Key West, 4th July Weekend, 2011.
I have no idea how this place was before they put the oversea highway in. Or how much that amazing highway cost. It reminds me of Monterey, California crossed with Vegas. This used to be a working harbor and naval base. Now, it's overrun by fratboys, sorority girls and their families. Middle America, come to pahtay.
That miraculous highway across the sea exists merely to bear these tourists here.
This is what I've spent my entire adult life fleeing. These people, the stench of their middling ambition for wealth, their secure pleasures and sporadic weekend and then once yearly weeklong binge drinking. They may have kids in tow now, but they're still acting like they're on spring break.
Hemingway I think hung out in both Key West and Monterey back in the day. Definitely Key West.. Maybe it was just Steinbeck in Monterey..
Whicheverway, I doubt either one of them would want to hang here (or in Monterey for that matter) today. All the old working fishermen are disappeared. Now we have the besotted technicians of stockbrokers taking their place, NASCAR hats on backwards, Coors light cans in hand.. It's like becoming trapped one giant Kenny Chesney video.
The unscripted, the rough and raw, the unusual, the dissonant, the foreign, almost everything that could complicate and zest the place has been stripped away. It's basically been made like one great Carnival cruise, but without the boat, and no free parking. Cue the Jimmy Buffet, and get yerself a fake tattoo and an overpriced weakly blended margarita.
All of which is merely to say that they've gone made this place in their image: very lame. American wealth always standardizes and plasticizes, pasteurizes and makes things cute, routine and sentimental. That's what this place is: where the CPAs and Rotarians can come and play at being a celebrity sport fisherman for a long weekend.
It's like when they read the cliff's notes to pass that sophomore English quiz on For Whom the Bell Tolls. They're still faking it after all these years.
All of which is merely to note that Key West pretty much sucks.
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