Oh Dark Thirty In Pictures

I was off but I woke up early that night so Cheyenne and I went into town to be alone together. Every traffic light I met was red, and stayed red with no cross traffic. As I approached Simonton Beach to park the Fusion I was ready to run a light just to prove a point. I am so middle class I wouldn't dare.

We wandered around and I took a few pictures of the emptiness of Key West before six in the morning.

Flagler Station on Caroline Street:

Cuban Joe's Marine Store looking with it's mast like a ship in the night.

Greene Street.

Cheyenne tugging my leash behind her.

It was as peaceful as I've seen Key West, and then the sun came up.

 

Key West on Dwellable

Posted with Blogsy

Fix It Again Tony

 

I made the mistake of stopping to talk to a dude yesterday as Cheyenne and I strolled the suburbs, she sniffing and me enjoying the temperate summer day cooled by a post-cold-front breeze. I have walked past that particular Big Pine home a lot and admired the bizarre collection of Fiats parked at random in the gravel space in front of the house. This time as I walked by an erect rather distinguished man with white hair, big tortoiseshell glasses and a green t shirt appeared from behind a modern bright red Fiat 500 and I stopped. "I have admired your wild collection of Fiats,"  I said rather incautiously.

It happens I am not very good at being social and the company of my patient dog is usually enough for me, especially when combined with the occasional encounter with a friend and altogether too much work and overtime during Spring Break. Twelve hours sitting in a  room  with two other overworked 911 dispatchers can tax the limits of my ability to be anything but morose and withdrawn. One would like to imagine that a brief encounter, a chat about a funky brand of car might help recharge the internal battery of a recluse and reaffirm the value of human interaction...The problem though was quite a different one. I am not a car enthusiast, though I like motorcycles and enjoy riding them and reading about them. They are my passion and I do not discuss them with anyone much in the real world though I do struggle on a few forums on the Internet where I find opinions abound and are frequently passed off as fact. Cars? Useful but not exactly exciting. My interest in Fiats stemmed more from the fact that there is a dude living in Big Pine who collects them. How weird is that? Big Pine Key is the Lower Keys refuge for people who want to enjoy their guns and their paranoia in peace not to be sitting around collecting cars that in no way resemble giant pick up trucks...That was what interested me, not a thirty minute disquisition on double barreled carbs, twin headlights and 1972  gray imports of Fiat 850s. But, by gum, that's what I got. My mother drove a car like this one below, a Fiat 850 coupe of which my interlocutor had had one parked in front of his house.

 

 



That one was off being  restored he said and then he proceeded to uncover a black convertible and he lifted the hood and I got to see a new collection of pipes and wires powering his 124 Convertible. That was a car I remembered from my childhood. My father bought my twin sisters the car and they drove it all over Europe, to England and Italy, Germany and Austria and across France and Switzerland. It was an unhappy time for them as they tried to convince my mother their lives should be lived in Italy but they kept pissing her off in her Italian castle and she'd send them back to her ex-husband in England. I took quite a few trips in the rumble seat of my much older sisters' fancy car. You can imagine the attention twin good looking twenty one year olds in a convertible got in the 1960s. I was eleven and wondered about the fuss we got at every border post. 

 

Where was I? Oh yes, it seems not many 850s were imported to the US and the Fiat crazy guy on Big Pine got his, the one with the dual headlights direct from Italy with a speedometer in kilometers and he only paid forty five hundred bucks for it. Which made me wince as my 1977 Vespa is going to cost more than  that by the time all's said and done, maybe six grand. At least his fancy 850 still has to be restored though he says it may be worth seventy grand by that time. My Vespa may be worth three grand by the time I'm done, but my plan is to ride the snot out of the thing as usual  and destroy all resale value. I tried to ask how he got into Fiats and why but all I heard was he felt that these funky cars kept him alive through his recent cardiac problems. "More likely caused them," I said, trying to crack a funny in the middle of a lot of technical mumbo jumbo. Oh no he said, sincerity larding his voice lest his cars hear him deprecating them, they saved  my life he said, missing my little joke entirely. Sigh.

 

 

I never really thought about it too much until my mind started to wander from all the minutiae of owning collectible Fiats but I've actually been around quite a few of them. I bought my own when I was in my early twenties. I remember driving to the dealer in Perugia at the urging of a friend and there it was just like the car pictured above offered for 9 million lire I seem to recall, perhaps three thousand dollars back then? I wrote a check and took home ( a few  days later, Italian bureaucracy is generally quite slow but I think the dealer wanted to unload the weird car while he could so I got my tags in a hurry) my first  own car. People in the village thought I was joking when I showed up with this extraordinary space ship of a car, accustomed as they were to seeing me riding my motorcycle in all weathers. A Fiat they said incredulously, looking at their own utility Fiats by comparison. A convertible? With a hard roof? And the seats don't lean back? They looked appalled at the thought of spending nine million lire for a car you could not get laid in. That was okay; I had fifty empty rooms at my disposal in the castle my late mother had left to me. Space was not cramped for me in my lonely youth.

                                                                                    

None of this was of interest to the Fiat dude. We had not exchanged names in the flood of technical details that I had been drowning in. Then I asked about the Internet, thinking that restoration is so much easier with the Web. I know it encouraged me to get my 1977 Vespa and helped me find what appears to be a top flight restorer in distant Pennsylvania. Fiat Dude looked appalled. Oh no, he recoiled, I don't have a computer. Never had in the twenty five years I've lived here. I call So-and-So in California for my parts. Oh I said, so he has the computer! I needn't have said anything because now Fiat Dude was in full flow about how the Internet interferes with human relations and how he believed in true human interactions and making the world a better place etc...and when he started to refer to his comparative religion class at the university I started to send signals to Cheyenne that this conversation needed to end. Now, please. Obediently my old Labrador picked up on my invisible distress signals and got up and started lumbering off.  I said I could never have had the courage to buy my Vespa without the Internet for help. Vespa car he asked hopefully? Oh God no I said thinking of the weird little Vespa 400 that makes an old Fiat 500 look large...



 

My mother would never let me have a motorcycle when I was growing up in Oklahoma Fiat Dude said. So much so she encouraged him to get a car, unlike my mother who encouraged me to get a motorcycle by buying me my first Vespa when I was 12. But what did he care, the lonely humanitarian too busy talking to listen? He got in his stick shift Fiat 500 Abarth and drove off toward Highway One as Cheyenne led me gently away my ears ringing. I had even tried to find common ground by pointing out how much I like my wife's convertible, seen below uncharacteristically not converted (though she can open the roof all the way while under way...), but Fiat Dude poured scorn on the automatic gearbox, because clearly ours is inferior to his manual shift. I wonder how high he scored in comparative religion class?

 

Maybe I'm just doing it wrong, but no matter how I slice it, I like Cheyenne's company best and she I am flattered to think likes mine. Besides all that imagine the total lack of curiosity that leaves you thinking that having access to the world around you, albeit only electronically, isn't something worth doing. Screw Facebook if you like , but all the world's literature, newspapers, films and music are on line available to you in Bumfuck Big Pine if you want it. I think this ability to explore the world from this or any other isolated spot is one of the great benefits of modern times. The Internet is a pain in the ass, and creates dependence and screws up youthful minds and all that but I love having the world at my fingertips. I can watch episodes of  Dad's Army or Don Matteo any time I want on U Tube and if I want to be intellectual  I can download all the world's books to my phone and I can send pictures to my nephews half a world away any time I want. Fantastic - and this dolt immersed in his rusty machinery thinks its all a waste of time. Dull is as dull does.

 

I suppose it's my Asperger's but I just don't get what the point of conversation is when you have a dog and a book and a warm sunny day. And I didn't have to take a class to learn that.

 

 

 

There Is No Alternative

 

It takes the wit and wisdom of the incomparable Santa Cruz cartoonist Tim Eagan to point out what no one else will: as much as the Affordable Health Care Act sucks, it's not like opponents have developed a better idea. Me? I'm for Medicare for all,  funded by deductions like Social Security. If you want your own gold plated policy buy it for yourself. But as I am fond of saying, I've never met anyone who dumped Medicare or the VA in favor of buying a private policy from the vampire squids of the private health insurance scam market.

 

From Huffington Post:

 

 

Dr. Danielle Martin, vice president at the Women's College Hospital in Toronto, totally schooled Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) on health care Tuesday.
Martin was in Washington D.C. to answer questions from a U.S. Senate subcommittee led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on different health care systems around the world. When Burr asked Martin "on average how many Canadian patients on a waiting list die each year," she answered with a fact about the American healthcare system.
"Do you know?" Burr asked.
“I don’t, sir, but I know that there are 45,000 in America who die waiting because they don’t have insurance at all," Martin said.
But that wasn't the only question Martin schooled Burr on. There was also this exchange:

Burr: What do you say to an elected official who goes to Florida and not the Canadian system to have a heart valve replacement?Martin: It’s actually interesting, because in fact the people who are the pioneers of that particular surgery, which Premier Williams had, and have the best health outcomes in the world for that surgery, are in Toronto, at the Peter Munk Cardiac Center, just down the street from where I work.
So what I say is that sometimes people have a perception, and I believe that actually this is fueled in part by media discourse, that going to where you pay more for something, that that necessarily makes it better, but it’s not actually borne out by the evidence on outcomes from that cardiac surgery or any other.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/13/danielle-martin-richard-burr_n_4958164.html

http://www.amsa.org/AMSA/Libraries/Academy_Docs/WaitingTimes_primer.sflb.ashx



Wandering Key West

A cat napping next to a dog's water bowl outside a Key West business is putting itself directly in the line of fire. Check out how composed the cat is. Not a car in the world, especially considering 107 pounds of furry Labrador love was bearing down on her.

We were in the meadows and a pick up truck pulled up. Two strapping men, one younger one not so much, started working a big cardboard box off the truck and into the garden gate. It looked like an appliance delivery and it made me think back to when I used to work at Fast Buck Freddie's shipping and receiving. The younger kids loved to get out of the warehouse for a delivery. For me it was always a pain as Key West homes more closely resemble jigsaw puzzles than houses and maneuvering furniture through Hobbitland was a pain in the ass even when I was 20 years younger. I did not envy these two even though it looked reasonably simple as these things go. My colleague told of getting a new full sized refrigerator in her apartment last week. The movers had to take the door off the hinges to work it into her tiny nest. They earned their tips.

Speaking of Fast Buck Freddie's I met a former coworker on the street as Cheyenne and I strolled. Ann Lorraine is a local artist who used to dress the windows of the famous department store on Duval, now sadly closed. An artistic soul behind the windows | KeysNews.com. I used to hang out and chat with her and she had stories to tell about her youthful travels. She was married for a while to a diplomat and lived in faraway places. She told me of wandering the streets of Vientiane, the capital of Laos with her sketchbook drawing what she saw. She made quite the impression on me. "I don't understand people who get bored in retirement," she said, expressing the wish she could get a good old medieval patron to fund her and let her paint in peace. Nowadays they all worry about ROI and their image so it's the splashy charities that give tax credits that get the attention. Medieval Florence and Rome seem a long way away.

 

This next picture is the former waste-to-energy plant that the city declined to refurbish with modern scrubbers owing yo the complaints of wealthy condo owners in the Stock Island neighborhood. Now the trash gets trucked 200 miles to Pompano Beach and planted in the ground. And this space, with Mount Trashmore in the background will become something else along College Road.

Citgo here at Truman and White is a popular gas stop. The Chevron across the street has a small convenience store as well and they also have a mechanic during the day. A friend of mine has worked there since I can remember, but Citgo has one thing that trounces all other advantages: Dion's Fried Chicken, as I mentioned previously

 

One thing that I find amusing about Citgo is how they always stress their local roots. I don't know if anyone remembers anymore, short attention spans being what they are, but there was a scandal in 2006 when a convenience chain decided to drop Citgo owing to then president Chavez's anti-US government comments. So we see these signs of local fervor seven years later...

This I labeled "DIY" on my Facebook page. $99 for three months inside the gym or buy the bicycle for $200 and take it home. I like to sweat in private so its no contest where I would spend my money if I were in the market.

Cheyenne laboring on a hot February day. Winter has been too short for her.

But relief is always at hand after a cold front, be it ever so mild.

I have been enjoying the eighty degree days with cool breezes. They make me think of pleasant summer days in more temperate climes.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Better in Bisbee

An alert reader noted that Chuck formerly of Frances Street has relocated to Bisbee Arizona, a town of 5,000 perched on an apparently steep hillside almost overlooking the Mexican border. It's Better in Bisbee | Living on the edge… is Chuck's page writing about life in the high desert. Here he was on Frances Street showing me his collection of motorcycles, including this AllstateTwingle by Puch.

When my wife and I were struggling to figure out where we should relocate to get away from California's cold damp coast which was wreaking havoc on her rheumatoid arthritis we checked everywhere you could describe as warmer living. We checked Arizona but the desert is searing in summer and cold in winter and oddly enough the dry air of the desert did nothing for her joints or my skin. I get parchment-like in dry air and I don't like it. I know, I know humidity is everyone's pet hate but with air conditioning one can live a civilized temperate lifestyle and show up to work without sweat rings everywhere. Chuck starting his lovely Beeza 650. That one was my favorite in his collection even though it needed work.

I suppose the fact that I knew people in Key West, that I had lived there previously helped, but we we weren't sure about Key West at all. Arriving by boat from California, with all the color and heat of a 7,000 mile journey to Panama from San Francisco and on to Key West had worn us down. We were ready for secure income, for familiar waters and for a change of pace. My buddy Robert expressed surprise when we got jobs and settled into the new routine. Not many people come to Key West and actually do that he said. Mostly they talk about getting a job and leave when the money runs out. We hadn't had a bad life at all in California but when we started living in the tropics, south of Baja in Mexico, my wife's pain receded and she started to sleep more soundly than ever she had in Santa Cruz.

Chuck sounds like he is enjoying Bisbee, a town that's off the map and where he can indulge his love of old cars and eccentric architecture and where apparently real estate is relatively cheap. Housing he says is one fifth of Key West prices so it would seem for a hundred grand you could buy a small home. How to pay for it is the question, as a city of 5,000 has limited work opportunities for those of us that need them. To pass the time Chuck will rent bicycles to visitors.

My wife and I stayed in Key West because we got good work, not that our jobs have been drama free but we have each of us negotiated the prickly personalities and prima donnas of our respective workplaces and are now able to live and work in peace. My wife had been a lawyer in California and she was burned out. Teaching appealed but she stayed in the criminal justice system at first by becoming a juvenile probation officer. Her interview was absurd, consisting of an hour's worth of questions about the lack of housing and the high cost of living in Key West...they gave her the job and warned her off visiting clients alone in Bahama Village, a nest of high criminality. She bought a scooter and made house calls unaccompanied. After defending murderers and gang members in California she thought the "gang problem" in Key West was laughable.

I was walking the waterfront one day when a man came up to me and asked if I knew how to sail. Yes I said, I enjoy it. Can you get a Coastguard license? He asked. I have a fifty ton license I replied. Want a job he said, not really I replied. Oh go on it will be fun he insisted and I need captains. I'm not at all sure about this I demurred but off I went. We were living in Key West and working. A Key West house in Bisbee, by accident probably, or maybe by design...

Chuck spent much of his life traveling for work, trouble shooting and being an engineer much in demand across the Far East. He burned out too and settled in Key West to retire as his children started to launch their own lives. He seemed to like Key West but apparently not enough to stay. Read his blog and see how he feels more a part of the very small desert community than I suppose he felt a part of Key West, a town that can be stand-offish. I don't know why it is that some people fit in and others don't. I like living here because there are no social requirements, there are no dress codes, no value set by name brands or styles. It's the same apparently in Bisbee, but Key West is large enough that at the same time as making space for oddballs it offers real work too. At least not as far as I can tell so that works for me. I enjoy my own company and I can get that space here not least because so many people come and go. The transient nature of life in Key West suits me as much as it aggravates my social wife. Chuck admiring his BSA, his grimace was caught by the camera as usual and does not I believe reflect his feelings toward the machine.

Reading his blog one sees a man frustrated with the irritations of Key West, the drunken revelers, the gentrification, the stuff that makes Key West a place that is not stultified or dying but alive and irritating. I enjoy my life in the suburbs but that notion of not needing a car is appealing to a lot of people that think they want to live in Old Town. It's hard to be around true eccentrics and rebels when you are a nostalgic I find, and I have little need of human company and I enjoy commuting on two wheels. And like I've always said, ambition is frowned upon in Key West. He wanted to develop a business plan for my blog and I was flattered by his attention and his notion that there could be more to this modest pixelated page, a plan that fell through when his attention was diverted to canvas sewing on a more familiar business model, and I found myself worried about what I wrote, anxious not to let The Plan down. With relief I slipped back to my more familiar format, a page of dusty ramblings and ironic observations of my small place in life's broad canvas. Buchi, the new dog in Danger Boy and Pixie's life. Apparently the soil of a Bisbee is toxic to puppy paws and the dog may only travel without touching the ground. Danger Boy indeed! Bisbee Friends of Shelter Animals

My wife applied to work at the juvenile jail when it opened and needed a teacher willing to work a twelve month schedule. She was the sole applicant, got the job and promised to get her teaching credential subsequently. They were dubious, ambition is always frowned upon, but they had no choice so she did just that. And qualified to teach English as a second language, and qualified as a reading coach, but carefully did not qualify to be an administrator. She teaches with no ambition to lead so she threatened no one over the years. And she added to her juvenile probation state pension through the teachers' pension fund. Florida's state pension system is one of the few in the country that is solidly funded, surprisingly enough. Two years later Dade county laid off 400 qualified teachers and Monroe County was flooded with more applicants than it knew what to do with. "I'd never get that job today," my wife says, now enjoying her dream job of teaching adults in Marathon, a town filled with sober working adults eager to learn, taught by a fully qualified teacher who enjoys commuting the Seven Mile Bridge in her Fiat convertible. Pixie caught in a pensive moment on her Frances Street porch.

We came to realise that living on a boat and working in town was getting tedious. Our own neighbors in the marina viewed boats as low income housing and we started to feel trapped in our slip. Our boat never moved, our elderly Labrador could no longer get on or off easily and we liked Key West. It was a slow curve of appreciation but yes, we could live and grow old here. We had money from our home sale in California, a momentous sale choice selling that house that sealed our fate. We put a large deposit on a tree house on Ramrod Key and moved off the boat which we promptly sold. Goodbye Gemini catamaran, hello suburbia. I got a job at the police department much to my surprise after Captain McNeil (who bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the Ulster firebrand Ian Paisley) looked me in the eye after studying my sailing resume and said normally he'd never hire a dispatcher with such a spotty work history but he was desperate. I will outlast you I told him, and I did. And I still enjoy my work. My pension through the city of Key West is also reportedly well funded. How we got jobs with defined benefit pension plans so late in life I can hardly understand. The possibility of retirement made real by Key West of all places?

Bisbee is without doubt pretty and I think Chuck has found a place that might serve him well. It fulfills his nostalgia kick from growing up on the margins of modern society and the social nature of life in a small isolated mountain community, like that of my Italian youth, might suit him well as it would not suit me. Does this Bisbee Street not look French or Spanish or Italian?

People come and go in Key West, Chuck's Frances Street home is still adorned with his daughter's art project though the old Harley Davidson's parking spot has been replaced by a banal plastic scooter. I am growing into an old timer, trying to nurture my young colleagues into an appreciation of our extraordinary good fortune earning a living wage in a job we actually enjoy. And those pensions..!

I ride my Bonneville in the heat of a Florida Spring and feel my good fortune. Soon my new/old Vespa should be restored and perhaps I shall get it before too long. At least I know the job will be done right by Gene in Pennsylvania. Slow and steady wins the race I hope. We are taking a road trip during my wife's Spring Break in two weeks and we plan to cruise up the coast exploring in depth the small towns between Jacksonville and Wilmington. Essays to follow as I get some time off after these buddy weeks of drunken student revelers in town! I expect Chuck is glad to be far from Spring Break in Key West. I envy Chuck his proximity to Mexico, though he shows no signs of cruising his lovely Suzuki GS850 to nearby Naco for authentic Mexican tacos...I'd be there right away because to me the best thing about Tucson when we checked it out was proximity to Mexico and it's food.

I lived my life backwards in many respects traveling when I was young and experiencing as much as I could. Watching my mother die when I was 14 gave me a clear understanding of the fragility and limited nature of life. I wanted to live as many lives as I could with no guarantee of retirement as far as I could see. As my wife and I edge closer to that date cancer-free and active we feel lucky we landed here in middle age with good jobs, pensions we never had previously, lovely weather and thanks to the good offices of my gregarious wife, friends. For me it's still better in Key West and it's suburbs.

Posted with Blogsy

Key West Bight By Night

A lunch break on a crisp cool night. The waters were still and only a few young men were around scuttling back to their boats, as though the witching hour were upon them. The place was otherwise empty. All mine.

Above Turtle Kraals, named for the place where they used to corral captured turtles before killing them. Below the old Waterfront Market boardwalk.

The Western Union which used to be used to lay telegraph cable between Key West and Havana until World War Two. Recently restored for a million and a half bucks, she continues to haul tourists to the sunsets.

Appledore, another "tall ship" nomenclature that bugs me. Square rigger or barque depending on how the sails are deployed. Tall. Ship. Oh well.

People live at anchor and bring their dinghies in while they spend the day in town. Traveling sailors call their dinghies their "station wagon" as the little boats are indispensable.

 

My Vespa is pretty indispensable to me when it's time to go home...

Conch Republic Seafood, as I like it, empty and devoid of people, like a stage set waiting for today's performance to begin.

Lazy Way Lane. Heading back to work.

 

Key West on Dwellable

Posted with Blogsy