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The New Page
In 1994 I moved to New Orleans. In 1997 I began writing emails to a few friends around the country about my life as a blue-collar working white boy in a mostly black New Orleans ghetto. The ghetto was represented by the 2600 block of Dumaine.
In 2000 one of the email recipients in New York introduced me to a brilliant webmaster who was hosting his own website and I was invited to begin posting here. The email recipient came up with the name email from NOLA. In that same year I bought a burnt out abandoned crackshack on Rocheblave, six blocks from the Dumaine house, and began a learn as you go renovation.
In 2003 I was offered a soft gig in Virginia caretaking a Shennadoah weekend property for a childhood buddy. The next three winters I found reasons to spend them mostly in New Orleans, last winter, stretching from October to June, so that I could look after my Rocheblave house and do a few necessary post-Katrina repairs.
The Dumaine house is still occupied by a friend who has remained all these years very involved as a freelance mentor and tutor to neighborhood children. She was boat-lifted from the house last September and evacuated to the west coast before returning recently in hope of receiving Road Home grant money to fill the gap left by being screwed by her insurance company.
The Dumaine neighborhood was always a little rougher than average. An average that to many of you would itself seem unacceptable. And while murderers did live and recreate on the block, the block itself was more or less murder-free for the last 13 years. So it is unusual but unfortunately true to say that in the last two months two young men have died by gunshot in the street in front of the house. And one other near the Dorgenois corner.
It is this type of drama that made up parts of the original emails from NOLA (of which only a few samples are posted here) but I don't myself have exposure to such drama now, nor do I live in New Orleans. So I've been working on a new page with a different name which you can access at--
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/mtpleasant/
Or perhaps I could offer you an actual link to get there.
RIP Eric
M, not that this would be all that unusual but I haven't heard from you since you moved back to the block, I guess you got rid of the Oregon cell phone. Hope you are all right. Sorry the craziness is starting again. It was really quiet for awhile after the flood. Drop me a line sometime if you get the chance.
Better Late Than Never
Elloie suspended by La. high court
Russia, Fresh Spinach, And The French Canadian
I don't know enough about avante garde film to make valid comparisons but after watching Dziga Vertov's Man With the Movie Camera last night I'm going out on a limb to say he rose the bar pretty high 75 years ago. If only for its documentation of 1920s Russian images it is a must see. It is a silent film and I don't know if the sound track is original to the time period (or added later) but if it is original to the film, the bar goes up a couple more notches.
I seem to have rather convenient access to a bucket load of fresh music these days and the Outkast (Idlewild) album is fresher than a bag of raw spinach (according to the FDA).
Twenty-eight years ago I was standing on the side of highway 290west, aimed towards California, but only at the time just outside Austin, TX., and this French Canadian kid with a deep south Georgia accent approached from a distant store up the hill. He had just shop-lifted some snacks and these he shared with me. We hiked all the way to Los Angeles together. After a week or so he headed north up the coast and I headed back east, to Texas. I ran into him some months later, in Austin, and he suggested a high risk caper that would finance a trip to Europe, but success was not in our cards and we got busted for some misdemeanor foolishness and spent two or three days in the Dallas jail, and after that, again went our separate ways.
High On Ladders And Bocce
Jimmy the pool guy came by early this morning to get the final word on important pool matters and said he had just seen a guy on early morning exercise TV who reminded him of me. I said, oh no, not that awful energetic, long haired, buff, exercise guy? No, the guy has short hair, he said. And he does yoga. Said it was just the way the guy moved and his demeanor that was reminiscent of what I had always hoped was inimitable. I will look into this imitator even though as often as not it is through TV viewing that your illusions are shattered.
It has been overcast and rainy out here for three days but that doesn't keep me from climbing the 28 foot extension ladder and bleach cleaning the bighouse facia and soffit. I really need a 32 foot ladder to reach a couple of areas but instead of acquiring another expensive ladder I have saved the Mt. Prosperous bank account hundreds and hundreds of dollars by simply adding those four feet to the existing ladder, sticking it in the bed of the 4wheel drive utility vehicle and then leaning it up against the 150 year-old brick underneath the higher paintable wooden faced gables.
Not wanting to overwhelm the property with too much of my "work smart, not hard" ethic, I took off the rest of that ladder set up day and studied and practiced the formal rules for bocce (for there is now a proper bocce court), then set out to master the game and beat all comers, or just that one blithely acerbic NYker, who had recently, some weeks previous, won top prize at the Mt. P bocce doubles freestyle tournament, even though that championship is under review due to what was a fairly obvious and very cloudy score keeping by said opponent and his pony-tailed partner who couldn't be bothered with the details of his cloudy-headed teammates' scoring acumen. I am not a poor loser in general, but I will at the very least be demanding a rematch at some point in the future when all four members can be made to face the reality that a slightly tarnished win, a win that is shown in the books with an asterisk by it, is not the type of win you want on your resume.
As that inaugural evening of bocce on proper court wore on and I frankly became weighted down by the embarrassing heft of my bocce mastery, the blithely acerbic NYker snuck in a win to tarnish my opening day prowess. If it is true you learn most in life from your defeats, the NYker could prove to be a dangerous opponent in the future.
The clouds are low today, the Shenandoah hills erased, and there is fog in the hollows. As for me, I will continue to eradicate mildew with my bleach-filled garden sprayer, and possibly spot-prime the gutters I scraped yesterday.
All Business
A man out here recently known for his philandering with a much younger girl (girl then confessing the deeds on a Sunday in front of the entire Baptist congregation), has a wife who in the past has done periodic cleaning of the bighouse, but I just received grapevine news that the man has in the last few days been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and I am hesitant to contact his wife for menial house cleaning, so I am doing it myself.
Picking up rubber bands in the kids room I hear the words of Mrs. BC upon last leaving--you boys better pick up all those rubber bands before we leave. If Jim has to pick those up he's going to be plenty mad and will by all rights be forced to put your little heads in a bench vise and turn turn turn he will until your little heads pop like ripe cherry tomatoes. That may not be a direct quote.
The bighouse is not inaccurately named so this detail cleaning is taking some time. I am vacuuming and wiping all ledges, above doors, windows, along sashes and window sills, across 6 fireplace mantels and sucking spider and cobwebs from corners and sucking up bugs and dead wasps (which is unusually gratifying), toothbrushing gunk marks on the wood floors, and shop vacuuming the fireplaces free of creosote droppings. Mopping, washing sheets and towels, and searching out mouse doo-doo wherever it may lie.
My insurance on the New Orleans house has lapsed because obviously one year after devastation the mail system is still not operating flawlessly and 17 days is not enough lead time for mailing in a renewal check for an amount obscenely more expensive than last year. I have left a voicemail with my agent. Why she or someone else is not in the office on a Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. I have no speculation. I did finally take care of that back taxes thing, with much help from L, and also received reimbursement from that bitch realtor/lawyer who was supposed to take care of it 6 years ago, with escrow funds.
Just went down to my PO box and my renewal notice was in the mail, so that was some pretty damn fast response time. I called my agent, she was in the office, and said, forget that earlier message.
Parked in front the Post Office and that guy who rides his lawn mower around town and along the highway was walking out of the cafe and giving me the look while I perused my insurance documents. He wasn't going to be ignored so when I looked up and pretended like I was seeing him for the first time he motioned for me to roll down my window and he then bummed a ride to the Co-op for chainsaw parts.
I called Geico and got the Jeep and trailer covered. Now I think I need to drive into Culpeper, drop off that trailer license plate at the DMV because I forgot to do it last week when that ad man was driving me there, running every stop sign in town, until he got corrected by smokey bear. I think I'll get new tires for the Jeep and then drive into Remington and see if that guy can mill me some siding to replace that which is rotted on the bighouse because evidently whatever they used on this house doesn't exist at any of the local lumber yards (a slightly modified version of german clapboard).
I really need to get on the stick though because I still have to get back here and finish cleaning this big house, before the cocktail hour