Tiring My Dog On And Off Love Lane

I am not a fan of Facebook. I have an account, I think, but I find it intrusive to a degree that irritates me, and yet it is also a space that doesn't allow for reflection or extended thoughts.others disagree with me, billions of people actually like Facebook.

I tried Instagram too until I discovered it was overrun by Facebook and he they wanted to make money off the pictures submitted to the service. That got my allergies running rampant so I dumped Instagram.

I like my own page on the Web, my place to despoil my pictures, my ruminations and my memories. It is not an easy thing for people to maintain a web page it seems, a arrangement that I find relaxing and thus self perpetuating. Love Lane Jack used to keep a rhyming blog, a page unique among the unique, a thing of particular interest, a mish mash of pictures and politics and blasphemy all mixed in with insight and humor. above Solaris Hill .

The page is gone, left for dead on the electronic battlefield of ideas and in its place Jack has forged ahead on the dreaded Facebook. Whatever works I am sad to say, but I miss the ribald irreverent thought provoking poetry on the new page. (2) Love Lane Jack

Life goes on and so does my eleven year old Labrador.

I thought of the following picture as a study in white, the peculiar lengthened Conch cottage, added on as money and desire allowed. Not exactly McMansions!

A vast spacious empty lot, devoid of parked cars except the elderly and still bright scarlet Alfa Romeo Spyder.

The idea of one human family gets a tad bit frayed around the edges from time to time but I did like humor the sticker posted over a defaced No Trespassing sign.

This cheerful dumpster sits in Fausto's paking lot, to cheer up grocery customers. Faustos Key West | Home

This sign caused me to chuckle. Oops! Scaring off the customers won't work!

My sense of humor causes me to enjoy irony even in death, that most fearsome affliction of even the faithful. Death comes to us all but Trespassing on it is frowned upon at Key West's largest funeral home. From time to time of course I have to call out the on duty undertaker when police officers come across a body. No matter how ungodly the hour the voice answering the undertaker's phone is always a voice of a man wide awake, calm, and ready to help. I have great admiration for undertakers, they deal with people in terrible shape and they do it superbly.

The Federal Building on Simonton Street is lovely in its limestone magnificence and then your eyes are drawn to the ghastly security measures that demean the beauty and solidity, as though this were a fortified foreign legation not a customs and court house dispensing the Law.

This lovely grassy knoll is a few blocks from the Federal Building. In point of fact it is across Lazy Way Lane from Schooner Wharf Bar.

The former model home for the proposed development by a group of failed local investors has been torn down to make ready for a new hotel. Oh well, the open space will be nice as long as it lasts.

I frequently come across dog walkers who fear an encounter with my happy Labrador. Dogs are the gods of frolic but so few of their owners know it. En garde!

Gecko, anole, or miniature iguana. You decide.

An elderly Cuban dude rolled up on a bicycle while my dog was rooting around in his bicycle parking spot and I was busy taking a picture of yet another pair of abandoned shoes. Where do they all come from, I ask myself?

The Cuban dude smiled as I reeled in my errant dog. At first I thought he was, as everyone is, afraid of my hound. Instead he kept smiling at her happy face, parked his bike and sloped off into his house. Cheyenne and I went back to Love Lane to find the car.

Key West Diary: Love Lane

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Walking On Water

You don't have to go far in Key West to find dramatic seascapes. This one I took facing west from Truman Waterfront, looking across the Navy Basin towards the harbor.

The skies are usually blue around here, unless it is threatening sturm und drang thunder lightning and rain.

I enjoy the play of sunlight through the wispy cotton wool overhead and I spend too much time peering overhead as I go about my business down here.

The old coast guard cutter Mohawk has long since departed the seawall, dragged to Sanibel Island to be sunk unceremoniously to attract divers to the Lee County coast. It was got rid of to make way for a marina planned for the area now stymied by a firm no thanks by the US Navy which controls access to the waters of the Navy Basin. All that's left are these deck guns painted the same shade of gray, incongruously decorated with a bottle of fabric...softener? Most unwarlike.

One day not too long in the future the city wants to have a pedestrian boardwalk running the length of the waterfront, from Fort Zachary Taylor to the south, to Trumbo Road to the north. I look forward to it. At the moment the waterfront is a bit chopped up, with large hotels like Ocean Key dominating the waterfront skyline.

Mallory Square's bricks retain some of the old ambiance of a working waterfront, marred by high visibility clothing and the ubiquitous rehydration device, bottled tap water. High Viz is highly fashionable but curmudgeons like me wonder why anyone expects others should see them when thy are out enjoying themselves. High Viz is a cult requirement among novice motorcyclists . I figure it's up to me to pay attention, not to expect bored drones in cages to notice me. Try telling that to a devotee of fluorescent yellow.

Old Key West is always celebrated, but always as a way to pander for dollars. I like history because the past is a guide to the present. It makes sense of life the way religion works for believers.

On the subject of history Key West has its own Wall Street:

When I'm answering 911 calls I wish each building in Key West had a sign like this. The a swer to my inevitable question: Where are you? would come easily...

The answer to the question of where Cheyenne is at any time is: usually rooting around in the bushes.

I am always surprised by how much clutter occupies the lives of the residentially challenged, overflowing bicycles and shopping carts abound in Key West.

Some kind soul donated a snack to my dog. And not even hidden in the bushes.

The pause gave me a few minutes to compose some pictures through the Mallory Square railings.

This guy on the walkway was enjoying a morning in Key West a d we came abreast of him I gave him a cheery good morning. He looked startled. I guess men in pink Crocs are looking for sex wherever he comes from. Glad I don't live there or my life would be extra complicated.

Every morning Key West is ready for the tourist influx.

The Westin:

Once the boardwalk is complete there will be lots of places to amble and stop and look and think.

Not that you can't do that right now.

I was looking idly at the Cusotms House Museum windows, enjoying their beauty when I oticed the photo. Hmm, homo-erotic art? Really? Ah, Key West has an image to keep up.

Key West and its feral cats. They are smarter than a lot of people because they aren't scared of Cheyenne.

And then we come back, by way of Truman Annex to the Navy Basin and the seawall that separates it from the Westin Marina.

Amazing views.

My Key West; everyone's Key West, there for the viewing.

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Key West Labor

Well, the Memorial Day holiday came and went and around here that event was marked by a  great many people coming to town and spending money. In other parts of the country I am told people now have social permission to wear white as it is now officially summer, a season that ends on Labor Day a few months hence.

Therefore it seems to me that as we go into summer, a season that will be all too brief for the poor unfortunates who live in the snow belt, perhaps we should look forward to the great September Holiday marking the end of it all and take note of Key West labor. Above we see a gardener, quite possibly a transplant from somewhere cold and nasty like, say Wisconsin doing good work in the garden of a Key West attraction I still have yet to check out. Below we see work in progress, figuratively speaking, at a gate to Truman Annex knocked into the middle of next month by a car driver who apparently got lost or didn't see it or something. I don't know if the gate won but neither came out of the encounter well as I recall from the newspaper.

Its a stretch as far as being work related, but it seemed to me the cyclist was on her way to work. Telegraph Lane is not on the recommended tourist routes around Key West  and near Duval Street, but it does serve people who work in bars and the strip club  known as The Red Garter.

Above we see the worker on the best set of wheels one can have in Old Town stopping for a chat on the way to work. That is one of the best aspects for many people of working in the tourist trade in key West. After a while no one is a stranger and the low pay, lack of benefits and long hours are compensated for by the camaraderie of the workforce. I liked the Employee of the Month parking space, below, seen in the rear of the Hard Rock Café, and then finding out the employee in question rides a scooter and no one raises an eyebrow. In Key West scooters are wheels, not status symbols.

Silly me, I stopped to say good morning to this guy, an engineer in a former life who now threads spools for an embroidery company. I don't know how it happened, I blame Cheyenne who poked her nose in, but he started talking and didn't stop for fifteen long minutes as he expounded on his philosophy of life about the Federal Reserve, Debt and imminent economic collapse of everything (including presumably the embroidered cap market). Which is why I prefer not to get into conversations, monologues actually, with strangers. Not that I disagreed with him necessarily but it was a cascading waterfall of words and I nearly drowned.

The restaurants of Key West require all the usual maintenance but only if you walk early enough will you will get to see the elusive common-or-garden lesser known Key West worker. I find it ironic I have the most enjoyable, stable job of my life in a town where stable work is by definition an anomaly unless you are the person hiring the workers. Perhaps this guy is the employee of the month at Hard Rock? Who knows...I photographed him as we walked out of the courtyard in front of the Red Barn theater.  

There is a little alley off Simonton, actually there are several it turns out, but this one is less of a  street and more of a driveway. The business is one of long standing, Monroe County Glass and Mirror that operates almost out of sight in this courtyard. You'll see their trucks all over town. Glass is a fragile thing I'm told, and most probably mirrors are too.

Delivery trucks are supposed to be off Duval by noon and this one had hours to go before the deadline. I have come to feel rather dubious about restaurants that buy food from bulk suppliers considering all the weird stuff we read about adulterated foods world wide.

Somebody has to clean the outside of Sloppy Joe's and it happens to be him, suddenly aware of a large pig in a fur coat near his vulnerable ankles. 

 And then there are those whose job it is to sit around and slowly watch the day unfurl.

 That sort of defines me, considering I work nights when most people sleep. Roll on Labor Day.

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