Dangermond.org

A friend sent me an email this morning saying she felt like a woman again after having a wonderful night with her new beau. Another friend sent a text message asking if it was okay to just bypass dinner tonight with her date and get down to business.

After a day of being swept in one thousand directions, I drove into the parking lot and my neighbor was sitting on the curb drinking an Abita and I said the pelicans are back and he said I only want one thing and that is to have sex with you. What goes on? I told him, as I have before, subtlety might be his friend.

In an effort to find a reporter because we are maxed out on capacity I asked a colleague to send me some names and she said – I think you are really going to like this guy. And I said great, I really need someone fast. And she said, no, I mean you really will like this guy.

I’m like what goes on? Is anyone not thinking about sex right at this moment?

Mr. Pelican has brought a friend back with him. Soaring and diving into the bayou. Awesome.

Hoping the Voodoo Fest does something for the gris gris that is floating around these parts – everyone seems crotchety, including me.

Take this simple exchange – it’s a bad habit of mine to care more than I should – so today when I voiced my concern about someone and the response was “okay mother” – “blech” was all I had to say to myself. I’ve never liked the idea of women who mother men – it gives me the willies outright – and believe me I know enough women who like role-playing as mother to their men to know that it makes me utter a resounding blech.

I prefer role-playing where me woman, you man. Not me mother, you man. If all of life is a stage, and the roles are Madonna or Mary Magdelene – I’d ask to play the whore every time.

D, who was my best man at my wedding many years ago, writes me from the trenches telling me he is spending too much money looking for Mr. Right and so he has decided to budget himself till the end of the year – I don’t know if he is referring to men or money.

I went for a run this afternoon and the LaLa was humming – the siding is almost finished on the addition. The shutter wall for the outdoor shower is framed up and almost done. P was still applying the second coat of glazing to the guest bedroom walls. After much ado, the hinges are what we are using and we’ll just paint them. The tile man is supposed to show up tomorrow to lay the floor tiles in the addition. Wala.

This morning I took the Bean out in the pitch dark of morning to walk around the bayou. We made our circle near General Beauregard’s statue and were headed back when the sky broke into this scarlet gauzy red. Awestruck, we crossed the Friendship bridge and as we were making our way back to the Can, a rainbow peaked out from behind the clouds and suddenly grew more intensely visible and wider stretching all the way from the Can to Old Metairie – hey, I thought, with a lift in my step, the pot of gold is right there at the Can.

When I got to the apartment there was no sign of leprochauns or gold or anything – just the ordinary magic that makes life so wonderful – a nice cup of tea, a dog to lick my ankles, and smoked salmon on an H&H bagel reading the Wall Street Journal. Four missives – two from my gal colleagues congratulating me on GYI call, two from salesmen congratulating me.

Well the rotten mood seems pervasive amongst all my peeps. G back from NY in a foul humor. T down the hall said to watch out because she’s in a nasty mood. Meanwhile, on Sunday when S came by to talk about the house he said we needed hinges and asked if I wanted to pay the expense of having the old kind of brass balltop hinges to match the rest of the house and I said I didn’t know. Then the more I thought, I thought I did and so I said I’d get them at Ricca’s. And so I went and Ricca’s didn’t have the balltop, they just had the new kind, that have no balls, then S and K told me today that I was basically ripped off completely because you could buy those hinges new at Home Depot for about $2 and I paid $10/pair. And they’re not brass, they’re iron. And blah blah blah. I told them to deal with it.

I drove by mom’s house on my way back from Metairie and caught her trying to water her decrepit looking flowers with this huge watering can. The past two times I was there she had this totally retarded guy doing her flowers. I say that not kindly – because he is a freak not someone with a disability – she lent him money and he could never pay her back so she told him to make it up by putting flowers in her pots that line her walkway.

He works in some kind of landscaping gig but GOOD GOD ALMIGHTY I have never seen such a thing – he had these dead marigolds he planted with these petunias – all just slap dash – nothing going together – it’s just like a crime scene, a crime against flowers. And she’s out there watering this mess of a landscape. Good grief.

I think about my own insanity and take heart that the chaos of leggy burnt marigolds, mingled with white tinged pink impatiens, coupled with purple petunias all half hanging out of limp soil is not the first thing I see in the morning. It gives me pause.

I took the can from her and finished the watering. I was still in my bike shorts from this morning’s bike ride having gotten absorbed into work and such during the day. I was on the phone chatting with L, and she kept coming out and looking at the job I was doing with her flowers, and pointing to areas she thought I had missed. When I hung up, she came outside and put her hands on her hips and said, “Look at you.”

And I said, “What?”

She said: “You look like a little girl with your hair in that pony tail and wearing that baby blue shirt.”

Delusional, I thought. But I told her, “Girl trapped in a woman’s body, mom.”

She came over and put her arms around me tight and held me close against her and cooed, “Oh honey, I know. Oh, don’t I know.”

Mothers – whatyagonnado?

My truck has been held hostage by the slow Veterans Ford who discovered that I had all sorts of rocks and debris in my rotors on my brakes. Meanwhile, I rode my bike to E’s and we had a good fun session. I told her I don’t feel in control of my emotions and she laughed. Duh, you can’t control your emotions, she said. Well I want to, I said. And she laughed again. I’m glad I am there for her amusement.

I called a cab to pick me up from E’s and get Blue because I wasn’t riding my bike out to Metairie at 5PM in the traffic. Cab driver was a funny guy – big guy – told me all about the dinners he made himself with his wife out of town – sounded horrible – cream of potato soup with a large can of pork and beans and rice. Yikes! Anyway, he took me on a short cut that I always forget about – Academy Drive to Fleur de Lys – just bypass all that Causeway I-10 pile up – he said he used to operate in the east, but now there’s nothing there.

We drove through Lakewood North – which is where Academy comes out of and onto Veterans Boulevard. The brick on slab houses were all empty except for maybe one or two that had new landscaping outside. It was disconcerting – all the empty houses, boarded up. He pointed out the water line along the freeway wall. “Where they going to go?” he asked. “I couldn’t stand being away from here for the four weeks I was evacuated.”

I said, I know. I was in California for 15 years pining to come back. And moved back in May of ’05. He said, good timing. Yep, I said.

He wondered aloud – “if they don’t come back, what will they do with all these houses, tear them down?”

He turned to me and said, “There is no place in this world like New Orleans. In the midst of all this foolishness, we had Mardi Gras, because we are fun loving people. I spent some time in California and in New York, and it’s just not the same there, the people aren’t the same.”

I said, I know, I know. But I couldn’t help gritting my teeth a little as we turned left on Vets and saw all the houses lining the street that are half gutted, or boarded up. It’s like you get in these little microcosms where you don’t see it and you think, we’ll be alright. Then you see an entire neighborhood with houses barren, funky, and desolate yards and you think, how? How are we going to come back?

Would it be great to have Oscar Wilde at a cocktail party?

The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.
– Oscar Wilde

Jeffrey Skilling gets 24 years for screwing over countless people not to mention an entire country and investors and my brother gets 30 years for messing around with a savings and loan? Good grief, surely there is no justice in this world. Unbelievable.