I wanted to again try to canoe at Biscayne National Park but found that the concessionaire only rented them during narrow windows or for tours so opted for the Miami Art Museum.  I would later know that the best view of the day occurred on my way in:

The museum was hosting a Susan Rothenberg exhibit that was lazily lit and poorly arranged.  The pieces had no narrative to tie them together except the theme of horses and even the artist’s commentary clashed with the presentation.  I can’t stand when artists “evoke” an idea which to me was always a way to use a stereotype of something to save the hard work of conveying an idea and I found the temperature and humidity recorders to be the most elegant things present.  The permanent collection wasn’t much better and the curator knew not how to compose descriptors.  Half of the pieces said “<one extreme> yet <another extreme>” and this becomes tired quickly leaving me to kill time some other way until my host got his practice time in.

I walked around the Miami cultural district and saw genuine bag ladies as well as a fellow in a hospital gown tooling around in a wheelchair.  The bagperson is new to me and is hard to find below hardiness zone 7 so there are fewer in New York and Philadelphia which have panhandlers and street performers but few general “bums”.  On my way back I drove leisurely, knowing that even after I returned to near Alex and Ashley’s apartment I’d need to consume 2 hours of time.  The main road parallel to the ocean in Miami Beach was an alien environment.  The inhabitants cut neatly across all strata of society and attractiveness and as much as I wish I were “different” from they we’re all from the basic pool of humanity.  A crying woman wearing a bikini top and short shorts ran out of a restaurant, mounted a scooter and started driving across lanes of traffic, I slowed down when it looked like she was about to tumble off the scooter and when she did a motley group came from all directions to sweep her and the scooter from the road.

Back near the apartment, I took pictures around the Bass Museum of Art which I would later learn had a much more impressive (to my interests) permanent collection than the Miami Art Museum and played with light and shadow poorly (none of the pictures went in the keeper category) for an hour or so.  Towards the end I was doing 30-60 second, very long, exposures of the area and a man was standing off to the side holding something.  As I left I saw it was an unhomed person holding his bedding, waiting for me to finish so he could lay down next to the museum’s reflecting pool.