Days of Summer

After seeing an Inconvenient Truth this afternoon, today’s heat seems to possess some underlying evil besides having robbed me of my energy. It was interesting to watch Gore present an issue by layering it with his own personal tragedy and loss – usually it’s the woman’s narrative that reads so intimately. Through adversity comes knowledge – again strength of character is forged through life’s tough experience. I think of S, whose experience up until last year had been fairy tale – he’d hate the word lucky, but it was. Last year, about this time, we all thought we were lucky, but bam, the cards had something else in store for us. When I think of the human tragedy of Katrina and parallel it against the personal tragedy of the past year, I think that I have too much knowledge and would like to crawl in a hole. Gore’s right, it is an inconvenient truth, and it makes a mockery of sitting in Canal Place, in the a/c, having just bought a pair of shoes – it’s all a farce.

I corresponded with a potential new reporter who asked what we do at my company. We as researchers seek to tell the truth in a world (Wall Street) full of lies. Sometimes we are rewarded for telling the truth and sometimes we are telling an inconvenient one because the herd wants another truth.

Truth is Beauty and Beauty Truth and that is all ye need to know – or at least that is what Keats wrote. The truth is sometimes we get stuck, in a life of our own making but we marvel at how we got there and we wonder how to get out. This morning like every morning, Arlene tugged to the LaLa, a gale force pulling against the leash. She wants to be in that house, she wants to hang on the porch. I don’t allow myself to think of it as home yet, because it needs more time, more money, and more something something to get there. But she’s simple, she’s an animal, and she likes to hang on the porch and watch the bayou. She prefers it to being cooped up in an apartment on the third floor where she can’t see the outside.

She and I had plans to canoe but after my long bike ride this morning I came home and worked instead, putting off the canoe till later in the day when the heat wasn’t so oppressive. On a whim, I dashed out in the late afternoon for a movie, a documentary that talks about Global Warming, about big events like Katrina – Gore used the best of Nagin – the emotional no nonsense Nagin – to quote from – he outlined a scenario of utter catastrophe but a solid hope that we possess the ability to right what is wrong right now.

I sat in the dark theater and thought about this ability – why I couldn’t stop myself from doing wrong – I came home and wrote down my own obstacles to progress and one of them is forgiveness. I didn’t fall in love with N lightly, I was drawn to him like a moth to a flame partly because I could no longer live S’s idea of the perfect life, partly because he said all the right things at the right time and partly because I made him up. I embued N with everything I believed he had the potential to be, while ignoring the obvious.

In the meantime, I think of moving home and Katrina almost erasing home and at times, as guilty as I feel for saying this, I wonder why me? It’s a horrible feeling, this survivor’s guilt. Good god, I lost neither house nor all my personal belongings much less a loved one (well I lost plenty love ones but not to death) and to be so petty as to have that thought makes me want to hit myself on the head with a brick. E would say “Rachel, go easy on yourself, okay?” and I say “okay” obediently but then secretly go on wearing the barbed wire under my shirt.

Sitting in the dark theater, two elderly couples sat behind me and one told the other about the “twins’ bar mitzvah” and how the “twins are boring really – dull looks on their faces” and the one guy told a joke about a tourist coming to New Orleans and sitting on a plane next to a New Orleanian. The tourist says “I hear there is a lot of crime there” and the native says, “it’s not that bad” and the tourist asks, “well how should I protect myself?” and the native says, “you won’t be in neighborhoods that are bad, you’ll be in well-lit tourist parts of the town, so no worries,” the tourist thanks the native, and after a little more chit chat the tourist asks the native what he does in New Orleans, and the native says, “I’m the rear gunman for a Coca Cola delivery truck.” All four erupted in laughter. Was it missing S right at that moment, missing being a couple talking nonsense with another couple, that made the tears start gushing out, or was it fierce underpinning of truth in that stupid joke? 15 minutes into the movie, they were still giggling and ended up walking out – all four of them. What?

The pool at the Can has been so crowded all day – who are these people? – I have never seen any of them before at the Can. Today, I bought a new baby blue bikini. I’m thinking of a surfer camp or a fire dancing workshop for vacation if I can get away from the LaLa’s day to day neediness. D was down at the pool with her husband – she said, “I’ve seen a lot of progress at the house lately.” I told her what a difference a competent contractor makes. When I think of those punk morons that were at that house and didn’t appreciate it and gave me such grief I could just become a fireball myself.

Last night I dreamt I had sex with Vince Vaughn all night long. What goes on? If I could dream like that every night, I’d sleep as often as I could.

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