First Postcard from Key West

I've always heard Key West described as a decadent, sweaty, rumpled sheets kind of place. A place, like San Francisco, where people go to live on the edge of the world, as far from the disapproving frown of civilization as possible. A place where people go to reinvent themselves. What surprised me was how little peace and relaxation I found there. True, we were only there 3 days / 3 nights, so I have only the most superficial impressions. Normally, we would try to rent a house, blend in with the locals, stay awhile. This trip was done at a dead run because we had so little time and so much ground to cover. Unfortunately, I don't have a job that approves of frequent or long vacations. I'm starting to come to the realization that if I want to see the Netherlands this summer, I'm going to have to do it as a 5 day Blitzkrieg where 2 days are eaten up just with air travel. So, if I found no peace and relaxation in Key West, well, I didn't exactly bring it with me.

I would describe Key West as the standing wave of spring break caught in pink concrete, a frat party gone terribly wrong and invaded by people old enough to know much, much better. The entertainment seemed to be to gather every night at Sunset Pier to watch the sunset with a stiff drink and spend the evening, every evening, pub crawling down the 14 blocks of Duval street. To hit every establishment serving alcohol would have been quite an achievement. The bars were shoulder to shoulder. No theme of decadent missed out on. There were sailor bars, redneck bars, a clothing optional bar, Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville theme bar, Sloppy Joe's (the physical building where Hemingway drank), Captain Tony's (the establishment that Hemingway drank at until it was forced to move because of high rents), Cuba bars with Cuban cigars, pirate bars with their own gift shops, sports bar, Salsa bars, raw oyster bars, and so forth and so on.

Between the bars were gift shops selling the tackiest of souvenirs. A large number of vendors booths had flatten glass beer and hard liquor bottles, where they'd taken the bottle and heated it so that the glass was soft and pressed it flat to be a wall hanging. Mardi Gras tittie beads, you know, the shiny metallic bead strings they throw at you from the floats if you lift up your shirt and show off your chest. But here some of the strings had balls 3-4 inches in diameter. You would see gentlemen at the bar, wearing these enormous strings of metallic beads that looked more appropriate for fishing net floats than casual wear. And let us not forget the ubiquitous pink flamingo.

Bad street performers passed the hat in anticipations of the wonders they would perform because, quite frankly, I never saw most of them do much. In the street, drunks weaving in and out of the permanently stopped traffic in noisy Vespas. The first night when we accidentally ended up driving down Duval street, we ended up behind a guy taking his upright piano for a leisurely stroll down the middle of the street.

It's not that we didn't try to give it a go with the tourist-type merriment. We had a drink at Sunset Pier at sunset. The bartender yelling down the length of the dock, "do NOT feed the seagulls. do NOT feed the pelicans. if you do, they will NEVER GO AWAY" to the people who somehow thought radioactive orange, genuine imitation, glow in the dark, cheese nachos were the native food of sea birds. But Dean and I are not in training to rock a bar stool and the margaritas at the Sunset Pier could best be described as 8 oz tequila shots with a straw and 2 cubes of ice. That was the beginning and end of our pub crawl.

In the beginning I thought it a little odd everyone gathering for sundown. Was sunset the starter's pistol for the nightly crawl? But then we realized that people on the east coast don't normally see the sun set into the ocean. I remember the first time I'd come to Florida, to Boca for a business meeting for Motorola. I'd been on the road two weeks, this was my third state. I was completely disoriented. I woke up in a mold stained hotel to find the sun rising from the ocean and completely lost it for a moment. The sun did not rise from the ocean. That's it. The magnetic poles have flipped, the earth is spinning the wrong way, it was the end of life as we know it. And then, oh, I'm in Florida. Right. Did I mention that I'm not a morning person? So, the east coast types came out to see what they don't see, a sun sinking into the ocean, the birds and boats coming home to rest, and when the sun was gone and the dusk had begun to settle, God bless them, they applauded.

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