-> MY GLASS HOUSE
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NEW ORLEANS - 19 June, 2002: I began last week's entry in this on-going diary of my travels (travails) saying that I had moved "toward" the French Quarter. I misspoke. The correct word to use was "to."
I am now working as a dishwasher at a "gourmet" pizza restaurant and counting pennies. I live directly above a popular bar that offers live (loud) music seven nights a week and directly across the street from another popular bar that also offers live (loud) music many nights and, most definitely, on weekends. Local drunks and the tourists like to stand outside of these bars on the street corners during the band breaks. Like all drunks, they talk loudly. I get to hear all the wisdom they can spout in the upper decibels. I get to hear their life stories and their angers.
Listening to them, I wish I only lived in the quiet of this ether. Am I the only person in America who still appreciates SILENCE?
26 June, 2002: When I wrote the entry above, I firmly believed that I might be able to launch this edition of the magazine by 19 June. It came and went and I changed the update date on the cover to the 21st. Then to the 24th. On Monday I was afraid that I wouldn't manage to finish all the work and find a way to launch until Friday. So it goes. I did announce on the TOC page that we'd be on an irregular schedule this summer. If only I'd known how irregular that schedule and my own life would become!
As the post-partum depression that followed my course for the NSSJ set in last week, I let Barbara know that I felt this time New Orleans had finally managed to suck me into its black vortex. I said I was not sure when I'd be rejoining the world again, if ever. I'm still not sure as I write this. I have a few (sketchy) plans but no solid prospects to speak of. I shall try to catch up with some of my e-mail when I upload this current edition of the site. I shan't have time to read all of it right away so I've already created a few e-mail filters to weed out the flotsam and jetsam so I can concentrate on the truly meaningful missives.
Dragana should be completing her series of documentaries very soon, so it will be a comfort to be able to "talk" with her again. Even Terry will have checked his e-mail by this time, so his humor will also be tonic. He lived in New Orleans once, so he may have a few new recommendations to make.
Bill e-mailed to say that he'd been thinking to write me that the new California adventure might not be the best of ideas, so he was pleased to see that I'd reached the same conclusion without his own input.
It has rained here each of the last few days. Our rains here in Nawlins are of a decidedly tropical variety. The humidity doesn't seem to decrease at all, the heat abates only a little.
I've been thinking maybe I should become a hot dog vendor like that character in A Confederacy of Dunces... or perhaps I should drive one of those mule-drawn carriages that take the tourists through the Quarter.
Life Is A Banquet
Two editions back, I did my "reflection/reflective hands" cover featuring photos of Sophia Loren and Juliette Lewis. I had this feeling that, being a person always accused of being too subtle, most readers wouldn't get the effect or what it had to say about my personal design sensibilities. I doubted anyone would even see the beauty in pairing those two photos from the scores I'd looked at for that cover.
What gets me about thoughts like the foregoing is that I literally spend as many hours these days on the cover of the GENERATOR 21 as I do on almost the entire rest of any particular edition. I take the cover too seriously, I suppose. Most people use it like any entryway -- especially those who aren't on our Mailing List and get direct links to their favorite articles -- and usually don't comment on changes or (what I might consider) improvements.
I ameliorate my sense of being ignored in that work by reminding myself that most people don't comment about the cover designs of print magazines, either. It's considered too gay.
Over time I've migrated some of the influences of the cover back into these inside pages, some of you may have noticed. I'm hoping that the elements I've chosen are the best ones for this feast.
As I've said in this space before, my all-time fictive heroine is Rosalind Russell's version of Auntie Mame in the film of the same name. I've always wanted to believe that Mame was correct about life being a banquet and I've tried to show that in the effort I put into my multiplicitous endeavors. I share Mame's obsession with showing her "Little Love(s)" the richness and beauty in the otherwise cold world around them. And especially the possibilities that opening one's mind to cultures and ideas foreign to one's own upbringing and background can afford. That, in and of itself, has been like swimming upstream most of the time. The price has always been very high.
The way I've handled that price is to remind myself that when I shuffle off this mortal coil, probably in a potter's field somewhere, I'll be doing it entirely alone. It won't matter one whit whether some one thought I was a great guy or a jerk. "You don't take nothin' with you but your soul," as John Lennon sang. And as far as that accounting goes, I've spread more love than hate in the world. I've even helped a few people's careers and given some (often considered brutal) insights about what's important and what's merely "fronting" and window dressing.
A common thread I've found among the most misguided people I've encountered on this planet is the belief that their "subjective reality", their own personal experiences, were as valid as our shared consensus about the world. People who espouse this view are not simply cultural and moral relativists, they are afflicted with an extreme form of hubris. It's come as no surprise, therefore, to learn that they are historically ignorant. They have no idea of the thoughts and insights of the many generations who passed this way before them, and like some interviewee on "Jay Walking" on the "Tonight Show" seem almost proud of their ignorance. The problem, from my perspective at least, is that they don't understand that Jay's smirks and winks don't include them and their ignorance. Exactly the opposite.
The most overbearing of these types of people isolate themselves in their trivial pursuits while vehemently maintaining that they revile how "stupid" the rest of us are and rant about how they "hate" people. That's the worst of it, I guess. Who in his right mind would say that he hated people?
That's a shallow and careless, thoughtless thing to exclaim, by my lights.
But then shallowness is as popular as the mall.
Reflection and rumination are too underrated in a society that fears its own silences.
THINGS I WANT THIS WEEK
1. To develop a new outlook on the possibilities afforded.
2. Employment that I can value and that values me.
3. A new passion to pursue.
Thanks for coming back this week."Work like you don't need the money,
"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 appeared 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.
This year he worked as Assistant to the General Manager of a Big Easy company that does restaurants and nightclubs. (Think: The Boy.) Oh yeah, Rod's Day Job is working construction. Mostly renovations of old New Orleans structures, houses and now a bar. Sometimes he designs Web sites for other people so that he can get his creative juices flowing the way he can't at a staid publication like this one. And he's been the instructor in Editing for Internet Publications at the Novi Sad School of Journalism in Yugoslavia. In his spare time, he chases women. 
Rod lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, right now. He wants out so bad he can taste it. He wants to live somewhere civilized when he grows up. Wish him Luck.
He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.
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