January 2007 Archives

It seems like all I do any more is go back and forth between travelling or being sick at home. This week's adventure brings me back to Boston for my Uncle Eddie's funeral. The obituary says nothing about biker, hell-raiser, or fantastic storyteller, but I guess the paper has to maintain a certain air of dignity about the whole thing.

My memories of Eddie from childhood are pretty fuzzy, but my best memory of him is from my grandmother's funeral about 11 years ago. I crashed at his house in East Boston, and after the wake, the night before the funeral, he and I had a couple of beers at his little kitchen table and he told stories about the family, about East Boston in the 40's and 50's, and a couple beers turned into a couple more and a couple more and before you know it, it's the wee hours. We weren't exactly fresh-faced for Mass the next morning, but the stories were great.

So it was 19 degrees when I got off the plane yesterday. There's snow on the ground today. I've had my chowder, my fried clams, my steamed clams, and my proper Irish breakfast. But Dunkin' Donuts has lattes now, and doesn't sell crullers any more, which means the End Times are upon us. My Boston accent is already creeping back, which sounds weird when combined with "y'all". I have to remember not to say "y'all" up here, because they really really look at you like you're speaking Wuluf or something.

Scout and Athenae and Mr. A from First Draft are coming to New Orleans for a long weekend of gutting and investigating and a little bit of food and music and fun thrown into the mix, and they want their readers to join them.

Check out the details here.

I had the honor of meeting Scout during last summer's Rising Tide conference, where she helped clean out Ms. Cora's house in Hollygrove. She's a keeper, and I look forward to meeting the rest of the gang in March.

I've been hitting reload on my sitemeter for the last half hour waiting for the odometer to finally roll over.

100,000.

It took not quite three years to get here, and it's an underwhelming visitor entry, lacking in depth or any person details, but at least they had the class to click out to Ashley's place:

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Time of Visit Jan 22 2007 12:33:20 am
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Visitor's Time Jan 22 2007 12:33:20 am
Visit Number 100,000

...from a lifelong member of the Red Sox Nation.

There is something to be said for losing, and for doing it with style.

My upbringing has made me a New Orleanian. I was raised on NOPS red beans & rice and McKenzie's king cakes and Hubig's pies. But genetically, I am undeniably a Bostonian, born at Chelsea Naval Hospital to a mom from Roslindale and a dad from Eastie. I learned to dismantle steamers and lobster before I ever tasted a crawfish or an oyster.

And because of my DNA, I spent my life with the Curse of the Bambino coursing through my veins. I suffered the Reds and the Mets and the motherfucking Yankees, Bucky and Buckner and Aaron Fucking Boone. 1975 and 1978 and 1986 and 2003. So many years the season was over by August, and so many other years the season was snatched from us in October.

But there was always next year. "Wait til next year" was our mantra. One year we lost opening day and the Boston Globe's sports headline was "Wait Til Next Year". Ha, ha. Sure, losing sucked. Some of the losses really sucked hard. But being the perpetual underdog gave us strength. It gave us unity. It gave us a mission. Like the perpetually losing Irish Republican Army, we were defined not by victory, but by the struggle itself. This year wasn't so great, or this year we were one inning away, but next year...man, just wait. Next year will be unbelievable.

And then in 2004, we won it all. It was fantastic. It was glorious.

And then in 2005...it was weird. All of a sudden, it was just baseball. We weren't the glorious storied underdog any more. Now we were just another team that has won the World Series a few times, but isn't winning it this year. We were becoming a brand, a best-selling logo, like Hilfiger or Calvin Klein or the Yankees. We were fashionable. But we weren't a religion any more. We didn't have the struggle any more.

Honestly, I found myself envious of Cubs fans. Because they hadn't won yet. They still had the struggle. They still had something to look forward to.

We like to draw analogies between this season of the Saints and this post-storm era in our city's history. Our troubles mirror their troubles. Their successes inspire our successes.

But the difference between what we experience living here and what the Saints have done this season is that with life in the city, there is no end date, no giant trophy, no thrill of victory or agony of defeat. There will be no ribbon-cutting ceremony where it is declared that we're finished, New Orleans is all fixed and it's beautiful. Neither will there be a sad day where they turn out the lights and say it's over, it's done, you don't have to go home but you can't stay here.

Post-flood New Orleans is not like sports in the sense of a final victory or defeat at the end of the season. It's like sports in the sense of being the perpetual underdog, and being unified and driven by our shared mission. And if you think of it that way, the Saints have given us the best thing they could have given us. They gave us hope, they gave us unity, and they gave us something even better to look forward to.

Because it's the struggle that is important. There is a magic that imbues to the perpetual underdog that is unavailable to the routine winner. We, the City, will never be declared the winner...there's really no such thing. But we will never really lose. It will never be over. We will have days of glory and days of despair, but there will always be more games. There will always be next year.

And just wait. Next year will be fucking awesome.

Hey, I'm trying to get a crew together to do some house gutting on Sunday afternoon.

Who's with me?

Last night I accompanied Professor Morris to Electric Ladyland for his first of hopefully many tattoos. The carnage (and resulting artistic splendiferousness) is documented here.

Later we retired next door to Cooter Brown's where we discussed the crime scene, cheese fries, the pace of rebuilding, what makes a good beer, what makes a crappy near-beer, the pros and cons of various realtors, and our shared view on our unsuitability for teaching at a Catholic girls school.

For all you locals, another reading and book signing for Chin Music Press's Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? will take place next Wednesday, January 24, at the Jefferson Parish Library, 4747 W. Napoleon Avenue in Metairie.

I'll be reading from my story, "I Was A Teenage Float Grunt", and other DYK authors David Rutledge, Sarah Inman, and C.W. Cannon will be reading as well. Copies will be available for purchase at the event.

The festivities start at 7 PM.

I still am not able to really collect my thoughts about the murders and the march, but I need to say something, so while I'm trapped in Houston airport layover hell, I'll try to scratch out something vaguely coherent.

I spent a lot of the time after Christmas sick in bed, feeling very lonely and sorry for myself as my kids were at Grandma's in Austin and Gina was travelling some (although she turned around mid-journey on the 30th to come back to the city to haul my ass to Touro when my temperature approached 103, bless her rollergirl heart).

I'd been having a dicey time emotionally already for various reasons, and a long illness always comes intertwined with a little depression, so I had a lot of time to think and to second-guess everything going on in my life. The move and its affect on my kids. The wisdom (or lack of) of trying to buy a house in New Orleans this spring, and whether to pay through the nose to live uptown or take a risk in the flood zone of Fontainebleau or Broadmoor or Mid-City.

And then the murders happened.

And then people like Loki and Bart started talking about moving away.

And I say this with a pretty health dose of shame, but I spent my sick days pondering all this sadness as viewed through only one prism: how does this affect me, and my decision to move my family here and buy a house?

The first few killings of the year, I did my usual, googled the addresses so that I could safely classify them as "sad, but not something that would happen to me or my family".

Then Dick Shavers was shot, and that hit a little closer to home. I'd never met any of the Hot 8 and I've yet to see them play but I know the AWK has helped a few of them and Shiek talks about them all the time. But the first reports of the shooting made vague mentions of possible criminal activity in his past, and I thought it was tragic that it's so easy for even good and talented young black men to get caught up in that life, but again, it allowed my white Uptown self to put his murder in the "sad, but can't happen to me" file. And even when the real story came out, of this being an Uptown vs. Downtown thing between kids at John Mac, I thought, well, unless the Eastbank vs. Westbank thing at Lusher escalates to shooting, it's something that is not of my world.

And then Helen Hill was shot.

And I tried really hard. Again, I didn't know her, and didn't realize how many people knew her. But I tried hard to distance it from myself. They lived on N. Rampart, and hell, that street makes me nervous in the daylight some times. I waited, hoping for some news report that said that this wasn't just a random crime, that it was some grudge somebody had against Paul, that it was somebody they knew.

And the report never came.

And I had to face the reality. That I could just answer my front door some morning and watch half my family get shot down in front of me. Just because Ray was stuck in a rut in Austin, just because Ray was obsessed with his hometown since the storm, just because Ray felt compelled to be here to do...something...something important, but something I haven't found yet...it's all about me,and I've moved my family to a city where they could be taken from me at any moment.

And then people like Loki and Bart started talking about moving away.

I know the New Orleans blogosphere has been called a big echo chamber before, and in some ways it's true. We're a giant emotional echo chamber. If two or three of us get pissed off about something at the same time, we all get pissed off. If a bunch of us get really excited about something at the same time, we all get excited.

And when two or three of us get angry and depressed and scared enough to talk about leaving town, it spreads. Like a disease. And we all start feeling angry and depressed and scared, and we all start questioning why we're here and whether we wouldn't be better off somewhere else.

In a lot of ways, I have deeper roots here than many of you. I grew up here. I went to school here. I have family here. I have memories of a time before Krewe du Vieux and the House of Blues and the Moonwalk and the French Quarter Festival. But in other ways, my roots are very shallow. I'm only living here as an adult for the first time in my life (my 20-year-old self was not an adult by any reasonable definition). My kids are still very much Austinites. And let's face it, you really have to twist around and squint and shuck and jive and just close your eyes and hope if you want to make a coherent case for moving here. I was already having my doubts, and the murders and the subsequent epidemic of grief and fear just kicked the legs right out from under me. I had nothing to fall back on, nothing to encourage me, nobody to talk to. Just me and my self-doubt.

So I started to retreat. I started playing out scenarios. What if we don't buy a house? Maybe keep renting for another year. Maybe move into a cheaper rental. I put any career plans on hold for one more year. Just don't commit. Don't do anything we can't take back.

Maybe go get some lessons on handguns.

And I started looking at Austin real estate ads again. Just in case.

I don't really know when things changed, when my mood improved, when I started feeling optimistic again, but they did, it did, and I do. Part of it was being in Austin all week, and being reminded of how dead I felt there before I left. Part of it was being out of bed interacting with humans again. I think the Lee Brown thing today is finally a welcome measure of adult supervision that may hopefully lead to something productive. A few days of no dead bodies certainly helps.

But I think the best thing was the second epidemic that has gone around the blogosphere since yesterday. An epidemic of righteous anger has replaced cynicism. Optimism has replaced despair. This feeling is infectious, and even though I couldn't be there in person yesterday, I've caught a little of whatever bug y'all have been passing around since the march.

I feel better about this city than I have in weeks.

I wrote most of the above in the Houston airport while my connecting flight was delayed. I haven't proofread it or edited it, but now that I'm home and I've had a chance to finally watch the march videos, I fear that my sentiments above can be taken as so much white Uptown selfishness, navel-gazing, and self-absorbed thinking. That's not how I meant what I wrote. But I can't talk as movingly about Helen or Dinerral since I didn't know them, and I don't have anything intelligent to say about policy or organizing that wouldn't just be a "me too" piggybacking on the hard work that the rest of y'all have done this week while I've been AWOL. It's just a snapshot of the whirl of thoughts that have been going through my head. It may not make any sense, it may be easy to read stuff into it that I didn't intend. I don't know. Maybe I'm just a stupid yuppie.

At any rate, right now I feel like we're staying. I feel like things will get better.

But God help us if anybody gets shot at a parade.

Sorry about the lack of noise from my end. I spent a lot of the holidays in a pretty low place, between having the flu and having my family out of town a lot of the time, watching the news unfold and feeling pretty fucking powerless to do anything about it.

I'm in Austin on business all this week. Still haven't seen my kids since right after Christmas.

I hate to miss the march but I guess I'll read about it later today. Could somebody print out a picture of me and carry it around, so I can be there in spirit, like a Flat Daddy?

I'll try to write something more coherent in the next couple of days.

Miss y'all.

shopping shopping shopping family family shopping shopping cooking cooking cooking cooking family family presents presents cough presents presents cough casino family family family family work stress stress stress cough cough work stress stress stress cough cough cough 99 99 100 101 102 102 102 102 103 touro touro touro touro touro touro touro touro touro touro touro xray xray walgreens drugs drugs drugs drugs sleep sleep sleep sleep twilight zone cough cough cough twilight zone cough cough cough twilight zone cough cough cough sleep cough cough sleep cough cough twilight zone cough cough....

Apologies to Philip Glass. And God bless the SciFi channel's Twilight Zone marathon.