May 2008 Archives

Loki wants everybody to know that Humid City will be back soon.

To pass the time, please enjoy the rhythmic stylings of Mike "Dancing Around the World" Long, who I think gets Minor Threat better than anybody.

The shirts are out and the modeling session was h-h-h-HOT!

Get your shirt now, be a fashion trendsetter, and support Ashley's family all at the same time.

Exclusively from Dirty Coast.

Sinn Fein, mooks.

So this penguin is driving down the road when suddenly smoke starts spewing from under the hood of his car and the engine dies. Not knowing anything about auto repair, he calls his road service and gets the car towed to the nearest mechanic.

"I'll put it up on the lift and take a look," the mechanic says. "You can hang out in the waiting room and I'll let you now what I find out."

The penguin takes a seat in the waiting room and idly flips through some magazines. After a while he notices that there's an ice cream shop across the street, so since the mechanic seems to be taking a while, he ducks out for a snack.

A little while later the penguin returns, just finishing up his vanilla cone, when the mechanic comes out, wiping engine grease from his hands.

"It looks like you blew a seal," the mechanic says.

The penguin blushes and wipes his mouth and says, "Oh! No, that's just ice cream."

ba-dum-dum

And now, back to the news:

MSNBC: Seal caught on tape molesting a penguin

In other news, a priest, a rabbi, and Britney Spears walked into a bar...

The weekend after Ashley died, one of my oldest friends Dr. Sarah came in town for a visit, and I took her down to see the Lower Ninth Ward since she hadn't been here since the storm. We drove past a few houses I'd gutted before, and saw the usual lack of progress. We drove by Robert Green's trailer on Tennessee Street and I told her the story of how he lost a young granddaughter off his roof during the flood and found his dead mother months after the storm.

And then we drove by the house on Gordon Street.

I blogged about gutting this house with the Mardi Gras Service Corps back in November '06. It was a lonely block. One house had some renovations going on that seemed to be going slowly, and a few houses were gutted and the lawns were being kept up, but the block didn't seem to have a lot of hope, and the house itself was a mess. Lots of termite damage, some tree damage to the roof joists and the back frame of the house. A sign on the front said "For Sale By Owner: Mr. Henry" with a phone number.

There was also a light switch in the back bedroom that had a Disney character floating under some balloons which got me all choked up when I ripped the moldy sheetrock down around it.

But down the street was an uninhabitable Baptist church with a FEMA trailer outside it, and that Sunday while we were gutting, three carloads of older black folks in their Sunday best, the women all wearing their crowns, all showed up, went into the trailer, worshipped, then came out and hugged each other and shook hands and drove off. So I always had kind of a fondness for this block. It seemed hopeless on the face of it, but maybe not so hopeless if you squinted just right and held your head at the right angle while you looked at it.

In November of '07 I blogged about my tour of despair, of all the houses I had gutted which hadn't been touched since I left them, and I took pictures of this house on Gordon Street, the last one in that post, and wondered if there wasn't some sign of progress.

The windows were still broken, the house was still gutted and open, but the For Sale sign was gone, there was a storage unit out front, and there was new debris which maybe was construction debris, not demo refuse.

Well, I drove by it four weeks ago with Sarah, and check this shit out:

New doors, new windows, new plumbing (see the vents in the roof?). New sidewalks, and landscaping, and brand new trees!

It's not occupied yet, I don't think, but clearly somebody has plans for this house. And three other houses on the block are occupied now too, whereas back in '06 we felt like we were in the middle of Siberia until those church folks showed up.

Progress. Little bits of progress bring me such huge bunches of joy sometimes. Sometimes at the times that I most need them.

I realize it's just a sketch, but Colbert just ripped "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" out of a copy of Salinger's Nine Stories. I flinched like I'd just seen a snuff film.

You do NOT fuck with "Bananafish".

(OK, I'm trying to come out of my hole here, cut me some slack.)