This yesterday (12 June 08) from a woman reader living near Jupiter Beach:
“I think you are a writer waiting to write…your novel. There must be a thousand stories in Key West or at least two or three story lines and lives to weave together. Your commentaries remind me of the book and movie THE PELICAN BRIEF. Individual lives [and homes and wildlife] don’t seem to be worth much when developers can make millions.”
Hmmm . . . I already wrote four what I felt were damn good novels that didn’t seem to meet with too much warm public reception . . .
Hmmm . . . I wouldn’t know where to begin writing a novel about Key West and the Keys . . . so many weird places to start and so many bizarre stories to tell . . .
Hmmm . . . I’ve been writing about Key West and the Keys daily, and posting it for free to goodmorningkeywest.com’s Today’s Cock-a-doodle-doo page and to goodmorningfloridakakeys.com’s Today’s FlaKey Drivel page for quite a while now . . .
Hmmm . . . Seems a lot more people are reading my wacky writings on those two websites than I ever had read any novel I wrote, or any book I wrote before I started writing novels . . .
Hmmm . . . Maybe if I wrote a novel about all the utter brilliance I see and experience daily in Key West and the Keys, I’d have to make up the names of the guilty to protect the innocent, as publishers live in mortal fear of being sued for libel . . .
Hmmm . . . Maybe if I wrote a novel about Key West and the Keys, I could write about stuff that doesn’t really happen here and become a lot like the novelists who write stuff they make up . . . novelists like John Grisham, Carl Hiaasen, Michael Haskins . . . and me . . .
Hmmm . . . Maybe I should tell what happened last night when I told Penny Johnson, co-owner of Sippin’ Internet Café in Key West, what I’d just read on the front page of the Keynoter about an 18-story hotel at the airport, and she laughed and said we need a lot more condos, too . . .
“ The Monroe County Commission, asking for a broad range of ideas for building hotels at the Marathon and Key West airports, will learn about a proposed 19-story high-rise at Key West International Airport at Wednesday’s commission meeting. Such a building — 192 feet tall, 147 feet higher than the 35-foot limit in place countywide — would dwarf Key West/s tallest building, the seven-story LaConcha Hotel. It would also top the county’s tallest structure, the 13-story Bonefish Towers condo in Marathon.”
Hmmm . . . Maybe I should tell the County Commission that I think it’s a really great idea to open the floodgates to developers to build 18-story high-rise hotels and condominium complexes in Key West and throughout the Keys, because our hotels are always booked to 100 percent capacity and we have a screaming need for more condominiums and transient rentals and part-time residents . . .
Hmmm . . . Maybe I also should chastise the County Commission for not going along with local tycoon developer Ed Swift’s impromptu one-man-called county commission meeting, at which he berated the County Commission for letting out the building of affordable housing to Habitat for Humanity and Bahama Conch Community Trust, instead of to him, because he can build affordable housing a lot cheaper than those two non-profits can . . .
Hmmm . . . Maybe I should add into that Swift Concrete Mix Marathon tycoon Pritam Singh and other well-known Keys developers, and Key West attorneys David Paul Horan and Jerry Coleman, whom, along with Ed Swift, clearly know a lot more about what’s best for Key West and the Keys than do the five sitting county commissioners . . .
Hmmm . . . Maybe I also should mention that the 18-story hotel at Key West International Airport was County Mayor Mario DiGennaro’s brilliant initial idea . . . and that I told State Representative Ron Saunders last week at a Key Largo candidates forum that I had taken out a hit contract on Mario . . . and that I’d gotten the Mafia to agree to do it . . . and when Ron said he wasn’t sure I was kidding, I said the Mafia I was talking about had wings . . .
Hmmm . . . Just can’t bring my legal mind to see any publisher ever putting its name on a novel that doesn’t make up stuff and change the names to protect the guilty . . . so maybe it’s not supposed to be a novel . . . maybe it’s supposed to be what it already is . . . a theater of the sea, but on land mostly . . .
Sloan Bashinsky