Color-Free Key West

They say Key West is "colorful" a euphemism for weird. I can fix that.

Have a pleasant weekend, filled with color and light and check out our podcast at Travel and Safety this week talking about starting a career in photography and what to check out in South Africa with Travis Levius of Mr Levius. 

Morita's Cuban Cafe

The Conch tradition of Cuban coffee shops is alive and well in Key West and I like them very much. You'd think this town would be saturated but they keep popping up. Some people I know swear by this or that place, not always the places tourists know of, Five Brothers and Sandy's being leading contenders. "Did you try the coffee at the gas station?" they say, "It's the best..." Really? But Cuban Coffee is what the Lower Keys operate on, and I dare say all the Styrofoam cups in North America end up down here where recycling is a vague concept not fully embraced.

  

So perhaps I should have been surprised when my wife noticed a new/old sandwich shop appear on the frontage facing Highway One on Cudjoe Key, a block from her gym. However Cudjoe, an under served island had no Cuban Coffee available so the former sandwich shop at this location could be expected to end up offering Cuban food... Five Brothers Two on Ramrod Key is fully five miles north of here...

Morita's is classic Cuban, a family run, hole in the wall business aimed at the take out market. Perhaps its a matter of economics or simply tradition but Cuban coffee shops don't offer traditional sit down amenities that modern North American coffee houses have embraced. Cubans a re strictly carry out. You may find a seat or a bench or a stool at a counter but these are not places to linger.

The bread is Cuban and looks like what passes for French bread in North America (true Frenchmen would blanch) but the soft spongy baguette shaped loaf is made with lard they say and it has its own imperceptible flavor. Wrapped and ready to go for working stiffs on the go:

We shared an egg breakfast sandwich and a couple of coffees, strong enough, sweet enough but not bitter. The sandwich had a salsa, pico de gallo, I've not been offered before on a Cuban sandwich. It made the thing unusual and good and distinctive. Clearly one cannot pile on these kinds of sandwiches daily but I hope we can get a (Styrofoam) container of lunch ion the Cuban style before too long, and see how that goes. Cuban food has come to Mile Marker 23, lots of parking and an easy pause on the road to Key West.

Key West's  Cuban culture is really home grown, and even though Cuban is usually equated with Miami by the outside world, Key West's Cuban culture is homegrown, indigenous and only partly integrated. We live in a  period of increased homogenization thanks to intense electronic "connection" so I particularly appreciate that fact that this is not a chain. 

Sometimes you want to sit and nurse a coffee in air conditioning, but sometimes you need to sip on the wild side and take your Styrofoam and hit the road, a rebel without a cause, Cuban style.

Key West Bight

Key West is struggling desperately to increase recycling quotas. There was recently one of those weird big community struggles over the number of pickups weekly in the city. Proponents of once a week garbage pick up stood their ground saying the reduced garbage collection tripled  recycling rates. The vocal opponents of once a week pick up demanded that collection be doubled to  reduce smell and rotting trash in this tropical heat. This enraged the once a week crowd because they thought recycling rates  would plummet. It turned into urban guerrilla warfare with both sides sniping and commenting in the daily paper while the Blue Paper  did  a brilliant investigation of this massive problem.  The result was they continue to toy with a typhus outbreak and continue to pick up trash once a week.

I live in the county and my trash is picked up Mondays and Thursdays so I watched the great trash debate from a distance. Mind you I have never smelt rotten smells or seen maggots like the critics charged and I walk around a lot of trash cans. On the nicer side you can enjoy palms in the Southernmost City.

 Or masts.

 Old school drinking at Schooner Wharf Bar...

 ...and the new brew pub where the hipsters will no doubt congregate and music will be played and complaints will be called in. Key West sees more than its fair share of complaining I think. So I am hoping they offer a few gentler beers, less hoppy IPA fashionable beers and more milder and smoother beers for old men like me. I am not holding my breath. 

I did a weird walking tour of Popular Places People Prefer, and for some reason the Conch Republic is popular. I prefer Alonzo's for fish but the Conch Farm does land sale business. They call it the Conch Farm because they grow Conch to try to repopulate the reef with Conch which have been hunted to extinction. Please bear in mind "Conch" is pronounced "Konk." Konsh is unforgiveable and causes strong men to wince when heard on the streets of Key West.

I  took this picture of Kermit's the Key Lime store, another popular haunt which I like a lot. Sometimes at night I stand in front of the TV screen for as long as Cheyenne will let me and I listen to the Asian voice talking about key limes and pies and whatever it is they are saying. Its weird to me how popular this place is but I guess its the power of marketing, a lesson to be learned. Then I messed around with the picture and made into some peculiar kind of painting. Digital photography si the shitz as young people are wont to say. 

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1915- A Reality Check

I am very fond of a  website I came across a while back called Stonekettle Station written by a thoughtful Alaskan who wrote this intriguing look back at 1915 for Labor Day, the US equivalent to May Day in the rest of the Industrialized World, including the former USSR, hence the US reluctance to celebrate the day in May. In any event because I like history and have developed a belief that the present reflects the past ( a radical notion!) I thought this essay is well worth reproducing (with a few of my color photos for those not interested interested in history). Jim Wright the author has a donation page on his website and I like to think this kind of writing is worth encouraging. 

You ever stop to wonder what your life would be like if it was 1915 instead of 2015?
Imagine.
Imagine what it was like to be your great grand parents.
In 1915, the United States was in the middle of the Second Industrial Revolution.  It was a time of wonder and ever advancing technology. It started in the 1860’s and would last right up until the beginning of World War I. It began with steel, the Bessemer process to be specific, a cheap and easy way to mass produce strong and reasonably lightweight metals.  Strong lightweight steel was the skeleton of the modern age, the core of everything from the new cars to steamships and oil rigs to utensils and lunchboxes, to the machines that manufactured the future.  A few years before, in 1911, a tall skinny fellow by the name of Eugene Ely landed a Curtiss #2 Pusher on the deck of USS Pennsylvania and took off again – and thus was born naval aviation, a profound moment that would change the very way wars were fought and thus change almost everything else too and the effects of which are still being felt to this very day.  If you were moderately wealthy, you could buy a Cadillac with an electric starter. Despite the fact that there were still plenty of horses out there on the roads, the car had become so ubiquitous and affordable that Michigan created the first modern roads when the state started painting white lines down the middle of the more heavily traveled avenues.  Though many factories were still powered by steam, electricity was no longer a novelty.  The first modern public elevator began operation in London, England, and soon became common everywhere – leading directly to the modern city skyline.  America was booming. Her factories were churning out new products at a record pace. The western frontier had all but disappeared – oh, there were still a few bandits and cattle rustlers out there, but the wild woolly west was long gone.  The gold rushes, the boom towns and gun fights were long over.  Hell, by 1915 Wyatt Earp was living in Hollywood and working as a consultant for the new movie industry.
It was certainly a marvelous time.
If you could afford it.
If you lived through it.
See, those churning factories were horrible places.  In 1915, most were still powered by a massive central steam engine which drove an enormous flywheel, which in turn powered shafts and belts and pulleys, which finally powered the machines.  And though, as noted above, electricity was becoming increasingly common, most of those factories were dark and poorly lit – typically illumination was sunlight through skylights and banks of single pane glazed windows.  Often boiling hellholes in the summer and freezing dungeons in the winter – both air conditioning and central heating were still decades away and all those single pane windows didn’t do much to keep out either the cold or the heat. Those factories were filled with smoke and poisonous fumes from the various manufacturing processes, lead vapor, heavy metals, acids, chlorine, bleaches, all were common.  Normal working hours were from dawn to dusk, typically anywhere from twelve to fourteen hours a day, sixty and seventy hours per week for wages that would barely pay the rent and put food on a factory worker’s table.

Child labor was common, especially in the textile industry, though in some states there were supposed to be laws regulating it.  The kids toiled right alongside their parents.  The children typically worked the same hours as adults, but for a quarter, or less, of the pay.  Pictures of the time show children working barefoot among the machines, ragged sleeves flapping near the flying belts and spinning pulleys.  Whole families hired out to the factories, the men doing the heavy labor, the women and children doing the more delicate tasks. Towns sprang up around the mills, often controlled by the factory owners. Company towns, where workers very often became little more than indentured servants.  Life in a company town was often better than the alternative on the streets of places like Hell’s Kitchen or out in the fields of the South. Company towns gave workers a higher standard of living than they would otherwise be able to afford. But the running joke was that while your soul might belong to God, your ass belonged to the company.  Mill towns and mining towns and factory towns and logging towns were common across America, places where the company ownedeverything from your house to your job to the church you prayed in to the store you bought your food from. And prices were whatever made the company the most profit and in many places there were laws that prevented you from renting or buying outside the company town.  The company might pay you a decent wage for the time, but they got a lot of it back too.  Get crosswise of the company and you lost it all.  Get injured on the job and could no longer work, and you lost it all. Get sick, and you could lose it all.  Get killed, and your family was out on the street.  There was no workman’s comp. No insurance. No retirement but what you managed to save – and since you probably owed a significant debt to the company store, your savings were unlikely to go very far.
Of course, you could always take a pass on factory work and return to the land.  In 1915, millions of Americans were farmers.  Farming was hard back breaking work (it still is, just in a different way) – so hard that seventy hours a week in a smoke filled factory with a high probability of getting maimed or killed looked pretty good in comparison.  Most of those farmers, especially in the South, didn’t own their fields. They were sharecroppers, living in conditions little better than slavery or the serfdom of the Dark Ages.  Of the small farmers who did own their own land or rather owed the bank for their own land, more than half lived in abject poverty.  In the coming decade, the decade of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, most would lose everything.

Most of America was powered by coal in those days and if there was anything that would make life in a factory town or in the sweltering fields look good – it was working in a West Virginia coal mining town.  It was a race to see what would kill you first, explosion, cave-in, or the black lung.  And just like in the fields and factories, children worked alongside their parents – if they had parents, orphanages were also common. And orphan labor was even cheaper than the average child, both in life and in pay. Renting out orphan labor was a good gig, if you could get it.
You could always become a merchant seaman, though life at sea was damned rough. You could move west and become a logger, though you’d probably live longer in the mines of West Virginia. You could still be a cowboy, or a cop, or carpenter none which paid worth a good Goddamn and had the added benefit of a short lifespan.
Since people got sick and injured a lot, and most couldn’t afford even rudimentary medical care, many turned to patent medicines.  The pharmaceutical industry was only loosely regulated, but by 1915 there were some few laws in a handful of states regulating the more outrageous claims for the various elixirs. The big medicine shows were gone, but there were still plenty of drug store shelves stocked with hundreds of varieties of patent medicines. Some were mostly benign, like Coca-Cola. And some were downright toxic, like Radithor, made from water and radium.  As late as 1917, The Rattlesnake King, Clark Stanley, was still making Stanley’s Snake Oil, a worthless mixture of mineral oil, turpentine, and red pepper, and fleecing sick people out of their money and making them yet sicker (hell, as late as the 1960’s TV’s commercials touted the benefits of smoking for sore throats. And, as late as 1970 there were still X-ray foot measuring devices that would give you cancer in use in a handful of shoe stores across America).

In 1915, only a few states mandated that your kids attend school, and then only through elementary.  In the South segregation and Jim Crow Laws were in full force and civil rights were decades away. Lynching was common.  On the other hand, women could actually vote in exactly five states, well, six if you included California which grudgingly acknowledged in November that females might be citizens too despite their unfortunate plumbing.
In 1915, maybe three out of ten Americans could ever expect to own a home, most would pay a landlord their whole lives. Few had any rights in those relationships either, you paid the owner and you lived with what you got or you got thrown out. Period.
In 1915, a lot of Americans were hungry. More than fifty percent of seniors lived in poverty, but then the average lifespan was only about fifty-five, maybe sixty if you hadn’t been breathing coal dust or lead vapor all you life.  Few of those seniors had pensions, most lived on the charity of their families – if they were lucky enough to have families.  Sanatoriums were a common place for the aged and infirm to spend their brief final years.
In 1915, if you had ten kids, you might expect six of them to survive to adulthood.  If you were lucky. Polio, tuberculosis, measles, mumps, pneumonia, whooping cough, hard labor in the mines and factories and fields, lack of social safety nets, lack of proper nutrition, lead paint, food poisoning, poverty, orphaned by parents killed by the same, would probably claim at least four of those kids. Likely more.
People from that generation always wax nostalgic for The Good Old Days – and then theyimmediately proceed to tell you why life was so much harder and more miserable back then.

The simple truth of the matter is nowadays we Americans live a pretty damned good life.  And we live that good life because since 1915 we’ve put systems and laws and regulations in place to improve life for all of us.  Programs like Social Security and Medicare have a direct and measurable effect on how long we live, and how well. Regulations governing working conditions and workplace safety have a direct and measurable effect on the probability that we’ll survive to retirement.  Laws that prevent the rich from owning a whole town, or abusing workers, or turning them into indentured servants, or hiring children at pauper’s wages to maintain the machines in their bare feet, have directly benefited all but the most greedy few.

The American dream isn’t dead, far from it.
I’ve been to countries where dreams have died, America is far, far, far removed those hellish places.
It is a measure of just how far we’ve come, and just how big an impact that those laws, regulations, and social safety programs have had that those who directly benefit from those very same laws, regulations, and programs can complain with full bellies just how terrible they have it.
Things like Social Security, Medicare, Workman’s Compensation Insurance, The Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance, child labor laws, federal minimum wage, occupational health and safety standards, the Environmental Protection Agency, The Centers for Disease Control, The departments of Education and Health, Labor Unions and workers’ rights, and yes, even Welfare, all of these things were created for a reason. For a good reason. For a compelling reason.
These things were created because when you leave it up to the church and charity to feed the hungry and clothe the poor and heal the sick, a hell of a lot of people go hungry and cold and ill.  It is really just that brutally simple.
These things were created because when you leave it up to charity and family to take care of old people, a hell of a lot of old people end up stacked like cord wood in institutions. The moldering remnants of such places are all around us.
These things were created because when you leave it up to people to save for their retirement or a rainy day or for accident and infirmity, a hell of a lot of them don’t, or can’t, or won’t.
These things were put in place because when you leave it solely up to the market to weed out poor products and fake medicine and unsafe machines, the market doesn’t, or can’t, or won’t, and it’s perfectly happy to go right on killing people for profit.
These things were put in place because when you leave it up to industrialists and share holders to treat their workers with dignity and respect and to pay them a living wage for their hard work, you get indentured servitude.
These things were put in place because when you leave it up to devoutly righteous people who go to church every Sunday to decide what is right and proper and moral, you end up with lynchings and segregation and Jim Crow. And that is a Goddamned fact.
These things were put in place because when you leave it up to the factory owners to decide wages and safety and working hours, you get this:

When you leave it solely up to bankers and the factory owners and the industrialists and the politicians, well Sir, then what happens is they end up owning it all and you get the privilege of paying them to eat out of their garbage can.
And for most of history, right up until very recently, that’s exactly how it was.
Fundamentally, government exists to protect the weak from the ruthless, otherwise what damned good is it?
Lately there are a lot of folks who think they want to live in 1915, rather than in 2015.

The question you need to ask yourself, on this of all days, is what century do you want to live in?

A Dull Fiery Sunday

They say this summer has been hotter than ever and honestly I can't really say I feel it too much. That is to say it is warm but not noticeably warmer than usual. However I appear to be in a minority position as my friends say it is as hot as (put your expletive here) and they are begging for summer to end. I have to say I miss the drama of summer thunderstorms. as rain has been in short supply down here and the clouds have hardly managed to build up to any size at all. Usually summer in the Keys is full of lightning, thick black clouds, sudden heavy rain, winds and then equally suddenly a return to serenity and sunshine.

So another summer of drought and heat, said by some to be oppressive produces modest clouds and skies that are less than memorably spectacular though these early morning pictures were better than I expected. I was taking Cheyenne to a quiet Big Pine neighborhood for her early morning constitutional and the sky was on fire. I couldn't resist testing the lmits of my iPhone to catch color on the fly... 

It has been a strange time for me lately, alternating between work and preparing 911buddy for launch. There are so many odd details to take care of that I feel like I am packing for a long trip and am afraid of not having enough pairs of clean socks. My wife is organizing to make herself the company accountant when our app goers to market. She started out as a lawyer, now she's a teacher, tomorrow she becomes a bookkeeper. That's quite the evolution and not without it's own stress. Walking Cheyenne is a chance to clear my head and now Cheyenne is getting  a little too elderly to enjoy walking much in this heat. I like it but I defer to my 14  year old Labrador.

 We did get to walk to the corner of the old Seahorse Trailer Park in Big Pine. Cheyenne used to love this place when there were people here dumping all kinds of interesting smells in the street. This time she paused, looked and turned back. I hate seeing the empty spaces, homes removed to make building permits available for a new hotel on Stock Island. The county's attempt to control growth requires one unit to be removed for one unit added if you want to build living space beyond the few permits issued each year under the Rate Of Growth Ordinance (ROGO). So to build a new hotel at Oceanside Marina they bought and wrecked the old, infirm but affordable trailer park. The local commitment to affordable housing is all the rage for election season but it doesn't mean much. 

It was so nice to come home to the Keys after another weekend on the mainland conferring with my business partners. I feel more lucky than ever to live here, even though my life is mostly a round robin of work sleep and make phone calls. This year I am actually looking forward to Goombay, the Zombie Bike Ride and Fantasy Fest. I am going to make an effort to take some time and enjoy the madness  even if from the sidelines for a little. I feel like I have missed too much of the events and silliness that marks summer in the Keys this year. All in a good cause, no doubt, but all work and no play makes me dull. And these islands deserve never to be called dull. May your Sunday not be dull.

Another Day

I went in to work last night and it was Coffin Night I discovered as I sat down at my desk. Well, that was a surprise, I had forgotten it is the season for High School High Jinks: Coffin Night. Mind you, Key West seems to have a habit of leaving mysterious, tantalizing hints about what went on the night before. Here on the sidewalk a pair of shoes whose owner seems to have vaporized while striding along the street:

Overhead on Caroline Street I saw a sky filled with cotton wool balls:

And Gallery on Greene always has something whimsical, locally produced to view:

Seven in the morning and hardly anyone was around...

...except of course the wildlife, clucking and fussing as usual:

Cheyenne found breakfast in the aloe in front of the Key West Aloe Company. I have no idea what it was but it crunched quite satisfactorily. The numbers of lost pets in Key West quite boggles my mind: Lost and Found. I am grateful to Cheyenne for being so easy; she uses her dog door to come and go, no fence around the house,m no wandering into the street she just sunbathes on the deck and watches the street from the top of the stairs. When we go for walks she gets her way and we are all happy.

Whoa! Clearly this guy wasn't drinking hard enough the night before!

The massive city operation that is street clean up on Duval, a strictly government operation despite the trash generated by private enterprise and their plastic cups and food containers, is an amazing holding operation in the face of the nightly avalanche. 

I enjoyed this beautiful signage to the world famous sunset affair at Mallory Square. It captures the spirit of the even perfectly. Classy as a friend of mine described it.

After a night at work walking the dog downtown seems beyond the call of duty! I was tired, as tired as my dog after an hour of random strolling.

She loves downtown and won't give up. These days my walks with Cheyenne are one of the rare occasions I get to be in town in the daylight. 

And with the sun coming up it was time to go home.

Where's my bed? My life in Key West...