thee istsfor manity reader

… interesting…

… to say the least. There were so many buses parked across the street yesterday, and I was so bone tired, that I failed to notice the GULF OF MEXICO right across the street from the hotel (which you may see a smidgen of at the extreme left of the panoramic shot).

Coolish and very windy all day—strong headwinds and crosswinds—gusting up to 20 miles per hour and steady at 14-16 mph all day. Oy! But it was thrilling to be off of US 1 for the first couple of miles in these mangrove thickets…

… but then it was straight into the wind tunnels, completely exposed to the full force of the headwind with tractor trailers, huge SUV’s pulling boats and most people speeding like demented demons…

… which is why I appreciate these cool little parallel bridges (old highway US 1) as brief, safer, havens for bikers…

… walkers and fisher folk…

… so wide open and traffic free…

… that action pics are de rigueur (if you’re not blown off the bridge by the 20-mile gusts)…

… one may even stop for a right arm with bike still life selfie (I did, for what it’s worth)…

… that’s me, your host with a sore ass!

Now this traffic and debris free (wide) shoulder is more to my liking…

… and so are these benches that the state of Florida sprinkles about the trail near state parks (this is near Long Key State Park)…

… see, I was here.

I was blown sideways, perilously close to the guardrail and the choppy, salty, Atlantic on this bridge into Islamorada…

… so I rewarded myself with some home cooking: a croqueta de jamón and a cortadito (look it up) at Ohio Key… see them half consumed on my bike seat?

On Tea Table Key there are memorial plaques to Ponce de Leon, the Cuban Rafters of the 1980’s and 1990’s, and to the lost Spanish fleet of 1733 that disappeared in a hurricane bearing plundered Incan gold and silver.

This, apropos of the midway point between Key West and Miami, is an excellent place to stop for lunch or breakfast…

… baked goods and a chocolate almond milk, peanut butter and banana smoothie for me (now my thing) to power into the afternoon…

… colorful anyway, and very good eats!

Just down the road, in Islandmorada, stands a monument to the civilian and veteran victims of the (still) record strongest hurricane on Labor Day, 1935.

Over 300 people lost their lives and the “Hurricane Monument” memorializes the tragedy.

North of Islamorada one has the choice of the four foot wide bike lane “shoulder” or the 8-foot wide sidewalk… I choose the one not so roar of traffic-addled and debris-strewn…

… but even here some iguanas aren’t so lucky…

… it wasn’t me, I just documented it…

… and finally, temperature controlled ass-recovery in effect again …

… this place has its own beachlet on the GULF OF MEXICO side… and I’m eating every bit of this dinner after burning 2,074 calories during today’s ride…

… which looked like this on the map…

… inconsequential elevation changes, but tough riding due to the high headwinds and crosswinds out of the northwest.

Day 2
Start: Marathon, FL
End: Key Largo, FL
Miles: 49.2 miles

My old hometown and good Cuban cooking await tomorrow (today) in Miami.

What I’m Reading:

Don’t forget that although you aren’t telling a story, you must still do what stories do, which is lead the reader through an experience. Don’t forget that the book will exist in the future. Don’t forget to write, even if it’s going nowhere. Don’t forget to write, even though it will never be published. 

— Sheila Heti / Alphabetical Diaries

What I’m Reading:

‘Another cargo of eager victims—one almost expects to see Breughel and Hieronymus Bosch cruising the freeways in their rental-company cars.’

— J.G. Ballard / Crash

sloop on a loop

kneading each other
this short flicker film
a protest sloop on a loop
at a tax and stay caravan
affixed to martyrs and brandy
the birthday violation
the fighter as a circle
who gained footage of world expansion
the spiritualist from these broadcasts occasionally overpowering the fiercely militant drawing-room in radical decorum

go figure
eleven years later

What I’m Reading:

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!

— Lewis Carroll / Through the Looking Glass

a cemetery assortment 

a wedding for a cemetery assortment
of chests hired to capture crab apples worldwide
apples with no stunt-phrase or apple handlers
the cast—including a fifty-five-year-old forest of dreck during the eight sublime shares spliced by ages with runways in jumbles across the vast velocity veldt, villages suicide to keep up

a noose is flung around nature
for the ring of her cries

surely, if you weren’t impotent
you would be shouting
but there ain’t a thing you could do but take it
take it like those who didn’t bother to leave
the house to vote
let that bite you in places

set a ring around this circus

What I’m Reading:

Then we’ve got to take to the streets in a different way. We’ve got to shut down this country. . . We’re just beginning to think it through. We’re talking with colleagues and other organizations. There’s got to be a moment when people of good will will just say, This is way too far.

— Anthony Romero, to David Remnick / “We Might Have to “Shut Down the Country” / The New Yorker

Signs & Legends (redux)

There is no legacy in semiotics, she thought—nothing to tether to—not land, historical connection, cultural heritage—it was a deep deracination. She found no reason for planting any of her own signs, for setting her own roots, for begetting generations. She expected another apocalyptic culling—this one global. So why read signs?

Take a blithe light around the blockyard, you. Just leave me alone. You gimcrack tchotchke addict. Get your orgiastic superstars elsewhere, maybe at the Debauched Mart—they’re open 24 hours. Be off with you … and your pedestrian fish pix. So, again, why read signs?

What I’m Reading:

The days are bleak and I’ve forgotten how to dress.

— Tishani Doshi / “Tigress Hugs Manchurian Fir”