Back to the Palm Trees
The bizarre little island that is Key West holds a special place in my heart. It’s a strange place situated south of and beyond the long peninsula that is Florida, and it’s a tantalizing combination of beautiful and derelict. It’s palm trees and turquoise waters, but there also remains a feeling that it is a pirate outpost full of drunkenness and a general disregard for the rules. I believe this is largely a good thing, but like anything in life, there are moments in which it shows its dark underside. Frolic merrily; heave and stagger. So it goes. I went there every year from 2013-2016, and then for myriad reasons did not return again for over five years.
This is notes and pieces from the return trip.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been to the tropics and felt that feeling - life anew. Life as it could be, life as it should be. Life and a place where it’s easy, and it feels good, and all the creeping constraints of the daily grind and all its associates fall away and you remember what it’s like to feel free. It’s warm, and it’s pleasant, and the colors are vibrant and there’s a peace that flits in softly on the breeze after a few days, and then you remember what vast opportunities this thing holds. This thing that is life. It doesn’t have to be a grind, or a series of dreaded routines to achieve shifting milestones, or even a track of progress to some distant promising point. It can be sweet, and it can be free, and it can feel good as it happens. You can drink rum on a beach under a palm tree and then wash it all away in turquoise water. You can be engaged in the scene all around you, and you can smile and know that it is good as you take it in, and there is no need to be aloof and plotting for the next day or any more distant day, and then also importantly there is no need to let in the dull dread that comes knocking when you aren’t. It’s a sweet day by day existence with pleasantries that are not vapid. The easy joy in the air and the sunset into the sea as the evening breeze brings a slight chill - isn’t that nice? Isn’t that something that makes you want to live more? Isn’t that something that reminds you we are free in this world?
the colors in the photographs i took this go round are not as warm as years past, that is to say i.e., less pink and yellow, more deep green and blue on gray stone. this is partially for the simple reason that i wanted to shoot true color, but equally because i really didn’t do any street photography on this trip and so largely forewent the town itself along with the buildings, the people, and all the decor that goes with them. that then is partially out of laziness, but perhaps it’s more because i don’t know that i’ve ever needed a classic edition vacation as badly as i did when the plane touched down in the conch republic, and so anything with even a semblance of work about it became intensely unattractive. give me a rum drink and let me lay down on the beach in the sun. fuck the documentation. so below here it’s cool and deep colors that don’t match the warm tropical whimsy colors shown above. but they are true. and of course, with pictures of lizards as always...
