summerland Key reflecting on the water. It was a nice peaceful moment and I was enjoying it until the first drops hit. It started as drizzle, a pleasant scotch mist as it were. But then it suddenly got tropical on me and the curtain of water fell upon us like a waterfall. We were two hundred yards short of the protection of the space under the house and by the time we got there we were soaked. It felt just like summer, sudden isolated downpours mark rainy season. We scampered up the stairs and toweled off none the worse for wear. I heard the wind rain slashing the house and it felt good. Bed beckoned.

That's the sort of weather that makes Giovanni envious. Where he lives rain is cold and stops play on the motorcycle. For me a shower can be refreshing, or alternatively I give a pretty good impression of a drowned rat after seconds under the downpour ....

Well it was four o'clock in the morning my dog was laughing at me and I wanted I get to bed, what can I say. I was going to post oprygirl's picture here but she looked rather suave and not at all like a drowned rat.

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Good And Bad In Key West

I dropped my wife off at work and drove on into Key West from Stock Island. Cheyenne needed her morning walk so I started by stopping at The Pines, a shady spot near the airport, which gives a pleasant view across the ocean as the sun comes up. And there, on the horizon, a cruise ship shuffling up the ship channel.

Cheyenne soon lost interest so we headed downtown, her preferred hunting ground, and went sniffing around. I found this mark I the cement, perfectly formed and intelligible yet lacking any purpose. Boza was here seems a rather inadequate memorial in a town where Boza is a well know last name.

I love these notes that pop up in odd corners of the city. Keep off my fruit, I prefer to give it to my friends. The endless warnings to beware the utterly harmless, possibly imaginary, dog. And that perennial favorite asking we not block driveways. Then there are the more personal notes.

Well, it is a bit of a lump on a narrow street!

People get seduced by the beauty of old town but the profusion of signs entreating and pleading and demanding and threatening hint at the reality of close quarters living.

One of the other irritants that pop up in the endless litany of complaints are the leaf blowers. I have enough engines in my life already and I don't need any more so I use a machete, clippers, a broom and a rake. I am not alone apparently.

Green white and blue, the colors of the Keys. It's supposed to be mid eighties by day and mid seventies by night into the foreseeable future. Excellent.

Then there are the feral cats that litter the city, literally. Feed and spay would be the sensible long term plan for an improved outlook but I certainly don't blame the soft hearted for carrying out half the program. Some strays do better than others.

Then with one quick click of the display panel the camera transports me to another city, or perhaps the same city in another time. Windsor Lane looking toward the Olivia Street grocery.

Bamboo can't be native to the Keys, I know that much but there again a botanic failure like myself can be fairly certain I have never lived in a habitat native to the bamboo. That hasn't stopped me from liking the stuff. I have heard there is a kind of cane that doesn't spread out of control and I think I'd like to plant a stand for myself. A hedge against future next door neighbors.

It's a funny thing but because I live in the Keys some people think I am supposed to be if not an expert at least conversant with the flora if not the fauna. However as I never tire of saying I have no interest in storing lists of names in my head, so horticulture and I are barely on nodding terms. Just because I live here doesn't mean I'm going to change the habits of a lifetime and suddenly start collecting things and names and so forth.

Island Bicycles had a sign up indicating they are now keeping summer hours. Bloody hell, spring was short. Bring on the humidity somebody.

 

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