Please don’t ask where the June 12, 2007 date at the top of this homepage came from, because I don’t know, nor can I figure out how to get rid of it. Perhaps that is sufficient preamble. For visitors to this website not yet familiar with the Keys, they are insanity’s, er, sanity’s last stand in America, maybe in the world — maybe even in the Universe! You’ll have to come here, though, to understand that and maybe start feeling better about yourself, but perhaps reading some of the musings on who knows what posted nearly daily to the “Today’s Flakey Drivel” menu page at the right will help get your feet a little wet.
When I started up this website in the fall 2007, with the indispensable help of the notorious “Capt. Conch” of bigpinekey.com, who can’t figure out how to get rid of the June 12, 2007 date at the top of the homepage either, I perhaps didn’t realize why. But life zigged and zagged along, and, well, as I said, you can get a glimpse of some of that in my grumblings and horsings around on just about any and everything in the Archives. Take plenty of food and water; it will take you while to read it all. Or, to get a sneak preview, open and read some or all of the other menu pages. Then call the folks with the funny looking coats and butterfly nets to come get you for reading it!
You may now be starting to see what folks around these parts have come to appreciate, some more kindly than others, that there’s just no telling what might up and jump out of my pen, er, laptop. Just no telling. Meaning, I do not view life, running for public office, or whatever heaven gives me to do as a beauty or popularity contest. I sometimes go way out of my way to make people unhappy with me. I sometimes don’t get invited out much for social events. I sometimes write about people who invite me out. I often write about elected officials, politicians, jounalists and who and whatever else crosses my path. I claim angels tell me in dreams what to write about, or else. Most people don’t seem to believe me. They would if they lived in my skin, but since they don’t, I suppose they should be darn glad.
Meanwhile, anyone still gawking at the pretty nature pictures up the way might wish to keep ever in mind that nothing in the Keys is entirely what it appears to be. Our coastal waters are often contaminated with human fecal matter. Our only living reef in the continental United States is dying. The cost of living here is beyond belief. Our real estate market is plummeting like a stone. Our county government is a candidate for bankruptcy court or the Saturday morning cartoons. We have a staphylococcus pandemic, MRSA it’s generally called. (See “MRSA cure” page in the menu for treatment method.) We have more booze and narcotic consumption, and maybe more churches, and almost certainly more homeless people per capita, not necessarily unrelated, than any place you are ever likely to find. Despite mucho spraying, we usually have a healthy popoulation of starving mosquitoes during the warm months, and now some of them critters carry dengue fever. As I recall, the warm months are also when hurricanes sometimes come calling. Yet we call it Paradise.
Which all brings me to maybe reason #2 for this website. It’s turning out to be some sort of off-beat newspaper or book, or, as some say, rumor mill or daily news from the state mental, none of which is copyrighted, all of which is freely usable by anyone who reads it – but it is asked that it be used in context, which I realize may or may not happen; as should anyone who uses it out of context have realized by now that if I learn of it they just might find themselves keel-hauled in the next Today’s FlaKey Drivel missive. After gandering this webtoon, if you still feel adventuresome, you might wish to check out goodmorningkeywest.com, weblink provided last down below. It came about when I lived a while in Key West and tried to prove how nuts I was there — pretty tough to pull off in the nut capital/capitol of the Universe.
A sub-book, or, if you wish, soap opera, not any way necessarily related to bigpinekey.com, weblink provided somewhere up the way, is reported in the Big Pine Key: Heart of the Resistance menu file of this homepage. It contains posts from the Today’s FlaKey Drivel file that are particularly related to Big Pine Key and its nearby environs. Posts some people will say, maybe, that I made up or wrote from the state mental. I sometimes wish it were so. Sometimes.
Cheers!
Sloan Bashinsky, local runaway and otherwise dubious character
Contact me at keysmyhome@hotmail.com
http://GoodMorningKeyWest.com
(sister website)