October 2006 Archives

November 6, you can catch a fantastic benefit at Tipitina's sponsored by the Future of Music Coalition, and benefiting the Arabi Wrecking Krewe, the Tip's Foundation, and the New Orleans Musicians Clinic.

Lineup includes Steve Earle, Mike Mills (REM), Allison Moorer, Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine), Boots Riley, Corin Tucker (Sleater-Kinney), and (of course) Bonerama. With special guest Al "Carnival Time" Johnson.

Tickets available at tipitinas.com.

Spread the word and we hope to see you there.

Wow, when I was typing my last entry a few nights back, I didn't really know where I was going with it. I've found that riding a motorcycle is a good time to think, because there are very few distractions around like cell phones or radios, and some of my thoughts just seemed kinda vaguely blogworthy.

Especially the bit about the chocolate malt chip. Seriously, have you had this stuff? It's amazing.

I appreciate all the emails and comments. I guess I should clarify that at no time was I seriously contemplating harming myself, so those of you who were worried in that direction, rest your pretty heads.

Things have a way of sorting themselves out, and I'm sure they will, but it's nice to know that people care.

Thanks, y'all.

It's been three years as of last Friday.

Unlike last year, or the year before, I don't have anything uplifting to say. I'm just not feeling it.

I'm not struggling, I don't think. I don't really have any compulsions, no monkeys on my back, other than maybe ice cream. But neither am I on some damn pink cloud any more either.

For a while I'd been kicking around the notion that maybe someday I could go back out. Just be more careful. Drink like a normie. That whole idea changed a few months ago when I was out with Maitri at some pub in the Quarter. I bought a round of drinks, and her Guinness spilled onto my can of Rockstar and down my hand, and without thinking I licked all the Guinness foam off of where it spilled.

It shot straight up into my brain and down my spine into all my nerve endings. It was electric. Almost orgasmic.

Alcohol. Wow. I'd pretty much forgotten. I'd reduced it to a distant memory, a sort of academic curiosity about myself, like my shrimp allergy. It was just something I'm not supposed to have. And it all came rushing back.

I liked that one little lick waaaaay too much.

I've been wrestling with my place in society lately. It's changed so much in the last three years, and even more since I moved. I used to be the guy that organized the pub runs, the Bigfoot beer schnocks, the Sunday afternoon darts and pints. And when I quit, I stopped calling people, and they stopped calling me. I know how it goes, I used to be the same way. You don't know whether to call up the recovering drunk and invite him out when you're gonna be drinking, in case it might somehow be rude. And so vast stretches of my social life just kind of slowly faded away.

And now we're in a new city. A city where everything revolves around booze, and where a guy who is visibly not a drinker just kind of doesn't quite fit a lot of the time. And I am the stay-at-home dad, and I have a high-pressure job, and so vast stretches of my social life just seem barely out of reach. I can see them, but I can't get to them.

Sometimes the only things that remind me what city I'm in are my lunches, and my gutting days. Which is why I'm so passionate about the gutting, and why I'm gaining weight. Another kind of gutting.

I had a majorly frustrating weekend, and I tried to finally clear my head of the crud last night by taking the Triumph out. Which led to more frustration, since the motorcycle is both 1. infrequently ridden, and 2. British, so it was a bitch to start.

I headed out to a meeting, to a place I'd never been, thinking to maybe pick up my three year chip. Turns out it was a speaker meeting, at a halfway house, and they don't do chips on speaker nights but I wasn't really feeling the love anyway. Halfway-house and rehab meetings are like that. Sometimes they can give you perspective, but sometimes they give you too goddamn much...perspective.

Afterwards I took the bike and decided to wander vaguely in the direction of Angelo Brocato's.

I was on the freeway, going way faster than I've gone on a motorcycle in at least a year, feeling the wind going up my sleeves and ballooning out my jacket, feeling my hands pulling away from the handlebars. I felt like letting go. I felt like something in the universe wanted me to let go, just to see what would happen. Do you ever get that feeling when you're looking over the edge of a great height, and you have to resist the urge to just step off the edge? I get that feeling all the time. I always have. It just fascinates me that it only takes one second of courage, or stupidity, to step off, and then you're committed and you can never take that step back.

The bike was like that. I could just let go, and maybe I would float backwards while the bike raced on ahead. Or maybe something else would happen.

Part of me wanted to find out. But more of me really really wanted a cannoli.

Maybe the Guinness was like that too. Maybe that one step is just a pint, and maybe nothing happens. Or maybe I die.

Maybe shrimp is the same way.

Angelo Brocato's was closed.

I headed back Uptown to the Creole Creamery. Thinking that it's dark, half the streetlights on St. Charles still don't work, I could hit a pothole and that would be the end of me. And I tried to remember what my last blog post was, and would it be a fitting last post. And I wondered what happens to somebody's blog when they die a premature death. Does somebody pull the plug? Or does it stay up for weeks or months while total strangers pick through the archives finding every mundane post suddenly fraught with meaning and foreshadowing? I remember thinking about this last summer when Hiromi was having her dark days. What happens to her blog? Would Karl and I, her blog maintenance man and her blog gardener, respectively, know what right thing to do if she were to leave us?

Creole Creamery was open. Chocolate malt chip is very good. I called somebody. They teach you rule number one before they even teach you the steps. Call somebody. Somebody who gets it. I know people who get it. I know people with only months under their belt who sometimes get it better than I do.

I'm OK today.

I'm out of the country this week, back in America. Austin, specifically. It's definitely a weird feeling here. Not so much the culture shock that other people report, more just a vague sense of homesickness. Not that I want to move back; if I still lived here I'd want to be in New Orleans. But I lived most of my adult life in Texas and my kids were born here so obviously there's going to be a little tug.

I only caught myself looking for the bathtub ring on houses a couple of times. I think it must be the hills that put the thought out of your mind.

There are almost no black people here. I think I've seen fewer than a dozen all week. In New Orleans I would see that many before I got to the end of the block in the morning. For all the talk after the storm about how "segregated" New Orleans is, the difference here is stark. I guess it's easy to talk about other people being segregated when your own city doesn't actually have anybody you need to integrate with.

People here say "hi" to strangers on the street much more than in New Orleans. There's too much mistrust, too much fear and exhaustion in New Orleans these days and it's wearing down people's natural friendliness. Plus there's the whole whiteness thing here. It's easy to be friendly to people who look like you.

But nobody in Austin will call you baby.

All of the Starbucks here are open for business. There is other coffee to be had, but you have to know where to look for it.

There are too goddamn many SUVs here.

Like New Orleans, they're bulldozing what makes their city special in the name of growth. In New Orleans, it's Creole doubles in Mid City. Here, I was startled to see that commercial development has made the jump across Loop 360 and is now spreading across the southern end of the greenbelt.

It's very clean here. Clean like parts of Uptown.

I'm scared to drive fast through puddles. I know that the streets here are fine, that there's no chance of there being a 4-foot-deep sinkhole hidden in the water, but I'm conditioned. I once saw a car with its front end stuck in a deep hole in a puddle at Calhoun and Claiborne and now I got The Fear.

The Mexican food here is really good. As is the ice cream. And the water pressure.

I want a french fry po boy.

Back Friday.

Sugar Daddy died in his sleep last night.

We got Sugar years ago after Foamy and Bootzilla died, because we didn't want Doriella du Fontaine to be the only kitty in the house. Gina and the kids picked it out at the shelter because it had messed up ears from earlier mistreatment. They were told it was a girl and needed to be fixed, but after we named it Sugar, we found out from the vet "actually, it's a boy and he's already fixed". Silly us. We tossed around various drag queen variations on the name Sugar before giving up and finally settling on Sugar Daddy.

Sugar hasn't really been very happy since Doriella died last spring. He's had kidney problems for a long time now and stopped eating and started having seizures on Wednesday morning. By Friday morning we took him in expecting to have him put to sleep, but the vet thought that with some anti-seizure meds and another change in diet he might do OK for a while, but it wasn't meant to be.

At least he died at home, with a full belly, with Beezus the pooch keeping a 24 hour vigil outside his room.

Liam is taking it very hard. After Doriella died, while we were crammed into that tiny apartment in Austin while our house was on the market, Liam and Sugar got to be close and slept together every night. It's hard to lose two pets in one year when you're that age.

Little Miss Ruffit told me to pass it on, and I generally do what I'm told:

The Big Easy Rollergirls are gearing up for their sold-out October 21st bout at Blaine Kern's Mardi Gras World, but they need your help!

Saturday, October 14th at 1PM, Victoria von Doom will host a Volunteer Orientation at Mardi Gras World. She'll walk through what it takes to put on a BERG bout, discuss the varying responsibilities and answer any questions. All volunteers will receive a BERG volunteer t-shirt, which will act as a volunteer pass.

What's in it for you, you ask? Aside from the complete adoration from all of The Big Easy Rollergirls, you will receive a free ticket to the next bout.

If you are unable to volunteer the evening of the bout, but still want to help, there are a limited number of volunteers needed the morning of the bout to assist with set-up. You will receive a free ticket for the bout that night.

For more information, contact Victoria von Doom at:

victoriavondoom@gmail.com

Or for more information on the requirements and behind-the-scenes photos:

www.bigeasyrollergirls.blogspot.com

A ricey ricey weekend.

Saturday we went to see Tulane play my alma mater Rice in the Superdome. It was nice finally getting to spend some quality time in the Dome, since the Monday Night Football thing was such a rushed in-and-out affair. I don't think I'd actually been in these stands since the Rolling Stones in 1981.

As football, it was underwhelming. Definitely not a clash of titans, although as a Rice grad I'm accustomed to losing. I pity the poor scalpers outside, trying to hawk tickets to an event where you could walk up to the box office and buy row 15 tickets on the 50 yard line. There couldn't have been more than two or three thousand people in the Dome, making it a lonely place indeed. I did the math and actually I'm guessing the Dome could probably fit every person who has ever graduated from Rice, including the dead ones, and still have room to spare.

And cold! We learned afterwards that it takes two days to prime the AC system for a sell-out Saints game, so the temperature must have been in the low 50s. We huddled around the pretzel vendor for warmth.

Next day my Rice experience continued. All ready for gutting and nowhere to go, I found out from Susan Hoover, another old-school mobster, that the Rice MOB and the Tulane band were volunteering with a group called SAFER to gut a few houses in the Lower Nine, so I joined them for a few hours and ended up supervising a team. I also got to chat a bit with the founder of SAFER and learned about how they're already starting to rebuild houses, the way the AWK wants to do, so hopefully we can pick their brains and learn from their experience.

The MOB quit early (1:30! wusses) and since I was already down there and already dirty, I headed over to the Common Ground Blue House and had them send me to another house they were finishing up on N. Villere.

I spent two hours pulling dry wall nails out of the framing studs. And the whole time I was thinking how happy I am doing this compared to how frustrated I feel when I'm debugging Java code. How I'm still trapped like I was a year ago, but how there is a light at the end of the tunnel and this time next year I might not be so trapped.

And that night, to cap off the ricey weekend, we went out to eat at Hana, and they had katsudon! Ever since Hiromi posted her yummy recipe I've been wanting to try her favorite comfort food. I'm guessing hers is better, but this was still really good.

If there are really only 185,000 people in the city these days, why is it still so goddamn hard to get a table at Jacques-Imo's?

A bunch of the usual suspects are out of town this weekend so the Arabi Wrecking Krewe desperately needs your help tomorrow.

They'll be gutting the home of Preservation Hall clarinetist and soprano sax player Jacques Gauthe.

The address is 5513 Cameron Blvd, off Elysian Fields near UNO.

In addition, the Sunday gutting at Gentilly Girl's house has been postponed due to a lack of volunteeers.

A recent article in the Times-Picayune points to a lack of volunteer bodies as the single biggest factor standing in the way of houses finally being gutted and prepared for rebuilding. One organization says that at current volunteer rates it will take 3-5 years to gut every house on its list, and other organizations face similar hurdles. The other day a new T-P story indicates that the city is stepping up with grants to supply equipment and food for volunteers, but this only helps in the case where the volunteers exist. And the volunteers don't exist. The number coming from out of town has slowed to a trickle, and locals can only do so much.

It frustrates me that such a critical cleanup task is still 100% dependent on the kindness of strangers, but thus far this is the hand we have been dealt. Sinn Fein and all that shit.

If you can make it out tomorrow, please come, and if you can't please spread the word.

Thanks.

After Katrina Dennis Hastert put forth the idea that maybe New Orleans shouldn't be rebuilt.

A year later his political career is likely over thanks to a teenage Congressional page from Louisiana.

Life is sweet.

There are several opportunities to get your wreck on this week. This is short notice on all of these, complicated by the fact that the Arabi Wrecking Krewe's web site is currently down, so please pass the word as much as possible.

Wednesday, October 4: The Arabi Wrecking Krewe will be helping pianist and music historian David Bodinghouse try to salvage artifacts from his house. This job is time-critical since David is going on an extended European tour soon.

Thursday, October 5: The AWK will return to sax player, band leader, and Jazz Fest regular Al Belletto's house at 3138 Toledano.

Saturday, October 7: The AWK will be doing a full gut of Jacques Gauthier's house.

Sunday October 8: Various bloggers with AWK support will take on day two at Gentilly Girl's house, 2918 Annette St in Gentilly. We cleared all the stuff from the main house last time, so this time we'll do the stuff in the apartment, the big appliances, and start on the sheetrock and plaster. We are hoping to be able to use the Arabi Wrecking Krewe equipment like last time.

If you can help at Gentilly Girl's house, please sign up on the ThinkNOLA Wiki.

For the other AWK jobs, contact Brian da Fiyaman: west270 at netzero dot net.