To save time and wear and tear, here’s the shorthand view many people in the Keys and elsewhere hold of yours truly.
For more adventuresom visitors to this website, who are not yet familiar with the Florida 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 with my Muse here just below.
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 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 else 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 as a result of that, and probably other factors. The cost of living here is beyond belief. But, good for you if you hanker to live down here, not good for us, our real estate market is still plummeting like a stone following Hurricane Wilma’s dance through the Keys in the fall of 2005.
Wilma pays Key West a brief but memorable visit
Wilma’s high tide flooded the lower level of thousands of Keys homes and killed probably 30,000, maybe even more, motorized vehicles and no telling how many bicycles, baby strollers, skate boards, lawn mowers, weed whackers, TV sets, stoves, refrigerators, diswashers and air conditioning units, not to mention providing a landfill amount of ruined sheetrock, plaster, wiring, plumbing, furniture, and dead trees and shrubs that took contract haulers months to haul out of the Keys to wherever they dispose of such things.
Our county and city governments are candidates for bankruptcy court and/or the Saturday morning cartoons. We have, not necessarily totally unrelated if you are into symbolism, a staphylococcus pandemic, MRSA it’s generally called. (See “MRSA cure” page in the menu for treatment method. Not a joke, this a survival kit.) We have more booze and narcotic consumption, and maybe more churches, and almost certainly more homeless people per capita, again 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 warmer months, and now some of them critters carry dengue fever. The warmer months (think May into early November, to be historically comprehensive) also are when hurricanes sometimes come calling. Yet we call it Paradise and view it as a nation unto itself.
Old Seven Mile Bridge (left) and the remains of old Bahia Honda Bridge (right). The trestle was added onto the railway bed for motorized vehicle traffic. A beautiful state park, Bahia Honda, lies a few miles below Seven Mile Bridge, just above Big Pine Key. The right-hand photo at the top of this homepage is another view of the old Bahia Honda Bridge. God’s country, if ever it was.
In late 2000, on the last leg of my move from Maui to Key West on a Greyhound bus (don’t get me started on that wacko story), I personally relocated the Mason-Dixon line to the center of the modern Seven Mile Bridge (left-hand photo at top of this homepage). The original bridge built by Henry Flagler for his Overseas Railroad a generation before I was born (I’m 67, I think), was one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. Or should have been if it wasn’t so classified. After the Labor Day Hurricane of ‘35 wrecked some of the railroad bridges again, the railroad was discontinued. Then, the only way into the Keys was swimming alligator, crocodile and shark-infested waters (weak joke), boats and airplanes, until highways were paved over the railroad bridges and the Florida Keys entered the modern era, so to speak. In one of my prior lives I drove a few times over those narrow two-lane bridges, with traffic whizzing 60 m.p.h. both ways — real exciting moment, meeting an 18-wheeler coming the other way at a mile a minute. Today, parts of the remaining, amazing pictuesque old bridges are used for walking, bicycling and fishing. And other parts are closed off.
Which all brings me to yet another reason for this hugely uncommercial website. No, not the lovely pirate wench above, who already picked your pocket cleaner than a whistle with you all the unwiser. This howling at the moon and stars has turned out to be some sort of off-beat rag 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, if I learn of it, they just might find themselves keel-hauled in the next Today’s FlaKey Drivel missive.
If, after gandering this webtoon, er, page you still feel adventuresome, you might wish to check out goodmorningkeywest.com, weblink provided last down below. That even more unclassy website came about when I lived a few years in Key West and tried to prove just how nuts I really was — pretty tough trick to pull off in the nut capital/capitol of the Universe.
Big Pine Key natives watching the invasive species come ashore - humans.
Meanwhile, back to the somewhat less weird, somewhat, a sub-book, or, if you wish, a horny soap opera, not any way necessarily related to bigpinekey.com, is reported in the Big Pine Key: Heart of the Resistance file in the menu on the right-hand side of this here homepage. It contains posts selected from the Today’s FlaKey Drivel file that are particularly related to Big Pine Key and its nearby environs. That’s why I keep providing the indigenous weblink: bigpinekey.com
Cheers!
Sloan Bashinsky, local runaway and otherwise dubious character
past-life photo (2006)
Contact me at keysmyhome@hotmail.com
http://GoodMorningKeyWest.com
(sister website)