My writing "career" (shee-it, careers pay money) didn't start til Katrina, but this quote from John Biguenet's essay "The What and the How of It", linked from the P&W article, rang true to me:
For there was nothing in the canon of American literature or the traditions of the visual arts or music in this country that could offer models we might imitate. Never before had the United States seen a major city destroyed, so how were we to represent what had been visited upon our city by an agency of our own government?
And there was a second issue to confront: Who was our audience? The impulse of many of us was to put aside our creative projects--our sonnets and novels, our sculptures of the human form, our love songs, our photographic studies of shadow and light--and author instead urgent bulletins to the rest of the world about the desperate plight of our city, about the suffering of our fellow New Orleanians, about their abandonment by the government.
I was thinking of these things a couple of weeks ago while reading Haruki Murakami's collection of short stories, After The Quake. In these stories, published in 2002 but all set within the first few weeks following the tragic Kobe earthquake of 1995, Murakami manages to make the quake a central focus of all of his characters lives, while at the same time making the various plots have almost nothing to do with the quake. He manages to walk a perfect line, acknowledging that all of these people have been irrevocably changed by the earthquake, while still understanding that despite the scope of the disaster, life goes on and most things in life are not "of the quake", they are of the stuff of life: love, anger, jealousy, regret, desire...the same raw materials that any pre-quake story would be built from.
It's the kind of writing you can do once you have some distance, some time, between yourself and a great trauma.
Which is kind of a roundabout way of getting to talking about the new book from Gallatin & Toulouse Press, A Howling In The Wires.
Howling is not that kind of writing that requires distance and perspective. Howling is an anthology of blog writing, letters, and poetry written in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, by those directly affected by the storm. As I wrote in the book's introduction:
All of these writers had things in common. A frantic need to know what was really happening to the city and its people. A passionate desire to make sure the world understood the scale of the tragedy, the impact on those who suffered, and the future implications for the rest of the country; why New Orleans mattered, and what was being lost. A furious rage as insults piled upon injuries. And deep down, an undescribable pain, a wide-eyed teeth-grinding emotional trauma. A scream out of every nerve ending. A psychic howl of pain and exhaustion and abandonment.
Join us tomorrow night, Thursday, August 26, around 8pm, at Mimi's in the Marigny, as we launch A Howling in the Wires with readings and signings and the usual drink and merriment that goes on at Mimi's.
It'll be fun. Buy a book. It'll make you feel good. Louis Maistros, Lolis Elie, Stephen Elliot, and Ethan Brown all recommend it, and what, you gonna argue with THOSE guys?
]]>I grew up at KTRU. It consumed my life for most of the 80's and is an integral part of who I am.
Please click on the Save KTRU logo over on the right and do everything you can to help. We may still be able to stop this injustice
This piece is something I wrote for the Testimonials section of the Save KTRU site. Reproduced here in its entirety.
_________________________
My first day of Freshman Week in 1982, I met my advisors and the first thing I asked them was, "How do I get to the radio station?" Computer science was the "official" reason I selected Rice, the academic reason, but deep down I have to admit KTRU was the thing that really sucked me in.
I still remember my first training session, with a sophomore named Ray Isle. Ray would later become a close friend and roommate, and these days he gets paid to drink wine on national TV at six in the morning, but back then he was exactly what I wanted to be: a KTRU DJ. He showed me how the board worked, how to play a cart, how to cue up a record. Then he gave me a turn to sit in the chair and try it out and asked if I had any requests. "Joy Division," I said. "'Love Will Tear Us Apart'". I knew all about Joy Division since I was a voracious reader of music magazines, but I'd never actually heard them. He dug out the 7" single and I put on the headphones, dropped the needle on and then spun the record backward til I found the beginning of the song, just like he showed me. He made a little small talk while we waited; I mostly sat there terrified, and then when the last song faded out, I pushed the levels up and pushed the green PROGRAM button, and the little Joy Division record began to spin and that thumping bass line came through the headphones and I grinned.
"That wasn't too terrible," Ray said, but I wasn't listening.
This. Right here. This was it. Not the student paper. Not the band. Not soccer, or softball, or yearbook, or theatre, or politics.
This. This cramped, grotty little cluster of tacky wood-paneled rooms in the basement of the RMC, with the ancient analog equipment and the falling-apart headphones and the squeaky chair and the weird graffiti. And the music library. The enormous, glorious music library. I fell into those stacks like Augustus Gloop falling into Willy Wonka's lake of chocolate. Cool, the Cramps! Look, the Velvet Underground! Wow, Mission of Burma, what's that, are they good?
I was finally home.
KTRU was the driving force that would eventually propel me through six years and two college degrees. My best lifelong friends are all people I met at KTRU. And together we learned about music, about business, about media and promotions and organization and scheduling and budgeting. We learned how to deal with people, how to compromise and reach consensus. Sometimes we didn't learn as well as we should have, but goddammit, we learned.
And somewhere in all that craziness, all those late nights drinking beer and listening to records and arguing about music, we accidentally participated in a movement. A movement that would permanently change the face of the music industry forever.
Michael Azerrad's landmark book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991, documents the rise of American punk and indie rock during the 1980's, a musical movement that burst into the mainstream in 1992 with Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit". In its formative years, this movement, made up of a loose network of small record labels, innovative musicians, small press fanzines, and college and non-commercial radio stations, provided the breeding ground and the DIY ethic for a revolution in music that dominates the music industry to this day. In the last four decades only the rise of hip-hop has had anything close to the same effect.
And KTRU was there. Rice students, using their own talents, their own sweat equity, helped make it happen. KTRU was invaluable in helping this musical culture flourish in Texas.
Somewhere out there, in the heads of a bunch of passionate music-minded middle school and high school and undergrad kids, is the next musical revolution. And KTRU can still be on the leading edge of this innovation and progress, but only if they are still around to do so.
My great fear is that if KTRU's 91.7FM frequency and broadcasting tower are stolen out from under them, it will result in the eventual slow death of the station. For many reasons already well-documented elsewhere on this site, an Internet-only radio station simply does not have the influence and resources necessary to survive as a self-perpetuating ecosystem. The loss of the frequency will essentially gut the station's programming. And it breaks my heart that my two brilliant, talented, music-loving teenagers, both of whom up until last week were considering Rice as a possible college destination, may not get to experience what I experienced.
Not at Rice, anyway. If they want what I had (and they do), and if Rice continues on this ill-advised course of action, they'll have to go to Stanford, or MIT, or Berkeley, or Tulane, or Carnegie-Mellon. And I intend to encourage them to do so.
]]>First came the news Thursday that 134-year-old New Orleans institution P&J Oyster company was ending its shucking operation immediately. Also mentioned in that article was the possibility that Felix's will likely be closing its oyster bar in the near future.
I decided I better go out and get me some oysters while I still can, so I checked the web site for Shuck Shack, which had some really good Louisiana oysters just one month ago. They have this notice up now:
"Due to the problems in the Gulf, we are out of the fresh-shucked oyster business for a while. All of our other seafood is inspected and is safe, healthy and tasty!"
And I started to panic a little. I thought Texas oysters were still OK. (And I like Shuck Shack, but they put pico de gallo on their po-boys so I'm not sure it's worth the drive and the parking hassle to explore the rest of their menu.)
I called Quality Seafood and they said the only Gulf oysters they had were from Florida, but they had some others from other parts of the country (bluepoints and other such pretentious yuppie delicacies).
So me and the boy, we had dinner at Quality. We got there early so we got to chat with the manager and with the very lovely bartender for a long time about the oil, seafood, oysters, Katrina, the usual topics.
The manager said that even though there are still oyster beds open in Louisiana, the Louisiana oystermen are serving their local customers first and so it's impossible to get Louisiana oysters all the way over here. I have to admit I thought that was fair and reasonable, and the bartender agreed.
The manager also pointed out to me that oyster season in the public beds in Texas officially ended at the end of April, and most private beds have been closed due to an algea bloom, so unless she could find some private beds in Texas that are still open, the only Gulf oysters she can serve for the rest of the summer will be from Florida.
We ate four dozen of the Florida ones. They weren't particularly briny, and size-wise they were all over the map, mostly on the small side. They were decent, though. More methadone than black tar, and definitely not the best oysters I've had there, but you do what you gotta do. I'll be back over there regularly since some oysters is better than no oysters, and the bartender was extremely charming.
One thing about dinner that was nice was talking with people who get it. Several of the employees there are Louisiana natives and the bartender said they're all walking around in shock, and the manager really understood the enormity of what's going on down there. People in Austin, their heart is in the right place, by and large they're environmentally conscious and they're horrified, but just like after Katrina, they're kind of looking at it from a distance. It doesn't hit them in their gut the way it does people who have lived there. Talking to the folks at Quality, I felt a lot like I did after Katrina when I run into a fellow New Orleanian to talk to. They truly understand how bad this is and you don't have to spend a lot of time educating them on the latest developments.
]]>The Celtic cross is my first tattoo, by Freddy Corbin in 1989. The rest of the sleeve and the touch-up of the cross is by Chris Trevino of Perfection Tattoo in Austin, done between 2006 and 2008.
The cardinals are for my grandmother on my mother's side.
Which maybe explains why it's 2am and I suddenly feel like writing something. Or maybe it's because I had too much time to think in the car on the way here.
I was listening to the Grateful Dead's American Beauty during the drive, and something about the music and the sunlight and the highway spun my brain with the exact right amount of English on it to dump me all the way back to the Bay Area, 1988. It's the beginning of the summer drought here in Texas, most of the wildflowers are gone but things haven't gotten brown and dead and crispy yet, and the grass along the side of the road is a beautiful radiant gold when the evening sun hits it just right, the same gold that decorates the hills south of San Francisco all along the San Andreas fault.
My first job out of grad school I worked for a big telecom company down in Mountain View. Writing networking software by day, living the very very drunk and wired San Francisco hipster life by night; this was before the whole Internet boom, before there were more than a handful of techies doing the reverse commute from The City to The Valley.
It was a weird time in my life. I had made some choices before moving to SF, some choices that I would later regret, and even back then I had a sense that I had made a mistake. Don't get me wrong, there were some great times, I have memories that I wouldn't trade for anything, but underneath it all was this sense that something was just kind of...off. My life was careening ahead and it was exciting and usually a lot of fun and yet I couldn't get a handle on it, I couldn't quite make sense of it and I couldn't even really grasp exactly what it was I couldn't make sense of.
My afternoon commute up Interstate 280, I used to listen to American Beauty in the car, windows down, the afternoon sun warm on my face, drinking beer and watching the fog roll in over the top of the mountains. It was beautiful, but it also made me ache with homesickness. For Louisiana. For Texas. For the person who had introduced me to the Dead one year driving back to college from a fantastic weekend at Jazz Fest. The same person who I had left behind after graduation because the plan for my life said I had to move to the Bay Area, and I didn't have enough of a sense of myself or what I wanted to be able to deviate from the plan.
I would try to sing along with Jerry, with Bobby, and on some songs it went OK. I mean, as OK as it needed to considering I was alone in the car and usually a little buzzed. But the most haunting song on the album, "Attics of My Life"...well, I would sing along, but it has such a complicated five-part harmony that sometimes I was singing the high voice, sometimes the low voice, sometimes something that was kind of a moving average of all the voices. I loved the song, but I'll be damned if I knew exactly which line in there was the melody. For more than twenty years, I'd sing along as best I could, sometimes well, sometimes poorly, never quite sure if I was getting it right or not. Maybe I needed backup singers, I don't know.
So today I am driving to New Orleans. For the first time since that first job, I am once again working for a big company. I am once again unmarried. I have once again recently made some choices. You could argue that my life is careening again according to some plan that is not of my making. Maybe you could argue that. I don't live in the city where I want to live. I'm not doing the kind of work I want to do (because, well, writing doesn't really pay as of yet). There are people important to me who I am unable to have near me in my day to day life.
And yet, for the first time in a long time, maybe for the first time in my life, nothing feels off. Nothing is out of alignment. Even though not everything is where I want it right now, for the first time ever everything is at least pointed in the right direction.
Somewhere around Brenham, very late in the afternoon, "Attics of My Life" came on, and it was like when you've been struggling forever with a key in a stubborn lock, and then suddenly some imperceptible shift happens, not even enough to call it "movement"; just a slight change in angle or pressure or mere intent, and then the tumblers fall and the key turns without a hint of resistance. I was singing and the idea of the song as a gospel hymn popped into my head and the melody just clicked into place and I got it, I really got it, and I sang it and restarted the track and sang it again, and again, and again.
I know exactly what the melody sounds like now. For the first time, I can hear my way through all the competing voices and I can find the one line that I should be following. And having found it once, I know I will never forget it.
In the book of love's own dream
Where all the print is blood
Where all the pages are my days
And all my lights grow old
When I had no wings to fly
You flew to me
You flew to me
[Disclaimer: For my Austin peeps, this isn't personal, I pretty much trashed most of the Mexican food in New Orleans when I lived there too.]
I've always had opinions about the few places where you could get one or two decent New Orleans dishes here in Austin (good gumbo at Shoal Creek Saloon, Casey's Sno-Balls are good and authentic although nothing like Hansen's etc), and after getting to live back home the past few years, I'm here again and missing the food more than ever.
And for some reason, I guess because my recent history makes it a conversation topic, people lately keep wanting to know where to get good New Orleans food in Austin, and when I tell them the very short and disappointing list (see below), they feel compelled to tell me where they got some great "Cajun" ("stop: Cajun food isn't New Orleans food," I say; "Yeah, sure, OK, whatever, anyway like I was saying..." they say) food. And I'm always skeptical. But I figure I'm gonna try, every few months, to give some of these great "Cajun/Creole/What-does-it-matter-they-don't-know-the-difference-between-the-two-anyway" food places a try. Because what the fuck else you gonna do while you're living in exile?
So last week I tried Sambets.
Now I had been to Sambets back in the mid-90's. Tried their crawfish etouffee and found it way way way too spicy, and one-dimensionally spicy at that; typically Texan, it was all black and red pepper. Texans are all into that macho "make it hot enough that I scream" bullshit, which is OK for what it is but it's got fuck-all to do with Louisiana cooking, either Cajun or Creole. Creole food should be well-seasoned and balanced, it should not be hot hot spicy and painful. In general Louisiana food has a good deal less heat than Tex-Mex.
But everybody told me "Sambets is great, you should give them another try". And I work in far Northwest hell now, right around the corner from them, so I figured what the hell.
First I googled them. And unlucky me, it looks like they took down their old web site just yesterday because I swear to Christ as recently as two days ago the old site had a picture on it that was supposed to look like it was taken in the French Quarter looking toward Canal Street, but if you looked at it closely, you could actually see that it was taken on Mulberry Street in NYC, in Little Italy looking south towards Chinatown. I totally wish I'd grabbed a screenshot of it.
Fortunately their menu is still up. And from the very first line you begin to notice some weird shit:
"Muffuletta - Cajun tradition!"
Excuse me? Cajun? Jeezus. Sit down and shaddup and let me teach you some basics. It is widely known (outside of Austin, at least) that the muffuletta was invented in the early 1900's in New Orleans, by Sicilians, most likely at the Central Grocery on Decatur Street by Salvatore Lupo, a Sicilian immigrant. It's a Sicilian sandwich. It has Italian meats and Italian cheeses and olive dressing on a type of Sicilian bread which was called "muffuletta". It's a Sicilian word, ferchrissakes. There is nothing remotely Cajun about it, and in the early 1900's there were very few Cajuns at all in New Orleans, since Acadiana is over a hundred miles to the west over on the other side of some pretty daunting swampland.
"Specialty bread brushed with seasoned olive oil, topped with meats and cheese, grilled & heaped with our olive salad"
Grilled? OK, stop. The sandwich is a cold meats sandwich, and though originally intended to be served that way, and is still served only that way at Central Grocery, there is a contingent in New Orleans of "warm muffuletta" fans. But by warm we mean just warm. Not melted, certainly not grilled. You grill a sandwich full of cheese, there's already a name for that: a grilled cheese sandwich.
I point these things out not to be a pedantic dickhead. I point them out because they are examples of people not knowing even the basic history or traditions of a food that they purport to be enough of an expert in that they've decided to open a restaurant to sell it to the public. Whether or not it's good from a culinary standpoint, it is intellectually and artistically just wrong to call this a Cajun tradition or Cajun food, or to serve it as a grilled sandwich.
Anyways, I didn't get the muffuletta. I could have gotten a bunch of these other things though:
Turkey Muff - Turkey, Salami, Provolone Veggie Muff - Pepper Jack & Provolone cheeses grilled, topped with Olive Salad, Lettuce & Tomatoes Pest Muff - Muff with a twist! Pesto spread, Turkey Breast, Provolone, Bacon, Lettuce & Tomatoes, YUM!!
Muff muff muff muff muff WHO TALKS LIKE THAT? What is it about Austinites that everything has to be muffs and bugs instead of muffulettas and crawfish?
Anyway, I thought I'd try the basics. I got a roast beef poor boy and a cup of chicken and sausage gumbo. The roast beef because it's kind of the basic poor boy...it's like a cheese slice at a NY pizzeria, if they fuck up the cheese slice then nothing else they do is going to be worth a shit. And chicken and sausage gumbo is the most basic of basic gumbos.
A typical, average New Orleans roast beef poor boy (and just an aside, the poor boy was also invented in New Orleans, in part by Sicilians, but I digress) is supposed to look like this:
French bread and roast beef with gravy and debris, either plain, or dressed with shredded lettuce, tomato, pickles and mayo. You can request other stuff like Creole mustard. You cannot request onions, and you cannot for the love of God request cheese.
The Sambets poor boy looked like this:
and it's so wrong in so many different ways that I might as well just start from the top and work my way down.
The tomatoes...good, quality tomatoes. Sliced way too thick to be put in a sandwich, which I guess is why they didn't put them in the sandwich, they put them on the sandwich. Now due to the boat-like construction of this thing, there is absolutely no way to hold this sandwich or squeeze it or get your mouth around it in any such way that you can get some tomato as part of a bite of sandwich. The only thing you can do is eat the tomatoes first. Like a salad. Which I did. Which brings us to the next level...
The lettuce....not shredded, but large hunks of Romaine lettuce. Yes, Romaine. Romaine lettuce is so staggeringly wrong for a poor boy. It's one of the more strongly flavored lettuces, and the Romaine-ness of it overpowers the more delicate flavors of the sandwich filling itself. Especially when you put a metric fuckton of the stuff on it like they did here. And again, it rests on top of the boat. Good luck eating the lettuce with the sandwich instead of before the sandwich. You're better off thinking of it as part of the side salad.
At which point we come to the roast beef. It looks like good quality roast beef, cooked right, sliced correctly. And it's got gravy. No sign of debris, but if the gravy is right we can forgive that. Taste the gravy.
SWEET JESUS IT'S SALISBURY STEAK ONION GRAVY!
Sorry, I had a Luby's flashback there. Do I have to explain why the kind of gravy you put on a salisbury steak, reeking of cooked onions like a French onion soup, is not the kind of gravy you want on this sandwich? Just trust me if it isn't obvious. The onion gravy stench is so strong I can barely taste the mayo. In fact I can barely see the mayo. In face why the FUCK is there no mayo on my poor boy? Wait, what's this white stuff?
My god.
It's melted cheese. Provolone, I think. Follow me now....Romaine lettuce, onion gravy, and melted provolone cheese. If you were to draw a culinary Venn diagram around these things, it would be impossible to get all three of them in the same circle without bending space and time so much as to render Stephen Hawking speechless. Romaine lettuce + onion gravy == WRONG. Melted provolone + onion gravy == WRONG from the opposite direction. The flavors just don't work. Again, I'm not being a pedantic authenticity Nazi here; it doesn't matter whether or not this is a traditional New Orleans-style poor boy, because there is no culture on earth where these three flavors can co-exist in the same mouthful and not be repulsive.
After all that, even a fresh loaf of Leidenheimers couldn't save this. Fortunately they didn't waste the good bread on a bad sandwich; it's pretty much a featureless sandwich bun, not particularly crusty or tasty or anything. It's just a receptacle, a means of transporting le déjeuner misérables from table to mouth to trash.
I took three bites (not counting the tomato appetizer). Cassidy took one bite and said toss it. I tossed it.
After that atrocity, the gumbo had to better, and admittedly it was. If it was served to me in New Orleans I'd give it a 4 out of 10, but in Texas it gets graded on a curve so it gets a 6. The roux was actually decent, the sausage was good, the texture was right, they served it over plain white rice. The only problem, the same old problem that Texans always have when they venture into Louisiana territory, was the seasoning. All I could taste was black pepper and thyme. Lots of thyme. Lots and lots and lots of thyme. All the thyme in the fucking world. Seriously, if I put a piece of andouille sausage in my mouth and the most prominent flavor profile is thyme, you've got too damn much thyme in your gumbo.
So, my dear dear friends from Texas: I love you all, but you don't have to recommend Sambets to me any more. I tried.
Next up: a new place in East Austin called the Shuck Shack. They have oysters and crawfish every Friday, I think. OK, I know y'all from New Orleans are wondering how anybody can fuck up a raw oyster, right? Trust me, in Austin it happens all the time. More on that later on.
Oh yeah, the authoritative list of where to get decent New Orleans food in Austin:
1. My house.
2. Popeye's.
3. Get in your car and drive east for, oh, about 9 hours.
Then I remember I'm back in Austin.
"No, dear, this is the dream, you're still back in the cell."
Which means it wasn't a ship, it was just a fucking train.
Sigh.
Martha Stewart (MarthaStewart) is now following your tweets on Twitter.A little information about Martha Stewart:
1912096 followers
1202 tweets
following 6002 people
Boy is she in for a surprise.
]]>That is all.
Rescuers row row
Do your best to change the subject
Blow the wind blow blow
Lend some assistance to the object
I'm back to writing again. Dredged up one of those short stories I've been sitting on for a few months. It's a great story. Unfortunately I am telling it in the most shitty, banal way possible. I suppose I just need to get the whole story down on paper and think about making it sound good later.
I don't know why fiction is so hard. When I'm writing about something in the real world, something that actually happened or somebody I really know, all I need to do is get the idea, and the thing writes itself.
I wrote a story about AshMo and me that is coming out in the new anthology from Chin Music Press this summer. It's the longest piece of creative writing I've ever written, and although I turned the idea over in my head for a couple of weeks ahead of time, when it came time to write it, the whole thing just blorped out onto the page in an afternoon, and needed very few edits.
Some of my introspective blog posts over the past few years have been not much more than a vague idea and a handful of catchy phrases rattling around in my head, and when I sat down to write them, my front brain got the fuck out of the way and the story just came out on its own. Hell, I barely even remember writing them when I'm done.
So why is fiction so damn hard? I've got such a clear idea of every piece of this story in my head, but I write and discard, write and edit, write and rewrite and it just sounds dreary and dull and dreadfully drearily dull. It's bad writing. Great story and great writing, you've got something that people will want to publish and read. Great story with no great writing and you got dick.
Anyway, fiction is sucking mightily tonight. But at least I'm writing again. I've got a couple over at Back Of Town here and here, and other BoT writers are hitting their stride as well, so check it out.
]]>If you haven't seen them yet, HBO has two new videos up, an extended trailer and a 4-minute "Making Of", both of which have a ton of dialog and are totally bad-ass. See them here and here, and discuss, at BOT.
]]>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.
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.
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.
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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.
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