Seeking The Artist

I find myself labeling people all the time and the fact that I do it doesn't prevent me from getting irritated at myself.  But we are human and that's what we do. People who study humans tell us we do it as a throwback to a time when we had to attach labels to establish each other's bona fides, a time when a label was less a critique and more a way of establishing our own safety. So if you describe me as a writer say, or  a photographer a  few millennia ago you might have been describing me as a member of a hostile tribe or as a mammoth's lunch. If you meet me at a  party and the usual first question is what do you do? I reply I dispatch police. I tell officers where to go.  Ha ha. I don't say I am an artist. Nor do I say I am a dog walker. Though I am in fact both those things.

In fact it has taken me a very long time to come to accept that photography is my art. My friends, including several of you, got me while I was down and told me as much and no excuses were acceptable. I was even more crippled then than I am now and simply said okay and thank you to the many who insisted. Like so many things in the past  four months it looked for a while there that me writing a blog or taking pictures was going to end rather abruptly in a  hospital mortuary. That my life didn't end is a miracle for which I am still grateful, as you will know if you read yesterday's essay. Taking up from that thread I am making a public declaration today, the second day of 2019: I am an artist. (I am also a dispatcher as I have no intention of earning money with my camera and I am a while away from getting my pensions).

I love digital photography, and I have said this before. It is inexpensive, totally forgiving and completely under the control of the person wielding the camera even if the pictures are taken in color.  Monochrome photography used to be handled in dark rooms by amateurs across the planet handling nasty smelly chemicals and stumbling into furniture while clutching pieces of wet parchment, all of which cost time and money. Nowadays once you have the camera and batteries, which could be as simple as a quality phone camera which I use quite a lot still, or a more complex "regular" camera you have everything you need. Any pictures I take on my Lumix FZ300 camera I download easily and swiftly to my phone where I edit the pictures using the iPhone native photography edit functions or those offered by the Google cloud where I ultimately store my pictures (for twenty whole dollars a  year...). I don't bother with sophisticated editing tools or complex photo storage sites. I enjoy using my camera filters and I do sometimes use an app to clean up wires or stray objects but what you see in my pictures is pretty much what was there when I opened the shutter. And  frequently I use the automatic features of the big camera because I am walking rapidly behind my dog and as much as he likes to stop for me often things are just too hectic. Mine is not the photography of  the leisured classes. I do not use a tripod; often I rely on rapid shutter movement to give my pictures crispness. 

I have a friend who is an artist her name is Mandy.   We communicate pretty much daily by text and she sends me stuff she does and she blows my mind. Compared to Mandy the artist I am a plodding westerner where she dives head first into Asian music, all flutes and pauses, or watercolors in those delicate shades and hues or crisp wood cuts limned in black ink. Once she sent me a video she found, ten minutes of a man pouring tea and meditating.  Yup, tea and meditation and I struggled with it and my western tendency to boredom. She doesn't get bored, nor does she question the art she loves or her role in life as an artist. Life is an experiment for her and she revels in it, trying out archery or knife throwing, or making sound essays with a microphone in a cemetery. I like linear stuff, stories with beginnings middles and ends, music with melody, pictures with colors that tell stories and this artist Mandy,  twenty years younger than me redirects my mind to accept and try to understand art and cultures from a completely different perspective. Han Shan and his Cold Mountain Poems is the latest mind twist this unselfconcious artist has pushed me into:

Every day I am grateful for her willingness to test me and put up with my plodding cart horse appreciation of what she is trying to teach me. I in turn am trying to test her sense of humor as I drop puns on her. She outclasses me all the time! Cheers to you Mandy. 

The other artist in my life is of course Webb Chiles a man who has made a living from his art and who is recognized around the world as the author of books, articles and memes, the latter accidentally as when he started sailing, using the wind as his artistic medium, memes on smart phones didn't exist.  Webb and I correspond almost daily when he isn't out sailing at the edge of human experience and he's another of these people in my life I wish had been here decades ago. Webb reads voraciously and turns me on to books and movies, he loves sports and ignores politics and we never seem to run out of subjects to muse upon. He has built my confidence in myself as an artist and for that I am grateful but I have to confess I do not look forward to the next legs of his sixth circumnavigation as he cannot write while at sea.

It is the requirement that Art absorbs yourself, your soul, your privacy that makes being an artist a pain in the ass even if you are not counting on your art to make you a living. Especially in this modern era of everyone being exposed by social media and smart phones it is necessary to be authentic and public to to root out the soul that troubles an artist. Complacency and secrecy do not an artist make, there has to be an irritant in your life, a drive to discover something within your own nature that forces you to create. If you think you want to be an artist it's not enough, you have to be driven from within by something that may not be apparent even to you. I have known people the polar opposite of my friend the artist described above by me. Where she creates and explores unconsciously because she is driven to, others who say they want to be artists live balanced lives in privacy that makes no art. A Facebook page can be art in my opinion but only f you have the courage and the drive to expose yourself on it.

And that pushes me to ask myself why I write this page or post my pictures here and on Instagram and the answer is because I have to do it. When I was lying in the road dying after my scooter accident I did what no one has ever done, according to the medical staff who saw my pictures: I took a self portrait and documented the business of being transported to the emergency room. Why? Because photography is my art. And out in the courtyard I looked to the sky:

I was very conscious of how much I missed my camera in the hospital. We weren't allowed obviously to photograph other patients  so I had to use my phone to satisfy the itch and I tried to turn the tools of rehab and physical therapy into suitable subjects for the lense:

It was then that I got the encouragement to view my efforts as Art and I recognized in myself the need, not the desire to create pictures. I used to lie awake at night when the hospital was silent and flat on my back I would create my essays on my phone app -Blog Touch Pro- and as physically hard as it was nothing would deter me from posting another story about life in rehab. 

One would-be artist asked me once if I would still post on my blog if no one read it, which struck me as an odd question as I don't monitor how may people read it as it is. I suppose if no one read it I might notice because you lot do comment and I met one reader in the loo at the Tropic Cinema rather memorably a couple of weeks ago, but I would still post pictures and words. That would-be artist will have to wait a long time to get going with her art if she needs recognition before she decides to stat creating. 

So here I am. Is it Art? I'm still not sure but it's what I love to do, what I need to do; walk the dog take pictures and record the places where I am. I'm glad you like to look at them too but if you drop off don't worry, I've been doing this daily just about since June 2007 and will continue to do so until that trauma finally does for me. 

Happy New Year. From the Artist. (self labelled).

Still Life

I think I'm driving my co-workers mad and I think also I should regret it but I honestly don't. My scooter accident and near death moment have done me a power of good. I see life in bright colors, I know what I want and I have no time for moaning. I appreciate the colorful asinine quality of a vehicle disguised as a reef:

I was awake enough to spot the young photographer of the week picture and I snapped it quickly before she bounded to her feet and skipped away. I hope she gets an Instagram account if she lives the rest of her life with eyes wide open. I, the adult, get frustrated and annoyed like I ever did but I hear the inner voice much sooner reminding me of the good and the worthwhile that surrounds the negative moment.  

It's so easy to let stuff at work make you angry or moody but I just stopped listening. Unless it affects me directly I pretty much ignore it and inflict my cheery good mood on you. Sorry about that but this page has become my outlet to ignore the negative nellies. I heard from my colleagues about the massive number of hours of overtime they were working and they moaned piteously. So naturally as soon as I got back I offered to help cover shifts - by taking four hours strategically I could give them more nights off. The mechanics of it are tedious to explain but by working certain hours I could give everyone breaks and allow one person a night off overtime. Did they take me up on it? Hell no! Now when they moan about the overtime I turn to my Instagram and look at pretty pictures from around the world.

We live where everyone wants to visit except a few select curmudgeons and you know who you are. Yes I know Key West was much more livable and fun thirty of forty years ago but so was everywhere. We lucky few in dispatch earn a  living wage in a complicated town and I wish the youngsters I work with could figure that out for themselves. These tourists did a good job of dropping all pretense of being Up North and let their inner Caribbean out:

 And we all have to love pirates don't we? Hell yes!

On the subject of being saccharine happy I can't leave Rusty out. We have reconnected like before, even better my wife says. He sleeps with me when I take naps and fawns all over me mercilessly when I get home from work. My wife says he used to do that to her when I was in the hospital. 

The scene of the moaning, we work in air conditioned comfort seated in expensive 24 hour chairs with all manner of electronic equipment to help us pin point problems, and aren't we the lucky ones?

I guess even I needed a wake up call to remind me of that and I don't wish it on anyone. 

Happy New Year and don't be a grouch.

Sammy Creek

The idea has been to go back to visit old haunts with Rusty, as a way to get back to life as I used to live it, only better. I stopped on Sugarloaf Key Christmas morning. 

Rusty went ahead as I can't keep up obviously walking on weak legs behind my rolling walker. In the event he went a little way and gave up, bored. I faced the dismal prospect of struggling to get my folding walker out of the park after struggling to get the damned thing in. Accessibility in the Lower keys sucks something fierce and now I know it.

Were you in a wheelchair there's no way you could get into the Sugarloaf Loop, most of which ironically is paved and even the dirt portion is easily rolled along. They put gates and posts and blocks to keep out what I don't know. Motorcycles as well as wheelchairs?  Luckily I am stroing enough to lift my walker over this mess:

From there we went to Sammy Creek a lovely spot, unoccupied by anyone else Christmas morning except my dog and I. And a fair old spread of gravel I had to push my small wheels through, one foot at a time...I got it done and took some pictures for fun and to create some new memories.

Me not feeling as grim as I look. I look like that just because I'm not very good at taking self portraits and I have to concentrate. So there.

Conch Life

The title of these photos is a little tongue in cheek, Conchs no longer can afford this life. Everyone loves a Conch Cottage, a wooden home built decades ago filled with character and small spaces while devoid of modern conveniences usually. The story is much of Old Town Key West was built by ship's carpenters using ship's timbers which accounts for rather odd angles and lack of structural integrity. It sounds a bit made up to me, like the fact that the chickens came over from Cuba alongside the human refugees, but that's the urban legend. 

 The awful truth is these homes are monstrous expensive these days, more than half a million dollars for homes barely a thousand square feet with no off street parking or frequently no central air conditioning. They are charming of course but it seems to me the charm would wear off pretty damned quick if your neighbors are renting by the week and partying while in occupation of your residential neighborhood. Or if your neighbors are calling you in to the parking police to complain about your car parking habits and so forth. Most Americans have not been trained in the art of close quarter living, so faced with the prospect of living cheek by jowl with people they may not like very much they fool themselves into thinking that because they paid a king's ransom to buy, they have certain inalienable rights. They discover they don't and things deteriorate from there.

 All this neighborhood angst hits hardest between January and Easter and the rest of the year the Conch cottages get rented (illegally) for short term rentals or slumber unoccupied. Their former occupants, plumbers teachers and office workers live in the outer darkness of the Lower keys and commute. The original inhabitants, those who were trained from birth to live cheek by jowl may have a few family homes still in their possession but most Conchs (pronounced: Konks) chose to sell their dilapidated wooden homes in forgotten downtown Key West to a new breed of entrepreneur in the 70s and 80s, gay guest house owners, and moved out to where the action was in New Town.

New Town offered Conchs the chance to acquire their American Dream, ranchette homes with a little bit of land and conveniences like garages and pools and homes that weren't riddled with termites. It seemed like a deal but then, it may well still be a deal if you like living in Key West out of the tourist trails, close to the modern stores on the Boulevard and with easy access to Highway One.  

I like walking Old Town and over the eleven years of this blog I think I have proved that clearly enough but I do prefer living in the suburbs, on Cudjoe Key with my canal to swim in and living on stilts I get views and breezes from my upstairs porch. 

For me the half hour commute gives me a chance to ride my motorcycle, and will again after I recover completely, and living out of town gives me easy access to the trails and open spaces Rusty and I enjoy so much. It's true we are also further from activities happening in town but I find the amount of time spent working overtime impacts my ability to enjoy my time off more fully. I keep hoping we will get fully staffed soon in dispatch. 

 Meanwhile as I get the use of my legs back I have a ten minute commute and easy access to streets and views downtown as I start to get used to restoring my life to what it was before my accident last August.

And no, most people don't have chimneys in their homes. Perhaps it is a function of climate change but I don't recall weather cold enough for a fire in the last decade at least.

Overhead the planes keep coming bringing more eager tourists ready to enjoy winter paradise on the island that is a peninsula, in the sub-tropics not the tropics, at eye watering first world prices with unfortunately third world service much of the time owing to the lack of continuity in staffing as finding a place to live sucks up all your income and requires more than one job leaving very little free time to enjoy life in paradise as a worker. So after a while you get fed up and leave. What an awkward circle of life. I'm lucky I have the job I have and every day I am grateful it allows me to live in paradise. 

Learning To Sleep

There are those times when you think you know what you know and there are times when you don't. Apparently I sleep badly, this despite the fact that I fall asleep easily, sleep soundly enough I don't remember my dreams and awake refreshed enough to take on the world.  But no, I sleep in a manner guaranteed to kill me, or something like that. 

Thursday  night I arrived at Mariners Hospital in Tavernier around  seven in the evening for an appointment to study my sleep. My pain doctor says I have an obstructed something in my throat which leads to me not breathing properly or something and the long and short of it was I found myself back in a hospital room for the night. Thank you Cigna for picking up the tab. Thank you Layne for reminding me to pack my green blankie, happy hospital memories under that warm woolly covering.

Sam the technician  got me settled in my  room with my stuff which I promptly dived into and ate my sandwich and fruit. When he came back he then wired me up with monitors all over my chest legs and head. The glue I will tell you leaves your hair matted in a way that could be embarrassing for people with filthy minds and the monitors come off peeling chest hairs like they're going out of fashion. But all that was for the morning after. I sat and got wired up around 9 pm and made the best of a grotesque situation. Never done this before, but as promised it didn't hurt:

My wife followed my progress from Key West and sent helpful pictures of the family enjoying a rambunctious night out chowing down on Cuban food at El Siboney on Stock Island. I much preferred my dinner from my lunch box  thank you. 

Then I was alone with my thoughts and the camera and speaker connecting me to Sam in his office next door where his machinery was set to monitor my sleep. Bleak about covers it. 

His voice sounded advising me to get some sleep and with the phone turned off I was in darkness with my wires and a red light from the camera on the ceiling. Fun. I slept. Until one thirty when Sam came in and took the probes from my nostrils (I told you this was fun) and replaced them with a breathing tube that pushed air into my nostrils. So I have sleep apnea I asked Sam and he replied he was only a technician and couldn't diagnose but clearly I wouldn't be getting the tubes if I didn't need them. 

So then I had the interesting task of falling back asleep after getting over the claustrophobic attachment of  tubes under my nostrils...and apparently I slept a lot better until my final wake up at 5:15 in the morning. No doubt a CPAP machine is in my future but I will let them decide that for me. And that is what a sleep study is all about. One more new and interesting medical procedure I had never much thought about before, just like all the others in my life which used to be hospital-free! 

In case reading about a sleep study is as unexciting as I suspect I am attaching some photos from a family visit to the Key West Wildlife Center yesterday. A good deal more exciting than one more hospital visit.

 Grandfather and grandson enjoying tropical fauna together: