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NEW ORLEANS - 5 AUGUST, 2001 - FULL MOON - Caio is moving into our flat this week, even as the moon turns. Think: Aries, Aries, Cancer. A new mix. My pal, JENNIFER BLUE predicts that the moon will be in Aquarius. Okay.
If you start the Web site here, you come to get a barometer -- even as I attempt to give you the best of the "on-the-ground" reporting on the planet. But I guess that doesn't matter to some of you as much as the personal chronicle of how I manage to (barely) survive.
We'll get back to me after I tell you about this fab edition.
I'm very pleased to welcome India writer N. GUNASEKARAN to this piece with a thoughtful and informative article on the recent summit between India and Pakistan in G21 ASIA. Check his debut out for yourselves. I'd also highly recommend BILL STEVENS second at bat in as many week's in RDR. Good stuff! The rest of us continue to do our soldierly best. You know what to expect. (I'm not linking because you've got the navigation bar right there to the right of this commentary. Duh!)
Tennessee Williams fans will recall that once in New Orleans there was a streetcar named "Desire." It went to a section of town of the same name. Nowadays, as the streetcar lines were mostly all torn up, we have a bus named Desire. It passes directly in front of the flat I share with Matt and Caio every single day, many times during the day. I wrote my friend Yona, in San Francisco, about that bus named Desire earlier this week.
Things continue to be rather dismal for me here in New Orleans. It seems that I've inherited that Bill Clinton thang of just not being able to catch a break. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Most recently my friend was sending me aid Priority Mail. Everywhere else in America, it takes two days. Not here. Not for me. I had hoped to have a pleasant weekend as the Louis Armstrong centennial is being celebrated down here. But that simply was not to be. Thank God I had this magazine to focus on and keep my mind off my troubles.
"So are you going to pay me for Wednesday," I asked, since after the first fifteen minutes I'd done most of the cooking.
"Huh?"
"You're going to pay me for working Wednesday night, right?"
"Uh. Yeah. Yeah sure. Payroll is on Thursday, come by anytime."
Thursday? We're talking all of $12 here! Why do I have to wait until Thursday?
Flakey. You're probably thinking I was better off not getting the job, since nothing the guy said could be relied upon. You're probably right, too. But that does nothing to ameliorate the current crisis, now does it?
Maybe that's why I'm thinking about giving up on New Orleans in the next couple of weeks and making my way to Oaxaca, in Mexico. I was planning to go to Oaxaca when I met Debbie, my ex-wife, those many years ago. Being with her shot that plan right out the window. I went on the 10 year sidestep that defined my life. Maybe I should get back onto the track I was before love intervened... There has to be some way to move out from under this cloud...
I've travelled 8489 kilometers (5,275 miles*) for this?
Only in recent years have I come to accept that A LOT of it was NOT my fault. I was just a child!
Anyway, that leads to my latest attempt at communications and assistance... I'm not sure how I should take the long ensuing silence or how to react to the actual response.
When it came, I explained to Matt that the situation was indeed dire, this time. And I shared for the first time all the pieces of the long story (almost seventy years of it) that I have managed to put together. Only most of it has come to light for me during the last decade, and especially on my first leg of this hegira.
When I had finished, he was as stunned as anyone privy to all of it -- including me, and I know that no one knows the full story -- has been. Rudell and I couldn't suss it all out, even comparing notes that last day I was in Bermuda. But no one can know all of any story, can we? Let me just say that the one I can't tell is stunning, convoluted, along the lines of Greek tragedy...
And now it appears to be approaching its final turn.
What am I to say, the biggest orphan in the whole tale, and the one some would call the most abused.
"I've gained an insight into you now, Dude!" Matt exclaimed. "Faced with all of this you started running and you've never stopped."
"That's one way to look at it," I said.
*The distance from Belgrade to New Orleans.
"Work like you don't need the money,
It seems that for every one step forward, there have to be two back. After applying for a job at the House of Blues, I noticed in the paper that a restaurant a block and half from my flat was looking for cooks. I hadn't done it in over 20 years, but I figured it was worth a shot. When I met the Chef, he said "Okay, I'll give you a shot. Come in tomorrow at 6. We'll work for about four hours, so you get to know the ropes." I was overjoyed. I spent the whole day waiting to go in. BUT when I got there, he said: "Well, we'll just work two hours tonight, so you can learn the menu." Okay. At the end of the two hours he said: "Well, a couple more guys have come in and I want to give them a shot, too. Then I'll call you all on Friday and let you know if you got the job or not." Huh? We had already talked rate of pay and everything, so I was little dumbfounded. When I didn't hear from him by Friday afternoon, I took the initiative to call. "Well," he said. "I didn't hire either of the other guys, but I don't think I'm hiring you either. I want to look around some more and see if I can find somebody with a higher skill set than you have."
Living Like an Orphan
I've talked about this one before... Where other people have their families to turn toward in times of crisis, I never have. I've covered most of that extensively here in the "Glass House." That's why it's reached the point that almost any communication with my family is akin to deciding to pick up an old Rubix Cube. Maybe you remember some of the combinations that create solutions, but more than likely it's like open a box full of puzzle pieces and just tossing them on the floor while your cats are playing. Pieces may get lost. The box became a "cat toy," so you have to guess what the finished picture is supposed to look like. That's been my history with my family. I've blamed myself for most of it, since I decided to run away from home rather than be shot dead.
THINGS I FEEL THIS WEEK
1. That my friend Laila's health will improve.
2. A profound and reinforced sense of my own orphanage in the world.
3. How easily the unjust can succeed and the dreamers be crushed.
Thanks for coming back this week.
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching..."
Rod
Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was also principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS magazine, which appears both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, reaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.
Rod lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, right now. The new home of the magazine. But he plans to return to Serbia next year.
He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.
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