Dangermond.org

I began reading Liar’s Poker this afternoon and am halfway through the book – it’s one I’ve been wanting to read for a while but was compelled to now that I picked up Lewis’ latest book, The Blind Side. I think I read too fast. I think I experience life too fast. I told Gomez as we walked around the bayou this afternoon that G has this uncanny ability to linger in bed in the morning and I get up and scale the mountain before I realize I’m breathing.

A moment ago I was almost panting as I went through stacks of bank statements I hadn’t reconciled and paid bills and made lists and got my calendar together for next week. It’s like without a topper I operate on adrenaline that fuels some frenzy – only I’m not quite sure I know what the hurry is anymore – I just get on the hamster wheel and pant away for no good reason.

Literally – most people think I am having sex when they call me cause I answer the phone half out of breath – they don’t know that I’m whirling on some natural speed that coarses through my blood and every move, even answering the phone, is done in mid breath.

There are three books that I’ve begun on my bedside table – and yet today I bought a new one and read half of it.

Rushing to the grave, I imagine.

I was shivering in my long sleeve shirt this morning while walking the Bean. At 10PM it was still warm and when I woke this morning instant cool. The good thing is that the rain has stopped and the siding can go up on the addition. The bad thing is that this weather makes me feel like a bear, I want to hibernate, BUT my cave still isn’t ready to be occupied.

I learned at the gym this morning that the guy who strangled then chopped up and cooked his girlfriend actually had sex with her two days after he strangled her. Gross.

Everyone who comes to visit at the Can is impressed by the large sunny windows and the kind of hip layout. You know what? The Bean and I say pishaw – living here is the equivalent of being kenneled – we have no access to the outside without having to go down three flights of stairs or the elevator – the windows are so large there are no screens and one time a swarm of termites flew in so I don’t leave the windows open generally.

All of my wonderful neighbors have moved into their new or renewed houses and now the hallway is quiet and there are few chance meetings when I come in or out. Sigh.

I’m like the only dog barking in the kennel.

The other night a friend told me that a guy we know takes issue with me because I cheated on my husband. I said, you know what, he doesn’t know me, he doesn’t know I loved my husband to the core. He doesn’t know that during an aberration – a rough patch in my and my lover’s marriages – that we also fell in love. The man who takes issue with me has never been married or had a long term relationship – I take issue with him, a man who has never occupied my heart, to fully understand me or my motives or to understand how love stretches and torques the imagination into believing that anything is possible. And I take issue with anyone who can’t forgive a mistake.

Speaking of mistakes – everyone keeps asking about L’s surgery and when I tell them that the doctor fused the wrong level and so ended up doing a double fusion, they are aghast at how a doctor could make a mistake like that. Sure mistakes happen (see above) but aren’t doctors supposed to ensure that they don’t? Having grown up in a medical family I have heard too often of carelessness that has led me to be very skittish about ever having to go in the hospital – my favorite saying is they kill you in those places.

After work, I went out to Metairie to see Abby #2 and she is more beautiful every time I see her. But her mother said she is a stinker and doesn’t sleep and wants to eat every 45 minutes. She slept in my arms for two hours. Then I made my way home down Veterans Memorial Boulevard – the soul of the suburbs. I picked up Saints shirts for the Snake – his birthday is Sunday and his party is at Handsome Willys on Saturday. Then I went shopping with a vengeance at Whole Food – I’m tired of eating the same thing every day, whatever that is, and so I bought chicken, beef, and shrimp since I’ve been having a rough time making real meals. It’s so easy to eat well with two, but one doesn’t eat that well or at least I don’t. Most days, I stand up at the kitchen island and eat because I have to, not because I want to.

I didn’t make A’s birthday at Cafe Degas. I didn’t go see Tom at the Ogden. But today I accomplished seeing the J-man, Abby #1 and Abby #2 and I took a break from the adult world that I have been orbiting.

On my way home from Whole Foods, R called to see if I want to do something and I said I had one thing on my mind – finally watching Grey’s Anatomy – and hanging out with the Bean on my sofa. S called from SF and said that he might come in for one of my New York trips to work on the A’s house and he’d stay at the apartment and watch the Bean for me.

I dropped two fat pumpkins off on the LaLa porch, and put the cherry stain by the back door (I had mistakenly bought a red mahogany stain for the shutters thinking it would match the real mahogany columns and windows, but when the stain was put on the cypress, it turned to almost black).

I let out a big sigh when H was walking by and asked when I was moving in – end of the year I hope, I told her.

The Yahoo disappointment is still a pall over the day and yes, I still believe Yahoo is a great company and maybe we’re looking at an ’07 story, but you know what, with Google having soared on its wonderful growth news it made the Yahoo story a bigger pill to swallow. My colleague and sometimes confidant and always sexy friend in Krakow IM’d me and said he feels my pain. Whatyagonnado?

It’s hard to be disciplined when the world you knew before just turned topsy turvy and you realize every breathing second that life is short (ah, but it’s wide) and so when do you quit being enamored with a company who WS is pummelling? Which event do you opt out of thereby slighting which friend? And when is not doing ever going to be as easy as doing?

Discipline – it’s very tricky.

G and I were supposed to have a date last night since of late she has been preoccupied and so have I and when we have seen each other it has been in the company of others. So we were going to have a steak at La Boca, home of L, man of mystery’s, food poisoning. I hesitated to go again, and L even asked why we were going there, but then thought I’d give it another try. T came to meet me for a cocktail at the bar there before picking up her daughter and then G was going to arrive after getting her hair redone – T said she really liked the food there, so I felt better. After dinner, G and I were headed to hear E playing with the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra with Irvin Mayfield at the Boom Boom room.

Well even though we were having a good time at La Boca, and Dean the bartender was taking care of us graciously, there were minor tremors in our landscape that were gathering and by the time G and I got to the Boom Boom room, we felt the tendrils starting to head the way of that Eli’s Coming feeling. We cheered E when they introduced him, and stuck around for Irvin’s new signature song, but we snuck out at some point feeling as if we were being hijacked the whole night and not having any time to just hang. Freddy Omar wasn’t at Cafe Brasil, instead there was a punk band, and the Spotted Cat was crowded and we didn’t want to fight the crowd there (the woman who was cut up by her suicide boyfriend was a bartender at the Spotted Cat), so we ended up at Snug.

It was there that we rehashed the evening, the culmination of the week(s) and G named the feeling, the Eli’s Coming feeling. Hers was magnified by the fact that she was leaving for NY today and mine was magnified by Yahoo’s new all time low which was a serious disappointment.

When we got back to the Boom Boom room, Kermit was in the crowd, so was Bill Jefferson, and NOJO was running hot and we were lulled back into the dreamscape of New Orleans.

G put a name to what has been bothering me, us, lately. Eli’s Coming. It’s like waking up with this feeling of dread – like did I do something wrong? is something about to go wrong? It’s possible it comes from laissez les bons temps rouler – it’s so easy here in the Big Easy to enter into the fray of good times. Take the upcoming last weekend of this month – on Friday night Swirl is hosting a costume party (B & K love to costume and are making a big to do of this), then on Saturday and Sunday it is Voodoo Fest where the lineup of musicians includes Original Meters, Shooter Jennings, Trombone Shorty, Drive by Truckers to name a few (T would kill that I didn’t mention Duran Duran) but on Sunday, L gave me his Saints tickets and N and I are going to the Saints game, and then Saturday night is the Voodoo on the Bayou – a costume or black tie party at the Pitot House, that Saturday also happens to be L, man of mystery’s birthday, but I’m not sure if he will be home yet.

Okay that is one weekend for godsakes! So tonight with Tom McDermott at the Ogden and A having her birthday party at Cafe Degas – how can I step off the social circuit and take a break?

Early this morning I held little Abby and played with the J-man who was home sick – at one point he started twirling around with joy and it overshadowed Eli and brought a smile to my face.

The other night L asked “you have been married three times” as if he was hearing it for the first time. I ask you what carries a greater stigma, at a certain age not having been married or having done it multiple times? Hard to say. It just is what it is.

By the time everyone figures out what is going on, it will not matter what is said now about Yahoo – WS wants to punish, so it does, and there it is, but there was a good article on MediaPost’s blog about how it is positioning itself as the 21st century media company. It needs to be a right now media company.

A guy jumped off the Omni Royal into the inner courtyard committing suicide, found on his body was a note that he had strangled his girlfriend in the bathtub, then cut her up and roasted her arms and legs in the oven and boiled her head on top of the stove. This was indeed verified when the cops got to their French Quarter apartment – one charred head in a pot, and well, you know the rest. My buddy B sent me the article and asked if the guy was a pal of mine. I said no, but it does give me pause, since a few weeks ago a guy I have been seeing bought Yahoo.

Yahoo’s stock hit an all time low today. Shortsighted or savvy investors? – you make the call – I still believe this is the media company of our future. But what do I know.