The sons of fire, the sons of ice, and the sons of air battle in the Keys. The sons of air provide good fodder for the assaults from the other two camps; they willingly fall into our traps and are tortured when they see the reality of our world.

The sons of ice want to kill and disable them, want to melt them and control them,

The sons of fire want to stab, punch, and assault them without them succombing to death, in order for them to savor the humiliation.

Air is supported by earth, but the earth of the keys belongs to no one, which is why the sons of fire and ice fight over it.

Law is not enforced, since the officers are sons of ice anways. Children of the air flock down the streets without the knowledge of what lies in the alleys waiting for them,
On one day of the year we have our saturnalia and no one except the sons of ice and fire escape alive.

They come back, because there's nothing else to do in this world except circulate, even if it means losing your life.

The problem with the keys, at least where I lived, was that none of the beings which inhabited it besides us was really native to the area.

They had come down like vultures, seeking something new in the lands to the south, having been shaped by the evils of the mountain lands they set upon the islands with flesh which burned at the touch of the sun and set about converting the islands into mountain hideaways, never allowing them to retain their original shape.

If there was only a man of the seaweed and the salt air, a being formed from the matrix of the sea and the rocky shore herself who could run and reign in the keys and restore order, but his kind were exterminated long ago.

All that remains of the Keys primeval splendor is the fair Key Deer, who wander the island munching on the leaves of the trees. They're the final link to the harmony which obtained
before the mountain people invaded; not to be discouraged the mountain people want to eliminate the deer, and indeed think nothing of them.

Homeless even in the mangroves they can't exist without the cancer which they've brought from the mainland, their ideas of life and living and all the acoutrements needed, so they leave the mangroves polluted, more polluted than they were when they came, and issue forth as more scum tempered by the elements instead of beings of the plants, of the forests.

They could transmute into them, but that would take time, and none of the mountain folks want to invest in the time it would take to slowly change one's being from a rigid, coarse, and angular form adopted to the impersonality of the new mountains to the smooth and rounded form which the islands naturally foster and encourage, if not totally held back and decimated by a foreign culture and way of life.

Darkness and decadence in the Keys.

The Key in which I lived was swarming with evil beings who inhabited it by day, concealed as humans, but who at night would take off their human disguise and come out as the demons they were, having no regard for social convention, morals, or custom. The evil ones would spread through the streets, doing their things, while the pious among us, those whose humanity was solid, even if it wavered, shuddered in doors. The dark ones would take flight at dawn, turning back into human beings, but beings who could be provoked into shedding their clothes during the daytime and revealing the grotesque form underneath if you addressed them in the wrong way.

It was good then to try to conceal ones' true self, as the sons of the king always did.

I know this is a Florida blog, but before I left on a trip I wanted to get something down about Michigan, where I was born and raised....

My major point about Michigan is that Michigan is truly a pagan state; it's tough to describe, but we're a forest people, we're connected to the forrests, we came out of the forests, and we still have connections to it. The forest or sylvan, as wendel berry puts it, mentality, is the bedrock on which Michigan as a unique culture is founded; it's our agrarianism, this forrest centered life, something which captures the soul of Michigan and which, if eradicated, will eradicate all that's good and valuable about Michigan life.

Michigan presents a constant series of battles between developers and natives; I've watched in disgust while forests were cleared to make way for yuppie home developments which, because of overinflation in the housing market, never got built in the first place. But the destruction to Michigan's natural environment remained.

Someone commented in the free press a while ago that Michigan was the only state he knew of where the practice of "going up north" existed and was so pervasive. Going up north means going back into the woods to a cabin someplace in the still rural sections of Michigan; everyone who has any sort of free cash at all, from relatively poor working class people to the richest of the rich has a cabin if they can, and visits it, uses it as a base from which to hunt and fish, and to commune with life.

This keeps us, northerners yet not so northern as to forget our pioneer roots (even if we don't have any), in touch with nature and with life, and is a pagan extravaganza within a nominally Christian society.....and it's a good thing.

It's not just nature worship, we ARE part of that nature......no wonder Michigan has a high concentration of Wiccans and neo-pagans, it's in our blood and in our history...

The Hitchhikers

About the only truly interesting event which happened during my stay in the Keys happened at the end, when I was already surly at tourists and a semi-local with local friends and connections....

Here I am, pursuing all of these weird studies via the Internet and the FKCC library, hating all the commercial aspects of the Keys, living in a tiny house with tile for flooring with my mother, who has also dropped out and is leading a Bohemian lifestyle, living in a Key known for it's non-comformity and the absence of questions being asked by neighbors, and what do you know----while driving down to Key West I spot a bunch of gutter punks at the side of the road in front of a boat shop trying to hitch a ride down to the end of the road.

I drive by them, then, in a fit of hatred for the bourgeois tourists of Key West, as well as for everyone else down there with money, I swing around via a dirt road and approach them again, this time stopping and asking them what's up and if they need a ride.

Of course they do; while a sort of introduction is made, I pull into the driveway of the marine shop, letting them load their many bags of duffelbagged luggage into my backseat and my trunk.

The marine shop guy, who's probably been watching them, comes out and yells at me 'cause I'm blocking up his driveway; I just make a concillitory remark and laugh, or snicker, at him when he goes away, along with my new traveling companions, who have no love for the son of a bitch either.

Well, we get settled, they get into the backseat and the front seat of my Mazda, and the circumstances of their traveling start to firm up.

There are three of them, two guys and a girl; the guys are from Australia, where, I believe, someone commented that a year abroad hitchhiking had almost become an expected rite of passage for newly graduated primary school students.

The girl is an American. Could be from anywhere, the midwest, someplace in South Florida, I don't know.

They're all dressed alike, which is, a combination of gutter punk patched and salvaged clothing, embellished with patches, and hippy dead head, which translates out to some of them having dreads, which, considering that the boys are blond, makes for a strange scene.

But I let it go;
I've been thinking about how it is that, while writing a lot about politics and rebellion on my computer and sporadically on the internet, here I am, living in the keys, and leading, for Keys standards, a sort of conventional life. I don't have any contacts with any youth rebels out there, who would be my age, I'm not hooked into the Keys underground in that respect at all, and I'm always too far away to take place in any sort of real protest.

My mom has been urging me to get involved with something, anything, which is consonant with my values and also gets me out of the house and possibly into a situation where I could earn some money.

So I think, alright, I'll put my money where my mouth is, if just for this time. I won't be a bourgeois asshole in rebel clothing, I'll actually do something direct and active which most middle class people would be loath to do.

So I stopped. Therefore I am.

Anyways it starts out as a strange scene; first, driving down there, I'm afraid that I'll look too weird to them, for some reason, so I turn down the Rage Against the Machine CD which I've been blasting from my car's stereo for the past couple of weeks, so as not to intimidate them, and try to act like a good, if reserved, host.

This approach backfires, for I forget that I'm not dealing with typical Keys transient tourists but gutter punks who have seen it all and have been traveling in a hardcore fashion for who knows how long.

My attempts at reigning myself in only serve to reinforce the impression that they have that I'm some weird, very normal, mainstream person, who, for some unknown reason, has picked them up, and won't tell them about himself. This makes them nervous, but the nervousness doesn't come till later.

At first, the guy who was delegated to sit in the front seat with me, this weird person driving, attempts to act as the group's diplomat, starting conversation and putting forth some noble, but bullshit answers to the usual stuff about why they're there, what the're doing, where they're from, while the other two sleep in the backseat, or alternately play fight in a sexual way and laugh amongst themselves.

After the usual stuff like "How's the weather?" he volunteers, upon being asked a typical question about why Key West, that actually, he's looking for a job, they are, but, not having a greencard and being a foreigner it's sort of hard. When asked about where they're staying, they volunteer the campground down there, which means that they'll either be sleeping under the stars in their dirty sleeping backs with the sanction of a company that controls a piece of land down there, or they'll be sleeping on the side walk when night hits.

They don't know anyone down there, they obviously don't have much money, they're there for the experience.

The girl I don't know much about, I never did, because, spirited in the backseat, I never got to talk to her.....

But be that as it may I launch into my introduction to the Keys, to their socio-economic background, to the cultural and political aspects of living in the Keys, giving it my best socialist synthesis about how things are, a synthesis that in normal times I probably wouldn't own up to, but which sounds damn good, If I do say so myself, now, based on my latest quotidian observations about the conflict between workers/dropouts and everyone else....

It sounds good, but I feel that it's somewhat not what they were expecting and, for the critical aspect of it, too pat and well, cheery and mainstream sounding, as if a guy from a clothing add had just come up to them and started preaching the virtues and conflicts about Communist Kazhakstan in the '80s and had added that, boy, Kazahkstan sure has some problems, but, hey it's a nice place to live, you know, with a wink and a nod.

They don't know what to make of me, and are somewhat nervous, partly because beneath the cool demeanor I'm nervous, or at least nervously starved to have some conversation and bequeath my infinite knowledge and wisdom and ideas on someone, so I appear, actually, a little bit crazed.

I had conservative clothing on for some reason, one of those coincidences that happen after you throw the dice so many times.

When pushed for what exactly it is that I'm doing down here, after a brain-dead comment by the Australian sitting next to me that "Wow, they actually have Yellow School Busses down here, I thought that was only in the movies" I, after giving the usual run around and stonewalling, point out that I'm volunteering for the Key West film society, and launch into an extended talk about the virtues of the Key West film society, about Cafe Noir, about the types of movies we show there, what we're planning to do, how great it is, when, pressed again, I saw, well, I do things like put the chairs out and arrange stuff, and do whatever they need to be done, little stuff, and that it doesn't pay.

While in any other situation this may have appeared as a slightly pathetic remark, in my situation, as it always is, pathetic gets translated into dodgy and suspicious; obviously, I'm driving a car, obviously, I'm down here living, obviously, I know a hell of a lot about the place, obviously, from my dress, I'm not just a braindead hippy blowing out his brains down here. There's something going on with me more than just arrangeing plastic chairs before movies in an art gallery/ cafe and bistro.

But they don't know what, and that's what starts them getting nervous, which they've already somewhat become.

We quiet down after all of the possible small talk is exhausted, at least, well, there hasn't been a meeting of minds, shall we say, and I'm not prepared to talk about my life, and I don't really care about their life in Australia, so we just settled down for a strange ride through the last of the lower keys.

If I'd only turned up my Rage Against the Machine maybe they'd have understood better.

I'm nervous 'cause this looks bad for me, it's what I've feared----put me in a room with interesting people after having been cut off from educated society for a few years and I'll act like a madman feasting after near starvation. I don't want to be that; people tend to resent that sort of thing, and I'm not going to oblige their hate by dishonoring myself in that way.

So me, with my Ozzie and Harriet midwest demeanor Communist on steroids amphetamine soaked to cheerful, possibly psychotic self driving down, we eventually get to the outskirts of town.....I decide, judiciously, that, with no paticular destination advanced by them as to where they'd like to be dropped off, I'd drive them to the geographic center of the tourism district, let them off near that same square/plaza, that I wrote about earlier, the one that's on the water and which is populated by a lot of derelict cats.

Not a bad move.

After all, if anything, being Judicious and considerate is what I've attempted throughout this whole experience.

I say that the Key West Film Society is putting something good on tonight, that I'll be volunteering, give them a rough idea about what the film is about, try to give them directions to Cafe Noir presented from the point of view for someone who doesn't know squat about Key West geography, and they mumble something about parties, I say I don't know of any, they say that's ok, I think, and, after thanking me for clueing them in on the Film Society, which is sort of prefunctory and purely a customary repsonse to my artificial presentation, they get their luggage out of the trunk, thank me, we shake hands in some sort of a pseudo gang/hippy style of cool handshake, and I take off.

I don't go far, since, after all this is a small island and the tourist spots overlap with the old town, which is where everything interesting is, and so I find myself, I believe, at Valedares news stand at the far end of Duval street, looking through it, then, I think, I hit the used bookstore, the cavernous one, on Truman, finding parking, before deciding, oh hell, getting these folks down to Key West was enough of an outing and an adventure for today and, after grabbing a coke, head back to Big Pine Key.

*****

A few days later I, in a strange fit of actually having something to do down there, hunting something down, looking for a store, I don't know, something probably having to do more with academia than with consumerism, I run into one of my charges on Duval Street as I'm heading south, he's in front of a church, I believe, he calls out to me, I say hi, we say a few things back and forth, obviously he's amazed to see me again, and his opinion of me has improved since the car trip.

But I'm on my way, making the rounds, hunting down a dream, and I can't be stopped, so I, rather rudely, brush him off after the social minimum of interaction, and go on my way, disapparing to do that 'business' which, what I'm really doing down here, they were always suspicious of, not knowning, now, anything more about who I am and what I'm doing, I just walk off into the Key West day and into a foreign land of social customs and transactions from a distant star, far from the everyday reality of my hitchikers.

Pepes was and is my mother's favorite eating place down in Key West; I liked it too, it certainly had character, but if faced with a choice I'd prefer some of the more modern and European places to eat scattered around the old town.

But Pepes surely is something to see; it's located at the edge of the water on the southwest side of things, near the large parking garage as well as the large electrical company building. You'd never know that behind this veneer of commercialism stretching from the road to the sea there was a quaint old neighborhood relatively untouched by the tides of consumerism that corrupted it's down street brethren.

Pepe's is a relic of a time when the Keys were really a nation unto themselves, when everyone knew everyone, etc...

It's an anachronism; you find places like Pepes here and there, usually in some town where, like the Keys, isolation and scenic living have some conjunction----Pepes is the neighborhood bar and restaurant that grew up with the neighborhood in a style of kitsch which, in other situations, would be considered endearing by outsiders.

Here it just adds to the craziness of the whole place. The other restaurant I'm thinking of that's set up in a similar way is "Dog Patch", located in Munising, Michigan, a town in the Upper Penninsula on Lake Superior.

I'll write about the details of Pepes soon, or possibly some other time.

Exiting the theater the feeling was renewed, and I cruised back to Big Pine Key in the dark satisfied that I had done something different, something special.

Actually, attending Dr. Strangelove at the Cafe Noir was not my first non-tourist activity in Key West, non-tourist meaning an activity beyond getting supplies and doing basic shopping on south side of the island. That honor would have to go to seeing "Boys don't cry" in a theater which doubled as a movie house one night in the spring. The theater was a sight to behold, the entire environment it was in was amazing. I only went to it once, but the surrounding area was the site of many pleasant days in Key West.

This theater is situated, it's a concrete building painted a dull grey, on the brick plaza which extends to the edge of the ocean on the end of Key West's Old Towne, at the end of Duval Street. It's famous because, besides having parking, it features performers and street vendors at night, as well as a group of people who have a sun-set celebration there regularly. This brings the tourists in. When the show isn't going on it's a strange brick expanse terminating in water, totally empty except for a few homeless people who live there, or for tourists using the benches to rest.

Directly behind this brick covered plaza is a series of old buildings, dating from the time when Key West and Cuba were intimately linked, which have been taken over by a restaurant and a few tourist shops, on the one side, and more shops on the other.......

The big building which houses multiple stores, the theater, which faces away from the ocean, and the other brick building on the other side of the theater, form a sort of small courtyard totally within the bounds of the city, you can't tell that the plaza exists from it.....

It's paved with cobblestones, and the famous Key West chickens mill about there...but the most impressive part of this courtyard is a garden set off from the rest of it by a cast iron fence which houses busts of important people connected, in some way, to Key West, put up on columns, with copper plates telling you who they were and how they contributed to the Keys....the garden is paved with blocks bearing the names of contributers to this project.

So it's a big courtyard; facing the garden, as part of the big building housing, among other things, a wonderful cigar shop, is a good Cuban restaraunt which serves Cuban haught-cuisine and which spills out onto the courtyard through a cafe like double row of tables located along the side of the building, hemmed in from everything els by an ornate ironworks, and covered by a picturesque canvas thing.

So the set up to seeing "Boys don't cry" is going down to Key West at dusk, with the sun setting as I approached the island, navigating through truman ave. and the rest of it, through the crowds of tourists, to the parking lot near the plaza, parking, running as the sun is going down through this picturesque old courtyard in the dark, with tourists yucking it up at the restaurant beside me, the whole place barely visible because of the effect of the dark cobblestones, the heavy insulation from light which the palm trees made, and the steep sides of the buildings making up the courtyard, to an open and waiting entrance which seemed to have been crafted out of the blackness that surrounded it, a hidden temple amidst the Key West scene, with lamps on one side, and the ticket takers and sellers still standing dilligently around waiting for the last stragglers to come in.

I bought my ticket, then realized that because this is the Keys, or rather after running around frantically I realized that, things never start on time, and that although this was a movie which had special resonance for Key West's gay community, that even social commentary dear to the heart of Key West residents didn't merit being prompt or arriving on time.

But the show did start.

After milling about I handed them my ticket and went in; it was a good feeling, because I had been mixing with the tourists, and going into the temple, handing them my ticket, and going to the movie appeared to be something which the tourists around me had no understanding of, and so the performance of the act set me appart from them, meant that I had, temporarily, entered the occult world of Key West society, of doing things which only residents were privy to and which tourists just watched with curiosity but without penetration or comprehension. It set me apart, and set me into the dark world from which the temple of the theater appeared to have been chisseled out of.

Florida Keys Community College is a sight to behold; on the Key immediately preceding Key West it sits, a post-modern extravaganza of block buildings, brightly colored, connected by red walkways perched on the second floor, well above the ground, with exposed red painted pipes connected to it's drainage system running up and down the blocks....

In the middle of the blocks lies a courtyard, really just an empty space that the blocks have made, in which sits examples of the abstract concrete art, sculptures and what not, that students there have produced......a nice fountain graces it, embellished by student ceramics....a little further back, on the shore where the ocean starts, is a japanese gate, actually situated a few feet, maybe five, in the water. A torri, I think it's called, meant to inspire peace in the viewers. A rock for sitting, or maybe a bench, lies at the end of the concrete of the courtyard...

All in all a weird place, but one which, strangely enough, intersects with history because of it's proximity to the Keys', or at least the Lower Keys' biggest hospital, which is a little bit down the road from the community college. It was at this hospital that Keys resident Barbara Ehrenreich looked at her own cancer cells through a microscope, as recounted in a Harpers article she wrote about her situation.

I think that I ran into Ehrenreich once, at a showing of Dr. Strangelove put on by the Key West Film Society, which I think I've already talked about; it was my first venture down to Key West for a social occasion which didn't have to do with pure tourism; I found Cafe Noir, where it was being shown, and saw Dr. Strangelove on the medium sized screen that the art gallery allowed.

Afterwords there was a discussion group, a lively mixture of people, and one of the people there was a tough older woman who recounted that when Dr. Strangelove was released she was living in Jersey with her husband and her first child....and went on to give sparing remarks about the film....the discussion was dominated by a male ex-hippie who very energetically spellled out how Dr. Strangelove was an indictment of the capitalist, US, system.

I didn't need the sermon, I'd been a socialist and a libertarian for years before I went to the film....

He showed up at a later film/ discussion group, where we saw "In the realm of the senses", the Japanese film which, although pornographic, makes some good statements about life and such. But it's hard core porn aspects are enjoyable as well.

At this discussion group the man distinguished himself by coming up with the idea that Asian culture, Japanese culture in particular, was obsessed with sex and that in Japan you find sex everywhere, that every action has a sexual theme, etc....it was pretty much a racist diatribe, as he was saying that all Asians are just horny bastards by nature. He didn't show up to subsequent films, I didn't know him, and I don't know his name.

Key West's old town......

I remember the first time that I saw Key West's old town......I had seen it before, when my grandparents had took me down there to see the aquarium on a visit, but it was a site to see the second time that I saw it. Like many another exploring expedition, the first time I got to Key West's old town I was hopelessly lost; the process of getting down to Key West to explore was a gradual one, and by the time that I'd checked out the shops on the east side of the island with my mom a few times and decided to venture further south I already knew quite a bit about the place.

My progress was hampered because I left my car up in Indiana, where I had been going to school. Through an archaic series of passes and methods our friend Brian got up to Indiana and drove the car down for me, a few weeks after I'd been down in the Keys.

At the time I couldn't drive because I was on some heavy anti-psychotic medication which made driving an unsafe venture.

When I finally was able to get down to Key West on my own, in my own car, I immediately got lost after I passed over the bridge which seperates the touristy, new, section of US 1 from the older, more traditional, part of Key West.....I wandered over strange one way streets before eventually making my way to the northern end of Duval street, the main drag, whereupon I wandered through some decrepit streets in the hispanic neighborhoods up there before getting back to US 1 going north, and getting myself back home.

I had checked out the Waldenbooks on US 1; it would prove to be the only bookstore, apart from the used ones, which was worth anything and which was in driving distance in the keys.

Valedares' newsstand, also on Duval street, was a close second, as was the bookstore that shared it's space with a health food store up on Marathon. Valedares has since scaled back on the variety of magazines and books that they carry, but at the time I was still able to get a copy of Foreign Policy, put out by the Carnegie Center for International Peace, and a copy of Whole Earth Review.

The intellectual culture of the keys was leavened by a constant procession of high quality books donated by rich people or sold during estate sales; but Florida Keys Community College, located on the residential Key just north of Key West, was my lodestone.....but I'm getting ahead of myself.

In terms of books Key West tried to accomodate it's clientelle, so there was a bookstore that specialized in 19th century aristocratic English authors, as well as Flaming Maggies, the big gay and lesbian book store on the west side of the island.....

But surely the most interesting place was a store which was located on Truman Avenue, the street which US 1 becomes south of the new section, which, located in an old storefront, was the main used book source in the lower keys.

This store was something else; it was housed in an old building with no air conditioning and instead had large fans, overhead and otherwise, which kept it aerated. The store itself was dark and dusty, and hot....it's dust was so thick that you could easily run your hand over the wood shelves and have it come back with a woolly mess of congealed dust on it.

Out front was where they made their money; located there was the magazine section, where a copious selection of porno magazines, as well as tattoo magazines and some hip lefty ones thrown in, was located. The register was on a shelf which faced perpendicular to the magazine section; behind it was the owner, a woman from Britain, who kept a close eye on things. In front of the register was a glass case, under which the most prized possesions of the store were kept; these amounted to rare books on marijuana cultivation. They may have been the most stealable books instead of the most valuable.

I explored this store by degrees, at first only going to the non-fiction section in the front, where thanks to estate sales and the unique nature of Keys society you could find leftist books which were unobtainable in many places on the mainland. They even had an old, hardcover, decrepit, Communist Manual----which was the statement about what good communists were supposed to believe, and which covered every topic imaginable. Towards the end of my stay in the keys I went back to look for it and buy it; but, for whatever reason, it had disappeared by that time.

Because the place was so dirty, and because there were rows and rows of used junk novels and science ficiton books somewhat close to the front, I didn't even suspect that they'd carry quality fiction and literature. But, one day, while killing time and exploring, I happened upon their back room, where an ancient fan churned in the air to a mixture of some of the best literature that was ever produced---all existing in cheap used editions, and most destroyed to one point or another by the Florida humidity and heat.

Gainesville's personality problem....

I live in a town which has some ambiguities which interfere with daily living....
To be precise Gainesville is a town in north central florida which can't decide if it harkens back to the confederacy or to Miami Beach. And then, after presenting itself as a town for all of Florida the locals get up in arms about it destroying their culture, which they present as being conservative and southern.

I have no problem with Southern towns; Florida has a few large ones, and Tallahassee, the state capitol, is an outstanding example of urban Southern society, but what I can't stand is this vacilliating between Southern traditions and South Florida culture...by default South Florida has won, since Gainesville isn't ruled in any overt way by Southern traditions, but this default win is limited parenthetically by reactionary measures by the natives intended to salvage their way of life.

Aleister Crowley reportedly said "Give me hot or give me cold but give me nothing in between", and I agree with that sentiment.

The lack of a cohesive culture in Gainesville is one of the chief reasons why I want to move out, move out of what, effectively, at the height of the college football season, becomes a generic spectacle rooted not in florida, or in the north, or in the south, but in capitalism land....lacking all local character but preserving the brand names intact.

I once sympathized more acutely with the natives of central Florida, but it was in response to practically being forced to by living in a less international city in this region, namely Ocala.

Ocala was a learning experience; it was also a traumatic one which almost resulted in my house being raided in the months after 9/11.

To say Ocala isn't open to cosmopolitan currents is an understatement; the mystery to me, though, was where the people and the culture of Ocala came from----they were so cut off from the outside world, yet they defiantly put forward their differences from said society every time they could, so where did it come from?

I'm still wondering; I think it was imported from settlers coming from North or South Carolina in the 19th century....

But questions like these are ones that you ask yourself after the fact, after you've moved out and are away from the danger. Ocala is possibly the most fascistic place which I've ever lived in, or driven through.....the people there don't seem to understand the concept of "Personal Rights", or civil rights.....It was quite a shock moving there from the libertarian keys..


But it was a decent move, and a good one, because the keys, as this blog has already presented them, are an enticingly closed society which, although pleasant to visit, ultimately presents a spiritual, cultural, and intellectual dead end----the progression of life in the keys leads to alchoholism and obliviousness to ones life going by unused.

Ocala was shock therapy, but at least it broke the spell of the keys. And at least I was able to move out before the authoritarians really moved in.