Ray in Exile

Republished, and Newly Published

2010-03-03T20:10:24Z

Who woulda known that being unemployed would mean even LESS free time?

I got laid off from the last gig at the beginning of the year. From the same company that I first blogged about back in 2004 when I had about ten readers. Fast forward five years and I'm back to having, oh, about ten readers. And most of those are just people who accidentally left me in their feed reader when my blog withered and then cratered in '08.

Fortunately I just got hired again. Not starting til the 15th, so you'd think I'd have lots of free time now that the job search is over. You'd think.

Anyway, those of you who haven't figured out how to delete me from your feed reader are probably having PTSD flashbacks since you're probably seeing reruns of the part of my archives from the week of Katrina that I have been able to restore and republish. More coming at some point, in roughly chronological order.

Meanwhile, in the Newly Published arena, I have a story up online at the new issue of Ghoti Magazine, Issue #21. Click the link, click on the microphone, click on my name, read. It's easy.

I've also got non-fiction tentatively scheduled to come out this summer online at The Northville Review.

And at some point I'm appearing, along with Master Folse, in a T-P article about "the real people behind the characters of Treme".

And finally, hopefully this summer, I've got work appearing in a new anthology from the Broken Levee Books imprint of the wonderful Chin Music Press.

That is all. I'll keep you posted. I just ordered HBO, so hopefully lots more here as Treme winds up. I imagine I'll have opinions.

It's Christmas Eve

2009-12-19T06:16:43Z

Tomorrow is Daddy Christmas Day with the kids, a peculiar holiday familiar to all single dads. This year is not my turn to have them on the 25th, so we're pretending that tomorrow is really Christmas. In fact, we've been pretending so well I actually found myself wondering about where the midnight Mass is tonight. Santa is making a special stop; I think he might have been here already, the stockings are full and somebody's already been into the cookies and chocolate milk we left out (burp).

Being back in Austin we've been reviving some of our old Christmas traditions that are different from the ones we had in New Orleans. We went out to Elgin to cut down our own tree, the same place we've been going since Liam was a toddler. We stopped at the 290 Cafe for our Chicken Fried Universe, but unlike past years we didn't see the eerily Santa-like biker dude having breakfast at the counter.

We went to the Zilker Trail of Whatever It Is This Year, and though the tree was as fabulous and as dizzying as ever, the scaled-down event was kind of a bummer. And tonight we swung 37th Street; I had heard that a lot of the original residents who started the wacky lights tradition there had moved, but I wasn't prepared for how much of a let-down it was. Half the houses were dark, several were for sale, and only two or three houses were making an effort at anything spectacular.

I think the kids are learning a little bit about how you can't ever go back. The Austin they left three years ago doesn't exist any more. There are more and more condos. Old traditions are dying. Austin is the kind of city that will break your heart if you're the kind of person who likes some things in your life to be timeless. Watching this city change is like losing body parts a little at a time...lose a finger when the Trail of Lights goes...lose a foot when 37th Street goes dark...I lost half my heart and Austin lost most of its soul when it tore down Liberty Lunch to build an office building. Nothing stays the same. Things change so much faster here than they do in New Orleans.

But tomorrow we'll do our standard stuff. We'll unwrap presents and listen to Christmas music. We'll eat too much candy in the morning. We'll have friends over later for Christmas gumbo made from the turkey leftovers from Thanksgiving, we'll watch football if we can find somebody who's got the Saints on, we'll go to a couple of dinner parties. We'll have pie.

And then Sunday they'll go back to their mother's until next year, and I will learn the beginnings of a brand new tradition. For the first time in my entire life, on Christmas Eve, I will go to bed in an empty house, and when I wake up Christmas morning (or afternoon, depending) it will still be an empty house. I could go to New Orleans to be with family, but I have to be back the day after Christmas and the short visit isn't worth the expense. And as I learned over Thanksgiving last year, being around other people's kids on a family holiday when my kids are far away doesn't make that holiday easier to take; it makes it harder.

The trick is to soak up enough holiday joy and kid time tomorrow to tide me over until New Years. I hope it works.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

run-on sentences, kept warm by

2009-12-05T16:02:10Z

OK, so I really didn't expect anybody to comment. That was all just padding to make my "hey, look what I noticed!" thoughts fill out to be long enough for a blog entry.

Y'all should read the story, though. And Catch-22. And Kevin Wilson's short story collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, which is ever so slightly to the real side of Murakami and (dare I say) almost as heartbreaking, and which I would have stayed up all last night to finish if it wasn't for the damn antihistamines knocking me out again and which I would probably finish tonight except that both kids will be out at parties which means I have a good three hours to myself to frickin' write for a change, if I don't squander it on Modern Warfare or something.

My editor-minded friends are always getting on me about run-on sentences, but they're fun and they keep me warm in the winter when I don't have any warm-blooded small animals around.

Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?

2009-12-02T19:27:27Z

I read David Foster Wallace's short story "Incarnations of Burned Children" after reading about it in a blog entry (I think) by brilliant short story writer Kevin Wilson.

Wallace was clearly insanely talented and this story is one of those that tumbles rapidly downhill, taking you on a ride so fast and so relentless that you don't have time to see the surprise heart-wrenching twist near the end until it explodes in your chest.

Which is an apt metaphor, because today while sitting in traffic, for no reason at all it occurred to me that the plot of Wallace's story is essentially a retelling of the climactic scene in Catch-22 where Snowden spills his secret to Yossarian.

Which makes me wonder...is this story less brilliant because this widely known twist of plot is reused and reappropriated? Or is it enough that in the telling, Wallace makes it his own? And is Wallace's story brilliant simply because it is told in a new and exciting manner even though it largely leaves unaddressed Catch-22's moral message of the material nature of man and the value of following your survival instinct to ridiculous lengths?

Discuss. Or not. I have to catch a bus.

It doesn't want to come out

2009-11-06T07:22:09Z

In my head the story is beautiful, it flows and aches with sadness, but on the page it's drunk and stumbling, stammering over simple phrases, tripping over its own shoelaces, knocking over chairs, talking too much too loudly and then lapsing into awkward silences, never finding the right words and finding too many of the wrong ones, the ones that have been used and used and used up. It's been on paper in many forms for more than two years, and so much time has passed that some of what used to be fiction is now memoir, yet much of what used to be memoir still resists any attempt to mold it into fiction.

Hemingway was once challenged to write the shortest possible short story, and he replied with

For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.

Yet I have as many or as few words as I want, and I have a thought, but I cannot cross the distance between the thought and the arrangement of words that would do justice to the thought.

So I keep writing crap, and I wait.

VI: My name is Lester Burnham...

2009-10-20T06:05:19Z

"I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me..."

There was this thing that happened on the night of August 16-17, 1987, if you're old enough you might remember it, called the Harmonic Convergence. It was a night in which eight of the planets of the solar system were all going to be in alignment, and it was heavily hyped in the New Age community as a cosmic event that signified an end to centuries of war and the beginning of a new era of world peace, and hyped in the mainstream media as, well, a lot of hype. To me and my friends in college, it just seemed like a good excuse to go out into nature and get blasted out of our minds. So we piled into a friend's pickup truck with some food, a lot of beer, a decent supply of "other things", and our favorite road tape which had the Velvet Underground's banana album on one side and Dream Syndicate's Days of Wine and Roses on the other, and we drove on out to Enchanted Rock.

The park was packed, no camping sites at all, not that we had brought tents, we actually had no intention of sleeping. We set about getting mind-altered in a manner befitting a Timothy Leary-like change of consciousness event, and then a few of us started hiking up the rock, no flashlights, just the moonlight.

About halfway up, I stopped to rest with somebody, and we sat down on a rock and looked up at the stars. Or rather, up at the sky. And after I minute, I realized what it was I had done. And I said to him, "I wish I hadn't taken that a little while ago", and he asked, "Why?"

I just remember sitting there being filled with sadness. I used to go camping a lot in my teen years, went back-packing once for a couple of weeks in New Mexico, but I hadn't done anything like that in a long time. And I told him, "I haven't been away from big city lights for almost ten years, and I'm finally out here in the wilderness and there are probably billions of stars and I bet you can see the Milky Way, and I know that it's beautiful, but because I went and artificially fucked my head up for the night, I can't see them because my vision is crawling all over the place. I can't see the real stars, all I see are shimmering hallucinations where the stars should be."

"I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me. But it's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world..."

And I've been thinking about that night recently as a metaphor for the whole of my drinking life. Because what I've found lately, especially in the past year, is that what keeps me sane and what keeps me sober and what keeps the voices out of my head, keeps the inner conversations from spiraling into a pit, are those moments when I stop and notice, really notice, something beautiful in the world.

Jupiter has been visible in the night sky for the past few months, and almost every night I'll look up at it and go, "yep, there's Jupiter". But more and more lately, I'll look again, and I'll just stare at it, and I'll think, "damn...that's fucking Jupiter. That is so awesome."

Little things like that are everywhere. Watching an old black man catch a giant catfish in the Mississippi at sundown while a giant Norwegian tanker silently powers upriver in the background. Sitting in the Houston airport waiting for my flight connection, watching the sun go down and noticing that as day turns to night, the three-dimensional skyline turns flat and two-dimensional, and the airplanes flying inbound and outbound become just blinking lights moving in lines across a flat plane. Poking through the leaves of my garden with my kids and finding two huge squashes ready to eat, and seeing a couple of bees working in the other blossoms. Cooking dinner or watching a movie and having one of my kids just walk up and give me a huge neck hug, for no other reason other than that they feel good and they're glad to be with me.

I didn't used to get the God stuff that they talked about in "the Program". Prayer doesn't work for me. I don't feel like there is anyone listening, really, at least not in the way that, say, Christians do. But I do feel like there is a benevolent force in the universe that wants me to be happy, that wants me to do good for others, and that wants me to be sober to the best of my ability. And my version of prayer is to notice all of the beauty, whether awesome or simple, that is all around me, and fill my soul up with that goodness, so that when night rolls around and I'm alone with my fears and anger and resentments, there's no room for them to get in, there's no room for them to spiral, because the goodness and happiness that I've soaked up that day crowds them out.

That's how my good days go, anyway. And there are more and more days like that, more than there have been in my life since I was a little kid. Even with all the external stuff pulling me in the other direction, the bad days are fewer and fewer.

You can call it hokey, you can call it "American Beauty spirituality" if you want. But it works for me.

And what this has to do with drinking is that alcohol did to my happiness, my real happiness, what that other stuff that night in 1987 did to my ability to see the stars. It's like the drinking put this sheet of bubble wrap in front of my eyes so that I couldn't really experience good and beautiful things as they were, I could only view them through the blurry and skewed and hallucinatory viewpoint of an alcoholic mind. The irony is that some of why I drank had to do with real fears and anger and resentments, and yet the drink prevented me from experiencing the things that could help me work through them; it just tamped them down where I could ignore them. And so for twenty-five years of my life, I chose to treat the symptoms of my life by drinking, not knowing that the treatment, the alcohol, was preventing me from seeing the cure.

I like it better the way it is now.

"I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me. But it's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world.

Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst. And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold onto it. And then it flows through me like rain, and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.

You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure.

But don't worry. You will some day."

Ray, alcoholic. Six years today.

And happy birthday, Professor, wherever you are.

Just to clear up the date confusion

2009-10-19T14:04:36Z

When I revived the blog, I went back and reconstructed some of my old sobriety posts from the archives and reposted them. Some of you might have seen these come through as reruns if you're using a feed reader, and if you weren't reading my blog in 2008 or 2007 or 2006 or 2004 they might look new to you but they're old posts. For the near to medium -term, check the dates on anything you see coming through, since it might be old stuff. And it'll definitely be surreal if I dig up the early Katrina posts.

As a matter of fact, I won't be hitting another sobriety birthday until tomorrow. That is, if I don't go out at lunch today and buy a bottle of Maker's and spend the afternoon sitting in the park talking to my imaginary friends.

Getting the Blog Back Together

2009-10-18T23:56:19Z

"You were inside, I was outside. You were supposed to keep in touch with the blog. I kept asking you if you were gonna write again."

"What was I gonna do? Take away your only hope? Take away the very thing that kept you going out there? I took the liberty of bullshitting you."

"You lied to me."

"Wasn't lies, it was just... bullshit."

So, yeah, I've taken the ill-advised step of trying to kick start the blog again. And I find myself in another part of the world. And I find myself in a beautiful house. With a beautiful...uh...garden. And you may ask yourself: well...how did I get here?

Same as it ever was.

So most of you know by now that my family shrunk a little last summer. I am now happily ensconced in single-dad land, waiting for all the paperwork to finally make it official.

I am also, due to the twists and turns of the custody process, no longer raising my kids in New Orleans. We're back in Austin. It wasn't my idea, and was not totally my choice, but my kids and I are happy as bugs here right now. We all miss New Orleans, and I'm sad that I won't be able to raise my kids as New Orleanians, see them graduate from my old school, all that. But they spent enough time there that they've got the bug, and I'm sure life will bring them back around that way often. And in the meantime, we've got a lot of life to catch up on after years of not living it to its fullest.

Sorry to disappoint, but I seriously doubt the divorce will be much of a topic of discussion here, and I won't be entertaining such discussions in the comments, so this blog will probably be a lot less confessional than it used to be. Despite that, I hope that I can still find a way to make it personal and engaging.

My blog will stay at this location, although the title bar might change from time to time depending on my mood. Maybe at some point some of the archives which I corrupted last year will be able to be salvaged.

It feels good to be back. It feels good to not have to limit my sharing to 140-characters, or to squeeze them into a Facebook YouTube link with emotionally relevant subtext.

I am Ray From New Orleans, In Austin, In Exile, and the future feels fucking awesome from here, even if I don't know exactly what it looks like.

V

2008-10-20T15:10:10Z

"Too much living is no way to die."

Annual report, year 5 A.D.

Lost three friends to the grave, much too young. Lost more friends to circumstance.

Made new friends, really good ones, and reconnected with old ones, really good ones.

Lost some family. Got tighter with other family. My kids and my siblings and my parents rock.

Watched friends go out, get drunk, come back. Watch friends go out, get high, not come back.

Did not drink. Did not consider drinking. Did not have weird dreams about drinking.

For the whole year.

Which is something, I suppose.

When I was at zero, five seemed unimaginable. Now it's just another year.

P.S. Happy birthday, Professor Morris. I'd give it all back to be able to stand you a round of Jameson.

IV: Quadrophenia

2007-10-20T06:30:36Z

"You're barmy, that's what. Staying out all hours. Gettin' up to God knows what. Dressing like a bloody freak. Stand still when I'm talking to you! I wouldn't be at all surprised if you're on drugs."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah....Haven't you got a mind of your own? I'll tell you, you're schizophrenic, you are."

"What's that then, eh?"

"I'll tell you. It's somebody, like you, who doesn't know where his mind is. Bloody split personality. Half your mother's family were the same. That's where you get it. Your Uncle Sid was always trying to kill himself. And when he did it was a bloody accident. He never knew what he was doing."

1979 was the year that Quadrophenia was released, when I was 15. I idolized this film. For obvious reasons...the music, the fashion, the rebellion. And for reasons that I didn't think anybody else really understood like I did. Split personality. One minute fun, the next moody, and the moodiness would drive friends or girlfriends away, which would make me clingy, making them run further away, making me moodier and angrier and more and more lonely. Even when I had a girlfriend, I felt isolated, like it wasn't real, like I didn't really deserve this. And if they dumped me, I would obsess over them for years. More often, I would dump them first, reject them before they could reject me. It's a useful defense mechanism. Attack before you can be attacked. Ask the Germans. 1940. A banner year.

1979, coincidentally, was also the year I started drinking. Heavily, from the very first night. I did not "experiment" with alcohol and drugs, I said "gimme!" And if you believe what some people tell you, the year an alcoholic starts drinking is the year that he stops developing emotionally.

Last week I watched Quadrophenia with my daughter, thinking I was just passing on one more bit of musical history for her so that she can be the hippest musical kid in school (it's working, so far). But as I watched, I realized I was not watching an image of my teen angst years. I was watching my current grown self on the screen, being amped up one minute and depressed the next, taking anger out at rejections, real or imagined, wanting to be part of something larger than myself and finding myself isolated at every turn, angry and confused and not knowing how to figure anything out.

Two weeks ago I almost relapsed. Not even because I wanted to get drunk, really. I was angry about something. Something stupid and petty, I don't even remember what it was. But there was a half-empty bottle of wine on the counter and I picked it up, took the cork out, and smelled it. And then I put it to my lips. Thinking, "this'll show 'em." Like I could prove a point that way. I could show "them" (whoever "they" were) that I'm serious, about whatever the fuck it is I'm supposed to be "serious" about. I used to do that in my drinking days. Drink "at" people. Drink to show 'em. And I was daring myself to do it, curious to see if it was as dangerous as it's made out to be, curious in the way I was curious about letting go of the handlebars on my motorcycle last year.

I tipped the bottle back, and the wine hit my lips...but I didn't open them. And I pulled the bottle back down, and wiped my mouth. Put the cork back in the bottle, and put the bottle in the pantry out of sight. Then I called somebody, 'cause that's what you do in AA. You call somebody. I called a person who was once a temporary sponsee of mine who is currently stronger and wiser than I have been in months. The student has become the master.

And I'm hauling my ass back into meetings for real now. I have friends in the program now, friends who I know from outside activities, so it's easier to stay connected. It's kind of ironic; I get called "rescue hero" by a couple of people I've helped in the past year, I get called "fireman" by somebody who knows about my secret dream of wanting to be a volunteer fireman. And the other day in a meeting, a chick there who I didn't even know said she thought I looked like the sponsor type, like the kind of guy people must ask to sponsor them all the time. When inside I still feel like a messed-up kid half the time.

Four years ago today, in the wee hours of the morning, I drank the last drink of my life (a pint of pink lemonade and vodka that was about 2/3 vodka) and cried my eyes out to my wife about things in my past I'd never told her about, at least not in detail. That really was my last drink. I've never relapsed, and I don't plan on doing it any time soon. And today I will get a new little AA chip (why don't they call them doubloons here?) with a big Roman numeral "IV" on it.

If it's true that your emotional development freezes when you start drinking, and starts growing again when you get sober, then today I turned 19. I feel 19. I feel like a confused teenager on the verge of young adulthood who is only just now starting to figure out what is important and what is just distraction. What parts of my past are worth hanging on to and what parts should be traded in for something else. And it's high time for me to drive the Vespa GS off the cliff and walk away from all that mods and rockers nonsense, and grow the fuck up.

I'm Ray, and I'm still a motherfucking alcoholic.

III Redux

2006-10-26T21:27:25Z

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.

III

2006-10-24T03:06:09Z

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.

Santa's hideout at chicken fried heaven: a family tradition

2005-12-13T04:25:32Z

Every year we go out to Elgin to cut down our Chrismas tree. And every year we stop at the Cafe 290 in Manor to get their heart attack appetizer, the Chicken Fried Universe: fried green tomatoes, onion rings, and deep fried zucchini, green beans, and mushrooms, with bowls of ranch for dipping (and I guaran-damn-tee you, Karl, this ranch was not homemade):

And every year, we see somebody who looks suspiciously like Santa, sitting at the breakfast counter in civilian clothes, drinking his coffee and reading the Sunday paper. I realize this is as blurry as a Bigfoot photo, but I didn't want to spook him by using a flash...I swear to God, it's really him:

And every year I say we are going to get a tree tall enough to touch our 9'3" living room ceiling, and every year the family overrules me and picks out a tree based on shape and aesthetics instead of pure height:

Six-and-a-half. Sigh.

Cassidy tells me "size isn't everything, Dad." And you know, a lot of smart-ass responses immediately come to mind, but none of them are ones you want to say to your 11-year-old daughter.

Dinner party, old friends and new

2005-12-12T06:08:16Z

Last night was a big dinner party at our house. Some random old friends and family, and some new friends from New Orleans. Twelve adults, five kids, two new twin babies. A big pot of redfish courtbouillon with lots of sides and snackies and red wine and Ellen's peppermint brownies for dessert.

The folks from New Orleans were evacuees from the neighborhood around the Fairgrounds. I first met this woman at the Speedway Grocery, said hi because she was wearing a sweatshirt from Tricou House. We got to talking, naturally mostly about Katrina and moving back vs. not moving back, we swapped phone numbers, and one thing led to another and they ended up coming over for dinner: wife, husband, son, and their other friend from the 'hood who was in Austin taking a break from cleaning up.

The friend is moving back. He's single, no kids, was renting, he works with underpriviledged kids and wants to be there when they start moving back.

The family is staying in Austin. They just can't handle the instability in New Orleans right now with a four-year-old. They don't have power yet in the house they own there, they don't have jobs there any more so they don't have a lot to move back for, they can't imaging moving away for 3+ months every time another hurricane hits, they have no idea what will happen with schools and levees, and Austin has been good to them. So their house in New Orleans is up for sale, and they're rebuilding their lives here in Austin.

They're fantastic people. We hope to see a lot more of them. And I gave them directions to Gene's for a sloppy roast beef, dressed.

A few food pics in the flickr page. And here's what I had for dinner tonight...leftovers:

Richard Pryor

2005-12-12T05:04:37Z

There have been a lot of words written about the brilliant Richard Pryor over the past 24 hours, but nobody has delivered the perfect, succint, to-the-point eulogy like Trent:

Can we please have a moment of silence . . .
For the funniest motherfucker on the planet.

I can't really add a whole lot to that without ruining it.