PopcornJackTerry

I know that many of you are breathlessly awaiting my next chapter into validation, acceptance, self identity and the internet (at least that’s how I’m referring to it this week) but I saw an ad in the local paper today and it made me want to write about something different. (To show that nothing ever gets too far from my philosophical bent, even as I type this i find myself thinking “Am I doing this to get attention, to show how smart I am, as a combination of both, or because I’ve played enough games of solitaire on the computer?” I’m telling you, some days I think the inside of my head must look like a house of mirrors.)

And yes there is a soundtrack today. More than just one song. A friend of mine back home is a DJ (I don’t know if he wears a blazer and a badge) and he has a regular Tuesday night gig. You can click here to listen to it. Don’t mind the first minute forty-five of silence. That was probably when he was telling everyone the drink specials.

Anyway, the ad in this morning’s paper was about the upcoming vote as to whether or not a study should be funded to examine the benefits and costs of dredging the channel. Mind you, this vote is not about whether or not the channel should be dredged, but rather should we do a study that lets us know if we should then vote about dredging the channel or not. For a small town, it is a pretty divisive issue. It is certainly the most important item that is going to be voted on next Tuesday. Why we’re voting on it during the primaries and not in November is beyond me, but I long ago stopped looking for logic down here.

The ad was a quarter page and it was a family, three generations, and they were explaining why cruise ship traffic and the people on cruises were important to them. I don’t make the connection between how his father being a kids football coach for thirty years, his wife being a teacher and him “donating his time at many community events” (i.e. inherited a crap ton of family money) with a deeper channel and bigger cruise ships, but what really struck me was that the ad existed at all.

If I tell people I live in Key West, they immediately get an image in their mind of what life down here must be like on certain levels, and they would be right. But when they think of this island that way, they tend not to think of the other aspects of it, namely that it is a fully functioning small town. If i were to tell people that I live in a town of 24,000 people and follow that up with “and man, you wouldn’t believe the politics down here,” I’m pretty sure I would have opened a can of worms that were starving for a two hour conversation. Every small town has its fair share of ridiculous politics. That’s part of the backwards charm of small towns.

The town I grew up in back in Connecticut wasn’t too much smaller than here, and when it came to how the town was run, it was all pretty similar. Down here they call it the “Bubba System” and it is pretty much a nepotistic wet dream. If you have the right last name you are pretty much a shoo in for some city-wide office or job. I don’t know if we had a name for it back home (I left before I gave a crap) but there were definitely similar last names in different departments of the town’s government. It’s the same way all over.

Except when it’s not. You see, down here there is an outsider element: the snow birds. In most cases when people say snow birds they are referring to a retired couple on modest savings who spend three months a year living out of their RV some place that doesn’t have winter. We get some of those in Key West to be sure, but we also get people who haven’t retired because they never had to work. These are the people mostly responsible for the arts scene down here, thanks to their deep pockets and desire to show how worldly they are. To put it nicely, they are not fans of the Bubba System. I can’t wait until next year when the snowbirds’ incumbent mayor runs against the Bubba’s city commissioner.  I’m pretty sure at some point someone in a fit of pique will yell out “Let them eat key lime pie!”

Back to this ad. It tries very hard (and not altogether successfully in my mind) to paint a very local picture on a very international issue. Think about the last referendum you voted on in your town. Tax break for new businesses? Change the number of city council people? Whatever it is, the vote was by the people for the people. Down here that isn’t quite the case.

Last year over 9 million people visited the island, about a tenth of them off of cruise ships. Now, just because I like round numbers and hate doing math, we’re going to pretend that there are 25,000 people who live here, all of us are eligible to vote and all of us do. If that were to happen, each vote would represent at least 360 people. In an off-year primary election, a tenth of that would be considered a good turn out. So basically when I go to vote on Tuesday, I’m voting by proxy for almost 4,000 of y’all.

It’s easy to ignore all of this when you are here for a few hours or several days, as well it should be. You’re here on vacation. Still, when people ask me what it’s like to live here, I tell them that it feels a lot like what I would imagine living in Disney World would be like. We’re not here for the fantasy; we’re part of what makes the fantasy work for others. To do that, we argue over political issues, backed with hundreds of thousands of dollars on both sides and screaming acrimony about how important the issue is and why the other side is wrong, that most towns our size never have to come close to worrying about. To go back to the numbers, think of it this way: the outcome of the vote on Tuesday affects a population the size of everyone in New York City and then some.

And of course this being America, the outcome of the vote doesn’t really matter. The loser will sue the winner, the backdoor cronyism will go to work, palms will be greased, reports will get lost and ultimately those that want it bad enough will make sure things go their way. Some people argue that even if the study is shot down, the fact that it is even on the ballot is the first step of an inevitable slippery slope. We’ve opened the box. No matter how quickly we shut the lid and how tightly we sit on it, too much has already escaped. Two quotes come to mind. One is from an Eagles song “The Last Resort”: They call it paradise/I don’t know why./Call someplace paradise/kiss it goodbye. The other is from a shirt that a good friend of mine wears at work from time to time:

“Key West: It is what it is, but it’s not what it was.”

Shameless plug time. If you like fiction, you should check out my novel. If you would rather read a true life tale of a man’s journey through the fun house mirrors of his mind (guess who?) take a look at this. On top of my bartending gig, I also write for a website that is about to go live in just a matter of weeks called Woodsy Wino. Speaking of bartending, I’ll be doing a lot of that this week, every night through Saturday and a rare Saturday appearance as well. One of my co-workers is going to Vegas for a bachelorette party. Oh to be a fly on those walls….