Toxic Triangle

Our computer aided dispatch system at work has the name of every business in town listed in its search function. You call 911 and say you're in front of say, a convenience store and we know exactly where you re. Clever, huh? Of course you could just give the street and number or the intersection but for tourists in particular the feature is literally a life saver. It's common in emergency centers everywhere, of course. You could tell me you are at the ferry terminal, 100 Grinnell Street or the Buquebus (boo-kay-bus), which was the name of the Argentine company that first ran ferries to Fort Myers from here. The boat shown below takes people to the Dry Tortugas, but anyway...It's the ferry terminal.

Then there are the weird places, and I find out they are weird when I tell a Trainee "It's at The Ramp," and the Trainee looks quizzical. That's when I know some people don't remember the old boat launch ramp at the corner of Bertha and South Roosevelt on the south side of the city. They don't usually know what the Buquebus is either. I love the mysteries of CAD.

Looking at two pigeons (not chickens at least!) chasing food particles invisible to the naked eye I became aware, slowly, that this spot is in CAD and is most likely not known of a lot of people as The Toxic Triangle. The electrical generating tation on her side of Trumbo Road used to spew left over nasty stuff into the waters here. Ooh, look! An old pipe...

The Steam Plant is now a bunch of unsellable luxury condos. They were offered initially for more than three million. They have six left according to the sign out front and one and a quarter million will get you one if you want. Plus taxes I guess if people like that bother with piddly details like the glue that keeps the community together.

The seawall at the Toxic Triangle used to be a free home to a motley crew of boats, homes floating in a peculiar sludge that was supposed to be seawater. I visited my friend's boat but never swam in the water. nowadays the water looks great and smells like ocean. And the US Coastguard lives across the water from the seawall that is now devoid of water rats eyeing out a living. This smart dude seen below was heading for the base half an hour before they broadcast the recorded national anthem over a tinny speaker to start the day. A proper military band would be much cooler, but everything is a victim of technology and budgets these days.

I enjoy Trumbo Road, a slightly shambolic street untrimmed and very useful as it gives access to e school district headquarters and the landing craft that ferry supplies to Sunset Key the true home of one percenters in Key West.

I like this side of the harbor rather than sterile Sunset Key. Had I the millions I'd buy an apartment here rather than over there. Here it's lively, chaotic from time to time, messy and yet no longer toxic. Who says there is no progress?

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My Life With Aspergers Syndrome

I was amused to read recently that the American Psychiatric Association has declared that Asperger's Syndrome no longer exists, which is unfortunate for those among us who function passably well with what is now known as high functioning autism. Asperger's was diagnosed by an Austrian doctor at the end of World War Two, not the most auspicious time to be trying to figure out how people's heads got messed up, yet the autism spectrum diagnosis has gained currency and has spread like an oil slick in a time when we are told most people have got mental issues. Consider how we are expected to live, in a world of restrictive standards of attractiveness, declining financial expectations, centralized wealth and manufactured fear and uncertainty spread about on TV by our avaricious and narcissistic leaders...Little wonder is it then that we see people going crazy. Autism? ADD, ADHD and on and on and on. But not Asperger's they say, not anymore.

I was just getting used to the idea that I have Asperger's when the medics pulled the rug from under my diagnosis. I am not at all sure I want to have high functioning autism thanks, not in a world where I think of people with autism as lacking communication skills and struggling to cope with the tasks and irritants of daily life in ways we stereotype but that we feel sure we don't share. People with autism are stereotyped and shunned in our world, the world that reveres youth and social gaiety. People with autism don't function they want to believe, in a society that demands conformity. That's not me, I'm not "autistic" I insist, but unfortunately Asperger's is me, and it makes meeting people and dealing with every day social encounters a high stress affair. Asperger's Syndrome Symptoms in Children, Teens, Adults I can talk, I can communicate, I don't usually flap my hands in public, I trained myself to stop avoiding cracks in the sidewalk. I see patterns where others don't care and I talk too much and too long. I dread meeting people. I have Asperger's Syndrome.

All the more credit to GarytheTourist for being persistent and pulling me out of my shell to sit down to lunch with him on Greene Street. The food at Solo was an attractant I grant you...short rib beef tacos and fries covered I was told with sugar and salt. Little wonder America is addicted to freedom fries.

Gary had a seafood flatbread, a form of thin crust pizza minus tomato sauce... And over food we talked. Gary lives in Nashville and has had a fascination with Key West for decades. This is where he comes for vacation with his family who makes the most of the seaside, the turquoise waters and life in a small town freed from the stress of normal daily life. As a result he is fascinated by the travails of life in Key West when it is daily life.

I find Gary's life breathtaking in its complexity, his job is to keep people alive yet asleep while they are having their insides reorganized by surgeons, a responsibility that makes me queasy at the mere thought, and on top of that he manages the lives of a family in the throes of maturity not yet attained. For someone like me living in Key West is a piece of cake compared to juggling so many responsibilities at once. If you can do all that, saving lives dealing with college, surviving occasional snow falls, being married and all, why then, living in Key West is nothing. How can he find the interest to follow my meager life in the Southernmost City? Odd that, and he decidedly doesn't have Aspergers.

I offered to have lunch on Monday but Gary couldn't and as he was leaving soon my back up was Tuesday and I had an appointment to get my teeth cleaned. Of course I started checking the time carefully as the moment approached for us to leave. Being late causes anxiety in most people with high functioning autism. Gary took one spoon of Key Lime pie and left me the rest as we dawdled over coffee. I wanted two more hours instead of having to get on the Vespa and riding across town. That I am Gary's portal to Key West the rest of he year while he is at home freaks me out a bit. He shares none of my political views but he never reproaches me for them. He must be a terrific Dad.

I don't mind the dentist. My logical mind knows that dealing with teeth is better on my terms than on the tooth's terms so I enjoy getting them cleaned and inspected. I have been going to the same office for years and I have no clue what my tooth cleaner's name is. I have learned over the years to pay attention when people tell me their names and I try to create a word/image in my mind to associate the name with the face, and if I remember to do that I am safe. I know a woman called Marion whom I hardly ever meet. I thought of Robin Hood when she introduced herself and her name has stuck. Bloody uselessly, but there we are. This important woman in the dentist's office is one instance where I forgot to do the mind/image trick and now twice a year I let this charming mother and wife and all round cheerful chatty sweet dental hygienist into my mouth anonymously. Lots of people do that but I obsess about my incompetence and shrugging social failures off is hard for me to do. It is a struggle to stop the self defeating tape from playing over and over in my head. My blog rarely features people because they are so hard for me to read and in the end places are easier to deal with. Hence an empty South Roosevelt Boulevard:

I'm lucky, more than I realised for a long time. My wife understands and puts up with these shortcomings. My work is ideally suited to me, my desire for routine, my pleasure in paying attention to details and despite working in a room with two others the demands of the job give me the ability to be alone, to enjoy solitude in the middle of the work shift. I get to work aloneon my screens while also oddly enough being part of the team. I am half the ideal employee, I hate being late, and I take my commitments seriously. Yet my boss knows I will melt down when critiqued and she has taken the time to learn to handle me, which is the most amazing good fortune. I keep asking her if she is thinking of leaving because I know life at work will get tough if she "moves on." She loves a man far away and I dread the day she decides to move.

I started this blog with no real idea of what I was doing or why. I got to hate public internet forums where logic and facts took a back seat to emotion and insults and I wanted my own quiet space that I controlled. so I started a web page of my own with no ulterior motive to sell things or push a point of view. I never imagined I would be feeding the compulsive need of the National Security Agency to immorally monitor my every move. I wish them joy of it and I wish my fellow Americans were more outraged, even slightly outraged that the government behaves this way. My Asperger's mind calculates that three people were killed by the Chechen nutters in the Boston bombing. Four thousand people die every year on motorcycles in this country. 600,000 Americans have died since 9/11 in cars on our roads. Yet we have to be monitored everywhere in violation of the Fourth Amendment for our "safety?" Makes no sense to me, but neurotypicals and their reasoning never make much sense to me. And when I find out how we are being watched not just by corporations but by our elected leaders I figure, what the hell - what do you want to know? Here I am. This is my silly little web page. Enjoy the pictures. Smathers Beach covered in dead seaweed:

I was asked once would I do this blog if no one read it? I guess the answer is yes. The compulsion that makes me post every day as close to the same time as I can make it (midnight Eastern) is the same compulsion that makes me wash up the dishes as soon as the meal is done. I do it because it helps me make sense of things. I see old essays and old pictures and like Maid Marian they trigger memories for me, where I was, what I was doing though not necessarily what I was feeling as those memories tend to make me uncomfortable. It is a diary for me. From time to time I look at Key West Lou's page and I find the constant pursuit of people and stimulation and excitement utterly exhausting just to read. Never mind for me to try to live that life. Key West as seen by a sensible neurotypical: Key West Lou | My Life in Key West the absence of prepositions and pronouns gives me hives but at this stage in my life I know lazy grammar is my issue and my problem. Weird sentence structure and odd word usage are characteristics of Asperger's too, though in the pursuit of accuracy we sometimes come off as stilted and portentous (see what I mean?). Check out my home grown pineapple:

I guess I wrote this essay, uncharacteristically personal, by way of apology. Meeting Gary reminded me that having lunch is a normal activity, and it can be pleasant, enjoyable even. I would never make the first move but if you want to get in touch by all means try. I shall try to overcome my hesitation. I warn you, people with Asperger's Syndrome tend to talk to much, don't understand social cues and don't use appropriate facial expressions. All of which is fine for a 911 operator but makes meeting people hellishly difficult. People usually end up getting pissed off at me, which is a huge encouragement to keep myself to myself, and to write my blog. Neurotypicals don't like to acknowledge Asperger's, most people I know shrug me off as exaggerating or making a big deal out of nothing, or of being trendy (me!) so in my real life I only bring it up to people I care about. They aren't many, to the rest I just shrug it off as a party piece or a joke if it happens to come up when my wife is laughing off my inappropriateness. The worst is when people say I use Aspergers as an excuse to cover that inappropriate behavior. Luckily I have reached a point where isolation actually suits me. My wife jokes that if I were sentenced to prison time I would beg for solitary confinement. She's not wrong either.

I was surprised by some misconceptions Gary had about my life as we talked over lunch. It surprised me as I feel so naked and transparent when I meet people, especially people I've met before. I've met Gary but he mostly knows me via the Web. Partly because I can't read social cues, and partly because I don't know what to say I get far too inward looking. I got a lot out of a two hour face to face lunch. This essay is an effort to pass it on. If you meet some inept human who can't make eye contact the chances are they aren't a serial killer or a child molester. They are just lost and need a little help getting to the other side of the street. In a world dominated by the electronic generation of fearfulness and "terror" that simple human lesson is worth remembering. I wish the NSA were listening. They too could find better ways of doing their job than violating the constitution and spying on their inept little neighbors. At some level we are more likely to have a little Aspergers not terrorism in our DNA.

Asperger's Resources:
http://www.aspergers.com/index.html

http://www.johnrobison.com/purchase-books.php

http://www.wrongplanet.net/

http://www.rdos.net/eng/Aspie-quiz.php

I dislike abbreviations, they tend to infantilize, so I don't use the term "Aspie" which is popular. I think of myself as someone with Aspergers, but other people don't approve of that as they feel it puts one in a ghetto. As you wish.

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The Open Road

It was a lovely day. I stood there while Cheyenne sniffed around. I took pictures and cropped them and I realized they told a story, or several stories. Two wheeled travel, by bike scooter and motorbike. One picture is a duplicate, cropped differently. The first picture was me driving Cheyenne home, about to embark on the forty foot tall Niles Channel Bridge and marveling at how unusually empty the highway was.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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State Road 939A Closed

I haven't been down this road recently principally owing to the fact that Cheyenne isn't particularly fond of it. Wasn't I surprised to see these signs closing the road.

This will be no more Key West Diary: Paved Road Ends . Well, bugger.

Cheyenne is pretty clear about what she wants and what she does not want. When she is tired or bored she stops and we turn around. It's her walk, her time so she calls the shots. And she called an end to this walk almost as soon as we started. Thus proving my earlier point that she is not fond of walking this old state road.

Which makes me wonder how and why they, whoever they are decided to close this state road, a public roadway, to traffic. People liked to drive it so I guess that was reason enough to close it. It was easy enough to share with cars as speeds are slow giving walkers and cyclists plenty of time to get out of the way. A little driving adventure had to be shut down. What a boring sanitized world is closing in on us. I like walking but not everyone does. Too bad for them.

There are plenty of low flying bugs around here too, and forgetting the chemicals is a capital offense. Death by insect injection.

I remembered to apply my own before I got out the car. Fat load of good it did! The bugs seek out the tiny strips of skin not actually sprayed. I saw one trying to probe under my fingernail...

There's a big old compound at the end of paved section of the street, past the KOA camp ground. A multi million dollar mosquito breeding ground, poor buggers. Mind you they likely only use this vast spacious residence for a few weeks in winter so that solves that for the most part.

Cheyenne is a tough old bird and she gets more annoyed at me for brushing insects off her nose than she does at the mosquitoes for landing there.

It turned out to be not much of a walk. Cheyenne ate some grass then went and stood by the car door. I got the hint.

We stopped at the junction with the Overseas Highway, across from Mangrove Mama's Restaurant and we took off on a second attempt at a walk. This one I knew she'd like, looking for bait fish left on the old Flagler footbridge. To get there we had to walk through the construction where they are digging to install sewer pipes covered with a new bike path.

It was muddy and hot and mosquito free. Cheyenne was happy and that dissipated some of my grumpiness about the road closure.

 

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Dredging Key West

This October 1st City of Key West voters get to decide whether or not to get their city involved in a study to consider the possibility of widening the ship channel in such a way as to accomodate the latest generation of huge  cruise ships. As  you  might imagine this issue has got more than one pair of knickers in a twist and rightfully so. I have the rather distinct feeling this study, if it is approved will certainly lead to actual widening and dredging of the harbor channel at an initial cost of tens of millions of dollars with an endless future of endless dredging to follow to keep it open.  And if that happens I believe the nature and future of Key West will be irrevocably altered.

The issue of cruise ships in Key West always brings on heated debate among residents. there are many interests in town that want expanded cruise ship visits using the argument that cruise ship vistors tend to return for longer andmore lucrative stays later, however those not directly invovled complain the cruise ships block the views across the water, crowd Lower Duval to an intolerable degree, and bring no visible financial benefit to anyone outside the few blocks surrounding Mallory Square. At the same time they say cruise ship visitors lower the tone of the overall tourist experience and make Key West a less desirable, less sophisticated tourist detination. 

The picture above I found on the Italian ANSA website on a story about cruise ship protests in the city of Venice where residents want to keep the Most Serene Republic less crowded with cruise ship visitors. Venetians, unlike Key Westers tend to make their oppostion less cerebral and more...physical. Perhaps they are more emotionally involved than we are in the future of our respective cities.

It has long been my contention that Key West has lacked vision about its future. Lately Mayor Cates seems to have been working towards some more coherent plan not least with his determinatuion to make the attractive and centrally located Glynn Archer School the new city hall, over numerous  objections. Key West as a whole has never been a leader, or even a follower, in many of the civic struggles across this country as communities have sought ways to make towns more livable and more centrally focussed on how to attract populations to live work and shop in downtown. The flight to the suburbs of the second half of the twentieth century has been reversed in a  few forward looking towns, but Key West has been content to rest on its civic laurels of fortunate architecture and 19th century urban planning left behind by an extensive and largely accidental network of lanes and streets in Old Town. Indeed plans are in the works to open a shopping mall at Mile Marker Nine in defiance of current trendy trends to rebuild city centers as places of commerce.

I myself won't vote in the referendum on the study, not least because I don't live in the city where I work. On the whole I am opposed to channel widening and increasing the girth of ships and the doubling the number of passengers they carry. On the other hand I do work in the city and for the city and loss of income would be obviously an issue. On the face of it the problem seems simple: how to increase income or at least not lose  money in an uncertain economy with or without thousands more cruise ship passengers.

Looked at dispassionately I am not directly affected by the sudden influx of three thousand  cruise ship passengers of a morning from say the Westin Dock or the Navy Pier at the Outer Mole. They swarm the end of Duval Street and go home with an obscene t-shirt or the ability to say they had a drink at "Hemingway's favorite bar" in Key West (whichever one that may be these days!) and for someone like me living thirty miles away, why care? Yet I believe there could be assorted negative impacts on this city if  cruise ship traffic increases, and increased income may not be compensation enough. Indeed there is a question of how much increased income mega cruise ships will bring as opposed to lost income from upscale visitors who will be put off by Key West's loss of exclusivity to numerous massive cruise ship  visits.

Environmentalists argue there are inherent dangers to the reef already massively stressed out by human impacts. They say bigger ships with more dredge spoil will cloud waters even more and kill off  more coral, thus wrecking more fish habitats and reducing Key West's tourism appeal... to anglers and boaters and birders.

The thing is, this is a city that rolls on habit. People who make money off the status quo can't imagine making any changes for fear of upsetting the delicate balance of monied older people who come for the winters, families who come in the summer cruise ship passengers who come all year round and assorted special events that attract disparate groups like motorcyclists, swimmers and various authors and artists. To switch gears in any major way is to have to think really hard about how to sustain a new and possibly more challenging balance of incomes in a town that doesn't manage the "vision thing" very well at all. Too many opinions shouted too loudly leads to a civic inability to make plans and follow through on them. Things tend to get done by guess and by God and devil take the hindmost.

Gentrification is another buzzword that freaks people out. There is that notion that catering to wealth leaves the workers and the families and the ordinary among us out in the cold. In a town that by many measures is among the most costly in the state, adding to the burden of the working class seems grossly unfair and likely counter productive. So we eschew the lower class mass tourism of cruise ships; then what? Do we turn Key West into Naples, or Royal Palm Beach and seek out the one percent crowd who provide work for gardeners maids and pool cleaners? Ultimately they are the kind of residents and visitors who don't particularly want to mingle with hoi polloi off cruise ships.

Its the curse and the blessing of Key West that it is an actual living livable town, filled with people from all walks of life, with ratty houses next to mansions and crappy t shirt shops nudging upscale art galleries. Visitors who expect a more rarified visit can leave feeling disappointed yet visitors who keep coming back want to stay in Key West because it is such a peculiar mixture of the urbane and the slothful. I think of that gruesome bar called the Chart House which is such a dive yet it is located, struggling apparently in its new guise, in the hoity toity grounds of the Pier House resort.

So if voters decide to vote against studying widening the channel tour ship operators predict financial Armageddon, and their opponents predict environmental and social Armageddon if they vote in favor. Which conundrum makes me glad I live in the county. It has also been noted that the rather odd date of October First means a fair few voters will be out of town as October tends to be very quiet and locals like to take vacations when there is no money to be made. Conspiracy? Probably not as the Governor in an effort to boost his relection chances next year has to popular acclaim reinstated absentee and early voting in full force.

In the end though the vote has to go one way or the other and one way or the other things will change around here, once again, inexorably and inevitably. And this vote will give residents of the city a chance to decide which way to go. Good luck to them.

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