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This morning’s walk through City Park:

Two swans a nesting
One geese a laying
A white ibis flying
Several blue herons
Too many mallards to count

The ducks have been mating like crazy!

Tin is at the Waldorf School, which was founded by Rudolph Steiner over 90 years ago to address the needs of a post WWI community, a community that needed to radically reinvent itself. Steiner founded Waldorf – now 1000 schools around the world – as a force for social change. However, he also founded the biodynamic movement as well as an entire philosophy called Anthroposophy. From this philosophy sprang a dynamic and transforming movement that speaks to the mind, body and soul of not only children but all of us (teachers, parents, and citizens).

Four amazing speakers are going to be at Tulane – their presence together is unprecedented, their arrival here in New Orleans is probably once in a lifetime. They will be at Freeman Auditorium at 7PM on Tuesday, April 17th so if you are interested in learning more about Steiner’s philosophy that was before its time but more importantly of our time, about biodynamic farming and gardening, about social finance, about how Waldorf Schools contextually represent social change for each community they inhabit, and about how anthroposophy matters today, then please come to this unique event.

Also a film clip will be shown from award winning BBC documentarian Jonathan Stedall’s “The Challenge of Rudolf Steiner” – Stedall has covered other great thinkers such as Ghandi in his documentaries.

I think I inherited a certain disposition from my parents – from my mother, the inability to do what you are told to do, and from my father, being a renegade just because you can. This does not bode well for conforming to other people’s worlds.

March 28, 2012
Taurus (4/20-5/20)
Having power and having control are two very different things … you do not have to be the one in charge to shape how things are supposed to proceed. Do not think too small today — focusing on who is actually sitting behind the steering wheel will only waste time. Today the person behind the wheel is the chauffeur … and it’s the person riding in the back seat behind the tinted glass that has all the power. So let go of the wheel and go for a ride.

We’ve been locked in a battle royal of will here with a 3 year old and I see how that need to get what you want and not be told what to do is like pouring fire on gasoline for some and a matter of course for others. For Tin, he would rather spill his breakfast all over him than not make at least some part of it himself, and he would gladly go to school naked then be told what to do. Ah, the glorious will.

IN the category of this too shall pass, I was contemplating my hair loss today as I got up close and personal with a friend as we were both speaking into a microphone. He said, “I’ve been going like lightning speed for so many years now, I’m just done with it.” Amen I thought and so am I. Not to mention my hair that called it quits as well.

I was at a parent teacher meeting and one of the mothers said her son had acted like he had something in his pocket and then reached in and pulled out, “Powers” which he then proceeded to wipe all over him and told her it helped him “Fly!” And I thought to myself interesting, I’m going to reach in my pocket and see what sort of powers I pull out.

I do believe I’m trading in my Wonder Woman powers for Ponder Woman though, who wants to do more than gaze at her navel on any given day, she would rather hold still the onslaught of age and stress and dealing with the enormity of the age we are living in – the retort that everyone else is doing it doesn’t fly anymore.

Why? is more my question of the day, not to mock my son’s question of the day.

Why? asks Ponder Woman, as well as what the fuck?

I ran into a fellow dog walker this morning who told me that health is on the inside. She should know she’s a nurse and had worked for a time in cosmetology. We were catching up – she had gone through a lot of job crap years ago and had been listening to my job crap over the past few years. I told her I am trying to unwind from being wound up and when I listed everything going on in my life she practically yelled, “Rachel, this is why you have alopecia!”

Yes, I know.

Alopecia – when your hair’s falling out and you can’t make it stay
Alopecia – when you look to the left and you are going bald
Alopecia – when you look to the right and you are going bald
Alopecia

My hair stylist was singing me a song he wrote about a friend of his who went totally bald. He was singing it to him but the guy did not see the humor. Frankly, I didn’t either at the time. Now, meh, I’m going bald. And so what else?

I called a friend to help us find a home for Loca. Her nephew was killed in a motorcycle accident. People have bigger problems than me. But pathetically, my problems are all my own. As I gathered up the photos to send her of Loca – my heart broke – relocating the family dog. And so what else?

I’m beginning this week by divesting myself out of all of the obligations that I have stumbled into and I am seeking the path of not a stress free existence, but rather one that makes more sense the path that has got me here.

A neighbor told me that Sean Payton had an affair with a Saintsation and got her pregnant and that is why his wife is in Dallas, and he is here living with her. And so there are some people who think Sean is getting karma payback for that transgression rather than for the not acting on the bounty issue.

Since I have such telescopic vision, I always wonder about these things and karma is something that I have always paid dearly for. I was the child who couldn’t steal the piece of gum because right afterwards someone would steal my wallet. Karma is a bitch.

So I ask you in moving home three months before this city was wiped out and taking a footstep along the path that has led me here – a roller coaster ride not unlike the Zephyr, my most feared ride at Ponchartrain Beach – I ask you, have I paid enough yet for my transgression. And if not, what else?

Don’t ask.

Someone asked me if I had defined my writing goals and I said NO. But I must.

I am going to define my writing goals:
1) This blog has no purpose other than to provide a creative outlet for me and perhaps a cautionary tale to readers.

2) I will write a book – but I must visualize that book first. Right now I am visualizing too many books, too many topics, and not enough time.

3) I earn a living by writing – I read recently that by your 40s you pretty much have formed the path of what you will do for a living. I’m a writer, it was decided in grade school what I would do in my life. It just took me till graduate school to state it freely.

4) I would like to learn to sing, but since that is most likely never going to happen, I write.

I can’t simplify my life if I keep saying yes. I have to say no. It’s the only way. So today, I am practicing NO – if you are anywhere in my vicinity and ask me a question, prepare for No, it is the first and only answer I have today. No. A resounding No.

Or perhaps as Tin now says, “No, thank you.”

I was speaking to the wife of a doctor who said that the organization he works for has them scheduling the patients and followup in such a narrow window of care that there is no time even for eye contact.

I went ahead and cancelled my dermatologist appointment with the automaton – everyone has time to be human – and scheduled with a real person.

I walked over to the Zen center to check out the meditation times – my attitude is this – I’m going to change my life.

On the way home, I spoke with a care provider for the elderly who told me she has an 85 year old patient who gets up every morning with an attitude of gratitude. She wants all her patients to move in with her and let the rest of the organizational part of it go by the wayside.

Tin and I went to Clever today to see Evan Christopher performing with Roland Guerin, Matt Lemmler and O.C. Davis play some wonderful jazz. Tin stared adoringly at Evan the whole time and no wonder – those cats could play!

Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.
Tennessee Williams

This was one of the first years since returning from California in 2005 that I did not attend the Tennessee Williams Festival. The reason – dinero no hay. I let lapse my MOMA, NOMA, Ogden, City Park, Pitot House, and everything else membership because charity begins at home when you are starting over.

I was reading that Tennessee died in 1983 and frequently haunted Marti’s. Fancy that. I was in Atlanta and returned to New Orleans in 1980 and lived in the Quarter and frequently haunted Marti’s and the Chopping Block.

Those days are vivid in my mind, I was with my first love, Ken McElroy, and my brother, my sister’s beau and Ken owned the Vieux Carre Motor Lodge and the Burgundy Inn. I was the front desk person during the day. We frequently hosted theater groups playing the Saenger. I weighed 118 lbs, wore my hair long, drove a brown and tan Gremlin with a V8 engine, and smoked and drank and danced my life away like there was no tomorrow.

I was also a fag hag when I wasn’t with Ken and had another friend who had worked at the Playboy Club who used to sunbathe nude with me in my postage stamp back yard.

Was I aware he was around the corner, at the bar next to me? Most likely not, I was in love and painted a king size sheet that I hung from the wall of the parking lot on Rampart and Barracks that said, “KEN I LOVE YOU UNCONDITIONALLY” because I was listening to Donna Summer’s Unconditional Love one night and felt inspired.

The first woman who ever made a pass at me was in the Chopping Block one afternoon. The first time I knew what it felt like to be cheated on was Ken taking home a woman he had met that same afternoon on the barstool next to me.

I lived an entire lifetime in the four years I called that one small patch of Quarter home eating Jazz Alley burgers from the Golden Star and drinking ice cold root beer from the vending machine. A tall dark man held me up at knife point and took my purse that contained my $200 Dunhill lighter in the parking lot of the hotel. Often, I’d go home only to shower and then go to work – looking fresh as a daisy – oh youth.

Easily, I might have become a character in one of Tennessee’s stories. Or maybe I was.