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Find Katrina Victims
(Update: 9-6-05, Mandy Vincent has been rescued along with thirty others she had taken into her house on Dumaine St. and is now on her way to Oregon. She has a couple of teenage boys with her. I do not know how many people on this list were with her (although I can safely say a good few would not have been) and of these, and also the thirty with her at the house--airlifted to various cities--I have no word.) These are people I would like to know about from the city of New Orleans, Louisiana. What they would have in common is some connection to the 2600 block of Dumaine, possibly related to the deceased Dolores Santiago (Mama D, formerly of 2641 Dumaine), and almost certainly they would not have evacuated the city prior to the arrival of Hurricane Katrina. They would all also know Mandy Vincent at 2646 Dumaine, who has been caring for,assisting, and tutoring neighborhood children and teens for the last ten years, at that address. She also has not been heard from. Listed ages are approximate. There are this many more that I could list but hopefully one or two of these people would know about the others:

Shelton Ray Jackson, 20
Fermin Santiago, 19
Evelyn Santiago, 35
Julia Santiago, 17 (and children)
Glynn McCormick, 19
Lance Price, 21
KaKa McCormick, 21
Eric McCormick, 29
Jacque Lewis, 19
Shentrell Lewis, 13
Nettie Lewis, 17 (and child)
Marqin Lewis, 16
Kenosha Lewis, 20
Keshonika Lewis, 26
Erica Lewis, 13
Lulu & and son Greg
Phillis Santiago, 30
Joe Nixon, 35
Billy Nixon, 33
Van Casmere, 45
Beulah Green, 45
Eddie Green, 23
Yolanda Alexander, 30
D'Andre Alexander,16
Chris Alexander, 13
Justin Alexander,11
Bryan Henry & cousin Irvin
Bebe Lewis, 27
Jermaine Lee, 32
Michael Lewis, 20
Barbara Granpre, 48
Kizzie, 23, and kids:
Raticia, 13
Shadrica, 11
Corey, 7
Twins, Jonanthan and Joshua Short, and Mario, 20 from:
Dorgenois and Dumaine.
- jimlouis 9-04-2005 6:40 pm [link] [20 comments]

Sapped
Yesterday, after a christening near the West Virginia line, Lorina's girlfriend, with the glow of her 24-hour baby delivering labor not only lighting the room but also being like a hundred shiny nickels in a sock (its a weapon now), swung that sap-sock with an innocent and sincere querying strength and hit Lorina right upside her head, which had already been lately reeling from the shattering numerical force of her girlfriends now with babies. She took the hit like a middle-weight contender while I looked on sucking all the juice out of a Heinekin bottle, and guarding my flank from the roving guest of honor, the projectile-vomiting newborn.

On the way home through Front Royal we finally found the elusive parking lot for that Bookstore and two years past my initial introduction to the store, entered. Of note on a shelf was an Anthony Burgess sandwiched by a Bukowski on one side and a Burroughs on the other. I picked up a used Russo, Risk Pool, for a buck, and a Straub/King collaboration, Black House, hardback, for two-fifty. Lorina got a couple for herself and I took the four books to a counter in the back and laid them down and was told to pay up front. Coming in I had not noticed a place nor a person to pay. I said to the woman, "there is an actual human-being up there?" She assured me there was and that that person would answer to the name, Susie.

As I walked to the front of the store with the itchy heat of embarrassment in my armpits, I thought, how nimrodic of me, is there an actual human...? What, may I ask, is up with that phrasing? What the hell did I mean by that? I get to the front and I see the L-shaped counter right near the door and how damn lucky for me, there is a cat lazed on the counter like is requisite for the independent bookstore but which I must have walked right on by upon entering. That, the cat, is what I could have meant by that, if only, I had in fact, been aware of the cat. I put my face into the cat's flank and said, Susie, hellooo, Susie? until the presumable Susie showed up from behind a curtain, told me the cat's name is Willa, and took my money in exchange for the books.
- jimlouis 8-15-2005 6:40 pm [link] [2 comments]

Doodlebugger
I found something in the back of a drawer this morning and I'm wondering if you can find lost memories the same way, just rooting around. I lived in Austin more or less for 8 years and when I run into old mates from those days they will often tell me stories about myself that I have completely forgotten, so I guess the Austin drawer would be a good place to look for something I've forgotten I had. And the added bonus to this exercise is that it gives purpose to staring in space. I'm not just staring into space, I'm looking for something that might be important. Is it that...I had to postpone that last sentence in favor of getting up to clean the thing I found, buffing it up, removing old smells. I then put it away in another drawer.

I was out of Austin for months at a time over a year and a half period, living in small East Texas towns as a doodlebugger during the early eighties oil boom. I swung machetes, carried cables, detonated explosives, and drove tractor-like vehicles with giant tires and brush guards across pasture and through the woods, knocking down small trees in the path of our purposeful search for oil. I slung pipe, too. I befriended rednecks and bikers and college graduates, and dropped acid with them in the woods at work and fell asleep behind the wheel of their personal vehicles. When they fell asleep with their faces in their beers I helped them to their cars parked in the mud lot behind the honky tonk and hoped they didn't wake up when the car slid and slung wildly back and forth, narrowly missing other parked cars as the drunken good ole boy in the 4 wheel drive dragged us much longer than necessary at recklessly high speed out of the mud hole we were stuck in. The next day I offered to pay for the bumper repair. I swam in stagnant bogs of brown water, water teaming with moccasins as thick as my skinny wrist and alligators everywhere. I scratched tick and mosquito and red bug and banana spider bites until they bled. I rubbed them down with Lysol when it seemed like the accepted treatment. In motel rooms I watched guys lay down coke or crystal meth or blotter acid or crushed up pills into spoons with water over flame, and then suck that heated liquid up through cotton balls into hypodermics and inject it into their veins. I drank beer and shot pool at eight in the morning when that was what came up and once, that I know of, I swallowed a pill that made me forget a whole day and even though I had the day replayed to me by others, it is that day I wonder about most because it examples a break in my personal time/space continuum and I have to wonder did I survive that loss of time or am I still experiencing it or does time interrupted continue along the same path once its been interrupted. I listened with smiling sympathy when my Vietnam Vet roommate told me of being discovered as a youngster with a needle in his arm by his steelworker father and how his father had dealt with it by grabbing the wrist of the arm with the needle in it, and without removing the needle, putting his other calloused hand on my roommate's upper forearm and then slamming that log of bone and flesh against his knee so that forearm broke in a fashion known as compound fracture. That's when the bone sticks out of the flesh. A kid too young to be working with us (although only 3 years younger than my 19 years), a son of one of the bosses, drowned in a snaky, vine-ridden, pond after getting tangled in the vine. This was what I did for awhile after dropping out of the University of Texas. Three different times, three or four months at a time. I would come back to Austin feeling strong and virile and clear-headed with what at the time seemed like lots of cash and I would luxuriate with my slacker friends until I felt myself getting stuck in the boring repetition of aimless slackerdom and I then I would go back to the oil fields. But by the third stint I had used up all the magic available and knew my days on the seismograph crew were over. So, considering the relatively short period of this time I guess I'm not forgetting all that much about the period, although technically the oilfield drawer and the Austin drawer are separate. I can only get the Austin drawer so far open and it may be that what I can see in the partially opened drawer is all there is to see. I spent a lot of time in my Dallas youth in Sunday school or youth group activities and I can't seem to access all that much of that either. I wonder am I tired of my memories or am I just impatient for new ones? What? Oh yeah, be here now, for sure. The experience creating memories takes care of itself.
- jimlouis 8-10-2005 8:31 pm [link] [2 comments]

Think Brown And Flaky
I was born at the Methodist hospital in South Oak Cliff way ahead of the cool curve, just a few years before Oswald shot the President and officer Tippet and tried to hide out in the dark of a theater somewhere near the house I was in coloring a snowman on fire while listening on the combo radio/45 record player to the news of an assassinated President. Its not that scenic where I grew up, then or now, an area just barely fighting off the blight pressed upon it by the nearby snaking Interstate 35, which constricts the hopefulness out of the neighborhoods into which it carries the hopeful.

A year after the assassination we packed up and I'm not saying we rode that snake out of there because that sounds nasty. We jumped in the station wagon and relocated to the edge of farmland that is now the middle of North Dallas. If you left from that house today looking for the edge of farmland you better gas up first.

On the construction sites that were my playground I fell in infrastructure ditches full of chocolate rainwater and floated on discarded lumber in my heavy winter coat while waiting to be rescued. I traveled for miles underground in storm sewers during the Vietnam War only I was doing it in North Dallas, finally exiting onto the brown hillside that overlooked the earth movers creating the LBJ freeway.

My friend and I dug a hole in his backyard and I could think of nothing else during the Sunday sermon at the Methodist church than getting back to the digging of that hole. The preacher would later divorce his wife and his son was rumored to be gay and as long as it could last we all felt fortunate to know about such things without having the stain of similar impropriety on our own happy days. My friend had been on the grassy knoll that day the bullets whizzed by but we never talked about it. We were old enough to know better but we fantasized about maybe actually getting to China if we dug long enough. We hit a gas pipe many days into the project and I can only guess his parents were relieved because the hole was considerably deeper than was necessary for the tree they had intended to plant there, which now couldn't be planted there at all because of the gas pipe.

Before everybody fenced in their properties I pedaled between houses at full speed on my purple Schwinn Stingray with banana seat and slick rear tire, crossing blindly the paved alleyways that ran behind our houses, only once getting hit by a car.

Footballs soared and I reached up casually during full stride and pulled them to my chest, never slowing down until crossing somebody's driveway marking the end zone of our imaginary greatness. I had a Leroy Kelly jersey and I just loved it because while wearing it I not only looked super cool, I was possibly in possession of supernatural talent. The day it ripped during a tackle was like days that would follow, only harder, for the lack of the cumulative experience which becomes our perspective.

This morning things have gotten to the point where all I'm thinking about is food and each successive check proves true the same reality, that I have very little to eat here. I could but won't eat the garbanzo beans, the black beans, the chunk light tuna, the refried beans, or the can of soup, for breakfast. I did have a bowl of cereal and could have another one but I feel saddened by the prospect of that. What I will eat apparently, is the microwave spaghetti and meatballs. Last night I had a can of soup from the bighouse cupboard and then went out to the 211 Quickee Mart and got me a pint of Ben and Jerry's NY Super Chunk Fudge chocolate ice cream. I felt so good when I first dug in that I decided to just eat the whole pint and see what happens. And let me tell you something--what happens is near death, so be careful with that, you ice cream addicts.

Well, that was like a snack, the spaghetti and meatballs. Hey, let me tell you something useful, finally. If where you shop offers a sale on Stouffer's frozen dinners, like 5 for ten dollars or something, go easy on the spaghetti and meatballs and instead try the chicken pot pies (the lasagna is an ok value too). You are thinking oh my stove doesn't work or oh I don't want to heat up the kitchen for one little pot pie and the microwave browning technology offered by that silver cardboard stuff in frozen dinners is whack, hey, no, no, they finally got it down, at least with the Stouffer's frozen pot pies. Trust me, think, brown and flaky. Think brown and flaky. And now, having improved your life just that little bit, I bid you adieu.
- jimlouis 8-09-2005 6:52 pm [link] [5 comments]

Killing Rodents
Like a warrior come from the battlefield here I sit contemplating the stain of death all around me. From an inside connection at the compound of a local radical feminist octogenarian playwright I have procured a better mousetrap and the kill rate of my only remaining pets, the cute, furry, heretofore skittering farm mouse, is astounding.

I started in earnest on this nascent campaign of death after various failed attempts using the standard wooden based spring catapult/guillotine-type mousetrap that you would be familiar with if you ever came out from under that rock.

While failing, I considered the various rationalizations for living in harmony with bubonic plague carrying rodents. Life is sacred. They only come out at night while you sleep. The dimensions of the doo-doo they leave behind on your counter tops is small. Their urine trails can only be seen in the dark under ultraviolet light. As a kid you used to keep one as a pet (until the one Mr. BC kept eviscerated yours and you came down the stairs crying, Willie is dead, Willie is dead, while your brothers snickered over their cereal bowls). The plastic spatulas they gnaw grooves into can be replaced.

While I ruminated for days and days over these things I met other locals who would look at you like you the devil's little brother if you mentioned killing a snake. Life is sacred, life is sacred, life is sacred. A mouse is less threatening than a snake so I kept the mouse-killing campaign secret from those I suspected would ostracize my efforts.

Over time the poop piled up in corners and the urine trails got smear-wiped with Windex now and again and I stopped killing snakes and I looked on benevolently while deer decimated my garden and groundhogs dug tunnels under the 40 acres because you need a permit to fire a gun on the half of this property that is in town limits, and, while I say I don't need no stinking permit I am at least casually interested and observant of the laws of our land.

That groundhog, there's not just one but, that groundhog, the biggest rodent out here, stands erect on its haunches eating the only Cherokee Purple tomato that grew from the plants eaten to near death by the deer, and, juice and flesh bits matting his fur, shoots me the finger, before running off to hide under the barn, its fleshy haunches undulating from side to side reminding of that fat cat Herman who used to keep me company out here, before he died a horrible death at the veterinarians office.

I would earnestly ignore the fruitlessness of my attempts to kill mice with the aforementioned wooden traps and convince myself if I just smeared the peanut butter better (you have to be a veritable word craftsman, a damn word smith, to get the words "peanut butter better" together) or lubricated the parts or located the traps differently that I would achieve the success that eluded me.

Because I believe strongly in education continuation I would read books about Rats and watch strangely compelling made for TV type B movies, like the one called The Rats, which features in one movie the same swimming pool, once with rats swimming in it and once with all the water let out, the rats just coming from the NY sewer system to fill it up with all their horrific rat-writhing potential and then...I ain't gonna ruin it for you. Like Joe Bob says, check it out.

You poor desperate soul who has read this far to find out what is the new improved mouse trap I'm talking about, and I'm not shittin' you, these traps are stupendous killing machines, affordable, and reusable, and the only down side of these traps is how they throw in your face, before you even know it, your propensity for killing. Of course, given the right conditions, propensity for killing is something even the most ardent pacifist will come to, or so I think.

Oh hell, I'll give you a hint. I still use peanut butter to bait the new improved traps. That should get you there. Now, get out there, and kill some rodents.
- jimlouis 8-04-2005 7:58 pm [link] [5 comments]

Ardent Squeegeeing
The laptop freezes infrequently but enough to make me save a document before I start it, which is good, sound practice in any case and I save it with a temporary name, whatever my fingers dictate, and today that is brugl.

And brugl reminds me of the 16th century Flemish painter, or family of painters, although "the Elder" is whom I would normally think of.

Which reminds me of the poster of a Brueghel print formerly over the desk of my childhood room in Dallas which reminds me of the balcony off that room which reminds me of sneaking out which reminds me of underage driving which reminds me of caution as a secondary aspect which reminds me of at least three 360s which reminds me of near death which reminds me of life which reminds me of the exact time and space when I heard one pedant correct another for saying broogul instead of broygal.

I just now got up to put the cereal bowl in the sink and when I came back I was nearly attacked by a piece of lint approximately the size of a tree frog, which turned out to be--a lint covered tree frog. I let out a yelp and did a jig on one foot. Then I scooped it up and put it outside which reminds me of the slug crawling across the kitchen floor this morning which I also scooped up, only with a spatula instead of the more common frog transporting drinking glass. I think you are getting an idea of the richness of my life. How full of interesting events does fill up even the more mundane moments of my day.

There is a potato-washing-runoff lake on the smooth finished concrete floor of the garage and I can see no way around the rearranging of all the crap I have let pile up in there followed by some ardent squeegeeing.

What do you have lined up for today? is apparently not a question to be asked of me this morning but if it were I could easily pair two unlikely words as answer.
- jimlouis 7-30-2005 5:10 pm [link] [6 comments]

Dropping Acid With Alligators
I have deleted this the first sentence, now five times, each time bringing up the possibility for new subject matter. You can't really let the lack of focus get in your way.

I have found a couple of thrift stores in the area from which I furnish my home, in the fashion of Americana crapola, which is not to say there is a lacking of inimitability hearabouts.

Mediocrity, and how I love it, that was my original theme, even though my sincerity towards the premise might vacillate.

Like with old cars being classified as antiques, there is probably a minimum of years for the idea of a book being first edition to mean anything. But I got this first edition hardback of James Clavell's, King Rat, yesterday, for a buck, and though yellowed somewhat over the 43 years of its life, it is still like pristine, maybe never read, or only once perhaps, and I am happy about it in a way that defies logic.

I'll go stare at the same old tired thrift store book shelves over time, even if they don't appear to restock them but once a year, just in case something has slipped in. When I was a kid I started out to be a bibliomaniac and then when I started vagabonding I off-loaded and became bookless, a frequenter of libraries in whichever town I landed. In New Orleans, the last year or so of my stay, I spent some money on fifty cent paperbacks but when I left I gave them to that nice lady running the crackhouse around the corner.

And so my default for the last many years has been to go bookless, even though lately I've noticed my shelves getting kind of heavy with books ( I did bring a handful of books from New Orleans, the Hemingway and Fitzgerald hardbacks, and the Algren, a Bellow, a Brautigan or two, and a box set of philosophic thought sampling the entirety of man's recording of such) and now it almost seems as if I am heading towards that former addiction I enjoyed which required not just the reading of books but the possessing of them.

In my last two hauls I've done well, from two different thrift stores in the same town, and I'm not blurting out which town, because growth is coming, and with it, the savvy entrepreneurship which causes inexorable sadness and the end of 5 for a dollar paperbacks, and dollar hard backs. I've gotten over twenty books for less than 20 dollars, half of them hardbacks, and off the top my head, authors such as Bellow, Cheever, Barth, Plath, Marquez, Clavell, Oates, Heinlein, Auchincloss, Percy, Doctorow, Stevenson, Parker, Coupland, and that's all there is to happiness--simple tricks, and your willingness to give in to them. I also added to my thrift wardrobe, a two buck shirt, Izod's contribution to the paisley theme, and you know how I love my paisley. Somehow, while my attentions were directed elsewhere, the alligator dropped acid.
- jimlouis 7-27-2005 5:12 pm [link] [3 comments]

When Carl Fell Down
There was this kid named Carl in my junior high school in Dallas and this other kid named Keith. Carl was extremely fat and people made fun of him. Keith was an outsider, from a single parent home (said he had sex with a friend of his mother's), but was popular, as an athlete, and also had popular hair, thin and blond and straight, it hung down in his face when he dribbled the basketball downcourt. After he would cross the mid-court line he would slow down, turn his whole body sideways, raise a finger or two in signal to his teammates, and then he would crack-snap that head on his shoulders like a whip and the hair would fly in centrifugal fashion until it stuck momentarily to his sweaty skull, before coming loose again, one sweat-clumped strand at a time.

Carl went out of his way to be neither nice nor mean and was just there, tall, and slightly dull, with bad skin, and dirty hair, and fatter than you could ignore.

One day out of sheer mean-spiritedness Keith decided to beat up Carl. He said, I'm going to beat up that fat fuck today. I remember being among a group of people to whom he was bragging this and not a one of us asked, why are you going to beat up Carl? It was junior high school in the early seventies and integration had finally made its way to North Dallas and a fight between two white kids was perhaps for us a pleasant break from the occasional small scale race riots occurring in the hallways, outside the viewing range of the security cameras the school system had installed as preparation for racial tension.

It was after lunch and we were all milling around outside the lunchroom on that little patch of grass surrounded by chain link. Keith was amazing us with his ability to jump over the four foot fence without touching it, but when he got tired of amazing us he decided to beat up Carl.

Those were tense moments of unrealized potential those moments between Keith saying he was going to do it, and the doing of it. I liked Keith but I think I was looking forward to him getting his ass whooped by Carl, who was four inches taller, and 170 pounds heavier.

What happened though was that Keith, apparently having thought out the disadvantage of his size, and knowing that he would need to stay away from a potential bear hug, or being sat on, kept his distance and after one very typical school yard shove, just began punching Carl in his face, with all he had, while his thin, straight, blond hair flapped wildly.

What I was thinking of this morning, 32 years and 1,200 miles away, was the look of shock and hurt on Carl's face when he took the first fist to his chubby jowls, and the plaintiveness of his questioning between the blows, when he would ask Keith to explain the reasoning behind the brutality. But Keith was talking with his fists and kept on punching until Carl fell down.
- jimlouis 7-25-2005 5:15 pm [link] [3 comments]

Quality Lost
Some of the posts I haven't been making have been letters to the alzheimer flavored curvature of my mother's spine and the other posts have been deposited into the bottomless wastebasket of my intentional disregard for achievement.

I can't go to Kansas for my nephew's wedding happening only a few months before his National Guard commitment sends him for the second time to the land of pissed off, shell-shocked Muslims. Last time was Iraq for a year. This time Afghanistan. Used to be, back in the days of the draft, the National Guard was where you went to escape the draft and crazy military deployments, but not anymore.

I told my brother I can't make it but what did he know about family gatherings in Dallas, back at the old homestead? He said no definite plans were being worked out but that it seemed like there would be a gathering sometime, especially since it was being observed by another Dallas area brother that our mother's "quality was diminishing."

I can't get a handle on that so I'm going to call my mother now and ask her what the hell is diminishing. Perhaps I will be able to hear quality lost.

My brother also said we were waiting for a critical mass. I'm going to have to study up on that, too. There is too much I'm not getting.
- jimlouis 7-24-2005 6:02 pm [link] [4 comments]

Simple Nacho Recipe
I was having a temper tantrum so I ran away for a day to where was the first battle of the Civil War and had Pho for lunch with a Vietnamese beer for dessert. I say that like the Vietnamese beer for dessert was my date and why shouldn't it be?

Like the last time I ran away from home, 35 years ago, the day ran long, in the sense how do you fill up what is pretending to be the first day of the rest of your life? I thought about entering a bookstore (question: when is jimlouis not jimlouis? answer: when he turns into a bookstore) but I got that love/hate thing going on with bookstores and as I could feel my sneer muscles contracting, I ruled out the house of books.

I did not know what to do so I went to a theatre and watched the new Batman movie. Then I exited into the brilliantly sunny outdoors and became momentarily blinded and disillusioned with the reality that tends to exist in suburban movie theatre parking lots. It is for me the sensation of potential realized, and gone awry. The meaning of our lives is at least partly the result of someone else's marketing scheme. You cannot escape that. That uneasiness you feel from time to time is you not escaping that. You can only ignore it with the same success you ignore the pile of poop in a public place.

Sometimes what you see is based on what you sow and sometimes what you see is a blue strap-on dildo in the empty parking slot next to yours.

How long do you stare at a blue strap-on dildo in a public parking lot? How do you turn off the microfiche reels running in your mind? Where did you get all that info stored on those reels? The Internet, probably. Did you even know about strap-ons before the Internet? You did not. I'm not making any judgments about blue strap-ons, I mean, I think pleasure should be enjoyed. That last phrase is dedicated to the president of the United States. You have my permission to use it in your next speech. But whatever pleasure may have been experienced with the strap-on, and by whom, well, this was not a thing evident by its current positioning. The person who imagines happy times after viewing tangled black nylon straps, with frayed ends, attached to a slick penis-shaped cylinder of blue petroleum by-product, laid forlornly against a suburban asphalt background, is indeed an optimistic person.

I unlocked my hotbox of transport and tried to deal maturely with the apparent malfunctioning of its air-conditioner.

I wasn't really hungry but I thought a margarita and nachos would be ok so in the next town (whose name means "overcrowded living space," or, a place where rabbits burrow) I stopped at one of the several mex places I frequent but which don't inspire me yet do make me feel like I could be inspired if I just tried harder. That the mexican place should try harder to inspire is evidently out of the question. The nachos were only average and the margarita was large and I might have been better off sprawled on cardboard behind a dumpster with a pint of rotgut and sweaty, not quite puttrefied, dumpster fare. I'm a little uppity about my mexican food.

Just talking about sub-standard nachos made me crazy so I have paused to make a whole cookie sheet portion. I grew up in Texas making nachos on chalupa shells but its hard to find chalupa shells on the east coast (I could not find them in New Orleans, either) so I buy taco shells and snap them in two. With a fork and only a fork spread on a quantity of refried beans, lay on top the amount of jalapeno pepper you can handle, then a slice of cheese (NY Sharp) approximately one quarter inch thick, seven/eighths inches wide by two and five/eighths inches long. Cook on middle rack at 400 until cheese bubbles but before shells darken. Bon Appetit.

Like on this day I've got to come up with good things about eating alone I say the good thing about eating alone is that you can get around insulting your date by not hanging on her every word and instead stare at people while they eat. The only people who stare back are children because children aren't taught inscrutability until well into the game and even then in most cases it is just a result of curiosity being beat out of them by strict parents or the even stricter punishments of life experience. Let me here add that staring at people while they eat is disheartening and makes you wish for the company of someone to ignore. I blame this obvious lack of compassion for fellow human beings on my part, dates and otherwise, on sub-standard mexican food.

This boy about 11 was being told by his mother that he was playing football this year even if he sat the bench. There was a long pause while the boy--I had made enough casual eye contact with him for him to know that I was hanging on every word (I wished I had brought my Vietnamese beer date)--contemplated this dictate and finally he said, maybe I won't ride the bench. His father stared into the bowl of chips and grunted and his mother no-commented and his newborn baby sister sat simply in her bassinet exemplifying her exceptional coloring. The boy repeatedly called out--Dad, hey dad, dad? throughout the meal, and each time the father would stare into the chips because he was really tired. The boy was happy for this dad and would glance at me after each time he called to his dad in that way that people do when they are a bit of an exhibitionist, or just temporarily very self-conscious, because he wanted me know that this was his dad and he was happy about it. In this case apparently fatherhood carried no more responsibility of quality than did the chef of the mexican restaurant. But the restaurant is always crowded.
- jimlouis 7-23-2005 8:10 pm [link] [2 comments]

Bird
The bird came in through the chimney and despite many opportunities to experience freedom he stood around paralyzed by fear or a damaged spine and would not leave for two days. He frightened me a little because of the manic wildness of his demeanor followed by a catatonic stupor resembling resignation. I wished he would make up his mind. I thought he was gone a couple of times but then there he would be, hiding in the corner by the two hard drives on the floor under the sewing table, or hanging onto the bottom of a curtain right below an open window, and hours would pass. The bird, I should mention, looked a bit like one cast from hell.

The third day J came over wanting to be paid for work done and taking advantage of the eagerness he was feeling due to his proximity to easy money I said take care of this little bird for me while I write the check. I made it sound like a task equal in simplicity to getting a glass of water. And it would be if you weren't afraid. He said I'll shoot it and then put it out? That seemed a little severe but I was curious. How would you shoot it I asked. With a bb gun he said but I didn't want him to do that and told him just do it man, put the bird out, its only two feet from the open window. I asked him if he was scared because it was interesting to me that we were both scared of the bird. He thought I was calling him a pussy but I wasn't. I just wanted to understand why the both of us were scared. He said he didn't want to get pecked. I guess that pretty well summed it up for me, too. But I didn't relent. I wanted that bird out and I wanted J to do if for me. Being a caretaker is not all glamour. Sometimes you have to boss people around.

I got a small bucket for him and he went to it like a man doing something he didn't want to do, like a man afraid, like a man run completely out of metaphors in search of easy money but instead coming face to face with a task which made him feel like the very essence of his manhood was no longer a certain thing. He asked me for something to put over the top when he got the bird scooped up and I got him a blue, wide-ruled notebook. The notebook was not big enough to completely cover the top of the bucket. A very eager bird would probably figure a way to squeeze out. But I told J, J, this bird is not so very eager. If he were eager he would finish climbing up that curtain he has been hanging onto for eight hours and fly out that window right above him. The bird is disoriented, J. He needs the helping hand of a man who may or may not be getting paid today. J thought the bird looked evil. I did not respond to that except to raise an eyebrow.

J had a brainstorm and in one aggressive burst he captured the bird by covering it with the bucket and then scooted the bucket up the wall and out the window and the bird flew away.

J was some shook up but I slid the check across the table to him and he seemed to get some of his color back. I think by the time he backed out of the driveway he was a whole man again. I was standing where the brick pavers meet the gravel driveway. J leaned his head out the car window and pointed to a black speck of tornado-propelled lint or a mini tumbleweed from the charred plains of Armageddon, which was moving unrecognizable across the quaint canvass of my perspective, and said, there go your bird.

I've been reading books lately and they all ok but I'll be damned if I can figure out why people write them. They certainly can't be doing it for my lukewarm appreciation of them and when I say lukewarm you know I'm not talking about Slyvia Plath's, Bell Jar, which I just re-read whenever I lose my faith in whatever could be the reason for people to write books. Some people just have so much to say, I guess, or let's face it, they don't really have but one or two things to say, they just so talented they have no alternative but to keep saying it over and over with the most amazing phrase turning in one tome after another. I read a book about NYC rats and a few E.B. White stories which are very clean and I'm still working on the Samuel Johnson biography, and Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is not his most readable work but whenever you want to consider polygamy and revolution in a lunar setting in a way that doesn't make you feel dirty but may put you to sleep, repeatedly, I would say Heinlein's TM is a HM is your book. I read that bestseller, Blueblood, about a Harvard educated NY cop and it was a good read but approximately 187 pages too long. The Saul Bellow I am reading, Mr. Sammler's Planet, I don't fully understand, but Bellow, what are you gonna say, he's one of the god's, so your criticism can only amount to sour grapes.

Though, that doesn't keep me from wondering why the hell he wrote the book.
- jimlouis 7-22-2005 5:02 pm [link] [11 comments]

Ventriloquism
Went winding up through the Shenandoah Mountains all the way to Luray. At the Mexican food restaurant we got a table in the long rectangular room which promised to include no smokers. Instead of smokers we got a little girl who hummed prolifically, apparently even while drinking water. At another table a woman every bit as smart looking as Barbie explained to Skipper the difference between vacation bible school and Sunday school. I complained to Lorina that if the waitresses' whole family had been cut down in a drive-by and therefore she was in a state of profound lamentation, I would still require chips and salsa immediately. When the waitress did show up, and apologize, saying it was her first day, and being young enough for it to be like her first, first day, I said oh don't you worry about it sweetie, but not in so many words. When Lorina said did you just cut that waitress some slack I said I sure did the poor thing.

The food will only rate as last or next to last resort even though in some ways it was quite authentic. Once with my grandpappy I was right across the South Texas border and was served a sweaty rectangular cube of orange cheese wrapped in a cold tortilla and it was called an enchilada.

I'll never forget that time I went fishing on the King Ranch with Big Pa and somebody, not me, pushed him in his wheelchair all the way to the end of a long pier over bumpy uneven boards and though at the time there was no metaphoric value to the event, we did catch, after waiting several hours for the wind to shift, a large number of fish, using Garcia Ambassador 5000 reels attached to stiff rods.

After the Luraymex we played eighteen holes of golf at the Yogi Bear campground and one of the holes featured a paper mache' tunnel with Yogi's little friend, BooBoo, stuck to the side of it and Lorina said I had to walk through the tunnel, as it appeared to be the premier feature of this course. So I did, but hurriedly, and without touching anything.

At every opportunity, after sinking a putt, I would shoot my arm forward and maybe bend one of my legs awkwardly and exclaim quite seriously--Yeessss!
- jimlouis 6-23-2005 5:33 pm [link] [add a comment]

Ghetto To Boondocks
In Virginia I don't do this but in New Orleans I used to respond to violent crime trends that seemed especially local by propping a loaded shotgun near one of the doors in my house. The illogical nature of that decision was not lost on me. I mean I knew that people killing each other in close proximity to where I lived did not actually mean I was all that more likely to be killed, but the gun, for me, simulated the idea of appropriate response. It made me feel proactive. It made me feel--community-minded. I don't feel the threat of that anymore though, which is not to say that I don't experience fear out here in this affluent and bucolic Virginia boondocks.

There are no stop lights in this town of 200 people. There is a diner next to a post office across the street from a five star restaurant to which some dignitaries fly from surrounding areas by helicopter, or are driven to by limousine.

There are a handful of large 19th century homes and all but the one I look after (and the one other ramshackle mansion I would like to look after, across town) are Bed and Breakfast establishments. The other structures of note are churches, or smaller homes converted into shops which sell--jewelry, knick-knacks, antiques, art. One of the art galleries also rents movies and has a larger VHS than DVD collection.

There is a gas station/grocery but the saltines are stale.

In the middle of town there is a ye olde fashioned grocery where you can get what either are or appear to be, organic products, and wine and beer, and steak for 20 dollars a pound, and candy out of jars just like when I was a...well...just like a hundred years before I was born.

Behind that grocery which simulates the childhood I experienced via TV Westerns there is a newly constructed and never used plaza with beau coup comfortable outdoor chairs and a fountain and a free standing rock fireplace and a wistera covered gazebo-like thing. There is a cute little house with a cushioned wicker love seat glider out front, and it, the house, tried to be a pet supply store for awhile but failed. You can sit on the glider anytime you want and act like you live there. I would live there but Lorina says I wouldn't have the privacy to walk out my front door naked and even though I don't really do that I said, why wouldn't I? and she said, because of the people, and I, like a New Orleans domino player bent to intimidate, slapped my hand down hard onto the table surrounded by comfortable outdoor furniture, and said--What People?

The reason we are sitting in those comfortable outdoor chairs is because they are comfortable, and nearby, and on a good Friday or Saturday night we might be able to see five or six couples walking by on their way to the 5star, while we sip contraband from plastic go-cups. The men wear suits and the women wear what they are told to wear, which this year is a skirt cut like those worn by that sexy dynamic duo--Betty and Wilma, from the Flintstones. And of course, presumably, pink is the new black, unless you live in New York, and then we can safely guess that whatever is happening elsewhere, is already passe' there. You know, that low constant rumble you can sometimes hear on New York streets is actually people mumbling to themselves--been there, done that.

A couple of mornings in a row I would notice on my rounds of the property here a puddle of water on the pool deck right where the stairs lead out so that it appeared someone was pool hopping early in the morning.

The suspects were: a friend, a bear, a groundhog, a homeless person/traveler/itinerant worker, or, somebody I would like to chase around the property with a baseball bat. After the second morning I decided to camp out in the bighouse, which overlooks the pool, and see what I could see, which turned out to be nothing. For now I have decided the culprit to be the pool monster, which is an automated sweeping device set to run from seven to ten in the morning. Sometimes it gets stuck in a corner and will shoot water from a spout.

But with the heightened awareness caused by the real or imagined pool interloper I have set out to keep a closer eye on the bighouse.

And so it was just the other night that instead of watching Witness for the Prosecution down here in the cottage, I suggested to Lorina that we go on up and watch on that little TV in the bighouse study.

Thirty minutes into the movie and slumped we both were on the leather couch as the sun set and I don't know if you've seen that crop circle, extraterrestrial-invasion movie, Signs, but it was really just like that, both of us seeing out of our drowsy, movie-hypnotized eyes, two nearly human silhouettes moving across the front porch, back lit by the dusky night. There had been neither the headlights nor gravel crunching of tires to alert us of human invasion, and the house sits a good three hundred yards up the hill from main street, and it is pretty much hidden by dense foliage except in winter. It is not the type of property to invite casual tresspassing. Intentional tresspassing then. Sub-humans. Freaky stuff happens all the time to other people and apocryphal or not, in New Orleans, ghost stories by many are accepted as matter of fact. I accepted them, and experienced them as such, when living there.

So momentarily, for both Lorina and I, it was dreamlike in the worst way. The forces of fear both exciting us and immobilizing us. Neither one of us were able to get up from the couch in one swift movement. That the shadows had seen us inside seemed evident. That they moved off hurriedly like a scared wild animal made them no less threatening. We both ran to the front door and I fumbled with the lock just like a character from a B-movie who is always stupidly moving towards danger rather than away from it. But dammit, to face fear in the course of maintaining and protecting this property is part of my job. Could this tresspass be any worse than the many I experienced in the New Orleans ghetto? Is there something more frightening than a disaffected 15-year-old with a TEK-9 he's not afraid to use?

I finally got the door open and came face to face with my worst fear. Out on the lawn, moving in a retreating fashion from right to left, was that which is the seed of pure terror--it is the thing you least suspect, the thing all your experience has not prepared you for. It was two tourists from Easy Street, probably from a neighboring B& B, a man, who was way out front leading the retreat, and a woman, wearing a dress sort of like Wilma Flintstone. The woman spoke rapidly in profuse apologetic tone. We're sorry, we're sorry, you have a nice house she uttered while squinting to see if a shotgun was pointed at her head. I felt sorry for her. I said simply--you're ok. She apologized again while retreating. I said again, you're ok, and shut the door.

Afterwards, we heard inexplicable noises in the house and were afraid.
- jimlouis 6-21-2005 7:47 pm [link] [1 comment]

Eat, Deer
The people down the hill got some Adirondack chairs facing up this way which gives me a small sense of grandiosity, on site caretaker and single most occupier of this land that I am. I heard them speak once, at a local public forum, and they expressed their feelings of reverence for this hill and the low rising mountains behind it and I had to wonder were there people who get out less than I do. Not that the scenery is not nice but for mountain scenery in this area there is nicer. Or I may just be used to it. Two years ago after leaving New Orleans and driving 19 hours to get here I was myself somewhat overwhelmed by the scene of this place, and shortly after pulling through the gates and past the hand painted sign which implied this property to be something like that plantation in Gone with the Wind, I burst out laughing. Not in the funny, ha-ha sort of way but in the hysterical no one is stopping me and throwing me up against the police car sort of way. Because people like me don't occupy places like this.

In addition to feeling grandiose I feel annoyed, although you can call it paranoid, or some other common psychological problem, because the chairs make me feel onstage when I move about the place doing my chores. This feeling is much the same as my early-on problem with the 19th century bell tower (of what is now a baptist church) that rises high enough to be not only a very pretty site for me to look at but also gives the person up in there with binoculars full view of me and my rather skeletal morphology while I work or laze about the pool. Even though every time I use my own binoculars to look up into the bell tower, there is no one there with binoculars looking back at me. I think I am at a stage close to having worked through this problem of self- consciousness regarding people in bell towers with binoculars.

Yesterday I was down by the pond shoveling hardwood mulch into the back of a small four-wheel drive vehicle and everybody that passed by on the road waved at me. I have never before been waved at by attractive women in BMW's. And then I looked up and a church lady in a beater Chevy waves and smiles and I can only assume there is occurring some sort of celestial aligning that has people of all different socioeconomic persuasions being nice to each other.

Deer are eating my sunflowers and maybe too my young string bean plants but the deer were here first and I knew that place I put the garden was one of their main hangouts so whatever happens I will just try to be happy about, or, if I can't make lemonade out of lemons perhaps I will make deer sausage.

I am becoming a little smarter about poison ivy but still get regular attacks of it.

One of the women at the local art gallery/video store lets me spew ridiculous and perhaps in her subtle way encourages it and so I was being sort of full of myself and two more locals in the store said "who are you?" and then I told them, so I met two more people and am becoming quite the social butterfly. One woman was getting Meet the Fockers for her husband and I said oh my god that was the worst movie I have seen this year and she put it back and got something else. But then after she left I was shown some of the husband's artwork (sort of Bosch meets the California Raisins), there be beau coup artists hiding out here, and I felt that someone who can create such work as he should be allowed to watch whatever he damn well pleases, so I hope he gets to watch that movie, soon, and bears me no ill will for my temporary preventing of him seeing it when he wanted to. I myself got Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and consider it now my favorite Wes Anderson flick.

By the way, for my ten or twelve regular readers, if you don't want to check the site and be pissed off that I haven't posted for awhile you can thanks to the genius of our webmaster be alerted by email when I post something new. I will leave it to you to figure out how to do that. I'm going to copy this to a small device and take it up to the bighouse and post it now. I had high hopes for those sunflowers but deer gotta eat too.
- jimlouis 5-18-2005 4:51 pm [link] [15 comments]

Burgers And Beer
Lorina and I not having anything thawed and at least pretending budgetary constraints, belabored over what to eat for dinner. We have this 20 dollar for two rule we are trying out but beyond fast food that is a pretty tough constraint and on top of that the nearest fast food is almost twenty miles away, which could easily be considered a good thing, except when you are really hungry and tired and don't want the extra labor of cooking and cleaning up added to your day.

It was going to be my birthday soon so I said hey its going to be my birthday soon, we can go to that quaint little place with the outdoor seating and occasional septic overflow and have a hopefully juicy burger and two pints of stout a piece for about 20 dollars for each of us and even though that's twice over the budget, let's just live.

So we agreed on that and Lorina takes the scenic route up Fodderstack Rd. and I collar the first waitress I see in the bar and say, we can sit outside? and she says sure, but it's a little cold. We brought jackets, I say self-assuredly and with some pride, even though my jacket is a wreck, and I'm in dirty work clothes. "It's a little cold" turned out to be a euphemism for there is occasional septic overflow and depending on prevailing winds you might spend part of your meal thinking about dogshit.

It's hard getting me out sometimes because of my questionable feelings about larger congregations of humanity and I know in this tiny area the chances of running into someone we know is large and even though I haven't really met a bucketful of people I enjoy sharing Lorina with I accept the necessity of occasionally relating to people and being personable, which is a thing I am capable of and not all that shitty at, if not exactly drawn towards. So, I know we are going to run into somebody before we even go and I have factored that in to my wholehearted decision to go out and spend money we don't have on burgers that are adequate but not great and draft pints of Guinness (not that goddamned 11.2 ounce bottle) which are great, always great, just great. Where would any of us be without Guinness (although I have started drinking budweiser again as a mainstay of the budget.)

I know budgetary talk is less preferable than walking barefoot on rusty nails. You won't hear another word about it from me.

I was 24 hours recovered from my back pain medication abuse and had a hazy feeling affecting me not so distinctly that you would see a difference, if already you knew me. I hungrily devoured (Guinness qualifies as food) my first pint, only slowing down for the last few sips because I saw that Lorina was barely one sip into hers. She was facing the prevailing breeze and so was for the first few minutes distracted by a smell she thought was dogshit, and that apparently kept her thirst at bay.

We have, her and I, on a few occasions, driven to this town forty miles away, for Mexican food. We like it better than the 16 mile choice or the 22 mile choice, and the six mile choice went belly up, twice, because it sucked, both times. The last time we drove the forty miles, someone Lorina knew from our area was there, used to date the waitress he did, but on that day was content to plop down and regale us with his totally not uninteresting pursuits which nonetheless suffered from the overeagerness of his delivery, and that one unfortunate image seemingly derivative of a very popular yet somewhat shallow Leonardo di Caprio flick. We get plenty plenty of time alone Lorina and I do but still I can't seem to be sated by it and so I was a little put out by the intrusion but not overly so. Afterall, no man is an island, and equally possible is that no two people are a peninsula. We had a nice day together.

Back at the quaint place with occasional septic overflow it's the same guy who shows up and sits himself down summarily without an invite, although of course he was welcome. I mean that sincerely. But he appeared to be a few pints of lager ahead of my stout consumption, and, don't forget my residual drug hangover. And he went on and on and on, with equal or greater enthusiasm than he had showed interrupting our Mexican date. After he left, Lorina said I was dismissive of him, and I agreed with her about that, because that is exactly how I did feel after realizing his intention was not to have an interesting and lively three way discussion but rather to bogart my girlfriend with a version of himself that sounded pleasing, with occasional glances in my direction. The irony of "a version of himself that sounded pleasing..." is not lost on me, selective chronicler that I am.

He did get up and leave though, and so abruptly, that I was momentarily ashamed of my lack of embrace.

But shame, I think, is a thing of questionable value. If it spurs you on to greater performance then let's call it a good thing, but if, for example, you are a person who already helps many people, and you are visiting relatives who are economically less fortunate, and for no reason, let's just say I am with you, a last minute addition to your plans, and you are flying us around on a private jet, changing and arranging flights as your whim dictates, on a Blackberry, while being chauffeured, even if only by me, and you start feeling the weight of a trailer home juxtaposed against that jet meeting us late on a small strip miles from nowhere, rest assured that the reason I'm telling you not to dwell in guilt is not because I am the current benefactor of your graciousness but because I study that on an off day you do more for more people than any of the complainers who would have the leisure of time to suggest that your affluence is somehow wrong, or bad, or unnecessary.

At the outside table the wind blew fortuitously, Lorina's eyes gleamed, the yuppie man talking loudly about his wife's bowel movements was testament to the imperfection just under the surface of even the best moments.
- jimlouis 5-05-2005 7:43 pm [link] [1 comment]

Jetlag
I got another little crappy detail delivered to me by mail and it went a pretty good way towards harshing the mellow I had arrived at by a day of sustained manual labor and three budweisers. Put in its proper perspective it is a harmless detail and I will try to treat it is as such. And even though Lorina warned me of frost I chose to accept Weatherbug’s incorrect version of the morning temp and got light frost on my baby plants and so today am also expecting some disappointed news from Mother Nature in an enveloped marked “attrition,” with the body of the contents beginning—“Dear Sir, due to your abject carelessness with prescience, your flower account is being reduced by twenty percent.” I hope my surviving plants don’t hold against me my occasional ignorance and negligence towards them.

I still check up on New Orleans crime news and let me tell you people still living there that if you fear your sense of what it really looks like is being dulled by the relentless repetition of bad then I am here to tell you that from afar it looks really bad still and with no hint of cessation. And, as always, I only bring this up, I think, so as to offer a little contrast to the concept of New Orleans as an affected cutout called N’awlins, a happy happy party town. As for the children I used to know in those New Orleans killing fields, I don’t hear of them specifically anymore. I only hear of, through news reports, the continuing murders happening around them while they play in the streets (I feel certain the recent outlawing of street hoops in New Orleans will not be enough to make all the children disappear from those streets). I still aspire to and at the same time suffer from the desire to create in words a moderately accurate portrayal of a New Orleans youth from, for example, the Sixth Ward.

And this while I live as caretaker in relative opulence on 40 acres on the edge of a quaint and historic Virginia village populated by 186 people, where crime is only on TV, and not even there if you got a proper handle on your child rearin’.

Next thing you know I’ll be jumping on private jets to bop down to Texas to visit my mom for a day. How can anyone ever know what’s going to happen? And how do you keep from being perpetually dumbfounded?
- jimlouis 5-03-2005 6:06 pm [link] [1 comment]

Medication Road
I have always cautiously bragged that my back has held up pretty well to the strains put upon it so when recently I made an ordinary maneuver and my back went code red, which means it only hurts when I move, I was not so worried because I figured it would go away in short time. After a day, which is what I consider short time, and the pain was still there, I entered into the fortuitous convergence of my needing meds and actually coming upon them. A big man said, here, take these, only one knocked me out cold, so I took the whole bottle with me and drove back home. It can only be maturity that has me not popping them on the road as a late night driver.

When I got home I waited for a friend to come over but the friend had conflicting interests and so after a reasonable time of waiting I popped one. After more time I figured the friend's interest in coming over was more theoretical than actual so I popped a second one, deciding that consciousness is an overrated state, especially when you are alone and the night is well advanced. The two little pills made my back pain seem like something I had read about but never actually experienced.

In the morning I felt so stupid with pill haze yet still had pain in the lower back so I decided to write the whole day off to pill popping and bed rest. And anyway, it was raining a little so work on a metal roof seemed inadvisable. I dreamed about missles flying over America. I got out of bed in the evening and had a drink or two and that made me feel better than I could have imagined, because the prescription warned against alcohol mixing and the pills were stronger than other prescriptions with the same warning which I have summarily ignored. I then smoked a type of cigarette and arrived at a place that, although pleasant, seemed infused with too much knowledge of the artificiality of my agreeable state. I realized I only felt as good as I should feel, without meds.

So that's where I am now, on the road to wellness without meds. Of course, the road is long and the meds are many and although my back pain seems well removed I have received this morning a crick in my neck that makes me move stiff-looking, like I'm in a brace, so I'm not making comforting promises of abstinence to myself or any other fool.
- jimlouis 4-30-2005 5:20 pm [link] [1 comment]