Tending My Garden

My life is boxes. At home it is boxes and chaos tinged with the excitement of change. The prospect of lunch with George was a change I could look forward to, even as I negotiated the changes currently plaguing my life. I had been wondering if this is all there is for a while; I guess not!

At work, where our offices are bring refurbished, the usual domestic tranquility of night shift has been turned into something more closely resembling the end of days, as construction crews spend days replacing and repairing, and all semblance of order is hidden under a layer of displaced furniture. It will be good, great even when it's done but it's a hard grind.

The main road into the city, North Roosevelt Boulevard, known informally as "The Boulevard" continues to be a minefield of pot holes, raised manholes, uneven asphalt, dust and piles of dirt. This mammoth two year reconstruction job is supposed to end in July with new storm drains, new landscaping, new traffic lights and new turn lanes. It will undoubtedly be "awesome" but I cannot believe it will be done on time in a few short weeks. I avoid the boulevard as much as I can at the moment.

The weather is changing as we move into summer and rain is sprinkling around the Keys. Winds have moved to the north as though some out of season cold front has been huffing south in a desperate attempt to blow wind and rain through the islands before it is absolutely too late. As a result it remains hot and then the heat gets overlaid with the wet and the sub-tropics start to feel tropical and I remember why summers feel good. I like the wet heat of summer. I stopped by the side of the highway on my way home as the rain started to bucket down so I then pulled a  U-turn and rode back toward Key west where the rain was lighter and I got dressed in my waterproofs listening to the foliage crackle in the dark as the rain fell and spread across everything.  

I got a message from George advising me he was back in Key West having abandoned Prague for a few weeks to visit his family in the US, so while his daughter Julie napped and his wife guarded her, we men ate meat and drank beer at Finnegan's Wake on Grinnell Street. It was not a busy afternoon but I was reminded how pleasant a pub can be even with a couple of stupid television screens, and how lucky we are to have a pub with  decent grub in this small town. Finnegan's is one of my preferred sit down eateries.



George is good for me; he is an optimist. He has to be I suppose, not only because he lives in a small country at the crossroads of cultures, but because he has a child and that is a conditions that demands belief in the future. We talked about Ukraine, a few hundred miles from his apartment in the Czech capital, but it is a country as remote he says as it is to Key West. Except that winter heating fuel comes to the Czech Republic through Ukraine. Last winter was a long deep freeze, endlessly below zero, previously it has been unseasonably warm, George's optimism would prefer to lead him to the conclusion that something will be worked out; my pessimism makes me wonder how Europeans think they can sanction Russia when Russia holds the key to their energy supplies. Makes no sense. However I did read an interesting perspective on the motivations of the Russian President Putin, from Truthdig: Putin's Real Use For the Ukraine If you want a really interesting insight into the dispute in Ukraine and chaos read the article.

George tried to cheer me up with a quotation attributed to Candide, the eternal optimist and bane of young students of French literature, admonishing me that I cannot save the world that I must look out for myself, hence the title of this essay, the conclusion that the optimistic Candide is forced to come to after a novel spent discovering what shits people can be, and will be given the chance. Which advice is okay but it is not satisfying as it seems to me that even though I am doing okay, living where I want to live, enjoying my work, with a family and friends and in this I am one of the lucky ones. So it would seem that should be enough, I should not aspire to seek better terms for those left behind by our unequal society? It is I suppose one more human paradox that people should be so annoying so often yet one still feels the drive to wish them well. George was very patient with my feeling of unease poorly expressed.

In ways more numerous than I at first thought George and I are opposites, brought together by Key West on orbits whose trajectories would not at first glance seem likely to cross paths. Consider: George found himself in Prague after the Iron Curtain  collapsed and saw an opportunity to stay and prosper in a  world ready to be made anew and he did, devoted single mindedly to that endeavor. I instead lived for experience, attracted to the burning light of culture and art in a world already formed in expensive, hierarchical Northern California. I watched the Silicon revolution develop  right under my nose and I had no notion how to take advantage of it. I enjoyed the tangents from the wealth created by computing, which allowed me to take jobs, and mix work and travel, to quit and drop out and then drop in again as easily and as carefree as the proverbial grasshopper. I lived  a lot and it was good.

 

George instead built his carefully constructed life, retired early and is now setting about chasing down experiences, making children, writing books, living in spurts in Hemingway's Key West, attending seminars and readings and doing all those strenuous activities that slip past my workaday world.

And there is the question of greener grass. I realized as we talked that I have the same nostalgia for Europe that George cherishes for the United States. He sees his homeland as a beacon for Libertarian free enterprise, a place where corruption is muted and people can stretch their faculties and achieve precisely that which he achieved in Prague. Odd that because I look back at the  Europe of my youth with nostalgia. It was a place where no one starved but no one climbed too high. I grew up with the sense that we were all in it together and though that was easy for me to say as I was in the privileged class there was a comfort in everyone having their place. And even now I find myself appalled by the way poverty ripples through the US and it is accepted as  the cost of doing business. But the truth I don't want to see is that the comfy cosseted world of my youth no longer exists. Unemployment is rampant, suicide is up, welfare support is down, homelessness is back and austerity is the order of the day on a continent I no longer even know. The past, they say, is a different country; they do things differently there.

 

For George too the past has evaporated. The US he fondly remembers as part of his childhood is gone. Opportunity, climbing the ladder of social acceptance is all a thing of the past. Wealth is distributed in his imagination in response to hard work and the pursuit of liberty. The reality here is much more muted, government programs that don't work, welfare that doesn't seem to help, citizens who would have enormous difficulty following the pioneers' Oregon Trail from two centuries ago.

 Philip Pilkington on Feudalism in the 21st Century is an essay on the naked capitalism website that discusses the language of power and it is a discussion I find fascinating in its implications for all us, whether we seek a place at the table in the European centralized economies or in the Oligarch's world here in the US:

 

The fundamental idea of our current regime is one that most people have forgotten, because it is associated with Marx, and one must not talk about even the things Marx got right, because the USSR went bad. It is that we are wage laborers. We work for other people, we don’t control the means of production. Absent a job, we live in poverty. Sure, there are some exceptions, but they are exceptions. We are impelled, as it were, by Marx’s whip of hunger. It took a lot of work to set up this system, as Polyani notes in his book “the Great Transformation”, but now that it has happened, it is invisible to us.

 

The hopeful Libertarian in George's expatriate world sees corruption and cronyism in the tiny state that is the Czech Republic and he thinks back fondly to the US of his youth when sensible government regulated commerce such that humans' baser instincts were kept in check (sic!). George missed the deregulation craze of the 1980s and 1990s, the path that set us up for our brave new world of ever rapidly cycling of boom and bust in our economy.

 It  was food for thought as I went home filled with bangers and mash and baked beans refueled to carry boxes down stairs and up to the new place on Cudjoe Key. I read some statistics not so long ago that put my wife and I in the top 20% of people in this country by virtue of our government wages and our child free status. Good Lord I thought, that can't be right, can it? We couldn't even pay the mortgage without the promised modification that it turned out was like waiting for Godot. So if that is true, perhaps I am confused beyond redemption about the state of the rest of the world. Pangloss would not approve but he is long since dead as Candide was published in the 18th century, but perhaps all I really do need to do is figure out how to be a better gardener and not worry about the grass being greener elsewhere. This I need to think about.

 

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

Ode To A Coconut Palm

The move continues apace, boxes, books, odds and ends stuffed into the cars along with all the odd crap one accumulates through ten years of residence in one spot and twenty years of marriage all over the place.

The constant chaos has my Aspergers screaming much of the time, especially when I recall quiet times and routines with fondness even as the move brings new discoveries of old things. I have decided I must read my books once more before I die, and some of the titles will I am sure be easily digestible. I rediscovered an old biography of Robert Louis Stevenson and wild travel tales of North Africa, provocatively titled Hashish and a book of poetry I had forgotten I had. My wife knows I have a tendency to dawdle when surrounded by book so she kept a close eye on me as I emptied the first book shelves.

Cheyenne's role is to keep an eye on things, which she does very well. I have worried that the move, which we hope to complete in ten days, may upset her, but she shows no sign of any inner turmoil. She enjoys the cool tile floor and usually sleeps across the door as the business of organizing continues around her.

In light of what my wife calls this second job, and the time and energy it consumes, I am posting pictures of a coconut palm today, a symbol of stability in my changing world. Actually my friend Robert who has loaned me his vast spacious trailer, invaluable for this job, hates non native coconut palms as they produce much waste for no purpose and threaten unwary heads with their nuts. And yet these trees are the very symbol of the Fabulous Florida Keys that visitors expect to see...

A breezy morning at Veterans' Park.

An android phone camera with too many peculiar settings.

 

I took each picture separately with the camera on a different weird setting.

Amazing what technology can do.

To what purpose I'm not sure.

The new house on Cudjoe Key has a couple of mature coconut palms as compared to the home we are leaving on Ramrod which has a dozen and very messy they are too. But pretty, it has to be said.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Duval At Dusk

I've been busy enough that I only recently realized I haven't been on Duval Street lately, and when I found myself strolling the main drag I discovered once again a place of color and life. It looked good, which surprised me as I tend to subscribe to the conventional wisdom that Duval Street, named for Florida's first territorial governor, is pretty much useless. Unless you suddenly need a t-shirt describing your penis to all passersby, or if it occurs to you that a palm reading has'nt taken place lately in your life. Yet for all it lacks useful commerce Duval looks good at dusk.

I wasn't even drinking as we strolled Lower Duval, the north end of the street, and did some all too brief people watching, but it struck me differently. I like the colors at dusk, the people strolling and window shopping...

...it was festive, oddly enough, on a regular weekday evening. I don't usually take the time to slow down on Duval as I am going somewhere or to something, as indeed I was last Friday. Yet I wanted to linger on the street for a while.

Usually winter is too crowded for me down here but this past high tourist season I have been downtown a lot for some reason, but not dawdling. I'm not fond of fruit drinks but I wondered for a moment if we should stop and have a daiquiri drink instead of going to a performance...the others were already far ahead making a beeline for the Red Barn box office.

I envied these two strangers, at the quietest bar in town, no jostling for attention, no noise. I once again wished I weren't going to work later.

We watched seven distinct short attention span comedies RANDOM ACTS OF COMEDY AT RED BARN THEATRE and to their credit they remain clear, distinct and thought provoking in my memory bank. An evening of funny and poignant theater, so I did not feel deprived, in the end, by not being allowed to dawdle on Duval.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Sugarloaf Key

The sky dive sign (now incorporating the promise of yoga, incongruously enough) on Sugarloaf Key marks the spot where one turns north off the Overseas Highway to view the Bat Tower.

In this instance I wanted to let Cheyenne out on our way to Key West for some tedious chores, and though my original idea was to visit the Bat Tower I stopped short.

There is a canal cut into the rock which has been turned into a "viewing area."

There is an old shed along the short trail though what purpose it serves now one can only guess.

Once upon a time this was a contriversial dolphin facility, as I discovered for my 2010 essay Key West Diary: Go Dolphins.

Not only are the dolphins gone but so is any physical reminder there were ever here.

I wandered around and took random pictures.

To my surprise I was ready to leave before my dog.

Posted with Blogsy

Burger Fi

 I don't think I would make a very good retailer, not least  because I just can't get that excited about consuming for the sake of consuming. Even with things I enjoy, take motorcycles, I can see the good and the bad, the benefits and drawbacks not only of different models but of the whole concept of riding a motorcycle as daily transportation. So any effort to make a sale would be tempered by my own sense of reality...which successful merchants seem not to worry about. BurgerFi exudes enthusiasm on its website about its plan to "change the way we think about a burger." They use "natural beef" which is good for us, and one hopes good for the animals though free range is not part of the enthusiasm for these new style burgers which are antibiotic-free, we are told. I'd like to think better burgers come from American animals grazed on open fields but maybe that is too much to ask for ten bucks. Maybe one day a veggie burger worth writing home about? These people seem like they could pull that off.

It was part of an evening out, Robert suggested BurgerFi, and it was a good suggestion. This place at 221 Duval has been well received and I can see why, after one visit. They have a welcoming dining room, the staff are cheerful and attentive and they offer lots of places to sit, upstairs, outside in back and outside in front where you can watch Duval Street walk by. We took seating at a table in the middle of the restaurant after we placed our various orders.

 

BurgerFi is just brimming with corporate enthusiasm as I found on their website, herewith a brief superlative-laced excerpt:  More than just great food, dining at BurgerFi® is a unique experience- one you can feel good about. Each BurgerFi® store is built according to environmentally sustainable best practices, and includes earth-friendly elements, like chairs that are made from recycled Coke bottles, tables made out of compressed recycled wood, and large fans that use 66% less electricity. BurgerFi® maintains a low carbon footprint, and maintains strict recycling programs for oil, cardboard, bottles and cans. The thing is, none of what they do requires compromise on the customer's part. The furniture is comfortable, the air is cool on a hot day and the Coke machine is a piece of 21st century wizardry that I am embarrassed to say I found entrancing. I knew right away what I wanted from the menu.

The coke fountain machine is apparently going to be seen everywhere but this is the first place I saw it and I forgot to take a close up picture so I got one off the web. The mix and match of flavors is astonishing though I took a plain coke zero because I am a creature of habit. My wife tried coke zero with lemon mixed in and then went wild with some weird root beer concoction on a  refill. I guess old fashioned simple dispensing has to got the way of the Ford Model T and two stroke Vespas...The fountain drinks cost  just under three bucks and you can essentially do what you like with all the buttons and permutations and fizzy water and ice. Its pretty astonishing.

They cooked our food in this exemplary kitchen so while they worked we retired to our table and played with the coke fountain while we talked.  You have one of those Outback-style buzzing things that light up like a ballistic missile warning system when your food's ready. Trays are metal and reusable, Styrofoam doesn't exist  here and  recycle bins take up more space than trash. All in all not a  bad example for other Duval businesses to follow.

This is also a full bar which makes sense in Key West where alcohol lubricates most social interactions. They also have a decent list of draft and bottled beers which were off limits as I had overtime later.

 

The odd thing about all this franchising going on in Key West is that the town seems to have been discovered...Checkers closed recently but Five Guys has two locations and the newest burger franchise is something called Johnny Rockets, further up Duval. That one I have yet to visit as it promises some peculiar nostalgia trip, a cross between Leave It To Beaver and the Fonz "... the belief that everyone deserves a place where they can escape from today’s complicated world and experience the uncomplicated goodness of classic Americana." It sounds a little too much like Disney-on-a-burger for my taste but perhaps one day...after I get cable and spend some time with the nostalgia channel learning how the past was less complicated than the present. 

So after all the kerfuffle about lifestyles and antibiotics how was the grub? That's the real question and I have to say it was pretty good. If the idea of a ten dollar burger meal is too much you will have to stick with Mickey Ds and have it your way, but this was a decent sandwich and as such BurgerFi enters my pantheon of affordable eats in Key West. It's not Badboy Burrito or Yebo's or White Street Station, but it's a franchise that delivers. And the fries were excellent and far too abundant. Dolly and Robert had onion rings and they looked excellent too, coming in different diameters which gives one the idea that they are in fact off a real vegetable! I had the breakfast burger which is rather over the top with bacon cheese potato egg and I don't know what. I will have it again next time.

I have no idea if I am re-thinking the burger, whatever the hyperbole means, but we went to the play well fortified and free of harmful antibiotics and stuff. And I don't think bobby socks would have made the food taste better.

Posted with Blogsy

Trash, The Judge, And Trashing His Member

They do love their stickers in Key West and the latest I noticed advertises a blog I Conch Key West, purportedly, but in fact the blog seems to advertise a Facebook page  where all the activity seems to take place. I enjoy having a page to myself, a place wher I can think out loud and take as much or as little time as I like to express a thought. Facebook feels too hurried to me and life in Paradise is more than sunsets and webcams to me. More interesting too.

I suppose I should do a better job of advertising this page and start selling t-shirts and stuff but I am evading living in a world where the basis of everything is making a buck. I was approached recently to review motorcycle accessories on my page and allow them to post their own blog entries here; entries that more closely resembled ads than anything I write. Their representative got quite offended when I refused. This might as well be Cheyenne's page as I actually quite like her, as uncommercial as she is. She doesn't even mind sharing her lawn with a couple of bums, and she never panhandles.

Speaking of bums, this one (below) was passed out while the two visitors struggling with the map were looking for the place where you apply for a marriage license. Lucky for them I knew where the Lester building is. They were close but not quite there yet. Which is what the city pretty much told the would-be developers of Peary Court on White Street. They want to tear down the crappy Navy housing and replace it with "Key West style" housing that they promise will blend in with the neighborhood. However the Historic Architectural Review Committee nixed the latest proposals Peary Court developers reveal new designs | KeysNews.com. And the redevelopment struggle continues. Personally I think anything would be better than what is there now, but I suspect the developers, who p[aid  $35 million, will have to struggle a good bit more, or else get connected. I hope, perhaps in vain, that in the end Peary Court will look good and be livable, if it cant revert to being open space.

The city commission made a few people unhappy last week too when they fixed an application for trash service in the city and awarded the more expensive waste contract to the manager who has been in the rotary and chamber of commerce (please note Peary Court developers) while at the same time restoring twice-a-week pick up of trash. The irony is the recently enacted once-a-week schedule is credited with forcing city residents to recycle more stuff. So the city is rolling back the changes that increased the recycling rate from 7% to fully twenty one percent of the waste stream. And paying more to accomplish this improvement! So much so the city employee in charge promptly announced his resignation citing a coincidental family obligation across the continent in Seattle, while David Lybrand a member of the Sustainabilty Advisory Board, the group of volunteers trying to make Key West more Eco-conscious, also quit, accusing the majority of commissioners voted yes because of cronyism. All very ugly I'm sure.

In the realm of the law something notable happened last week. For the first time in years a Monroe County judge did not serve out his term but quit early, saying he wanted to restore his constitutional right to privacy by giving up his elected office. I suppose I should point out he was the judge who ruled against me in my civil foreclosure case, and even though I was expecting it as I am not after all too big to fail in the world of finance, I was still disappointed Florida constitutional law didn't  get invoked by the Justice in his ruling. Audlin was famous for ruling against a gay adoption ban in Florida but not at all well known for derring-do in foreclosure!   

Imagine my surprise when the announcement was made that chief Judge Audlin was abruptly stepping down last Friday with years left to run on his term. He has a reputation as a good and thoughtful judge and well respected inside and outside the courtroom. His disappearance from the bench has passed with nary a comment in the local press.

No one has stepped up to defend him publicly which I find extraordinary. His crime? Putting an advertisement on a gay sex site per the Miami Herald . As far as I can tell that has nothing to do with his ability to be a judge but when his photo and his most vital statistic were noticed the ad disappeared and so did his career with a prompt letter of resignation. The one human family was nowhere to be seen wondering why being gay and lonely is a prerequisite to judicial stewardship. I asked around and pretty much everyone gay and straight thinks resignation was appropriate, for a variety of reasons, not least because the web site in question wasn't about relationships but about sex. I disagree but clearly I'm in the minority, I don't see how exactly it matters.

We are told that America is not a racist nation and opponents of Barack Hussain Obama recoil in horror when the suggestion is made that they hate the Kenyan Marxist because of the color of his skin. I think they are transparently full of shit, but at the same time it seems to me we haven't progressed that far on gay rights just yet either. Judge Audlin is known in Key West to be "openly" gay, so what's the deal? Funnily enough the Florida Republican party just elevated a local attorney to the Appeals Court, but I guess he had better stay well closeted following the genteel lynching of Judge Audlin. Them poofs need to know their place, but I'm going to vote for Charlie Crist for governor whether or not he stays in his hetero-marriage closet.

I don't feel greatly encouraged by recent Supreme Court rulings allowing money to flow more freely and openly buy elections and the Republican Party is continuing to press for more relaxation of the rules. President Obama is hardly proving himself to be very effective in the role of Constitutional defender and his likely successor, the dynastic Hilary Clinton is calling ever louder for more powers to be given to government wire tappers and snoops. Meanwhile the great debate across the country is slowly shifting from gay marriage, kinda, mostly yes, to a return to the other great distraction of whether or not abortion really should be legal. Against such issues the rather dreary debate about the rule of law fades into a discussion of who killed whom in Benghazi and where to buy ammunition to defend yourself against the goons of government.

I think this summer really needs to be the year I get out on the water more, and our new home has a fabulous dock with davits and easy canal access.

Now that, and the presence of two loos in the house is really good news.

Posted with Blogsy