Anticipatory Letter to Mama.

Mom.
Seriously.
I've been packing 7-10 boxes a day for the past week;
I haven't made a dent, not even a shoveled dimple, in the vast mountains of Otter's belongings.
(I'm not freaking out
I'm not freaking out
I'm not freaking out)

But I am freaking out.
Just a little.

We may have a super-awesome two-bedroom place in the Vieux Carre: high ceilings, bathtub, courtyard, owned by a nice semi-retired pharmacist-southern-gentleman; old old old building. We're second in line for the place (second line?) after a couple who lived there a few years ago, who are moving back to town, who may or may not (not! NOT!) want the old place. We'll see after the first of the month. Four days from now.

Time is growing short, and I feel like there's too too much to do.
I feel the next week or two will be absolutely beautiful and love-filled, a wonderful closure to our time here, and I am still anxious as all hell to get on the way.

Oh, Mama, there's so much to do, so much to tell, so much that I really haven't got time to relate because I need to actually be packing instead of quacking about how much packing I have left to do.

I can see the alligator eyes above the water line, and they are waiting for me,
putting an eye up for me.
Mockingbirds are flocking,
are following me around the cemetery,
are chatting up clouds of thick magnolia anticipation.
I am so sure I am doing the right thing,
the very air hangs heavy with promise and portent.
This dream into which I walk is preordained,
latent in my old and secret bones.
Here live the visible graves' nocturnal dancers,
keeping their Buddy Bolden beat in phalanges tapped on stone;
Here live tree flowers with once-human faces,
emitting the sweetest scent of putrefaction imaginable;
Here is where humans crawled back outta the drink
(the second time)
and where they may return.
Here lives and has lived the most inevitable girl in my head,
inscrutable and sweetscary.
Here is where I am validated.
Here is where I am supposed to be.
For now.

It is raining to beat hell here. Finally. We've been over 60 days without a drop, and our plants have suffered somethin awful. I am spending this blessed rainy day inside packing packing packing, maybe baking bread, definitely drinking tiny pot after tiny pot of cafe au lait (whose subtle flavors I am quickly mastering), and listening to as much music from my new home as I can stuff in my ears. Looking for as many renditions of "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?" as possible, and there are many many. Listening for subtleties of longing and devotion.

I miss you terribly.
There is so much happening to/with me on so many levels that I do not feel I can communicate any of it without eye and skin contact.
I am dancing with the thunder and dreaming the dreams that are my life, however or whyever these dreams have so blessed me.
Thank you for somehow identifying this dreamreality early and allowing me to see how I need to see, allowing me to grow within my own sacred ground, even if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense very often.

The Thunder is great today, showing off its lane domination and sporting its new bowling shoes.
Thunder gets all the turkeys.

The closer I get to New Orleans, the more nonsensesense my head makes.
I am evolving, or I am just now noticing.
I am doing what I am supposed to do.

I am calm in my deep parts,

...the parts that do not have to pack.

*sigh*

I love you, Mama.
I'm dreamy in my head, making costumes outta cobwebs, but my heart is large and sure, and I know I love you love you love you in ways I can never love another human being.
Thank you for choosing me (even if you didn't know you chose).

I love you.

-rd-

First Kiss New Orleans

This is my first trip to New Orleans.

I find every bit as much Oxymoron as I expect,
but
not always where I expect to find it.
I also
find Serendipity,
Felicity,
and Coincidence,
and I realize,
beyond any skin or bone or flesh at all,
that this city is waiting for me,
that it can go on limpidly waiting and
will not be bothered in the slightest
if I should take a thousand years
or even
forget to come at all.
Its ghosts will remain and are willing willing willing
to tell all manner of Stories in form of Secrets, in form of Tall Tales, in form of involuntary Nightmumblings.

There is a strange Beauty about this city, beyond its romantic architecture, beyond its great moss-weeping trees, beyond everything that draws Dreamers & Seekers & Scalawags to its plumply velveted, jasmine-scented lap. I begin looking for a name for this ambiguous Beauty at the Jazz and Heritage Festival, when New Orleans' heart is purported to be at its finest.

*******

DAY 1.

First thing in, Thursday morning, right as the gates open at 11 a.m., I'm devouring Ms. Wanda Walker's Cochon de Lait po'boy with wet slaw, served up on a crusty third of a baguette; pork so sweet and soft, I could eat it toofless. Oh, it's so perfect. It's just what babies should taste like. I also manage a bite or two out of Otter's softshell crawfish po'boy, shells softer than kettle-fried chips, with fried sour gherkins and cabbage; crawfish never tasted so wickedly delicious. After breakfast, we're set for a day of music and food and music
and food and
and let's get it goin already, y'all.

On the Jazz & Heritage Stage, Red Hawk Hunters Mardi Gras Indians, resplendent in thousands of ostrich feathers, hand-beaded headdresses and chestplates, left to right, orange yellow fuschia green.

Kelly Guidry's sculptures (Breaux Bridge, LA) of elongated female forms. Beautiful winged mermaids, giant bugs, and the loveliest giant fishing lures. Dreamy whimsy. Romantically menacing.

Pirogues hand made by Tom Colvin, whose Cajun-French accent is thick enough to make communication difficult to my uneducated ears. The boats are joined without aid of screws or metal parts. They are flawless. I shed my first Fest Tears at this astoundingly skillful demonstration of a Beautiful and Dying Art.

New Orleans Rhythm Conspiracy at Congo Square.
Squirrel Nut Zippers meets Gogol Bordello.
...That about sums it up.

Panorama Jazz Band at Gentilly. Sousaphone, Potosa accordion, clarinet, awesome (girl) tenor sax and trombone, drums, banjo. New Orleans/Island/Latin jazz outta the 1920s-40s. Danceable, mysterious, nostalgic, ultimately joyful.

A man with a tie-dyed prosthetic leg sits in front of us on the lawn, tapping his fingers against his personal rainbow.

Timbuktu Art Colony out of Ellenwood, GA. Silversmiths who make The Most Amazing Jewelry I have ever seen. Turquoise and amber and silver in sweeping, gracefully organic designs. Yum.

Strawberry cream sno-balls and strawberry lemonade.

Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers. Kermit singing "What A Wonderful World" makes me feel the magnolias in my hair. As the band plays and swings and jives and invites everyone listening to Up and Enjoy all that Life offers, the band is slowly joined by family members, children, everyone playing some instrument or another, everyone dancing. When they play "When It's Sleepytime Down South," Otter and I get all teary-eyed.

Randy Newman. "God bless the potholes down on Memory Lane." Funny as all hell, to my surprise. "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country." Watch a guy camping next to us, who had set up his site early just to see Randy Newman, fall asleep about 15 minutes before the show starts, skin burning in the alcoholic afternoon. Newman has the quote of the day, about New Orleans: "It's important that America has a place like this, that knows what's important." When he sings "Louisiana 1927," a song about the worst river flood in U.S. history, there isn't a dry eye as far as I can see.

"It's not what you look like when you're doin whatchya doin!" is shouted over a thousand sunburned bodies by Tower of Power. It's their first time playing Jazz Fest, surely through some gross oversight. You wanna talk about some heavy bass- and horn-powered Funk, this is where it's at. Bootys shakin everywhere. Emilio Castillo shouting, "Let's see how many laws we can break tonight!" gives me the happy energy boost I need.

Fais-Do-Do stage has all the best dancers from across Louisiana. Swear. You can tell the natives by the movements that actually complement, actually belong with the music of CJ Chenier & the Red Hot Louisiana Band.

And...and I'm dragged over to see,
to see...
Dude.
Deacon John.
Seriously.
Old New Orleans style is Original Cool.
Slow Fluid Graceful.
A seizure carved outta butter.
No segue, from the Crescent City to the (rock-infused) blue Delta with its flesh-palpitating rhythm and shake.
Sexagenarian duckwalking across stage.
Breaks a string playing so hard.
Plays his guitar with his teeth.
Whole band in black suits, white shirts, dark ties.
Moved from Sweet Slow Slide "Amazing Grace" into half-fast "Shake Your Moneymaker."
Sky full of sunset, lovebugs, and bubbles.
No metaphor.
Best act of the day.

This evening, walking around Faubourg Marigny, our friend Jay exclaims, "If you're anti-porch, you're antisocial!"
I am inclined to agree.

DAY 2.

Second of May, Friday, promise of rain from drift-cloudy skies.

Photography of Jerry Moran, his Jazz Titanic series. Patina'd and rusted clarinets, case after case, ghosts of the River.
Brienne Joubert's surreal Cities of the Dead.
Ghosty New Orleans, pre and post, of Libby Nevinger's eyes.
Christopher Porche-West, his full-sized doors home and history assemblage, hold us rapt and overwhelmed with its layers of meaning and innuendo. Tiny essay on the importance of teaching history to our society's children: what it means, how it affects us, how it shapes us and teaches us and connects us to something greater than the sum of our lives.

The Driskill Mountain Boys coulda been Grandad and his buddies gathered together to accompany a Saturday dance. Pure bluegrass untainted by pop country or rock & roll. I cry like a baby, missin my grandad's fiddle.

Joseph 'Zigaboo' Modeliste, original Meters drummer, brings the funk, as well as an injunction to every musician to include at least a single track, on any album they record, that is positive, constructive, and encouraging to folks who're listening. He said it was an obligation of artists to do their part to lift up their audiences, their communities, to spur them to Love and to Action.

...And goddamn, this man shakes a stick like no one but the King of the Funky Drums can!

The pomp and ego and pure fuckin skill of Trombone Shorty is a wonder. Straight up New Orleans Funk all over Congo Square. He and his tenor sax and trumpet players leave the stage and snake through the crowd for several minutes, blowin and struttin and makin a joyful noise. As soon as they return to the safety of the canopy, the sky lets loose the first of its baggage, and we begin to drink the rain. It lasts just long enough to cool our backs from relentless sunshine and warm, just long enough to begin softening the interior of the racetrack and turning everything to mud.

The photographs of Frank Relle catch our eyes; they emit some measure of the light and spirit we feel around us in this city. Nightphotos of old New Orleans houses.

We head over for a bit of Stevie Wonder before heading back to Congo Square for Michael Franti. Stevie gives a shout-out for Obama, asks for a moment of silence for Katrina victims, dead or displaced, a moment of silence for all loved one lost (cue crowd tears). There appears a rainbow in the still-wet downpour-threatening sky.

Michael Franti + Spearhead. Ohhh, goodness, this is the most wonderful show. It pours, in vehement fits and sporadic spurts, down and down and down; Franti leaves the stage, cordless microphone in hand, to share the deluge with us, to sing among us, with us. He sings "I Got Love for You," and we feel it, we love them and each other and ourselves. The water comes harder, and we outdance it. We are soaked, grinnin, full of love and rowdy exuberance. We are ready to heal all wounds with our lightnin feet. This show is a blessing. A perfect end to Friday at Jazz Fest.

Later, on Magazine, we take a friend's recommendation for an awesome taco spot and are happy, happy, happy with what food finds our mouths. Everything, down to the plain ol' black beans, has intense, creamy, adventurously homey flavors. I'm not telling what or where the place is; they looked like they had plenty of business and, honestly, I don't want to have to fight another ogling tourista for a spot for dinner. Our lagniappe happens to be our server, Sunshine, who is a charmingly petite competitive eater; she proudly pronounces that she can put away a 17-ounce burrito in under a minute. We are impressed.

DAY 3.

Traversing the city today, checking out neighborhoods, performing our own odd surveying. I am glad for the break from Jazz Fest's sea of mammals.

Tonight we check out Rebirth Brass Band at the Rock 'N' Bowl, a second-storey bowling-alley-concert-dancehall that shakes to beat hell when it's full of people dancing like the devil's after 'em.
Oh, Rebirth, thy name is Joy!
Goddamn, we have the greatest time here, for any number of reasons:
talkin with two septugenarian ladies about Atlanta strip clubs and the joys of pot-smoking;
dancing until we shake the house, top to bottom;
eatin turkey and andouille gumbo in the middle of all that jostlin and dancin;
fascinated watchin the lady behind the merch counter embroidering bowling shirts to order;
looking over at the lanes and realizing everyone bowling is dressed as some sorta royalty, from Disney's aryan-nations Cinderella to ye creepy olde Burger King, and they are drunk and dancin and ludicrously beautiful;
watching six burly guys (including one of our own drunk, kind-hearted, built-like-an-appliance friends), sweatin and strainin, maneuver a 400-pound man in a wheelchair backward down a storey-and-a-half flight of steep stairs, depositing the gentleman into a wildly applauding crowd. No one knows how the wide giant got up the stairs to begin with, and he is not exaclty forthcoming about the matter.

End the night with joyfully circuitous conversation in an untopped convertible,
arms of grand oaks and
lights of New Orleans
stretching around
and above
us.
Perfect.

DAY 4.

Jazz Fest again;
the Final Day,
the most ridiculously crowded day.

The fairgrounds overfloweth with people, with mud, with mud that smells a lot like horse-and people-shit combined, with trash, and with unbelievably good spirits, considering how fuckin tired and hungover everyone is. I spend my own suffering dreaming of eating more Houma fry bread than my tummy has thus far been able to accommodate, and I also repeatedly dream of eviscerating my mother-in-law. When distracted from that, I get to dig on

Ivan Neville's Dumpstaphunk, bass-directed supercool funk, which helps shake off a lot of the previous night's party. We catch the beginning of Dumpstaphunk and the end of Galactic, those new grandaddies of N.O. funk, playing a high-energy set featuring some supagroovin tuba solos.

The only band I sit through, unattached, is The Raconteurs, though the sidereally related maternal hurricane is sitting next to me, which colors everything a little resentfully. Still, the band was pretty good altpoppowerrock, if you're into that sort of thing. They sorta sound like the Mars Volta if MV were, say, in junior high, recording in their parents' garage, praying for the experience and wisdom that will one day make them such an amazing band to watch and hear.

While waiting for the set to finish, we notice that dozens of birds are coordinating a grand mass of sticks and fluff atop several of the stadium lightposts. And the birds appear to be...parakeets. We later find out that New Orleans is home to wild Quaker parrots, indigenous to Argentina, now comfortably settled here, as well. Apparently, no one knows exactly how or why they're in New Orleans, but there are a hell of a lot of 'em. ...Huh.

The last day of Jazz Fest 2008 means:
We've gotta see the Neville Brothers.
Just gotta.
It's their first year closing Jazz Fest since 2005.
Apparently, there was some local ambivalence about the Brothers' belated performance:
"What took you so long?" and
"We're family; where you been while we need you like we do?"
seem to be the basic (painful) questions at the root of any popular hesitance.

Tell you what, though...
soon as that family opens their mouths?
soon as the first beats ride out on the humid evening air,
soon as the bass moves the mud,
soon as the keys color the clouds,
the entire crowd is one great embrace, one grand family, with its beauty and nasty and bicker and joy, these people are astoundingly happy to be together,
today,
right now,
doin what they doin.

And y'know, that kinda sums up the whole experience of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival: there's thousands of different people with different agendas and ideals, crammed into one blazingly hot, pretty grossly messy area for seven hours a day; there's a million-billion ways this thing could go wrong, wrong, wrong, but...
It doesn't.
I do not see a single argument while I am here.
I do not see any angry people.
I do not see a single person trying to meddle or control or interfere.
I do, however, see a lot of smilin, a lot of laughin
...a lot;
I see a lot of old-fashioned courteousness and instinctive lagniappe;
and I see a hell of a lot of people
happy to be together
today,
right now,
doin what they doin.

Welcome to New Orleans, baby.
Where you been?


Thanks to Internet Archive for the gorgeous live and 78rpm music that accompanied this transcription and translation. Ma Rainey, King Oliver, Michael Franti, Ethel Waters, and on and on and on. Thank you for making these available to the world.

Hungry.

There's a lovely little article in The Guardian today about the world's shrinking food supplies.
No, no...no.
...In actuality, it's about the world's violent crises surrounding growing food costs.
The above are
Two Very Different Things.

Robert Zoellick, World Bank president, is pleading for $500M from wealthy countries for the World Food Programme. In the World Bank's assessment, "Rocketing global food prices are causing acute problems of hunger and malnutrition in poor countries and have put back the fight against poverty by seven years." The International Monetary Fund is right in line with this, stating that, "more than 20 African countries will see their trade balance worsen by more than 1% of GDP through having to pay more for food." And while it seems like Africa and their (Western-)imposed poverty are a long way off, look at post-Katrina New Orleans, muthafucka, and tell me starvation can't happen here. Look at any major US city, look at any poor US hill country, look anywhere in this country outside the golf courses and resorts and tell me that It Can't Happen Here.*

In lieu of physical food, here's some food for thought: if the IMF and World Bank are the agencies acting as canaries in our global coal-mine, something is seriously fucked up. How morally bereft are we Western peoples if we've gotta have two of the most notoriously money-grubbing organizations in the world tell us to quit being so goddamned greedy? I mean, really.

On a very relevant side note, why the hell aren't more people growing gardens? From personal experience, I know how easy it is to grow enough food for yourself, your family, and a few of your neighbors in just a smidgen of space. I mean, tending anything to fruition is a bit of a commitment, but...what a worthy commitment it is! Get seeds from Sand Hill Preservation, from Heirloom Seeds, or from the Seed Savers' Exchange, all companies committed to real food, unadultered by genetic modification or insecticides. Sand Hill Preservation also sells all manner of fowl for eggs and meat, including many breeds of geese, chickens, ducks, and etcetera that have gone out of fashion or are in risk of becoming endangered. Many cities now allow, if not outright encourage, keeping a couple of chickens (yardbirds, according to Grandad) around the house, both for their obvious culinary benefits and for the less obvious benefits of natural pest control and soil enrichment.

While I am overwhelmed by current global food trends and my inability to just fix everything, my inability to make sure no one goes to bed hungry, I/we can at least take care of ourselves and our neighbors. We can at least make a start, a dent, an honorable effort at reversing our downward spiral into starvation.

It looks like we gonna be poor and poorer for a long while yet, but poverty need not be a death sentence.

We are all we have.
Take care of each other.
Grow your food and feed as much Family as you can.

*"It Can't Happen Here," written by Sinclair Lewis in 1935, is available in full text through this link to Project Gutenberg. Read it, damn it.

Wait.

I listen for your truck in the street outside our bedroom.
I wait for your footsteps
on the sidewalk,
the stairs,
the porch.
Wait for the crashing tiny tinkle of our front door's bells;
Wait for your keys & wallet & skull beads to impact the countertop tile;
To hear you in the toilet before bed, top hat set carefully aside.
I wait to hear moving air stop
as you walk between
the high-speed fan & our subtropic bed;
Wait for the metal-on-metal of your belt buckle releasing, of your pants hitting the floor,
The fabricskinfriction of shirt pulling over your head,
buttons & all.
I wait for your weight, trying not to wake me, as it shifts & shimmers in beside me.
I wait, anticipate your whiskertickle & soft lip-to-cheek whisper
"I love you"
before I let go & let sleep finally take me.

Last Night I Almost Went to Jail

...For smoking pot in the park. Which, y'know, I knew was against the rules, but fer cryin out loud: after 9 hours being nice to people who populate this little island just long enough to photograph it, rape it and trash it, I really just wanted to relax on the beach and remind myself why I continue to reside in a place where slavish attention to tourists is so high on the survival list.

I brought a joint with me, which several of us smoked in due time. We were not loud, obnoxious, or obvious. We were all tired, all local, all wanting to chill the fuck out and enjoy our current home for the sunset hour. When the bone was finished, it was finished. Done and done. We're not sure whether the out-of-uniform head park ranger witnessed us or whether it was some idiot tourist; regardless, my brother looked up about 20 minutes after we were finished and saw a very diminutive, very hostile cop fastmarching toward us with two uniformed park rangers and a really tall (vaguely familiar) guy in tow. BadCop immediately started shouting in his Outside Voice (wanting desperately to impress everyone within earshot),

"Where's the marijuana? Huh? Don't lie to me. Don't make me be an asshole! I know you're smoking marijuana out here, now where is it? Who's got it? We've got witnesses!"

Of course, all of us were fuckin stoned by this point, so fortunately didn't get as irate as LittleGoebbels (nee Lopez) deserved. He obviously had an eyewitness, the tall guy, who was unwilling to let go of the issue. Kept squawkin about "kids know(ing) what marijuana smells like" (begging the question of whom the hell exposed 'em to pot in the first place). Reiterated to us how criminal our activities were, that this was a state park, a family park (with concessions full of carcinogenic nonfoods). I realized we had too many witnesses and one PsychoCop(Lopez) too far off his rocker, too mad with power and inferiority to let us go with just a bag of denials. Somebody had to confess something or he was gonna have us there forfuckinever.

So, I, with my West Coast sensibilities, told him and the assembled rangers (who know me well enough) about the joint. Told them, yes, I brought it down; yes, a couple of us smoked it; yes, it was irretrievably finished and had not left a trace of evidence. I apologized for my mistake and reiterated (in careful fashion) that LittlePapaDoc was too late, the deed was done, over, finished, with nothing but the squint in my eyes to prove anything had ever happened. The confession mollified him a bit and he treated me a little less patronizingly after that (a little less), but oh that man was fuckin desperate for someone's head. Just desperate.

Unfortunately, there was a little metal Zippo case with a smidgen of pot in it sitting on one of our tables. GestapoLopez made a big show of asking to whom the case belonged; no one owned up (of course). So, he, shouting, said, "Well, if this doesn't belong to anybody here, and since it's on state park property, then I, as a police officer, can just come right over here and open it! See? And I'm not gonna find anything, right? Isn't that what you told me?"

"No, sir, we told you we don't know whose it is. We don't know what's in it."

"Oh, really?! Well, I'm just gonna pick this up, see? And now I'm going to open it, right here in the state park. And...and look what I found! And this doesn't belong to any of you, is that what you expect me to believe?"

The dialogue was so impossibly cheesy. I was having a hard time separating his reality from my own stoned "This is totally a cartoon, right? Nobody honestly speaks like this outside of pulp comix, right? Jeez, this guy is really badly written."

PsychoCopLopez demanded our IDs, knew we were criminals. Several of us denied having identification; several handed over their licenses; I gave 'em my Green Parrot Bar Tradesman card, unflappably.

Stormtrooper Lopez stalked off to run our information. I overheard him tell the tall guy that he intended to keep everyone's IDs, that we "should all be booked." Then Otter comes sauntering out of the water, walks right up to the tall guy and starts a conversation. Turns out Tall Guy is actually the Head Ranger Guy who's known Otter since he was a pup. Ranger was quickly and quietly informed that he was about to arrest Otter's wife and brother-in-law. Ranger Guy, after a bit of consideration, said he wanted to give us all a second chance, since we were local and otherwise not causing a ruckus. Ranger gave us a little talk from the You Know Better lecture series; told us to "smoke (y)our dope at home;" told us Otter had been in trouble many times before and that, much as he'd hate to do it, he'd bar us from the park if he caught us doing anything so blatantly ridiculous again. The petulant and egregious Lopez was angry as all hell that he didn't get to take anybody "downtown" (do we even have one of those here?), and did his best not to kick up gravel as he pulled out of the parking lot, probably to go home, get drunk, and beat his wife. Or his dog.

So, I didn't go to jail last night. Went home, rolled a huge joint, and smoked it with my brother instead.

Pays to be married to the guy who knows everybody, I guess.

Fair Trade vs. Fair Shake

Dude and Lady just came in asking if we carry fair-traded coffee (we don't yet).
Proceeded to tell me, while I was frothing and foaming milk for his cappuccino, what a pity it was that we weren't supporting indigenous workers and how "unfair"-traded coffee was taking money out of local people's hands.
I gave him his cappuccino, handed him his change, and watched him carefully put his 62 cents in his wife's pocket, avoiding my tip jar entirely, and walk out with an over-the-shoulder "thank you."

Local people, indeed.

The Unrealized American Dream

Do yourself, and the U.S. in general, a favor and check out Bitch Ph.D.'s notes on the Institute for Policy Studies report "40 Years Later: The Unrealized American Dream." It's a dark and beautiful introduction to the longer work itself, a tiny expose of our rotten little cores. Think we've progressed in matters of racial equality since 1968?

Wrong.

After reading her wonderfully written piece, for the love of change and empathy, head over to the Institute for Policy Studies and read the whole damned report yourself. Don't count on anyone else's interpretation;

read, judge, be aware.

Do whatever you can, in your own little way, to make some part of this better.

It's whatcha here for.

Not too long to wait, now...

Three, maybe three and a half weeks until I'm in New Orleans.
Otter says "Save your energy! Save your excitement! You'll need every last bit of it to make it through four days of Jazz Fest!"
...and with thirteen stages full of musicians, with a great racetrack full of food and art and food and artisans and food, with a barrage, a melange, an esoteric montage of all the great muddy wonder an underbelly could possibly offer, I am sure Otter is correct.

Nonetheless,

The Hotel St. Marie, the place Otter's always stayed, is full for a few nights of our trip, so we are spending the remainder at the Lafitte Guest House, both within the French Quarter, both ridiculously, authentically antiquey and boutiquey, both absolutely beautiful. Lafitte is purported to be "the most haunted hotel in New Orleans," a hell of a boast. I look forward to stumbling through foyers of both hotels, high and greasy, swimming at St. Marie, passing out on the balcony at Lafitte, hopefully still cognizant enough to treat people decently, still high enough to let the city eke into my porous bones, infect my marrow-bound dreams, without reservation, without a trace of my sizeable, malleable ego.

In Otter I've found another human being who shares the same rusted mercurial tracks with me; I wonder if New Orleans will be the candyfloss citystop whose edges melt into my own...

Not too long to wait, now.

Not too long.

Jazz Fest is Comin!

OMFG, I'm sooo excited about going to New Orleans for the Jazz and Heritage Festival!

Gobs of musicians, artists, artisans (c.j. chenier, stevie wonder, john prine, kermit ruffins, neville bros., michael franti & spearhead, rebirth brass band, dirty dozen brass band, the radiators, ann savoy, hot club of new orleans, the roots, marcia ball, the raconteurs, keb' mo', galactic...i'm heaven-bound!),

Our still-gutted house on the Lower 9th/Holy Cross cusp (moldy drywall all gone, water-warped studs mostly replaced, the whole damned thing raised 18", water finally flowing to both storeys, still no electricity, still not quite liveable, though i wanna live there anyway),

...and Food...did I mention the food? (dead animals ever'where y'look, y'all, ain't no lie: red fish bouillabaisse, crawfish pie, cornbread, poulet fricassee, jambalaya, couscous and veg, beignets, innumerable barbecues, fuckin snoballs!, pralines, fried alligator po'boys, crawfish bread for otter to shove into his drunken pockets for later-snacks, cracklins, muffulettas, crowder peas and okra, pheasant quail & andouille gumbo, catfish almondine, and red beans & rice. damn!).

Oh, Lawdy.

Oh, Lawdy, I'm excited, y'all.

"For your troubles---"

Yesterday, a gob of children with loud squeally voices found my last nerve and began poking it with a stick. Screaming inside is a nasty little habit for which I have no patience. It's mean, it's rude, and if even a goddamned toddler can be taught Inside/Outside voices with relatively little pain, it behooves every parent to take a little time out of their busybusy schedules and actually, y'know, parent.

Instead of any of that idealistic-parenting pap, what I received yesterday was this:
a torn piece of notebook paper folded around a $50 bill, handed to my employer, handed to me. It read:

"For your troubles--
ps. It wouldn't hurt you to learn how to hide the fact that you despise children---if just for the five minutes my kids are in the shop."
(parent-customer's name)

I read it quickly and put it away, not having much time for anything but work while I was there, thankfully. I didn't read it later, after I got home, but I thought about it and actually felt kinda bad for hurting this guy's feelings. Brain kept trying to think about it in its nightly insomniac shuffle, trying to make me obsess over the asshole I surely am. I put off and put off, wording and rewording my apology to this guy until I went to sleep.
Then I sat down to write this morning and read the note again.

~fuckin bullshit~

I mean, I am in the service industry, so I should have the patience of a goddamned saint. I should be superhumanly able to deal with every idiot who thinks I owe him somethin based on our relative positions around a countertop, but uhm...

Y'know,
I'm human.
I hate people just as much as everyone else does,
probably more.
I hate being stuck inside any enclosed space with a screaming anything,
but especially children with their freaky-loud glass-shattering registers.
Fingernails on a chalkboard?
Doesn't bother me.
Screaming kids?
I'll happily blow my brains out to avoid them.

Happily.

So, was this guy just trying to buy me off? I understand the snarky note, but what's with the $50? What does the half-C have to do with his children? Is this the New Parenting? Just fuckin throw money at whatever stands in the way of your child's whimsical desires? If s/he wants to scream her fuckin lungs bloody in public, does daddy just pay off the people who are most affected by it? Pay off the people who'll stand up with a "Dude, that's really not cool in here"? Do I get another $50 if I'm rude to his offspring next time? What's the protocol here?

For the moment, I'm stuffing the 50.spot into the Jazz Fest fund and resolving to exercise more patience and empathy with the people I endeavour to serve.

I wish more people would give me big bills when I offend them.
I'm sure I do it a lot.

and galumphing and galorpfing in his tallshipwaders
he took my wordmaps to his long tweed pocket
_____
and i know those books his fingers read
and i felt the telling of his head
and i heard a little something in his voice.
_____
the thing, i felt, was distance
-not an esoteric kind,
but a long away voice of tracks once "v" now "1"
a voice with something in it that is
Gone.
_____
and i smelt of snow on mountains
and grew moss in my joined places
and earth was soft and damp to me
and warm lap whispered
"Go"
_____
stop too long the earth rejects me
home is heart and little else:
i am meant for motion
_____
i'm meant for many things
many things
far obscured
wondrous
unstill
lightninbug chances
_____
i'm meant for many things still, i suppose.

nightwriting.

In the interests of wresting my creative life back outta the hands of my beloved devil weed, I'm nightwriting again. Fumbling for flashlight and pen, scribbling just outside of vision, trying like hell not to edit not to edit not to edit.

To clarify, the devil weed doesn't kill my creativity. It actually allows me a convenient means of changing perspective, especially when I'm angry, frustrated, homicidal, and having a difficult time seeing any point of focus but my own...which is much more often than I care to admit. Unfortunately, it also changes my perspective on, say, just how much time I've spent taking in as opposed to putting out.
Creatively.

Ahem.

Keep an eye out for nightwritings.
They'll be a little closer to the nebulous bone centers.

Anniversary 2: DeathMatch

I've been lying in bed, awake awake awake, listening to the rain that's not raining, to the thunder that ain't rollin, to the stuttering scramble in the back of my head that wants to talk about stuff that I find rather trying.
Or boring.
Or...
Or, fuck, just kinda self-indulgent, these 716 days later.

Squirming under my own deadlights.

I've been assiduously avoiding all mention of memorials, of Tragedies, of Community Grieving and alternative therapies. I've glanced at and tossed every email with mention of Survival or Healing. I'm trying to stay out of the glare of notoriety that follows follows, sometimes, even down here. As occasionally desperate as I am to talk and write about the Living Room Murders (which is how my head classifies that rot)...
I'm really pretty fuckin tired of even thinking about it, much less writing or talking.
Guess even I've gotta vomit sometimes...

Thing is...

The thing is,
is that while I'm still plagued by weeks-long nightmares now and again, I'm doin pretty well for myself. The sun and sand and thousand Anole lizards have done me a world of good. I do not, as has been suggested, feel guilty for surviving. Why the hell should I? I miss Jesus/Jeremy like nobody's business; think about him often when I cook, when I taste a good Malbec; but I'm doin okay without him, y'know?
Without all my beautiful Seattle family.
I gotta.
Just, y'know...
I just gotta.
And that's just how Life's gonna rub me right here.
That's just the rub, and they ain't nothin wrong with that.
Ain't nothin but a seasonin.

I learned a long time ago that, for me, the best remedy for damned near everything is perspective. Loooots of perspective. And the best way to jumpstart that heave-ho of a gargantuan process is to physically change perspective. Go check out the view from the other side of the living room. Go from Seattle to Key West. Switch climates, countries, cultures, cant. Switch up everything so as to force the brain out of its cozy little ruts of erudition. It is high time for another jump and shimmy, if I may say so (and I do), but for now,

For now, I know I made the right move. My Seattle family seem to be leaving the city, one by one. Two of them, completely separately, have said it felt like the city just didn't want them anymore.
The city wallows in its mourning.
The city does not understand how to bring laughter out of no-laughing-matter.
The city takes itself (and us) way too muthafuckin seriously.

We die tomorrow and
and every day we wake up breathin is a beautiful day.

Lemme reiterate:

We die tomorrow
(ain't got time to waste on hurtin)
and
and
and
and every day we wake up breathin is a
Good
Goddamned
Day.
...A good goddamned day.
(oh lordy i do love drawin breath, i love it and i try to be conscious as all hell of my continued ability to swell my lungs with oxygen and nitrogen and a thousand airborne chemicalspoisonsdiseases, because i am alive alive alive. i am alive.)

I just kinda dropped off the face not too long after the Thing, so I kinda feel obligated to acknowledge it somehow, to give some sorta shoutout to my misrepresented, misunderstood, monumentally beautiful family.
To tell them that I think about them every day.
To let them know how much their lives mean to me.
To remind them...

Just to remind 'em how fuckin awesome it is to be alive, and how ridiculously fortunate we all are to know each other.

Now that the sun's up, maybe I can get some sleep

Maybe I can get some sleep

maybe sleep....

Hide & Seek with Mistress Death

"I'm figurin on livin t'be 'bout a hundr'd an fifty.
When I was a young kid, i c'n r'member seem like people only live to be about 60 or 70;
80 was old;
today you got people livin ovah hundr'd. So, by the time I get close to a hundr'd, people gonna be livin to be a hundr'd an fifty, I figure.
Butchya nevah know.
I mean, accidents happen.
Lightnin might strike in a little while.
Y'nevah know.
...
But as far as Nature goes? If I can stay away from all the drunks,
the crazy people...,
I'll live to be an ooold man.
Real old.
Trust me."
-Wild Bill Treagle,
Alligator wrangler.

With all our fancy schmancy and high-falutin', why the hell we plan on dying so young? Why do we think we've gotta lie down in front of our genetics and beg for mercy? Why do we try fighting our body's own aging with Pills and Treatments and Cures that ain't doin anything but pandering to our scruff-necked paranoia? Why's it such a big leap to figure that, if our bodies have evolved in (re)markable ways, our brains have probably evolved right along with us? Why does acknowledging the freakasaurus mightiness of our mental faculties, acknowledging their ability to meet our genetic proclivities head-on a truly level playing field, seem like such a grand act of ignorant faith? Why does it still have a ring of the fundamentalist snake-handler to it?

Why are we so unwilling to accept that we're capable of a hell of a lot more cool stuff than we've been led to believe?

Why do we, docile as the hopelessly brainwashed, accept the idea that we've gotta die too young to have really understood anything?

Why do we think we can't live forever?

We're fatalists who won't admit we're fatalists.
We're terrified of our own power ("god within us" isn't s'posed to be literal).
We're scared to wake up to the next dream.
We're too fucked up and too fuckin wonderful for me to sort out before my coffeeshift starts,
but think about this:
We have more control than we think.

Way more.

An' sweet Mistrees Death just sittin there grinnin,
waitin for us to figure it out.

Little Girl Blue

"Love Me or Leave Me," as performed in 1957 by a 25-year-old Nina Simone, is the end-all-be-all, most movingly, ridiculously perfect edition of this song ever.
Ever.
Maybe it's the "Exclusive Side Street Club" part of the equation.

Regardless, it's what's on the hi-fi this morning. It's doing a relatively good job of substituting for the caffiene I'm not drinking. It's reminding me how much I love performing. Tell Mama (my own personal saviour more often than I care to admit) asked me the other day why the hell I wasn't makin money bustin my pipes open on stage when I have "the voice of an angel" (which comment I can only attribute to her inebriation; otherwise, God's Gestapo ain't so gifted as they've been cracked up to be).

...Yeah, Doxy, why ain'tcha singing and writin to pay the (back)rent? Girl you know you got skills, don't tell me you don't.

Yeah, well, maybe.
Maybe.
I can stay in key, I can and do improvise, and I've got notes and rhythms in my soul that most people don't see much anymore, outside of paintpeeled backwoods oldfolks' porches, or smoke-stained velvetlined subterranean speakeasies.
For the writing, I'm a word slut, an inordinately (maybe reasonably) proud autodidact with drugged up needle-on-the-rekkid Beats pulling warmwood rhythm outta the furniture for the Sufi's universal creation, everybody whirlin and smokin and lookin crazycool in my bluelight brainlounge.
I was raised on Jesus and the Jabberwock,
on Whitman and Eliot.
Bach and the Last Poets.
Angela Davis and Proverbs 31.
Solomon and Camus...

I'm in constant conflict,
knowing I'm an anomaly/regularity of god/universe/earth/energy/whatever the fuck I/you believe holds it all together;
knowing I got the Cassandra sight and that it ain't normal;
knowing I've got something that might actually be unique, the real deal, to serve forth into the world,
knowing I've never seen or heard my perspective anywhere else,
that I've seen lots better, but none justlikemine,
...and knowing none of that means a goddamned thing,
that all of it is ego anyway and, thus, self-negating;
knowing that I probably can't save anyone from suffering,
that Art ain't practical fer payin the bills,
and who the hell do I think I am to call what I do Art, anyway?
...

A chickenshit, that's whom.
A chickenshit who is so afraid of not being unique,
of being a poseur,
a charlatan,
a meat-study in smoke and mirrors,
that she draws back in horror from the idea of foisting her masturbatory detritus onto an already cluttered plane of writers and musicians and visual artists whose own work is no more original than The Gap's new clothing line,
no more inspiring than the latest tome of self-help pap,
addressing no more mystery than does a Thomas Kinkade painting.
...

So, I flipped the rekkid from Nina Simone to Los Hombres Calientes (vol 4: vodu dance) for an audial change-up and grabbed a little Albert Camus for a metaphysical refresher course in absurdist philosophy's take on willful creation:

(from "The Myth of Sisyphus")

"To work and create "for nothing," to sculpture in clay, to know one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries — this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors."

"Every act of creation, by its mere existence, denies the world of master and slave. The appalling society of tyrants and slaves in which we survive will find its death and transfiguration only on the level of creation."

"Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present."

And then I feel better,
feel like making art makes sense for me,
feel like the effort I need to expend in order to expand is
worth.
it.

Though Camus is often accused of nihilism, he really just vocalizes an acknowledgement of nihilism and an injunction to continue the rebellious path beyond nihilism into creation.
To create not for Greatness' sake, but for Goodness'.

In this mode of thought, this offshoot of absurdist theory found in my scribblings and moanings, creation is justified.

Not because I am/we are necessarily uniquely unique,

Not because I/we will necessarily positively change the world with this creativity,

Not because the Normals will ever amend their complacency and see the twin lights of Spontaneity and Joy that could change absolutely everything about our bipedal race of mammals and the world we have created,

But because my/our effort at joyous creation in the face of abject conformity is an honorable endeavour in and of itself.

Goddamn it.

I don't claim to speak Truth too terribly often.
Probably shouldn't ever.
But...
But this time, I do,
and I am,
and I ever will be,
riding Eternity as I/we have always ridden,
ephemeral infants and sagacious mystics,
all trying to sort through the mess we've created,
all trying to bring Beauty and Perspective
to the limelight
where it belongs.

Yeah.
To the limelight where it belongs.

Write even when I/you feel like a liar.
Sing even when I/you feel tongueless.
Paint even when I/you feel translucent.
Cook even when I/you feel abandoned by taste.

Transcend our insignificance through creativity and through ceaseless searching.

That way lies the Happiness in which we already wallow (and don't even know it).

bahia honda

Went to Bahia Honda yesterday, for no good goddamned reason.
Of course, that is the perfect reason to go hang with the pelicans and Portugese men-of-war, to watch the sunset from a different land-freckle on the planet's broad face.

The wind was strong enough that the pelicans barely had to put forth effort to leave the surface. They sat on the water, choking down fishies, then spread their wings wide and just sorta...shifted their weight, looked like. The air plucked them, buckety beaks and all, gently up off the waves, pushed them uply and horizontally until they rode feathers instead of bones. Magnificent.

Getchyo Ass Back in th' Kitchen!

JesusTits.

I've been so strung up with holidays and houseguests and wedding and catering gigs and a reg'lar job (or two)...when's a word slut s'posed to get a thought in around here?

In fact, I've got to run back out the door to scour the island for stuff like orange flower water and annatto paste and am so goddamned scattered my skin feels like it's stuffed with bees.

Tonight and tomorrow, we'll be preparing dinner for about 30 people, people who regularly cook and serve food we love to eat. They have a tapas-style restaurant and have asked us to act as guest chefs at their holiday party, to cook down-home Louisiana+ food for 'em; stuff they don't normally prepare or get to eat. Food that can't be found within a 300 mile radius of Key West, outside of our house. In spite of Otter's ironic warning that "nobody likes a showoff," I feel behooved to reprint our working menu here:
______________________

Bread on the Table:
* Homemade Sweet Potato-Roasted Garlic Rolls with Plugra butter (Mmmm...Pluuugraaa)

Salads:
* Pine Nut and Cumin-encrusted Goat Cheese, Baby Greens, and Poblano-Almond-Lime Vinaigrette
* Triple-Spicy Chilled Shrimp (poblano, jalapeno, chipotle), Avocado, and Hothouse Tomatoes
* Smoked Hearts of Palm, Romaine, Rum-glazed Pecans, and Roasted Shallot-Plantain Vinaigrette

Sides:
* Butter-crusted Crawfish Cheesecake with Crawfish Tail Saute
* Chayote/Mirliton stuffed with rustic Celeriac Mash
* French-fried Asparagus
* Bourbon Vanilla Pralined Sweet Potatoes

Entrees:
* Pig, Alligator, and Rabbit Jambalaya (Otter's four-generations-old recipe & method)
* Ghengis Khan Duck (packed and encrusted in rhubarb and roasted vividly tender)
* Pepper-crusted, Sugarcane-skewered Scallops with Sparkling Rose Butter

Dessert:
* Pecan Pie Baklava
* Cafe Brulot Diabolique (with Grand Marnier standing in for the traditional brandy)
_____________________

We'll just roll 'em out the door afterward.
Satiate 'em with food and then set their dining room afire with their after-dinner coffee.

I can't wait to see how we're able to feed people when we live close to real butchers and farmers again, instead of living at the mercy of, godhelpme, Sysco.

Bon appetit.

लोवे Focus on Love.

Put the needle on a little Ornette.

Ornette Coleman Trio plays "Golden Circle," Stockholm, 1965.
Sounds like people tryin to stay warm.
Like creating an insulating bubble just big enough for that particular club,
for those musicians and that audience's open ears.
Great music to write to.
Right Now's perfect album.

I've realized, far more often than I find comfortable, that I'm not nearly as pissed off as I maybe should be. Or I'm just not writing when I'm pissed off. Or I'm getting distracted by the minutiae of my irritants and losing sight of the overarching injustices that I really oughtta be attacking.
And then not writing about it.

See, I've been having these godawful nightmares about the eventual, emotionally-vampiric visit of my now-mother-in-law, singlehandedly the meanest, most manipulative, psychically damaging/ed person I have ever met.
And I've spent jaw-dropping afternoons with lifelong Klansmen, fer chrissakes.
Those hooded monkeys ain't got shit on Hurricane Beverly.

There are circumstances that prevent my flat-out forbidding her from ever interacting with us again, circumstances too sacred for me to even consider contradicting. That may be why most of my dreams this month involve killing her in really slow, clinically involved processes.
Since murder isn't exactly something that appeals to me outside the realm of desperate fantasy, I'm left with this painful little dilemma, this trying to figure out how to "take care of" this awful woman without allowing her to run roughshod over me or, more importantly, Otter's and my relationship.
Cause Otter's and my thing is way too special to allow anyone to try and tinge it with anger, resentment, malice, backbiting, verbal manipulation, goading, spying, accusation, guilt trips, lies upon lies upon lies upon lies! Or, y'know what? Jeezusfuckinchrist, we're just too goddamned volatile to be bathed in anything but Love and our own Righteous Indignation.
...and Duck Fat.

...mmmm, duck faaaat.

The things that we fight, the institutions we speak against, and the ideologies we try to expose are quite enough negative bullshit in our lives.
Our home is where Love lives.
It's where we regenerate.
It's not where we're martyred.
Not even by his Mama.

So, I'm all wound up in the tiny personal details of this Bundle of Insidiousness who insinuates herself into our lives so often (if she comes down anywhere close to XMas, it'll be three, three times in six weeks), and I'm losing/have lost sight of the Big Picture. Assuming there is one. And if there ain't one, I intend to paint it.

The Big Picture is nestled somewhere deep in our hearts, is breathing in the air around us, is dripped from every palm leaf, is in the throat of every little Anole that follows me around the garden. The Big Picture in my life, in our lives, lies in our ability and desire to help those less fortunate than ourselves. We are remarkably capable of feeding people's bodies. We are also able to feed their souls, whether by birthright or fortunate upbringing (my mama, his daddy, both beautifully conflicted, warmhearted, just, and altruistic individuals), people seem to find us, to seek us out, and to gain some sense of joy and wellbeing from hanging out with us.
I know why.
I don't know why.
I know if I look it straight in the mouth and try to define it, it'll lose some sort of Power in its own awareness of itself.
...
My Mama told me once, several times, that I will not be able to effectively help anyone else if I do not take care of myself first. I rejected this piece of wisdom for a lot of years. It sounded too much like the All-American "Look Out for Number One" mentality that has destroyed so many, many lives. But the more I tried to help people without taking the time to help myself, without setting up my own sacred little parameters for personal growth and safety, the crazier and angrier I got.
The more resentful.
The more self-destructive.
Until it finally occurred to me that destroying myself would pretty much insure I'd never be able to help anyone again, ever.
How's that for a waste of a perfectly lovely life?
...
(turn the rekkid ovah)
...
So, I know this thing with Otter is the most beautifully, ridiculously sacred thing I've ever run up against.
I know that, between the two of us, we can help a hell of a lot of people, including each other.
And I know that, when his mother's in town, his heart beats hard like a train comin full tilt down a rickety old wooden bridge.
I know that when she stays with us, he feels caught in the middle of her hurricane and my planet-sized meltdown.
I know that when she's here, I don't sleep worth a shit.
I know that we fight more when she's here.
I know that, when she's here, our house is not a home, much less our home.
We have no sacred space.
We have no privacy (she peeks when we're sleeping and goes through our things when we're away).
I haven't stood up to her because I don't want him to have to choose between us ('cause that's just fucked up, folks, let's face it).
He won't stand up to her for the vow he made to "take care of" her.

Thing is, I made a vow, both to my Mama and my brother, to the ghost of his father, that I would take care of him.

I don't generally make promises.
I certainly don't vow anything or take sacred oaths.
Honoring that sort of thing is way too important to trust to my flaky ass.
You make promises, you'd better fuckin keep 'em, so I don't make 'em too terribly often.
But two weeks ago today, I made a big one.
I looked my Mama dead in the eye and told her I'd care for this man until one of us dies.
I promised my brother.
I promised the portrait of Otter's dead daddy that hangs on our wall.
I promised him.

The thing between us and within us is our Big Picture. It is nebulous and vaguely defined.
But it is solid.
It is Holy.
And it is the most fantastic gift I have ever been given.
The most fabulous opportunity I have ever been offered.
It is the beginnings of everything toward which my life has built.

It behooves us to redefine the parameters of that "taking care" commitment.
We need to nurture ourselves in order to nurture others.
I'll be goddamned if I know how to do that, but we'd better figure it out, and soon.
'Cause she'll kill him if we don't.
I can't let her do that and honor my vows to him at the same time.
I don't take those vows lightly.

Premonitory Anecdote

A gentleman at the bar last night, by way of good wishes for my upcoming marriage, told me this tiny story about his parents:
-----------------------------------------
"My parents have been together for 57 years.
They met in grade school & crushed on each other,
became sweethearts in high school,
got married as soon as they could,
and have been together since.

"Recently, Dad told Mom that if she dies first, he couldn't see it being more than two weeks before his own heart gave up and he joined her on the Other Side. Only slightly kidding, Mom said,

"What on Earth could you possibly have to do for two weeks?"
-----------------------------------------

What a wonderful thing.
Makes my skin crawl with recognition.

Four days 'til the Weddin.
See you soon.

All my love,

rd

Betrayed by the FBI; Saved by the Vegetables

...FBI, in this case, stands for Food-Borne Illness,
the bitch that's been riding my back for the past 24 hours or so.

I thought it was the tequila, but I didn't have much at all; like, four shots over the course of several hours. Realistically, that ain't shit. Even on an empty belly.
What the tequila did contribute to the evening's debacle was my tipsy mortal weakness in the face of a meat-laden, rubber-crusted pizza from Papa John's. Oh, lordy. Within three or four hours of ingesting a couple pieces of that stuff-that-claims-to-be-food, it was rocketing forth from my mouth at a velocity that'd make the Cape Canaveral kids blanch with envy.
Terrifying.
How can they say that stuff is food? I mean, it's (barely) edible, sure, but it has the ability to turn the palate into an absolute wasteland, the gut into a chemical testing ground, and the body into one's own worst enemy.
It's fuckin poison, man.

Goatheaded gastronome that I am, I determined to make myself some real food, whether or not my body agreed, and somehow force myself to keep it down.

First off, by way of scene setting, my sweetheart and partner, the guy with whom I share a kitchen, is a really fuckin awesome Cajun cook. Like, not a pretender to the cuisine, but a real live Cajun by birth and blood, a gentleman who was makin' roux on his daddy's stove at age 5. That said, there's not much besides meat in our fridge. And, ohlordgawd, there was no way in hell I could keep anything resembling meat inside my body after 18 hours of vomiting.
Not even his beautiful duck.

I was getting suckerpunched with nausea every 5 or 10 minutes so didn't feel like risking the bike ride down to Waterfront Market for some fresh veg. Everything had to come out of what we had.
And did I ever need vegetables. And broth. Vegetables and broth. Yes.

We always, always have onions, garlic, carrots, and jalapenos, those comestibles whose fortitude is fortunately stronger than their timid aging. Sauteed those with a little dried thyme (out of fresh), some cayenne and allspice, a bay leaf and a few cracked peppercorns. Added a quart of water and cooked it all down to Flavorful. In a separate little sauce pot, I had dried black-eyed peas, water, and a couple cloves of garden-grown garlic, cooking to creamy softness.

Otter came home in the middle of all this, after a long-assed day in the kitchen. Poor darlin was so tired and, after watching me chop, stir, stir, hold on to the counter and try not to puke, stir, stir, wobble with nausea, etc., he began determinedly trying to skooch me away from the stove so he could finish making my meal.
Sometimes, even if it looks like I couldn't possibly be having any fun whatsoever, sometimes gripping the counter top and supporting my weight with a wooden spoon in an effort to take charge of my own sustenance is exactly what I need for my well-being.

I shooed Otter back with both a threat to disgorge on him and a promise to ask him for help if I really needed it. I added a couple of hurricane-emergency cans of Ro-Tel to the vegetable broth, smashed the pea-simmered garlic cloves with a spoon and tossed the whole mess into the soup pot, and then rough-chopped some on-its-way-out spinach and tossed that in, too. Yeah, I think that was about it. Oh, and good sea salt. Of course. I would've loved some fresh corn and okra, but y'know...for being on the cusp of projectile vomiting the entire time, I did pretty well.

And actually, the soup got Otter's approval.
Otter, who is suspicious of any dish without meat.
Otter, who thinks vegetarianism is some sort of mental disorder.
Otter, who cannot talk about "vegan food" without snorting.
He not only ate the soup (with a few extra jalapenos), but wolfed it down and was surprised it had so much flavor.
Vegetarian and vegan food is not as awful as most people make it.
In fact, veggies are the only thing my tortured digestive system didn't hurl back against the wall. This simple little soup took a few minutes longer (including swoon time) than ordering and devouring I'll Eat It If I'm Drunk pizza, but it actually contributed to my well-being rather than detracted from it. And I'll be goddamned if it wasn't tasty enough to warrant kudos from a carnivore. Hell, yeah.

राप्टर Return of the Turkey Vultures

Ohmygod, they're back!

The magnificent, graceful, utterly awe-inspiring turkey vultures are back.

I've been awaiting their return since March.

Otter saw a couple of 'em yesterday, but forgot to tell me about it. This morning, while out picking philodendron and papyrus starts from the yard, I saw a bird shadow pass me. A really big one. Then two more in quick succession. I raised my eyes and had to have been looking at about 30 or 40 vultures in flight, circling right over my little neighborhood. Nearly hyperventilating, I called Otter to tell him that I'd spotted turkey vultures, and lots of 'em. When I got off the telephone and went back outside, the vultures had been joined by about a dozen short-tailed hawks, all of the raptors circling past and through each other, the hawks's 3-foot wingspan looking positively diminutive next to the vultures' impressive 6-foot reach.

Their numbers continue to grow.

I'm popping back outside between every sentence or two to keep an eye on the birds. There are easily 50 or 60 vultures and maybe 2 to 3 dozen hawks up there at the moment. The cats are keeping low down. The chickens are fussing at their clutches, trying to keep their children together and hidden and as safe as they can be, under the circumstances.

The vultures, though...oh the vultures!

They slow Time.

They pass through Space like no other bird, as if they had claimed these patterns and passages long before humans ever even thought to notice Sky.

They are Divine, not just in their aesthetic magnificence, but in their utility as carrion eaters, as ferrymen for the Dead. They are absolutely awesome, in the weightiest sense of the word.

They are beautifully, wonderfully, jaw-droppingly perfect.

---------------------------------

"...and the Signifieds butt heads with the Signifiers,

And we all fall down slack-jawed to marvel at words,

When across the sky sheet the impossible birds

In a steady, illiterate movement homewards."

-Joanna Newsom, "This Side of the Blue"

----------------------------------------------

I sing this every time I see the vultures.

Every time.

When I've got a head full of pomposity and narcissism, I watch the vultures;

watch them do the things we are too squeamish and self-important to do;

watch them gracefully and unselfconsciously fulfill their genetic proclivities;

watch them make it look like God.

Thank You, Keep It Comin'

For You Who Are Happy & Relieved that Otter and I have each finally found someone as magically, beautifully, deliciously broken as we each are,
For You Who Want to Contribute something to our ridiculously joyous marriage,
For You Who (sadly) Cannot Be Here,
And for You Who Cannot Imagine What We Could Possibly Need,

We've set up a little wedding registry with the few things we need and want for our home.

It really comes down, mainly, to Reference Books and Children's Tales,
to Music and to Cash (much needed to assist both our move to New Orleans and our temporary flight out of the country).

We desperately Love You and Thank You from the deepest reaches of our palpitating hearts.

I Love Bitches

Aw, damn.

It's been so long since I've been able to hang out with educated women, who are just as beautifully angry and vociferous as I am, that I had forgotten just how much these women mean to me, how much courage they give me to continue my shitstarting, instigating, hopeful (if achingly gradual) reformation of the US' dominant sexist/white supremacist paradigms.

I stumbled upon Bitch Ph.D. today and am so utterly, completely grateful that this woman is on the face of the earth and that she writes so prolifically and so well.

Bitch Ph.D., I love you.

And thank you, with all my heart.

Aching for New Orleans

Oh, I am aching to move.

For a girl whose sense of self-worth rests largely on her ability to help people in some meaningful sense, my life in Key West is becoming more than a little depressing. Sure, I'm feeding people (always always always), but it's largely the wealthy, or at least the Wealthy Enough, those people who can afford to vacation here and drop several hundred dollars on dinner. When I'm painting for a living, it's painting the vacation homes of these same people, or painting businesses that cater to these folks. The catering business that Otter and I are starting up will, of course, cater to people with disposable income enough to pay several hundred or thousand for an inclusive meal in their own weekly- or monthly-rented domiciles. I mean, it's great that we can fill needs and niches, but...

...I know there are people out there who are hungrier, who are in more desperate circumstances, who need us far more than these priveleged sojourners want us. I also want to do more than just feed the hungry, y'know? I want to participate in the mycoremediation of New Orleans' soil, so damaged and diseased after being submerged in sewage for several weeks. I want to start guerrilla gardens all over town, not just for their beauty and edibility, but for their ability to brings bright spots of hope into places decimated by man and nature, abandoned by those elected to help them. I want to take Alice Waters' super-awesome Edible Schoolyard and try to duplicate it in other sections of New Orleans, bringing kids in close contact with the life cycle and their intrinsic part within it.

...For all my talk of wanting to do more than just feeding people, it's funny how all the stuff I wanna do just leads back to feeding people or helping them feed themselves.

Food is a beautiful thing.

Growing and sharing it is even lovelier.

Punkin!

We carved punkins at the Chart Room last night. It was far more fun than I had suspected it would be. I nursed a Neptune-sized snifter of Grand Marnier throughout the evening, accompanied by a squash-crazed Otter and an unnaturally calm Rubber Pig, who mostly stood watch over my drink.

This is the punkin Otter and I carved together. It totally shoulda won. Instead, the Dia-de-los-Muertos-lookin' one that I did placed third, and that's it. Otter's super-awesome punkin-with-folial-acne didn't get anything, and it was the most original one I'd seen.

So, if we're using a rubber chicken and gut-thick fake blood and squinty eyeballs in our punkin carving?

How could that not place first?

Seriously.

That's my punkin on the top, far right there. I loves me some teeth.

I always forget, though, what a pain in the ass it is to do all of those without destroying the face of the punkin.

...But goddamn, that is one happy cucurbit.

Otter.

His punkin.

Its follicular foliage.

I didn't get a single photo of this one that didn't cut off some part of its leaves or flowers.

It was really, really dim in there.

And I was really very drunk.

Too inebriated to be handling giant knives and antique icepicks, I'm sure, despite the exponentially raised Fun Level brought on by excessive inebriants combined with dangerous tools.

In retrospect, I'm surprised any of the photos turned out at all.

Painted Tits & White Guys with Cameras

For all the breasts that UStian males are exposed to, from every marketing firm on the planet, you'd think they'd know how to behave themselves when confronted with a pair of tits encased in an airbrushed "costume" and not much else.

Well, if you would think that, you would be dead fuckin wrong.

Key West is at the end of its much-touted Fantasy Fest, a celebration wrapped around the island's motto of "One Human Family," a festival intended to allow people to be/act as they really are, without fear of prejudicial treatment or arrest. It's like a mini-Mardi Gras without the historical backbone to hold it up and lend it credence. I mean it's a nice party and everything, but...

Seriously, dude, what's with the obsession with women's tits?

Please don't misunderstand; I love breasts as much and as contradictorily as most UStians, having been tutored, from the day I was born a girl, both in breasts' amazing qualities of form and function and in their absolute profanity, according to the also-obsessed Holier Than Thou churchmen, politicians, and etc.

Tits aren't the issue.

The Issue, the thing that completely and totally creeps me the fuck out, is the way the vast majority of UStian males behave when confronted with boobies made of real, live flesh and blood.
You wanna talk about watching a rapist-mob mentality, barely held in check by some dim, far-off awareness of the realities of jail?
You wanna talk rabid voyeurs with a sense of entitlement?
Watch a buncha drunk, white, US-born-'n'-bred dudes with their shiny digital cameras, turned loose in a festival that is one of the only places in this sanctimonious, self-righteous country where a woman can go out of doors, as topless as a man, without legal recrimination.
This week, anyway.

Okay, look,

1) Why the fuck am I, a woman, not allowed to walk outside without covering my tits?
Seriously. What the hell is so goddamned profane about my lovely, freckly breasts, especially when opposed to Shirtless Businessmen on Holiday, those bloated and pasty examples of UStian excess? I'll tell you what's profane about my tits: not a goddamned thing. It's the guys' preternatural fetishism that's profane. I have to cover up my sweet-creamy boobies only because the Boys are afraid they won't be able to control their dicks. And you can get, like, jail time for that.
Sometimes.

It's the same old argument:
"I wouldn't have raped her if she hadn't been wearing that hot little dress.
"I wouldn't have been spying if she hadn't forgotten to close the blinds.
"I wouldn't have followed her down the street taking photographs of her if she hadn't been outside without a shirt on."

Which, of course, brings me to the second query:

2) Why the fuck are you guys following these women down the street taking photos?
No, really.
What the fucking Fuck?
Don't you see how parasitically predatory that shit is? What the hell makes it okay, in your puerile excuse for logic, to grab a woman, a near or total stranger, and whip her around to face you so you can film her tits undulating? Who the hell are you? How disrespectful, how unforgiveable would that be if someone did that to your mom? Your sister? Your wife, girlfriend, grandmother, daughter?

I mean, Mister Old White Dude? If you get a girl to both expose and let you photograph her beautiful ta-tas, and you know you're gonna be jacking off to those same photos later? Muthafucka, you owe that girl some cash.

I am not fuckin lyin, either.

See, without that monetary exchange, your behavior is something I call Stealing.
That's what I call Taking Advantage.

Regardless how much your ridiculous indoctrination has eroded women's sense of self-worth,

Regardless how willing we are to allow you, a total stranger, to photograph parts of our bodies, knowing full goddamned well what you will eventually do with those photos, because we have come to see our bodies as being worth so fuckin little,

Regardless how innocent you have led yourself to believe you are in this ancient power dynamic,
You're still taking something from someone and giving not-a-goddamned-thing in return.

Steeeealiiing.
Cheating.
Lying from your eyeballs down.

...But, whatever, you're like, just another white guy, right?
That's just the kinda stuff you ignorantly priveleged white guys do.

...Man, what the Fuck is Wrong with you people?

Fantasy Fest Bar Notes ...or... Our Fest-Obsession and Puritanism Are Obliterating Small Town USA

At the Parrot.
Saturday night of Fantasy Fest week.

Brought food (delicata squash stuffed with andouille spicy rice, topped with a little bruschetta, toasty pecans, and parmesan; sweet pickled beets and peppercorns on the side) to a beautiful friend who's working a double, right in the thick of the crowds and parade.
Sat here at the back bar with the same friend and watched parts of the bodyart contest, which basically consisted of a buncha old white dudes taking photos of women's tits.

My beautiful friend told me how she has watched Fantasy Fest evolve, over the past 8 years or so, from an artsy, costume-float-frivolity-focused occasion into an event populated by middle-aged swingers lookin to see some tits and maybe, maybe get lucky with someone besides their own wives. While empathizing about the pathetic debauchery that is rapidly coming to signify the Key West Experience, it occurred to me that this same progression seems to happen to every place or event that is able to bill itself as some sort of bastion of freedom. ...Freedom, I say. Not that All-American crap that tries to fit in Freedom's underpants.

Maybe too many people found out about Fantasy Fest.

Too many people whose lives are otherwise totally constrictive.

Too many people craving an anonymous outlet for their Not So Deviant deviant behavior.

Too many people desperate to shake loose the Manacles of Propriety that they themselves helped fashion.

...................

It's pretty disheartening and more than a little disturbing.
...Y'know, the more I think about it.

....................

So, which is the next poor town or festival to fall prey to Ustians' flight from their own Puritanism? How will these (Our) towns and festivals pay for the privelege of being centers of openmindedness?
Will we pay with legal sanctions on/against our festivities?
Will we pay with our vibrant, living communities' eventual conformity to our country's mediocre standards?
Will we trade our neighborhoods and small businesses for the Big Box's cunning conveniences and contaminated comforts?
Will we pay, in effect, with the same qualities that made our towns and celebrations such wonderful destinations in the first place?

Birfday Barfday

Today is my super-awesome brother's 31st birthday. I will get to see him in a very little less than two months, when I'll squeeze him 'til stuff comes out.

Happy Birfday, Shane! You'll always be taller and more amazing than I, but I'll always be able to feed you well and knock you on the floor laughing.

I fuckin miss you, dork.

...and, y'know...I totally love you and stuff, too.

Big Ol' Cycle

man, this death stuff is heavy this week; the moon's getting darker.
this is part of a letter to my brother, d~, dated 24 august 2006. i'd forgotten it had been over a year. how did i forget?...
...feel all weird posting this, self-indulgent as all hell, but...sometimes that ain't so bad. -rd


on another note of longing, my amazing, ornery, foul-mouthed, big hearted, "darlin-i'll-always-keep-a-cowgirl-hat-for-you" texas grandad just died monday; his funeral's today. i am so fucking heartsore i can hardly breathe these mornings, too fed up with death and dying and suffering and missed opportunities and untold stories and lost links to other perspectives that i deeply treasure. i'm fuckin heavy with love that has lost three outlets this year, and with grandad it lost one of its main arteries. oh, d~... if ever there were a year to learn how to mourn and how to survive.... goddamn it. it's been 5 years since i've seen grandad. five motherfuckin years. i never wrote, never called. couldn't bear to hear his robust voice made small and flat by telephone lines. couldn't bear to try and write all the stuff i only know how to say with my eyes, to try and waste all my splendid vocabulary on a man who had no time for such things, who only had time for gut feelings that are too big for words. he was the first grown-up man i ever loved. ever. he was the first one to ever tell me i could do anything boys could do, that i'm just as smart (if not moreso) than boys and not to let anyone ever tell me different; he was the first one to lay out so many truisms in such plain language, language no one else i've known has been able to match: "just cause a boy's got a pecker don't mean he can tell it from his brain." he stood up for me to my dad. he wrote to me every year on my birthday, these past few always asking me to come and see them when i got the chance. ...fuck! fuck, Fuck, FUCK! and today they're putting him in the ground. today, six feet of earth step up to close the bridge that death first set afire. oh, d~, my heart wails a ululation as deep and slow as the very earth's rumblings today; i cannot separate this sorrow from the immense, unstoppable river of all humanity's woe. jeremy and jason's deaths were large rooms in my house burning down; grandad's exit is fully a third of my foundation rattled loose and crumbled beneath me. i don't know where to stand. i haven't been able to tell anyone about this, outside my housemates i mean, who were there when i found out. it's like i don't know how to say it. i don't know how to say "my grandad's dead" without it sounding small and insignificant, without belittling the enormity of its impact on me, without making it sound like just another body has passed from the earth instead of one of its titans. grief is a growling like no other hunger. i feel like a goddamned seive, full of holes, my love and perpectives and reasons for actively living, draining and changing, eroding down to nothing so that i might have room to rebuild them. ...at least, that's how i'm dealing this year. today, though...

today my bones cry.

Death? This is Doxy...

Every now and again, I am drawn along a necrophilic path of curiosity that never fails to uncover the most amazing observations of humans' relationships with Death. The woman to the left is from the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo, Italy. I have as yet been unsuccessful in gathering any other information about her. The Capuchin tombs are listed, along with the Sedlec Ossuary in Czechoslovakia, the necropolis of North Ossetia, and the burial sites of the Tana Toraja in Sulawesi, in a little article on humankind's most impressive extant tombs.

Further down this morning's path of beautifully confrontational mortality, please behold Kittiwat Unarrom, an artist who absolutely caramelizes my little bread baker's heart. In his shop in Ratchamburi, Thailand, he fashions the most heart-stoppingly realistic representations of (bits of) human bodies...out of bread. I read a blurb about him in Juxtapoz several years ago and only yesterday found this little video of the gentleman working in his shop. It's fuckin awesome.

Uhmmm, lessee...more dead stuff...

Yes, of course! The inimitable Sarina Brewer of Custom Creature Taxidermy has stitched together the most enchanting little capricorn in the whole wide world (and it's even blue!). Ms. Brewer's a naturalist with what appears to be a deep reverance for life, beginning to end. She deals with death by honoring the already-dead (roadkill, etc.) with beauty and immortality. I totally have a crush on this woman for both her aesthetics and her pragmatism; would that more people could see like she sees.

Another amazing artist in the necrophilic realm (and another girl, oh my palpitating heart!) is the taxidermist of A Case of Curiosities. She's done some chimerical physical illustrations of 18th and 19th century Russian, French, and German fairy tales. ...I'm talking real kittens in princess dresses here. Secondly, she's got a really lovely piece on exhibiting human corpses (mummified or taxidermied) and its longlived status as social taboo.

Yeah...,

Yeah, Death has been on my mind again, as she is during life-changing and -challenging spaces. I'm getting married, and so it is perfectly natural that my preternatural obsession with our inevitable quietus should resurface now, now, now.

My awe-inspiring brother D~ and I were recently discussing awareness as it applies to personal mortality. Knowing, or at least being pretty goddamned sure that we will eventually die, we agree that it behooves us to be as aware as mortally possible up through the very last moments of our lives, to be awake, in the most naturally esoteric sense, down to our very last inch. I have, of course, been reading about this awareness stuff through my whole life, through teachings of christ/buddha/mohammed, and etc. However, all my efforts at willful awareness, through meditation and the like, have proven pretty fruitless. The only times I have been really, truly in my skin, in my every breath, in whatever I have that feels like a living soul, are times when I have deliberately put myself in the way of Death:

Skydiving. Cliff-jumping. Formerly ingesting and insulflating massive quantities of potentially mortally harmful chemicals. It's like...

It's kinda like doing psychomimetic substances, specifically organic ones. Mushrooms, for example, always make me hyper-aware of beauty. When I'm up for a fungal, kaleidoscopic afternoon, colors seem brighter, more vivid, more like themselves. Ditto all organic shapes, smells, textures, tastes, and on and on. They help me remember how the world felt when I was a little, little girl. Y'know, back when I knew everything was made of magic way, way older than god.

Lovely as hallucinogens are...well, frankly, hallucinogens are tools, are means to an end. They are a cut-to-the-chase way to kick my brain out of its entanglement in the short-sighted day-to-day quagmire that we pass off as Reality with a capital 'R'. Visionary plants are not solely for recreation; they are not toys. They are keys to the doors in our own perceptions, our own realities. I take, have sporadically taken for years, mushrooms (and their organic cousins) to show my brain what it feels like to be open. 'Cause, y'know...sometimes I forget. The goal, though, the goal is to eventually be at a point where I can see Beauty for what it is all the time, without any additional help from the plant kingdom.

And it works.

Not quite like LSD does; I don't have uncontrollable flashbacks or disorientation. I don't suddenly see giant dahlias in my sautee pans or hear the cats talking to me (they do that all the time, anyway). It's way gentler than that.

I just perceive more. I actually notice season changes, even the super-subtle ones to be found here in the subtropics. I am much more prone to stop and smell the frangipani than I was before taking mushrooms. I observe and appreciate life. I know that the reward for occasionally sitting and watching the daily drama that takes place among the tiny anole lizards in my yard will far outweigh the "lost" time I could've spent doing something more industrially productive. I remember that this stuff, the unending performance of all living things, is actually important, each timeless moment of it, for reasons that are prohibitively difficult to articulate to the consumer-minded. And, difficult to explain or not, I am a hell of a lot wealthier for it.

So, back to the Death thing, I like to do stuff like skydive and cliff-jump and whatnot because these also function as tools to help my brain learn how it feels to be really, really present. While circling up and up and up in a little Cessna just built for jumping out of, Death is sitting, in all but physical form, right next to me, thigh to thigh. And lordy, is that girl grinnin! I've gotta be cool, gotta be calm so I don't do something stupid and panic-driven that might endanger myself or the pilot or the jumpmaster. Thus, it behooves me to look over at Death, acknowledge that she's got a job to do and know that I cannot stand in her way if it's my time, then just grin at her sweet and sideways, and give her a little flirtatious wink that says, "See ya at the bottom, baby; I'm goin for a ride!"

It seems to me that...well, that Death likes to give her blessing if you approach her humbly and mischeviously like that, y'know? And when I jump? Once I have come to that understanding with Death? I have absolutely nothing to worry about. Nothin. No future. No past. No grocery lists or social obligations. For all I know, I may be dead in a couple of minutes, and these sky-high, spellbound moments may be my last; I am sure as hell gonna live 'em. Peacefully. Thankfully. Joyously.

I will be Here.

Death is Birth is Death is Birth. Ain't nothin to be afraid of. In fact, I'm invitin 'em to my weddin. To all the events of my life, great and small.

All of the people I mentioned above?---the baker, the churchmen, the taxidermists and the preservationists?---all of them are working with their chosen charges in ways that pose a kind of anathema to our whitebread, plasticene, fear-based, UStian ideals concerning mortality and our relationships to Life and Death. In doing so, they absolutely honor us by gently, beautifully showing us what we fear to see: the immutable frailty of Life, and our heartbreaking, heartswelling connection to every single aspect of it.

How fuckin gracious and aware is that?