I'm proud to say, I've had a fairly healthy day. I drank a smoothie for breakfast, ate a light lunch, and put in 45 minutes on the treadmill (several minutes longer than usual). At the moment, I'm eating a spinach salad, which has been dressed with several dashes of oddly delectable German vinegar I found at one of New Orleans few functioning supermarkets.
In half an hour's time, however, things will be very different: things will go very wrong. For in thirty minutes, Adult Swim begins. Immediately prior, I will remove a bowl from the refrigerator--a bowl containing one pint of sour cream and one container of onion soup mix. I will then remove a plastic bag from the pantry--a plastic bag containing potato chips. Many of them. I will then consume these items in the bingeful, ravenous, white trash manner of my ancestors.
Should I pass away in the middle of the night, laid low in simultaneous explosions of nausea and flatulence, I would be very grateful if someone would take charge of shipping my personal effects to Jonno. He'll know how to dispose of them tastelessly.
Yours in gluttony,
Rico
Update at 9:03: Just in case any of you thought I was joking...
Just as Dennis Cooper had wrung from my exhausted, sleepless body every last drop of faith in human kindness (especially humans living in Los Angeles); every last desire to make people feel better, not worse; every last crazy impulse to find a wayto be very tender--just as all that was happening, some lighthearted, carefree, twinkle-toes toon-o-phile posted my favorite, favorite, favoriteFoster's bit ever, and now, everything's right with the world.
For future reference: If your boyfriend should ship out to Sam Clam's Disco for a four-month vacation, leaving you to sleep all alone in a queen-size bed at the back of a big, old, creaky house, and without him laying next to you in the dark, you start to feel a little uneasy, and this uneasiness works itself up into a minor case of insomnia, and you want to read something that'll put you to sleep, do not, under any circumstances, pick up Dennis Cooper's The Sluts, because three hours later you'll just be shocked and horrified and engrossed and nauseous and worked up and unable to put it down, until you can't stand it any longer and sprint to the bookshelf in search of Babar or Alice in Wonderland or anything else with pictures that are pretty and colorful and not in a genital-mutilation kind of way.
How can 59,460 people--many of whom have not been able to return to New Orleans to live--re-elect a mayor whose passivity is directly responsible for their painfully slow crawl home?
How can 59,460 people re-elect a mayor who's taken nearly nine months inking a fairly simple deal to have flooded-out cars removed from our city streets?
How can 59,460 people re-elect a mayor who seems to be directly responsible for a questionable and possibly criminal multi-million dollar contract for inspection of New Orleans' ailing sewage and water system with a firm run by one of his minister friends--a firm that was incorporated three months after it started work removing manhole covers at $90+ per hour?
Most importantly, how can 59,460 people re-elect a mayor who's lost all credibility with the US legislature--the very people he needs on his side to get the federal money he needs for reconstruction--when his articulate, forward-thinking opponent has bejillions of connections in on capitol hill?
Those are all rhetorical questions, by the way. I'm not expecting answers--though if I were, I imagine illiteracy, contamination of the water supply, and a surfeit of heat/humidity would probably rank at the top of the list. There are other answers, too--complicated ones so frustrating that they make normally sane people consider a career in suicide bombing.
Yes, I'm depressed now. But I was just as depressed--if not moreso--after the last presidential election, and I put that behind me, didn't I? And hey, all those dumbasses that voted for GW are getting their comeuppance now, so maybe the dumbasses who voted for Nagin will soon realize the folly of their ways, too. Maybe. (Yeah, and maybe one day GW will learn to pronounce the word "nuclear".)
At the end of the day, I tell myself, if DC can survive the re-election of a crack-smoking coozehound like Marion Barry, I suppose we can deal with a non-crack-smoking, non-coozehound (though cockhound isn't out of the question) for another four years.
With all the changes Our Fair City has seen in the past nine months or so, it's nice to see that some things remain just as they were pre-K--notably, JazzFest, Mardi Gras, the fact that there are no working vacuum cleaners at any service station in Orleans Parish, and, of course, DramaRama...
If you've never experienced it, DramaRama is kinda like a mini-JazzFest, but instead of jazz, there's dance and theatre and such, and instead of humidity and sunburns, there's air-conditioning and tastefully diffused lighting. And of course, booze. Lots and lots of booze.
So, that's my big plan for the weekend. Those of you in the GNO, why don'cha join me the CAC this Saturday evening (after you help elect Mitch Landrieu to be our new mayor, of course). At a measly $12--for five solid hours of performances--even the cheapest of cheapskates can party like a bunraku star.
I sent nothing to my moms--biological or adoptive--for Mother's Day. It's one of my least favorite holidays, but then, it's not a day for me, is it? I can be such a Leo...
I put on about ten pounds after Katrina, and I can't get it off for the life of me. On the other hand, I've been doing a different routine at the gym and getting back on track with the yoga, so I've probably put on some muscle. But ten pounds of muscle? Probably not.
I'm looking forward to summer, mostly because I enjoy canoeing, and I didn't get to go for my birthday last year because we'd planned to go on August 27, which was the day they started the contraflow and the day we skeedaddled to Lafayette. But although I'm eager to frolic once more in chilly Mississippi waters alongside scores of rednecks, in the back of my head, I'm secretly making emergency plans: what to pack up, where to leave everything else, how the hell to carry the cat (not gonna make that mistake again). In one fell swoop, I've gone from a stubborn always-ride-it-out kinda guy into an evacuation monkey.
If I were to haul one of these up to my grandparents' farm in Mississippi, I could live out the rest of my days in relative happiness--provided I could score some wi-fi. The boyfriend, however, would last about 5 minutes. Er, seconds.
On a significantly more upbeat note, the Saints and Sinners literary festival happens this weekend. In addition to panels and get-togethers with festival regulars like Poppy Z. Brite and Michelle Tea, this year organizers have put together something called Circus Maximus, a rather sassy, circus-themed cocktail party hosted by GLBT literary darling Michael Cunningham and DJ Jake Shears of the Scissor Sisters. And it's being held at a mansion on St. Charles Avenue.
I don't know how this stuff happens or who makes it happen, but goddess bless 'em--or demoness, as the case may be.
Some people think death comes in threes--like when Mother Theresa died, and then Princess Di, and then...well, someone else, but I can't remember who. I used to think it was all a bunch of crap, but after last week, I'm not so sure.
Things started going downhill early Tuesday morning. I was making my usual post-coffee, post-email, pre-shower stroll through the yard (which I'll continue to do until July, when it gets just too damn hot). I casually peeked into my makeshift water garden and saw one of the goldfish I'd bought the week before floating on its back. The two surviving fish hovered on the opposite side of the cast-iron tub, presumably too shocked from their loss to call a funeral home. I scooped him (or her) out of the water and had the gayest little funeral anyone would ever want to see. Tania officiated.
The next day I arrived at work and saw our CFO and a security guard peering at something on the ground near the front gate. I thought maybe it was a sick dog or a wounded pigeon, but in fact it was a snake--a king snake, to be exact, and the first wild snake I've ever seen in Orleans Parish. Having been raised partially on a farm, I wasn't particularly worried about the guy (or girl), but the CFO doesn't like snakes, and he wanted it moved. We called the SPCA, but as you can imagine, they're still overworked and completely understaffed. Prodding it with a yardstick, I tried for half an hour to get the snake to slide on across the road, over to a drainage ditch where he (or she) could wallow about in peace, but it wasn't working. In the end, despite my reservations, the poor thing had to be killed.
Karma must've been hard at work that day, 'cause an hour later, Jonno called, sounding very upset. The kitten--who'd been unbearably cute all the previous evening, curled up by his feet as he worked--wasn't moving or breathing. I dropped what I was doing, dashed home, and sure enough, Little Edie was dead in her box. I have no idea why, but given the somewhat depressing life she'd already led in her month and a half on Earth--including two abandonments by her mother--it's probably for the best. Here's the last photo I took of her, curled up in Tania's bowl:
Oy, such a week. Between work and other stuff, I've hardly had the chance to breathe, much less write.
It's not any better today. Rather than kicking back at JazzFest like tens of thousands of my closest friends, the bf and I are schlepping to Baton Rouge. Maybe I can put on the brakes sometime tomorrow night.
In the meantime, why don't you do some relaxing on my behalf--perhaps while enjoying this wee flashback to 2001? YouTube: all the fun of having a mai tai on the beach, but without the pesky risk of melanoma.
Everyone has a couple of curious habits. In wealthy people, they're called eccentricities, but for the rest of us, they're just quirks. Some of those quirks, like cravings for butterbeans or ice cream, stick with us our entire lives; others, we outgrow or grow into. My own quirks include:
A compulsive desire to Windex the bathroom countertop while I'm gargling mouthwash;
A compulsive desire to open the microwave door before my coffee has been fully reheated (preferably when the countdown hits a prime number);
A compulsive desire to kiss boys.
Recently--within the past year--I've added a quirk to the list that's probably peculiar to New Orleanians. I don't know if it has to do with the hurricane or with my neighborhood's tendency to lose power every time it rains, but, well, I'm kind of afraid of the weather.
I noticed it on Saturday when I was working in the garden. I looked up to see a big storm cloud overhead, and then the wind picked up, and then...well, I don't know exactly what came over me, but suddenly I found myself running around the yard, securing loose objects and frantically trying to get all four hounds and one of the cats back inside. By the time I'd shut the door behind me, I must've resembled a heady blend of Dorothy Gale (in my heaving-bosomed vulnerability) and Auntie Em (in my attire). At least, that's what I could gather from the puzzled look on Tania's very expressive face.
So I'm wondering, is it just me? And more importantly, am I going to be doing this all summer long? 'Cause I, like Miss Mary J herself, would prefer to have far less drama in my life.
