May 2006 Archives

Overnight?!

With hurricane season only three days away, the Army Corps of Engineers on Monday announced that a 400-foot section of earthen hurricane protection levee being rebuilt near Buras High School in Plaquemines Parish slumped by more than 6 feet overnight Saturday, and repairs could take three to six weeks.

...

"These repaired levees are virgin levees, and they need time to settle and get the grass growing on them again before they're tested with any major storm," Rousselle said.

I think Rousselle's got his metaphors all wrong. Seems to me the existing levees have been entirely too slutty, what with the big DP orgy that went on last fall.

Miss Syl happened to mention a comment she'd made in my last post and I wondered why I hadn't seen it. I check my junk folder, and sure enough, there are weeks and weeks of perfectly lovely comments that I'd never seen.

I'm restoring them now.

All this time I though I was unloved and boring. I guess y'all thought I was a dick.

Sorry about that.

Update: I think I got them all, and I went ahead and whitelisted a buncha y'alls email addresses. Thanks, Syl.

...And the only reason I'm singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if you're in a situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into the shrink wherever you are, just walk in and say "Shrink, I'm leavin' here today, yes, I'm goin' back home to stay, yes, I'm walkin' to New Orleans."

And walk out.

You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both queer and they won't take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin' a bar of "Walkin' to New Orleans" and walking out. They may think it's an organization.

And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin' a bar of "Walkin' to New Orleans" and walking out. And friends they may think it's a movement.

And that's what it is, the Walkin' to New Orleans Anti-Hurricree Sippiana Blues Movement, and all you got to do to join in is sing it the next time it comes around on the piano...

Gina has taken a job as Director of Architecture at a New Orleans company heavily involved in the rebuilding of the education infrastructure. She's also made the team as a new skater on the Big Easy Rollergirls.

Cassidy got into Lusher. Liam got into Audubon.

My current company will let me work long-distance for as long as I want.

And we're signing a lease on an apartment Uptown.

Meaning I am officially joining Mark and Ashley in the ranks of ex-pats who are crazy enough and homesick enough and optimistic enough to want to move back to New Orleans after Katrina, despite Katrina, because of Katrina, when we didn't even live there before Katrina.

That makes three, which like the song say, means it's an organization. Anybody wanna make it a movement?

See y'all in mid-July.

Desmond Dekker, 64, died today of a heart attack.

Another giant, and this one is even more personal. My son's middle name is Desmond, named after both Desmond Dekker and Bishop Desmond Tutu.

Dekker to me was second only to Otis Redding in the way he could move me to tears with a simple melody. I used to sing (badly) "Poor Me Israelites" to my kids at bedtime. And when I was in the car alone where nobody could hear me, I'd sing along (badly) to "Tips of My Fingers" at the top of my lungs, and whatever was bothering me that day, it would feel slightly better.

And it fucking sucks because my CDs are all in storage and my reggae stuff isn't on my laptop, so I can't even listen to him to say goodbye. I can't even sing along (badly) because I have nothing to sing along with.

If you don't know Desmond, and you have half a mind to buy a CD this weekend, go out now and buy Intensified. Or if you're an iTunes kid, search for "Poor Me Israelites", "Wise Man", "Tips of My Fingers", or "007".

And please let's not have that Rule of Threes this week. I'm in no mood to lose Willie or Dr. John or Don Walser this week, I've got too much else to worry about.

I guess I really am living in my own world these days, since it's after midnight and I just heard about this.

Clifford Antone dead at 56.

I saw countless shows at Antone's over the years, both at the Guadalupe location next to Ruby's BBQ, then later when he moved down to 5th Street. Many many sweaty nights of Maceo or Guy Forsyth or the Old 97's.

A giant has ascended.

This weekend BookWoman in Austin will be hosting a reading/signing for Chin Music Press's Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?

I'll be reading from my story, "I Was a Teenage Float Grunt". Austin film geek and New Orleans native Juliette Kernion will read from her reminiscences of New Orleans movie theatres, and David Rutledge will read from his awesome memoir about the days before Katrina, "Corners of the Quarter". Publisher Bruce Rutledge will also be on hand.

The event is Saturday night, May 27, starting at 8:00pm. BookWoman is located at 918 W. 12th St., near Lamar, right next door to The Tavern.

If you're in town, I hope you can make it. It's a great little book, and I'm proud to be associated with it.

No, not this Ray. (Yet. Maybe soon.)

That Ray.

C. Ray.

Last night after staying up late listening to the Big 870 and compulsively hitting reload on three different election returns sites, I was admittedly depressed.

Checking the elections forums on nola.com made me feel worse. A lot of gloating, from the usual suspects, about how Mitch was taught a lesson, and how Mary was next.

To be honest, it made me feel about the same way I felt in November 2004. That my world is dominated by those people, by that element, that they're never going to learn, they're never going to change, they're always going to win, and the only escape is Canada.

I've read a lot of angry, bitter words in the moderate and liberal New Orleans blogosphere today. Again, November '04 deja vu.

One post has made me feel better. This one from Ernie the Attorney.

Lately, I've begun to have doubts. I've often lost my patience and had trouble maintaining the right attitude. What happened was I started to focus on the tragedy, and not the miracle. It's important to understand the subtle (as opposed to obvious) differences between tragedies and miracles. Tragedies, especially while they are unfolding, are easy to capture on film and that's one thing that makes them easier to focus on (which is not helpful).

[...]

After the speech I had a chance to talk to Mitch and I was able to perceive something very clearly, which I should have seen twenty years ago. Mitch believes in miracles and he knows that they unfold in strange ways, not necessarily the ways that we want or expect them to unfold.

Whether Mitch Landrieu is the mayor is not as important as our willingness to believe in miracles. A miracle doesn't depend on an election. Miracles happen when people consciously will them to happen. Mitch reminded me that miracles are out there and they can happen, but we have to have the right attitude.

Maybe it's not so bad. Maybe there is a miracle in the works. Try to remember when Nagin really was our voice...fucked up and goofy and sometimes irrational, but still the best voice we had in a world of Brownies and Chertoffs and Hasterts and Dubyas. Try to ignore everything else. Ignore the racist Uptown contingent, ignore the out-of-state GOP spin machine. Just channel the good parts of Nagin, and hope that with the uncertainty of the election out of the way, and with hard work from everybody, things will start to move along a little better.

I have hope.

I know, I have a lot of damn nerve talking hope when I lost nothing. I'm selling my perfectly good house in Austin and I'm going to cruise into town and look for a nice dry place for my family to live, with a new job for my wife and my old job still intact and money in my pocket and a school for my kids, and no need or desire to ever talk to the SBA or FEMA or an insurance adjuster.

But I have hope. I agree with C. Ray. The pie is about to explode, and I want all my fellow New Orleanians to come home and have a piece.

I'll bring the ice cream.

I haven't had a whole lot to say about the mayoral race in New Orleans.

Partly because all the logistical details of moving back there (possibly, still, even now, not definitely) have been consuming all my waking thoughts, at least when I'm not either working or puking.

Partly because, as much as my mind has already disengaged from Austin and moved on ahead of me, it's not my election. I grew up under the elder Mayor Landrieu, I left town when the elder Mayor Morial was in office, and I've not got much of an informed opinion about how City Hall has or has not changed in the era between the World's Fair and The Thing.

But mostly I haven't said much because the New Orleans blogger community has covered the election so spectacularly that I've felt like a been-away-too-long ex-pat living in Texas can't possibly add anything other than a big Me Too.

There are so many angles to this story that the national media doesn't cover. How the Landrieu family is unfairly vilified as being the origin of the City Hall corruption that has decimated the city in recent decades, and how this smear is often the public face of a deep-seated resentment against Moon Landrieu's anti-segregationist stand. Or the Oyster-Adrastos theory that proposes that heavy GOP support for Nagin is designed so that he will remain in office as a convenient whipping boy to use for GOP advantage in later state elections. Schroeder, Markus, Da Po' Blog, Ashley Fucking Morris, The Third Battle, Bayou St. John David, all have been writing brilliantly over the last few weeks.

The latest post from Tim's Nameless Blog, though, entitled My Letter To Ray, sums it up perfectly.

I'm not a Nagin hater. I've defended him to my Republican brother in Baton Rouge countless times. Up until a few months ago, I would maybe have even supported him for re-election. But not now. Being back in April and seeing how little had changed since February, or November, is just maddening. I don't see the job getting done. I don't see leadership, I don't see coalitions being built, I don't see plans being implemented. Where progress is being made, it's by individual citizens digging in and hanging on by their fingernails. And that's not going to be enough for the city to come back.

New Orleans needs a change. It needs decisiveness and confidence at City Hall, and Nagin is just tired. He did the best he could for us at the darkest moments, but it's time to turn things over.

Y'all who can vote, get yourself to the polls.

Like the man say, it's like Waiter Rant, but in cab dispatcher form.

The Blank Top Chronicles

I stopped reading Waiter Rant when he went all poetic and sappy. Fortunately The Blank Top Chronicles are still thick with sarcastic goodness. Oughta be good for a few days' diversion, at least.

So how low can this go? Somebody call my bookie.

My freshman year in college, 1982, I weighed 128 pounds. I was a weak, scrawny little fuck. And being a bad-ass punk rock motherfucker I had decided to scorn exercise as being "only for jocks", and I had discovered beer.

I remember my senior year weighing myself in the student health center with one of those old scales that had a 50-lb weight slider on the top and a 1-lb weight on the bottom slider, and for the first time in memory I had to bump that top slider one, two...three slots to the right. 150. Ick.

I don't know when I hit 200 exactly, but I know that in February of 1996 I was 204.

I don't know if I ever hit 250. I remember in the late 90's seeing 236 a lot, and once seeing 244. I imagine I hit 250 at some point in there.

But I've been living a healthy life for a long time now. I've been bouncing around between 202-206 for a couple months, getting close to rolling the odometer back, but never quite getting there. I've added so much muscle in the weight room that I know I'm still making progress, that I'm adding mass at the same time that I'm shedding fat. It's just not reflected on the scale.

But still. I want the number. I want to see the century mark roll backwards.

Well, it wasn't the way I planned to do it, being laid out for a week by a stomach virus. I know I've lost muscle, I know I've lost mostly fluids.

But I did it.

199.8.

I will celebrate with an extra piece of toast.

Years after leaving all the booze and worse things behind, it's weird how certain things can still give me twinges of guilt about them, even when I've done nothing wrong.

Like every once in a while, I'll wake up with a headache, and my first thought will be, "Shit, how much did I drink last night, and where did I leave the car?", and it'll take me a few minutes before I remember, "Wait, I don't drink any more. I just have a headache. Cool!" I'm like George Bailey in It's A Wonderful Life jumping around yelling "My mouth's bleeding! My mouth's bleeding! What do you know about that?" It's just a headache, and gee whillikers I didn't do anything to deserve it. It just happened.

Then there is the Monday stomach virus. Somewhat amongst drinkers, and even more so amongst abusers of the wakey-wakey class of drugs, Monday is hell day, the day you're most likely to call in sick to work because there's no way you can get yourself into any kind of condition to be seen by the normies. And the best thing to call in sick with on those days is the "stomach virus/food poisoning" gambit. If you just say "I'm home sick", somebody wants to know, "Aw, is it that head cold going around? Do you have that cough?" and you end up having to do too much explaining.

But if you say "stomach virus", you shut down all further inquiry. That alone conveys more than anybody wants to know. It's "OK, get better, see you tomorrow".

Besides, in the tech business, it's not like Monday absenteeism actually gets you out of anything. If you miss a day of work, the whole schedule doesn't shift one day to accomodate. They're gonna take it out of your hide late nights and weekends as it is.

So here it is. Monday. I haven't had a drink in years. I haven't had anything worse than a drink in well over a decade. And I've got an honest-to-God incapacitating "Sweet Jesus what the hell did I EAT?!" stomach virus. Have lost five pounds since yesterday morning. I can use a stopwatch to time how long a glass of Gatorade makes the complete journey.

And it's hard for me to not feel just the slightest bit guilty. I'm just conditioned. I'm at home feeling like shit on a Monday, and part of me still wants me to think it's my fault, that some sin of mine brought me to this terrible fate.

I'm living on Gatorade and Saltines.

When what I really want is Amburgers and Woot Beer.

[Thanks to Gina from Chicory for the link.]

The Times Picayune has put together a great flash animation that shows minute-by-minute how and why each section of the city flooded. It's quite dramatic, and shows a lot of things that I wasn't aware of, for instance that by 8:30 AM the morning of the storm, water already covered all of Plaquemines, N.O. East, St. Bernard and the Lower Nine and was already leaking into the city on the west side of the Industrial Canal. The Lakeview breach, which is the first one that was in the news so much, actually occurred towards the end of the event, and even then, it was ripped open before 10:00am on the 29th.

This link allows you to step through the animation and get text descriptions of each event on the timeline.

This link plays it in one continuous display.

Absolutely fascinating.

My life is like this right now.

Work. School. Kids. Housing. Moving. Staying.

By the end of May there will likely be clarity, but right now there is nothing but fog and nothing I can do but wait for it to dissipate. And I can't blog about any of it until it is decided because there are personal and business risks involved with doing so.

I. Fucking. Hate. This.

And sarcasm in food writing, when done with grace and style, is a wonder to behold.

I bow before the Master:

We were given three complimentary glasses of champagne upon which the restaurant had economized admirably and three amuses-bouche of oysters, fixed three different ways. All were intensely flavorful. Mine was so intensely flavorful with its thick coating of cheese crumbs that it made me exclaim aloud.

It's from Poppy, of course. Read it here (scroll down to the second entry).

Peter King in Sports Illustrated speaks his mind and rips the government a new one over what he saw in New Orleans while covering the NFL draft:

Am I ticked off? Damn right I'm ticked off. If you're breathing, you should be morally outraged. Katrina fatigue? Hah! More Katrina news! Give me more! Give it to me every day on the front page! Every day until Washington realizes there's a disaster here every bit as urgent as anything happening in this world today -- fighting terrorism, combating the nuclear threat in Iran. I'm not in any way a political animal, but all you have to be is an occasionally thinking American to be sickened by the conditions I saw.

...

I'm a sportswriter. It's not my job to figure how to fix what ails the Gulf Coast. But the leaders of this society are responsible. And they're not doing their jobs. I could ignore everything I saw and go back to my nice New Jersey cocoon, forgetting I saw it. And I know you don't read me to hear my worldviews. But I couldn't sleep at night if I didn't say something.

There's more. Read it all.

The fucking sportswriters are turning political! That's how bad it is.

Everybody who has seen it with their own eyes feels the same way (except for a few ratfucker Congressmen who will hopefully be looking for jobs come November).

Everything up until now has been practice. It's been an extended pre-season.

Two things happen tonight:

1. Roger Clemens Judas Johnny Demon Damon returns to Fenway, wearing the pinstripes of shame.

2. I said before nobody could catch Wakefield's knuckleball, and at the very last second, the Red Sox bought back Mirabelli from the Padres and gave him a police escort from Logan to Fenway so that he could catch tonight.

Baseball is back. Finally. We fuckin' need it around here.

And the New York Yankees continue to suck. As if it needs saying.