Decorating Christmas Key West

I got a comment on the night decorations essay about how odd a reader Up North found it to see palms with Christmas decorations. Well yes, that seems reasonable. On the other hand if one were local literalist one would have to find it odd to see conifers and snow in Palestine.

Nevertheless these symbols are practically universal in the age of television of electrons so we see these for trees and stuff everywhere and we all know. What they stand for.

This place used to be an elaborate palace of decorative efforts but the elderly occupants as I recall decided they had had enough of the effort and nowadays a drooping flag is as much color as one sees. I understand their decision, time passes for all of us, but there it is.

And Mature provides where humans fall short. Bougainvillea is not exactly poinsettias but they look the part. That one can buy poinsettias here like anywhere in the US is all part of the universal oddness of Christmas.

The deflated Chrostmas decorations are the worst. They seem so undignified and their time on display isso limited...

This one needed no inflating though I thought the frown was a bit...unseasonable.

Ah yes, Palestine year of our lord, year zero as represented by snowy windows. Actually I thought this view of a business window on Truman Avenue Key West, year 2013 looked quite passably like a representation of a Victorian scene from possibly the well worn Christmas Carol story set in 19th century London.

I liked this attempt at a recall to the religious sentiments of the season, however it is I suppose up to me the atheist to point out that the resurrection story is a little later in the cycle of holidays. Even the son of god has to be born before he can be resurrected.

And here we are, not Palm Sunday, just Key West...

As a Christmas scene it does come up bit short doesn't it? All thanks to our inbuilt expectations of snow and sleigh bells and pine trees and scarves and thank you very much Charles Dickens at al.

Christmas doesn't feel like Christmas in Key West no matter how many plastic snowflakes you hang on the porch.

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A Study In Sunset

My Android camera continues to astonish me.

Especially at sunset.

And Cheyenne is just happy to be out and about on a warm winter evening.

She lets me play with my camera while I let her chase fish bait cooked by the sun.

And then change the settings and we get a blue sunset.

Taken on my favorite footbridge, connecting Cudjoe and Sugarloaf Keys.

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Key West: " Hookers & Blow!" Oh My!

There is a little storm brewing in the teacup that is Key West about a short interview segment of a program purported to be news, on the notoriously "Fair and Balanced" Fox network. A five minute segment of street interviews broadcast on the Bill O'Reilly program damns Key West eternally as a modern day Abilene inhabited by lawless refugees from the real world who live on the margins and who in the words of one brilliant interview subject do "hookers and blow" for entertainment. We have no Internet, bank accounts or lawful pursuits they tell us, much to our own surprise.

Apparently Fox interviewed "normal "people according to the Mayor, a normal person self described, whose words of wisdom were cut possibly because they were plodding and mundane as politicians are wont to be when trying to impress strangers with reasons to visit their town. When the editors sat down with the footage they got in Key West what do you suppose they found? A gold mine of easily directed half wits ready to say anything to get on TV. And they did say anything:

Watters' World: The Key West Edition - YouTube

The thing is the humor works because there is a grain of truth in the gross exaggerations presented in the story. You may have heard the joke about what you call the guy wearing a suit in Key West? Defendant...But on the other hand I don't own a suit or a jacket or even a tie and I do not feel the lack of them. And how many Americans do you know go to work each morning like this guy, hauling his wares behind him like a 19th century traveler?

He has a job, he sets up shop on Eaton Street and sells carved Conch shells. In this crazy town it is possible to make a good living in the tourist trade, but straight people like me also work "normal" jobs just like you. Unfortunately there are the wandering homeless folk who shuffle through our lives daily hauling their own baggage of mental illness and despair. They aren't colorful or funny though they get lumped in with the drunks and idiots who make Key West look bad on the TV.

In the newspaper article some few ingenuous locals wanted to get on their hind legs and make a flap about this silly five minutes of make believe on their all important telly. I think calmer heads will prevail and the whole mess will be allowed to fade quietly from view. I mean really, if someone wants to make a fuss what will the outcome be? There is evidence everywhere that Key West is not in the mainstream and that alcohol and begging go hand in hand. The really good bits are there too of course, but short attention span TV can't winkle them out in a couple of minutes of make believe.

There was the usual claim that police are nowhere to be seen, which is another fine distortion. Police move people along, arrest some when they have cause and sooner rather than later they are back on the streets just like before. I remember some civic leaders bruited plans to try a comprehensive approach to dealing with the bums involving law enforcement, social workers the courts and probation but the effort died before it was born. So the roundabout continues merrily along. You gotta blame somebody for it, right? Might as well be the police, as usual.

The chamber of commerce has issued a statement by not issuing a statement and telling the newspaper to forget it. It seems unlikely to me that anyone will base their vacation decisions on what one addle pated talking head thinks about this city, especially as he says he has been visiting Key West for decades. Wow, O'Reilly, aren't you the daredevil! I think he would be really edgy if he went to Mogadishu on vacation, or to volunteer at Mother Teresa's in Calcutta. Key West is more likely to give you crabs than see you robbed, though anything is possible because this is the real world and bad people live here too.

And I think that's where the problem lies. I doubt Bill O'Reilly stays anywhere outside of Sunset Key, the neatly groomed, terminally dull one percent enclave in the harbor free of chickens, bums and life itself. But this image of Key West as a colorful lawless frontier town is a myth that is propagated by people who want to show themselves as edgy and hip. So it is in their interest to portray this sleepy little town as some place only resourceful slightly reckless adventurers would visit. Phooey! Check out the way even the middle class have to rough it in Key West, that is if they don't choose intimate five star guest houses...

Too feckless for families? Really? Tell that to Disney who bring families to Key West on their cruise ships...the idea that Key West is unsuitable for the milquetoast cruisers seems absurd, not least because city leaders had been pushing hard for channel widening for even bigger ships, at the urging of the corporations that see Key West as a desirable destination! Cruise ships don't pile up in edgy destinations, folks! Behind the ship you can see Sunset Key, home to the likes of O'Reilly and his ilk, far from the worries of daily Key West "lawlessness."

The other thing is everyone has to claim a piece of Key West. "I've been visiting since 1971," says the idiot presenter proudly, and one is supposed to wonder how he gets out alive every time. Yet they chose not to interview the bums that sit in Mallory Square and read books! Hey we have a better class of bum too! I'll bet some one on the streets of Key West, outside of myself, understands corporate tax fraud as clearly as food stamp fraud. You just have to want to make that point. Which is why I don't actually have TV service at my home. I have better things to do than be indoctrinated by advertising, thanks. So let's see, I live in Key West, I have a tattoo, I drink alcohol, I don't have a suit or tie, I don't have cable, I ride a scooter, and I don't like living on the mainland. Shit, I guess I fit the stereotype?

It's boring but true, Key West operates thanks to people like me who show up everyday day at work just like "normal" people on the mainland. I have bank accounts and bills, health insurance and a pension plan, and the last time I checked I wasn't wanted anywhere in these United States. Which is not to say there isn't something different and special about Key West. For those of us who have a hard time masking our eccentricities Key West is an emotional refuge, a place where people don't necessarily feel the need to point out you are weird but they learn to deal with you. This is a town where men on stage dressed in tutus entertain and are celebrated for their peculiar talent. Someone like me oblivious and uninterested in being fashionable or blending in doesn't make any kind of a ripple. My neighbors let me wander with my dog taking pictures like a tourist and talking to myself while I go, unseen. It is a relief compared to life in the mainstream where my accent draws attention to me, my scooter draws attention to me and my choice of clothing draws attention to me, usually negative. Here I find my own private liberation and I like it very much.

City Commissioner Rossi a man who owns the Rick's complex on Duval and who ought by rights to be as rich as Croesus as a result of selling so much alcohol to so many inebriates has publicly lamented the passing of the time when Key West was a backwater and filled with "characters." It's hard to maintain characters in town when the cost of living is jacked out of sight by people who have made a fortune on that fact and who feel powerless to create a more appealing city from the results. The Studios At Key West does more for this town than most, pulling in artists and writers and creating a small universe of thought in a town dedicated to the worship of Bacchus. But even for them it's like pulling teeth to get financial support from the big wigs.

In Key West some people walk to work, but work they do, just like anyplace else, and worries about bums or art take second place, to remembering to pack your lunch (eating out daily is for visitors):

The other question that comes up is why do we vote for Mosquito Control? There has been talk of folding it into county government, that was popular when the district was spending money rather wildly and pissing off more than one taxpayer. However I suppose there are places in this country where Mosquito Control is an alien concept but around here the "Bug Board" gets a lot more attention than you might expect. It's a response to a need in a town where the climate never freezes and where people used to die by the thousand from yellow fever a hundred years ago. Key West unlike many towns in America, has at its core a phalanx of residents born and bred in this town, who give it it's true identity and it's ability to persevere as a community. The Conchs, as much as they may be derided as inbred Bubbas, are actually the people who provide the solid foundation upon which the flighty incomers come and go and pretend to belong. If you took the Conchs away from Key West not only would daily functions fall apart, what was left would look like St Pete Beach. A nice beach town but nothing memorable.

Key West is pretty, and some people are colorful, quite a few are boring and some like to tell everyone else what to do, which are the group that irritate me the most. As the years pass I fear the live and let live ideals of fifty years ago will be diluted to extinction, and then no one will even bother to do silly interviews about a silly little no account place at the end of the road.

And yes, there is phone service, high speed internet, daily mail and parcel delivery, potable water from a pipe, reliable electricity (mostly) and milder weather than most of the rest of the country seems to enjoy year round. You can fly here, drive here or come by ferry. We pay taxes and vote and there are more churches than you can shake a stick at along with a couple of synagogues and a mosque. We answer 911 calls twenty four hours a day and we do have police, fire, ambulance and a hospital to take care of you. The fishing's not bad either, I'm told, and children are welcome. Don't believe what you see on television.

Key West on Dwellable

 

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Key West, The Freedom of Christmas Lights

It is said Cuba and Key West have strong historical ties, and it is true, yet over the past half century those ties have loosened somewhat, forced apart by the continuing embargo against free travel from the land of the free to the godless Communists, never mind vice versa. We are free to eat fast food drive large cars and have our phones tapped with less protest than Cubans struggle against their obvious indignities.

I think of that separation often, ironic as it is when we are forbidden to be free, and especially when I listen to Radio Rebelde (620am) and all their serious posturing at "round tables" when they talk about the issues of the day affecting Cuba. They tend to be as boring and unmemorable as the parrots of our free and soulless press. I went to see "Twelve Years a Slave" the true story, accurately told and rendered into a movie historians tell us, of a free black man tricked into slavery and who, able to read and write could tell in painful detail of his appalling captivity. The film highlighted for me the helplessness of one and all, everyone made less by slavery, slaves, owners, and above all the bystanders of good will, those we white people of the audience imagined ourselves to be. Watching Benedict Cumberbatch save Platt's life and then apologize for selling him to a brutal owner as no one else would pay the mortgage he owed on Platt's life, I knew that we all fall together under the wheels of brutality and inhumanity as society demands of us. Even today President Obama's many political shortcomings pale in the face of his unspoken shortcoming that affronts so many of his white opponents. I voted for him three times and though he has not delivered on his promises, which politician does? I am glad I was one among millions that put a black man in the white man's house for the first time. It annoys the shit out of his enemies who are without doubt less likely to do good by commission than President Obama will do ill by omission.

Cuba was deprived of Christmas for almost three decades on the spurious grounds that the holiday interfered with the sugar harvest. Our political friends in Saudi Arabia absolutely forbid any Christmas displays, but our enemy the godless Cubans now get to celebrate the almost universal holiday. Not as extravagantly as we do:

The home above in New Town was facing a portion of flooded street, giving it the appearance of being on a lake. Below a neighbor looked like an enchanted forest. After the movie my wife asked that I drive us up Staples Avenue to see what we might see.

Old Town wooden homes get the attention this time of year but I, like my wife, enjoy the quiet streets away from the bars, the family homes decorated in traditional style, as irrelevant as it may be to our lack of Nordic hardiness.

The decorations coming as they do for only one month out of the year, do actually serve that original purpose of lighting the darkest season of the year.

Things at 24 degrees North Latitude don't get terribly extreme. It is warmer than it might be thanks to the Gulf Stream nearby, and winters are correondingly mild but daylight and night time doesn't get terribly out of whack summer or winter thanks to the position of these islands relatively close to the Equator. Were it not for summer time which permits the sun to set close to 8:30pm, daylight year round would vary by perhaps an hour from six o'clock. As it is we are now getting dark at six on winter time.

In Alaska our compatriots get not much sun at all this week, and the ones at the top none at all. So Christmas lights for them might really represent a valuable Yule log burning brightly to keep the impenetrable darkness at bay. In Key West Christmas lights are a lovely burst of color.

I don't find many singularly religious representations in these lights that are symbols to actually celebrate a religious holiday. They are lovely but they don't seem terribly Christian to me, and I'm not religious, by any stretch. So this year I am working the night of the lighted boat parade so these lights will have to do.

We see stars and icicles and lots of lovely colors, there are a few manger scenes celebrating the historically inaccurate notion that Rome would have held a census in mid winter, but though I looked for them I didn't find them this time out. Festival of Lights is enough I suppose.

And in the end, next month we will be back to this. Which I like just fine the other eleven months of the year.

Simplicity: who will trumpet thy virtues?

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Clouds Over, Sewers Under, Cudjoe Key

It is no easy thing to determine what the weather is really like in the Keys when looking from afar. Temperatures vary wildly in how warm or cool the air actually is, despite what the numbers say...humidity changes markedly how hot it feels, and the breeze plays its part.

All of which is to say I never quite know how energetic my dog might be when we head out for a walk. When she feels cool she gets more energetic, finds more things to smell and suddenly I have a puppy leading me in the dance.

It's been a while since princess agreed to check out the back country of Cudjoe Key and I was delighted to make the acquaintance once again of the strange parking lot alongside the trail. This used to be a car from the 60s maybe. In half a century it has been reduced to a pile of rust. I am durprised we are still told that an abandoned soda can will blight the landscape for 500 years. Cheyenne seems likely yo blight the landscape for a year or two more:

It is very difficult to get away entirely from the sounds of traffic rushing on the Overseas Highway, especially if the wind is blowing towards you from the traffic.

But inside your mind, in these spaces you can find quietude, and as Cheyenne rooted around smelling stuff I listened to the wind rustle my ears and watched the clouds scudding overhead.

The ground is close to the tideline and salt water. In fifty years they tell us this will revert to the sea, but for now it is here, modest and scrubby lacking the majesty of mountains and the true void of the desert. But it is deserted as the tens of thousands who live nearby, or winter nearby, rarely penetrate these quiet places.

In winter I come across joggers sometimes busy improving themselves, but if I try to penetrate these scrubby woods in summer my only companions are mosquitoes.

It took us thirty short minutes to walk out and back, Cheyenne chose, at the fork in the trail to turn back and head toward civilization.

It is little wonder the trees are so small in the salt air, for there is no dirt.

People warn me with dire concern that rattlesnakes will be the death of me. None seen so far these past four years with Cheyenne. And it's hardly surprising as this land tends to flood in summer making it an unpleasant place for a snake that likes to live in dry sandy uplands.

There are alligators and crocodiles and poisonous snakes abundant in Florida. The Keys seem to me to be the least threatening environment, human or natural, you could take a walk in. The human predators, pathetic things, seek to bum a free drink or to sell you cocaine around Duval Street. Out here you are free of the constraints of fear and internalized oppression if you so choose.

And you can stand like an idiot and watch an aircraft carrier float silently overhead into the rising sun.

Back among the homes nearby the toil and trouble of centralized sewer installation is ongoing. Soon the street will be covered in dust and gravel and the air filled with noise and more dust. This work should have been fond twenty years ago when the Feds threw money at public works projects. Now it will be paid for in bonds and property taxes. And the reef has been literally eating shit for unnecessary decades.

Walt across the highway has won a victory in his quixotic drive to minimize technically unsound grinder pumps planned for installation across many streets. He fired up a lawsuit based on his own extensive engineering knowledge and forced scrutiny if the bidding process for the thousands of individual grinder pumps. Gravity fed vacuum sewers are getting a fresh look thanks to Walt and corruption noises swirl around now that the stupidity of burying pumps everywhere in wet mud has been exposed.

Cheyenne bore the mark of her wilderness walk through the suburbs.

Imagine the work of severing, every street, every home connected by pipes buried in rock.

Just thinking about it tires a girl out.

 

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