Cocoplum Beach

I did my bit, but I might as well not have bothered. My fellow Floridians chose to re-elect the HCA Medicare billing fraud king as governor of the Sunshine State. And his homophobe side kick for Attorney General. And medical marijuana failed to pass.

Instead I went to the beach in Marathon. And lovely it was too. Warm on the face, cool breeze on the back and lots of sunshine. What's not to love about Florida? The politics? Oh well....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Bahama Village

When my wife was a juvenile probation officer a dozen or more years ago she was warned against working alone in the Village, a warning she steadfastly ignored, riding her purple scooter hither and yon checking up on "her kids" and their welfare. In a world that thrives on making us afraid she was always greeted cheerfully and respectfully by her young charges on the streets.

Bahama Village has survived and sometimes even thrived in a Key West that prides itself on tolerance in a world not given to that most Christian of sentiments. The oldest Jewish synagogue in Florida was founded here; there is a masjid in this tiny out post of civilization, churches are everywhere cheek by jowl praising their many and various gods alongside people like me who see only oblivion ahead...

Bahama Village is a modern monument to community cohesion and the maintenance of identity in the face of the invasion of money that has swept up Key West in one more cycle of boom in this boom and bust town.

The gay community has shrunk somewhat in the face of gentrification and more widespread acceptance across the land. Key West's Cuban community remains numerous and visible. The African American world tucked away west of a Duval Street is not going anywhere.

Key West's connections to the Bahamas are as old and as direct as those to the island if Cuba. The influential Spottswood family, came to Key West but are descended in part from ancestors in the Bahamas.

The name Albury is celebrated in Abaco with a reputation as a world class boatbuilder. And the African American roots extend to the Family Islands just as deeply.

Bahama Village is not strictly speaking a separate entity and it's boundaries are not marked but it is it's own delightful walk in a town filled with picturesque streets.

I walk here by day and by night and I have never been bothered by anyone.

It's like every other part of Key West where change seems constant and inevitable, yet the community behind the shifting businesses and refurbished homes seems constant to an outsider.

The formerly chaotic and open and welcoming Chapman residence is shut down by a series of events reported in the Blue Paper:

Bahama Village will, I trust, abide and he still out and about in his one man lighted musical parade from time to time.

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Airborne Stupidity

Stupidity is airborne in Florida, by Diane Roberts.

Diane Roberts: Epidemic freaks me out; what if stupidity is airborne?

From Context Florida

I don’t know about you, but this latest epidemic is really freaking me out. The experts say it’s hard to catch — you can’t get it merely by living in the same state as infected people or being exposed to toxic campaign ads.

But what if they’re wrong? What if stupidity is airborne?

Everywhere you look there’s a new outbreak. Rick Scott, asked what the minimum wage should be, said, “How should I know?” Doesn’t “the private sector” decide all that?

Er, pro tip, Mr. Scott? The government sets the minimum wage. It’s written down in a law and stuff. Perhaps one of your staff can explain.

Then there’s Attorney General Pam Bondi, fighting fiercely to protect the God-sanctioned institution of marriage from those sinister gays. She says children should be “born to and raised by the mothers and fathers who produced them in stable and enduring family units.”

Bondi’s been divorced twice herself. Straight divorce, of course, the kind God favors: she’s currently fighting the attempt of a lesbian couple who contracted a civil union in Vermont in 2002 to split legally.

At least we’re clear on where the AG stands on marriage equality, however backward and idiotic. Not the governor. Rick Scott says he:

Supports “traditional” marriage

Is against “discrimination”

Isn’t a scientist.

Contact with extreme stupidity can lead to panic. The mayor and city commission of South Miami, exasperated by the governor’s inability to grasp the obvious and extremely damp reality of global climate change, have voted to secede from the rest of the state.

No matter how often streets in South Florida flood, no matter how much sea water gets into the aquifer, Rick Scott doesn’t get it. Hallandale Beach had to shut down six of its eight wells. The water’s salt.

But at least nobody’s getting gay married in Hallandale Beach.

In 2013, Scott and that gaggle of imbeciles known as the Florida Legislature tossed out the state’s small but significant program to deal with climate change, probably because Charlie Crist championed it.

The state’s surrounded on three sides by ocean; 2.4 million people live within four feet of the local high tide line in Florida. If the sea rises just a few inches — and it will — their houses are gone. People with 30-year mortgages will find themselves under water in a whole new way. And one good hurricane? Bye-bye Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa.

Naples, too. Rick Scott owns an $11 million mansion there, right on the beach, one foot above sea level. When the Tampa Bay Times asked if he was worried, Scott said, “No. I’m not a scientist, but I can tell you what, we’re going to make sure we continue to make the right investments in the state to take care of our environment.”

Nope, definitely not a scientist, though he finally met some scientists who wanted to talk about climate change. Of the half-hour he granted them, he spent 15 minutes asking what kind of jobs their students get after graduation.

South Floridians blame North Florida for this infestation of ignorance, and given that the state capital is represented in Congress by a man of awe-inspiring, even proud, stupidity, I take their point. Steve Southerland don’t hold with that global warming and anyway, Jesus’ll fix it.

Southerland’s district has a lot of Gulf coastline and the state’s most productive estuary. Nevertheless, he wants to gut the Clean Water Act. He represents a lot of impoverished people, but wants to cut food stamps. He voted against the Violence Against Women Act, claiming, “it came straight from the Senate, was thrown on the floor,” and he didn’t have time to read it.

Two weeks elapsed between passage of the Senate bill and its appearance in the House. Maybe there were too many big words?

I should point out that Rep. Southerland is an undertaker by profession. He actually profits from death.

Speaking of death, Rick Scott now declares he’ll Protect Us From Ebola. Word is there are four, four!, people in the state whom the Centers for Disease Control say may have been somewhere near Ebola-land.

Of course, you have a better chance of being eaten by a panther, throwing a touchdown pass in the FSU-Florida game, or marrying Donald Trump than catching Ebola. But don’t let knowledge and reason stand in the way of a good, dim-witted panic, y’all. No doubt Pam Bondi will insist she’s cracking down on Ebola mills, Steve Southerland will suggest we build a wall around Africa, and the Republican National Committee will buy up airtime to explain how the whole thing is all Charlie Crist’s fault.

Meanwhile, the sea rises. And rises. And rises.

Diane Roberts lives in Tallahassee and has been heard on NPR. Column courtesy of Context Florida and Eye On Miami.

Nostalgia

From Richard Holt's Blog: 

...all except the bit about the soap in the mouth. I was a very well spoken child usually. And I do need roads like these from time to time: 

Hobson's Choice

I rode out to Higgs Beach at my three in the morning lunch break and went for a walk. At 75 degrees the air felt brisk, there was almost no traffic so I was flying at the speed limit, alone. 

Its a conundrum: how did I get to be so old? I never expected to reach my 57th birthday but yesterday I did, in remarkably decent health, still able to ride my bike without back pain and feeling half my age. I must have inherited better genes than I ever had any right to expect.

I was working last night, luckily a night blessed with a moment of inactivity and to my surprise a dozen police officers appeared in dispatch like a Christmas choir ready to sing carols, they serenaded me with the proper old familiar verse. Then we had cake, traded war stories and made merciless fun of each other in ways that officers do when out of sight and allowing their hair to drop just a little bit. It was very moving. It is a strange and difficult profession they have chosen, protecting and serving people who demand a lot of one and expect a great deal of serving as well. I couldn't do it and I am entirely happy handcuff-and-gun-free behind my civilian desk out of sight and out of mind.

I was 46 when I started in the summer of 2004 hardly expecting to make a career in an environment so alien to me but somehow I fit in and through the lense of taking 911 calls night after night I have come to see a different kind of Key West. It is unfortunately true that working with the police tends to give most humans a rather jaundiced view of their neighbors, who may not be criminals but who do not always act with a full appreciation of all the possible consequences. In Key West a great deal of police activity involves cleaning up after the stupid element, not the criminal one.

But from time to time tempers flare and what may simply be a bar fight can end up in something more serious. So for me a break walking around a beach, smelling the sea air and enjoying a breeze is one way to remind myself how lucky I am to have this job in this town. It is odd to be in Key West where nonconformity is the image and a lackadaisical approach to employment is par for the course, to find myself working to a strict schedule where absence or tardiness is not tolerated, where speed and accuracy are paramount and where occasionally it is actually  a matter of life or death how I do my job. 

But then there is the time away, the time to sit on the deck and read, take the boat out on the water, go swimming, and wonder about the meaning of life. The older I get the more evanescent it seems, and meaningless too. I used to think as a child that death would provide the explanations that at last i would know what it was all about. Now it seems to be about getting to the finish line in the least worst shape possible and to have a few laughs along the way. I never claimed I was ambitious.

This past year I meant to make the effort to go swimming off  Higgs beach, just once perhaps but at least once. I have never done it and now winter is upon us and I suspect only outsiders will find the waters warm enough to frolic in. Next year...next summer...out on the swimming pier I will go.

Some people define themselves as motorcyclists, but I consider myself someone who rides, and would rather do that than drive. I have been doing it almost daily it seems since the summer of 1970 when my mother bought me a Vespa 50 and I explored the hills around my home in a way and to an extent never previously permitted by my bicycle. Riding as exploration has been the thread through the years of my life. I took up  sailing figuring a boat could be a cheap place to live and when I went sailing up and down California I went exploring. Always exploring.

Even in Key West I will ride the long way round, up South Roosevelt, round the triangle at the entrance to the city and back down North Roosevelt, a ten minute brisk ride when a cut across six blocks would have done just as well. For me it is always the journey not the destination. Always is, still, after all these years. I still get a thrill out of my commute, wondering what obstacles will be set in my way, yesterday's drunk driver may be this morning slow dump truck or some crazily speeding kid from the Navy Base. I find my challenges where I can and Highway One is not, of itself very challenging, while its users tend to be.

I cannot imagine another thirty years of life, I expect I am in the final third. However in defiance of all the platitudes about seizing the day that plague the social media I have actually done just that much of the time, marched to the sound of my own internal drummer and not paid too much attention to the dictates of peer pressure or fashion. I am 57 years old and content. So far so good. And I never did waste time muttering this stuff to myself:

I just got on with it. What choice did I have? Hobson's, which is to say no choice.

Loss Of Daylight

I am about to become a vampire. The prospect is not alluring but until Daylight Savings Time becomes year round we are stuck with these stupid Fall and Spring changes. Looking at the sunrise this week I spent altogether too much time calculating what the time will be next week when the sun rises or sets. It seems impossible but as I arrive at work at quarter to six in the evening it will be getting dark. Conversely my ride home in the morning will be a ride into the rising sun, instead of the pitch black adventure I enjoy so much now. 

The season has changed in the Keys, at 24 degrees North Latitude. It is no longer summer, it is now winter, after three small cold fronts blew through and swept away the heavy blanket of summer humidity. Leaves don't turn yellow and fall around here...not even in the Fall. It doesn't get permanently cold in the winter, a cold front may drop temperatures to the sixties fifties or even occasionally the upper 40s in a numbingly cold spell, but a few days later the temperatures are back up in the eighties and gray overcast blows away yielding to crisp white winter sunshine. I hope that's how its going to work because the latest cold front is supposed to drop nightt time lows to the mid 60s this weekend...

I like the change of seasons even though I have to put up with endless nagging from people who are hardy enough to enjoy snowmobiles and ice fishing and catastrophic weather that requires heavy winter clothing. Human blood really does thin, and for people used to 90 degrees and humidity 65  degrees and dry air can feel Arctic  cold on the skin of a lightly dressed motorcyclist. I have a mesh armored jacket for summer use but on those cold winter days  (cold to me) I have a padded waterproof jacket heavy enough to make me fell like the Michelin man while keeping me warm on my forty minute commute.

Cheyenne has perked up and is now anxious to take long, lung filling walks in the cooler air which is all very well but her renewed winter energy clashes a bit with my heavy work schedule. I am sleeping later and later as my hours of overtime get longer and longer. None of which makes the shift to a shorter day any the more palatable. However I was not the one who misplaced a pair of apparently serviceable sneakers in a parking lot on West Summerland Key. Their presence is just another mystery in the odd arc of inexplicable nonsense that peppers life in the Keys:

I was born on Halloween, and as much as I appreciate the effort people take to dress up and celebrate that insignificant fact I am not one to join in. Aside from the fact I work tonight I abhor costumes and dressing up and struggling to find someone I want to be other than myself. On the other hand some communities in Florida get their knickers in a  twist over Halloween saying its some sort of Pagan anti-Christian ritual that should be banned from schools. There are some profoundly stupid people we are obliged to share the planet with, and they bug me far more than these silly skeletons and gore and cobwebs. If this is Paganism, count me in.  

With the Fantasy Fest shambles behind us the Keys have emptied for a few more weeks until holidays and snow bring down another wave of winter residents who would rather see this, than snow fields:

Fantasy Fest this year stirred up some Conch frenzy and civic leaders are girding up their loins to join a struggle with the merchant interests to tone down the nudity and sexual excess of Fantasy Fest week. I will watch the debate with some keen interest as the whole sordid business of adult rated parading about is all done in the service of Mammon and the forces of enlightenment are going to have to persuade the people who make money off the event to give up that income. Should be interesting.

Supporters of changes to Fantasy Fest rules argue that tourism is pretty much year round nowadays and there is no need to keep up this nudity fest which was originally designed as a costume fair to attract visitors to a dead tourist town in the heat of the Fall. Fantasy fest was conceived as a risque street parade, though one fueled by wit and satire and politics and friendship.That it has deteriorated, some say, into a sorry display of witless flesh requires correction. 

The debate leaves me indifferent. To me the opposition to Fantasy Fest comes in the form of ageism and to some degree hypocrisy, in that the air brushed quality of the event has slipped away. It is no longer much populated by young hard bodies fresh from the pages of fashion magazines and I have the feeling that if Duval Street were packed with sexually desirable young people the calls for morality and decorum would be largely muted. It may be in fact another form of gentrification. 

So, the sun sets on another summer, season of warm waters and swimming and  sudden thunderstorms and hurricanes (thanks, but no thanks this year -so far!). Winter cold fronts, crisp nights, and early sunsets. 

I think I can manage that.