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May 13, 2005
Up the Coast to Memory Lane
JACKSONVILLE, FL -- May 13
I came back to life around 8:30 am on a Friday the 13th that had me wondering if I'd make it out of this state on two wheels. As I sleepwalked through a shower, I did my best to wake up and hold back the sour stomach that comes from indulging in a mixture of Captain Morgan, scotch, and whatever that red stuff was. Within 20 minutes, the bike was loaded up and I said my pleasant goodbyes and thankyous for a damn good night out on the town.
Tim recommended the Country Kitchen up in Riviera Beach for breakfast, which happened to be right on the route I was taking up the Florida Atlantic coast. I pit-stopped in for a nice omelet and hash browns, and left feeling maybe 20% more ready for the day's toil.
It must be said that A1A is a much more pleasant ride than anything the west coast of Florida has to offer. With much of the Georgia and South Carolina shore an empty mass of swampland and islands, this and North Carolina's outer banks highway (which I plan to conquer on the way home) is the closest the east coast of the US comes to a Pacific Coast Highway.
All through the day I kept waiting for the sputtering and straining of Diana's engine to re-emerge, but it never came. With each mile I notched successfully, I was more prepared to accept Tim's theory wholesale that someone dealt me watery gas in the scary empty green and brown mush Florida has between its proverbial ears.
Between Melbourne Beach and Daytona Beach, A1A disappears and forces the would-be coastal traveler without high NASA clearance to make an inland detour around JFK Space Center at Cape Canaveral. Thus I enjoyed a nice speedy diversion down US 1 for 30 miles or so until I could cruise through the motorcycle folklore capital of the country. Or so I thought. This stretch of the highway is home to a few school zones that, in a compromise between the highway conditions and normal stingy 15 mph you see in residential areas, posts a strict 25 mph.
I downshifted to 3rd in hopes of braking enough to not make any abrupt moves, and blew right by a cop car for my efforts. The dome lights went on immediately and pulled me over 100 yards down the road. I humbly apologized for my lack of decisive braking to go with the downshifting, and the officer chided me to "slooooooow daaaaaayown" and walked away without another word. Making me 2 for 2 in cop pullovers on this trip without an actual ticket to commemorate the event.
The scenery made the day worth the weary traveling, and for a Friday the traffic was surprisingly sparse through much of the A1A going. St. Augustine was the final oceanside area I passed before picking up US 1 to head straight for Jacksonville. I highly recommend the place for anyone who has not been to Florida, as it is easily the most picturesque and historic of Florida's touristy seaside towns. But the novelty probably isn't as strong for me having been taken there for vacation every Summer as a kid. I stopped and did the obligatory pictures of the beaches, and haphazard photos from the bike seat of Castillo de San Marco which came out horribly.
The approach to downtown Jacksonville up the Philips Highway (the common name given this stretch of US 1 once near Jax) had no impression on me since I never spent much time in this part of the city. But the minute I landed squarely in Riverside and crossed the Main Street Bridge (the last of the picturesque old school metal drawbridges in downtown now that the Acosta and Fuller Warren were replaced with generic concrete arches, it triggered a torrent of memories. From the downtown waterfront I took the same Park Street ramp that I took many a day to go to Five Points, which at the time of my high school was Jacksonville's quirkiest artsy district of vintage clothing stores, record shops, hippie cafes, and the nightclub where I had my first DJ gig.
Unfortunately, I did not pick the best night to descend upon my hosts. They were shooting a wedding (with cameras, not guns) that evening and would not be available until 10:30. Fortunately, they planned to leave me a housekey in the mailbox and I would have a place to shower off, wind down, and explore a tiny slice of my long lost youth.
Soon I located their house in the pleasant revitalized Riverside area, and was faced with my first fun parking challenge of the trip. With only soft grass on which to park behind the house, I wanted to guarantee more kickstand stability. The engineer in me soon kicked in, and I spotted a nice flat wafer-like slab of concrete a few feet away for a makeshift kickstand support.
None of the stores from my youth, including both record shops where I pretty much began my record collecting from a modest crate of hand-me-downs, are still there. Nonetheless, the district still has an interesting tension of gentrification and fringiness. The nightclub has been gutted and is in the process of being replaced by luxury condos, but the old gigantic five-and-dime that was there circa 1995 is now a gigantic bar and coffee shop with a live stage, many taps, and eclectic crowd of drifters. The closest thing to a record store is a tattoo shop across the street with a scant shelf or two of vinyl and discs amidst its hundreds of T-shirts.
One of the few holdovers from my heyday of rushing out of school to hang out here is the Heartworks Cafe and Gallery, which was also my first introduction to that peculiar ism of vegetarian. I remember having a kickass veggie burger here on my first and only Summer back in the area from College when I was a nominal vegetarian for 2 years, so I decide it's worth it after a day of greasy spooning my way up from Palm Beach.
Then it was off to Fuel for a pint while I struck up some conversations with the other patrons wondering if any would suddenly look familiar as a ghost from High School past. That never transpired, alas, but I had a nice discussion with an older fellow who just bought a property on Cesery Blvd a few blocks from where I grew up in the Arlington district of Jacksonville.
I had just enough time to settle back into the living room when my hosts came home. We made the most of the 3 remaining hours any of us could keep our eyes open after respectively exhausting days by filing into their brand new Prius, which they seem more proud of than the house, and taking a tour of all the development downtown Jacksonville has undergone since I left in 1995. One of the most interesting aspects of the Prius, which may extend to other full hybrids, is that you end up looking forward to braking in order to better charge the battery for more fuel economy. This could be a huge breakthrough in the road-rage culture we live in whereby stop-n-go traffic becomes something to cherish rather than grit teeth at. Not on an old 650cc manual-shift motorcycle, though, and I've got 1600 miles and many stoplights before I'm safely back in town again.
Here's the Gallery for today:
And the playlist...
| Title | Artist | CD |
|---|---|---|
| My Thang | James Brown | Make It Funky - The Big Payback: 1971-1975 (Disc 2) |
| Stoned to say the least | Saint Etienne | Foxbase Alpha |
| Yagga blues | Nurse With Wound | Who Can I Turn To Stereo (Two Golden Microphones) |
| Water on the Pond | Miles Davis | Miles Davis Quintet 1965-68 (4) |
| summer's last sound | Disco Inferno | |
| Practice Makes Perfect | Wire | Chairs Missing |
| Something Sends Me To Sleep | Felt | Absolute Classic Masterpieces |
| The Birdcatcher's Return | Dose One & Boom Bip | Circle |
| Things We Said Today | The Beatles | A Hard Day's Night |
| Sand | OP8 | Slush |
| Lazy Old Sun(Unreleased Alternate Stereo Take) | The Kinks | Something Else + 8 |
| Never Mind | American Music Club | United Kingdom/California |
| Ioi | Medicine | The Mechanical Forces Of Love |
| Big Maz In The Country | Swell Maps | Train Out Of It |
| Loomer | My Bloody Valentine | Loveless |
| Hitch-Hike | Liliput | LiLiPUT/Kleenex (Disc 1) |
| Town Criers Walk | Dose One & Boom Bip | Circle |
| Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) | The Arcade Fire | Funeral |
| Train Song | Tom Waits | Franks Wild Years |
| Polly | The Kinks | Something Else + 8 |
| Dry Spell Blues Pt 2 | Son House | Delta Blues |
| Butch | The Geraldine Fibbers | Butch |
| Kingdom Come | Pere Ubu | Datapanik in the Year Zero (1978-1979) |
| Light As The Breeze | Leonard Cohen | The Future |
| Square Heart | The Black Heart Procession | 1 |
| There Was a Man | Pearls Before Swine | Balaklava |
| Barney (... and Me) | The Boo Radleys | Giant Steps |
| Intervals | Stereolab | The First Of The Microbe Hunters |
| Take Me Ta Mars | The Flaming Lips | In A Priest Driven Ambulance |
| Copstail | Don Ellis | The French Connection |
| Gene By Gene | Blur | Think Tank |
| Are You A Hypnotist?? | The Flaming Lips | Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots |
| Lovesick | Lisa Germano | Excerpts From A Love Circus |
| Landed at granma's | Nurse With Wound | Who Can I Turn To Stereo (Two Golden Microphones) |
| Flip Strings | Sound Effects | Kill Bill, Vol. 1 |
| Jumpin' Jack Flash | The Rolling Stones | Singles Collection: The London Years (Disc 2) |
| Dancehall Malfunction | Sub Dub | Incursions In Illbient |
| Ich Bin's | Einstürzende Neubauten | Strategies Against Architecture II |
| Old Dog Blue | Jim Jackson | Anthology of American Folk Music - Volume 2: Social Music |
| Episode 2 | Harpsichord In Hi-Fi | Harpsichord 2000 |
| Seagreen Serenades | Silver Apples | Silver Apples |
| Styropor | Einstürzende Neubauten | Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T. |
| Beautiful | Belle & Sebastian | 3..6..9 Seconds Of Light |
| Purelove | Byzar | Incursions In Illbient |
| Means To An End | Joy Division | Closer |
| Sunlight Bathed The Golden Glo | Felt | Absolute Classic Masterpieces |
| Walking Blues | Son House | Delta Blues |
| Theme From "Sangkala" | Sun City Girls | 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda (1) |
| Sad Little Moon | The Magnetic Fields | Holiday |
| Bills Corpse | Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band | Trout Mask Replica |
| O.D. | Don Ellis | The French Connection |
| Twilight of Idols | SPK | Auto Da Fe |
| Little Leg Woman | Big Joe Williams | Broke, Black & Blue: Volume Three - Good Whiskey Blues |
| Dust Switch | Squarepusher | Music is Rotted One Note |
| Blackmail | Swans | Greed / Holy Money |
| Whiz | Medicine | The Mechanical Forces Of Love |
| London Bye Ta Ta | David Bowie | Bowie At The Beeb (Disc 1) |
| Blood From The Air | COIL | Horse Rotorvator |
| She's the one | Saint Etienne | Foxbase Alpha |
| Babaar And Celeste | Secret Goldfish, The | Harpsichord 2000 |
| Incarnate | Organum | Volume One |
| The River | PJ Harvey | Is This Desire? |
| Hardknock Life | Jay-Z | |
| Silence | Claire Voyant | Love Is Blind |
| One And One | Miles Davis | On The Corner (Remaster) |
| Electric Mainline (Part 2) | Spiritualized | The Complete Works, Vol. 1 (Disc 2) |
| Untitled : Arnulf On Drums I | Faust | Tapes |
| Wish I Was Skinny | The Boo Radleys | Giant Steps |
| 52 Pilot | Saint Etienne | Places To Visit |
| Sons Of The Silent Age | David Bowie | Heroes |
| Sugar Tax | Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark | Navigation |
| Empirical / Howsomever | Empirical | Le Jazz Non |
| The Drowners | Suede | Suede |
| The Sounds Of Silence | Simon & Garfunkel | Simon & Garfunkel Greatest Hits |
| Dreams Are Like Water | This Mortal Coil | Blood |
| I'll Keep It With Mine | Nico | Chelsea Girl |
| Spiral Insana 2 | Nurse With Wound | Spiral Insana |
| Jimmy Mack | Martha and the Vandellas | |
| Everlasting Arm | Mercury Rev | See You On The Other Side |
| Soon I'll Be Loving You Again | Marvin Gaye | I Want You - Deluxe Edition |
| Insane Asylum | Diamanda Galás | The Singer |
| Turn The Table | Liliput | LiLiPUT/Kleenex (Disc 1) |
| Poison Ivy | The Puppets | The Joe Meek Story-The PYE Years |
| Stop! In The Name of Love | Diana Ross & The Supremes | Diana Ross & The Supremes |
| On Streets Without Names | Liliput | LiLiPUT (Disc 2) |
| Can We Start Again? | Tindersticks | Simple Pleasure |
| Yola My Blues Away | Skip James | Complete Recorded Works (1931) |
| The Wooden Boat | Miranda Sex Garden | Fairytales of Slavery |
| I Look Around | Rain Parade | Postpunk Chronicles: Going Underground |
| Suicide Song Mix | Jarboe And Lary Seven | Beautiful People Ltd |
| Texture | Catherine Wheel | Ferment |
Posted by Todd at May 13, 2005 11:41 PM