Well, I don't really want to know
I just hold on the best I can.
And if I fall down,
I'm gonnah get back up
It'll be all right, it'll be okay!
I'm gonnah make my world a better place..." -- Keb Mo

Rod Amis - Unbound

NEW ORLEANS - 14 October, 2002: I have been living days that seem like weeks. It seems the deeper you venture into the French Quarter the more layered things become. It is as though the ghosts who walk amongst us insinuate their own unfinished dramas into the lives around them. If you are fleeing drama, the Quarter is no place to live.

So much is different here by dint of the cramped and ancient architecture and the fact that lives are carried on chock-a-block with this city's major industry: debauchery. Trash pickup here in the French Quarter, for example, doesn't happen at intervals of days, but daily. There is no room for dumpsters, so the local sanitation crews come in every day, except Sunday, to carry away all the refuge of homes and bars and strip clubs. Sometime you think they should be dragging bodies away, as well. After 5:00 p.m. the restaurants and bars, flats and condos, deposit the refuge of another day's play and commerce on the sidewalks to be hauled away.

The dead soldiers of a single day's activity wrapped in plastic and cardboard are carted off in giant, noisome trucks amid the patter of shouting -- almost chanting -- crews. Phalanxes of hookers re-emerge on Bourbon Street, music fills the air, the night turns blue. It starts all over again to the tinkle of ice cubes and the cadence of dance bands. Maybe that explains my raging hormones.

I've been working extra shifts at the bar these last two weeks, which has divided my days oddly. I've not had more than one day off at a time, then back behind the bar for the latest version of The Rod Show. "What's your pleasure? ... Uno mas? ... Care for another -- and another -- and another ... Thank you, sir ... Of course we have music. There's music every night ... Care for another? ... Thank you, ma'am ... Ready for the next one?... Care for another?"

A bike delivery person for one of the local restaurants that ferry food out of the Quarter to the surrounding condos and apartments drops into the bar. She asks to use the phone after ordering her first cocktail. She tells her boss to call her at the bar's phone number if a delivery has to be made. She orders another cocktail.

Eighty percent of the people I know are living from tips, I realize. Most of the people of the Quarter serve drinks or food. We compete for your dollars just like whores.

My particular trick is to get people to come back to the bar day after day. My survival depends upon it, no matter how much destruction it might cause in other parts of their lives. Care for another?

As they succumb to the dramas and temptations that the alcohol fuels, I listen attentively or make a joke or offer sympathy and consolation -- and then encourage them to have another.

There is always chatter about relationships, or sex or what dumbass stunt somebody pulled after they had too much to drink. So my routine is either laughter (sometimes rueful or knowing) or consolation and encouragement. Then I encourage them to buy another drink.

Normally abominable with names, behind the bar I remember each of my customers' names, what drink or drinks they prefer, who they are married to or sleeping with, the details of our last conversation. That's part of the job, it's knowledge as important to me as the schematic of a manifold is to a mechanic. It's not the liquor I'm about, mixology is easy; it's the personal story of each person I need to seduce into staying on their bar stool. Curtis says that when you are behind the bar you are in charge. You are not a server, you are the new sheriff in town. I thought: The analogous position is that of Social Director on the Lusitania.

While other people are planning the night's festivities, or settling in after dinner for an evening of reading, perhaps, television, a movie, I'm just having my shift drink or leaving the bar. My clientele awaits or some woman who has wandered in earlier and decided to stick around. There are other day shift bartenders just getting off their shifts and eager to grouse or carouse. There is music blaring from every club on my walk home and women strutting in their evening finery, from in and out of town, ready to have a good time. Maybe that explains my raging hormones and these days that seem like weeks.

The last time someone counted, there were over two hundred and twenty bars in the French Quarter of New Orleans, an area of only 2 square miles comprised of small, Old World style blocks.

---

" ... Woke up this mornin'" ... Fans of either Alabama 3 (A3) or the HBO show "The Sopranos" will recognize that reference, used here again.

There's also that joke about creating the perfect Blues song.

I'm certainly the guy with the " ... blue moon in your eyes ... " even if my Mom didn't tell me I was the Chosen One. What's a break?

The A3 song takes on a different resonance now that we have that sniper in Maryland. If there is a typically American (as in United States) phenomenon, whomever is doing this fits. I couldn't imagine that kind of madness in Bhagdad, Cairo, Geneva or London. But we are a country born and bred on violence, especially hateful personal violence. So you know what I think about the National Rifle Association right now.

Sure, we'll sell you the guns, you "My God-given Second Amendment rights" wingnuts. But you have to make your own damned bullets!

Pardon my mini-rant, but there is NO GOOD REASON to sell someone an Assault Rifle (AR) or a handgun in a civilized society. NONE. Not one.

If you think it's your Constitutional Right to own a weapon then you are constitutionally unsound. Period.

I condemn you to attend every funeral of a child who died "accidentally" discharging one of these weapons. I condemn you to be pall-bearers for every child killed by an enraged parent, with a gun, who claims "I brought you into this world, so I take you out!" I condemn you to caring for their grieving families. I condemn you to care for every single wife shot by her husband in rage and every single person who isn't a criminal -- as you always use in your defense -- who lost a relative while cleaning one of your God-given weapons. You jerks!

If you spent more time fondling your wife instead of your weapon, we might not have this problem.

Speaking as a person who had to flee his home, as a teenager, rather than be SHOT TO DEATH, I welcome your flames!

---

16 October, 2002: SOMEONE OUT THERE VALUES my estimable skills as a wordsmith. My colleague, Binyavanga Wainaina, is developing a new magazine in Kenya and has commissioned me to do a piece for their debut issue. I spent a few hours yesterday morning, before reporting to the bar, working on a first draft. I plan to get it out to him this week, before putting together this edition. It felt good to do some journalism again instead of focusing on other people's writing and its presentation.

I am fighting becoming maudlin about my literary prospects this week. I met a new writer from Korea who gave me some of her work. It was quite well-done, in the sense of steak, both harsh and floral. In some passages you could see the gears grinding behind the engine. I used to write like that when I was younger. Now I'm into the Spencer Tracy mode of not letting you see me do it.

A new humor piece comes in from a writer in New York that makes me chuckle. But there are sentences that don't conclude and ideas left uncompleted. I give him the choice of going back and editing himself or leaving the chore for me.

Despite what some of you might think, each article you read here, with few exceptions, passes back and forth between the authors and myself a couple times. Sometimes more. The hand-holding and cajoling is part of my beat. Only this Glass House gets short shrift -- and that shows.

I've become resigned to (some) people thinking that I don't spend any time editing or designing this magazine. Those people don't do a magazine themselves every week. Joe Montana was always getting advice about how to be a better quarterback.

A DILEMMA I OFTEN HAVE in this chair presents itself when I'm faced with a piece for which I have an extreme dislike. Each of us has his/her own preferences and prejudices. So it becomes a competition between my impulse to be encouraging to new writers and that of knowing what I like (and like to see in this magazine.) I struggle with this issue, frankly, more than I'd care to and almost always come down on the side of encouragement.

I know that there are those who feel I'm too lenient sometimes, but I consider that part of the price one has to pay to develop (a) new talent. Sometimes it pays off.

---

20 October, 2002: ENOUGH ABOUT ME for this week, Voyeurs. There are some issues I think you need to consider as we approach the midterm elections here in the United States. So this next part of my thinking is exclusively for the people in the United States -- admittedly only a percentage of our readership - who come here every week.

Consider this:

1. Rosie O'Donnell and Penney Marshall flacked K-Mart as a place with people like you, average folks, who knew you needed a good value. Rosie and Penney were nowhere to be found, of course, when K-Mart filed bankruptcy this year and laid over 20,000 average folks off work with ZERO severance pay. "Take a hike, Loser."
   
   
2. The corporate scandals, cheated investors and devastated pension funds are bad enough. But LISTEN: the number of Americans living below the poverty level has increased by nearly TWO MILLION PEOPLE during this first two years of the Bush administration. Does His Fraudulency feel your pain? (Yes, that was a rhetorical question.) Wonder why the White House doesn't want to talk about the economy?
   
   
3. Let's talk WalMart. Paragon of The American Way, right? Wrong. Employees in THIRTY STATES are suing WalMart in a class action for forcing them to punch the time clock after they put in 40 hours and then keep working off the clock. "No overtime, pal. You are working for the good of the company and you'd better keep on doin' it if you want to keep your job."

   And you thought, as I did, that Lincoln freed the slaves.
   
   

4. Two years ago, every paper from USA TODAY to the New York Times wanted to celebrate how American relief agencies were embracing Somalian refugees. What a photo op! Welcome to The American Dream, poor oppressed immigrants.

   Oh-oh! This just in: The Portland (Maine, USA) Press Herald reported on 8 October of this year on protests by Somali immigrants. The protests were provoked by an Open Letter from Lewiston, Maine, Mayor Laurier Raymond asking Somali immigrants to give his city "some breathing room".

   Somali community leaders noted that the Mayor had not made the same request of other immigrant groups. (You can read the story online at this Web address: http://www.pressherald.com/news/state/021008somalis.shtml

We've been saying it all year, Kids. As editor of this little Web rag, I have to say it again: VOTE THE BASTARDS OUT!

I don't enjoy composing rants because, In My Not-So-Humble Opinion, you take a rant as the exercise itself and not a Call to Action. You take a certain visceral satisfaction out of having your thoughts validated and consider that the end of the process.

BUT IT IS NOT. There is always a next stage to the process that a rant is meant to begin. That stage is for you to act upon our shared feelings of distaste, dissatisfaction and disgust. In this society, for now, that next stage is civic involvement. That next stage is acting on your discontent and making it felt at the highest levels.

If the editorials you find in this space and throughout the magazine are about anything, they are about being a catalyst, an agent for generating the kind of energy that will make you want to join in the process of change.

You can make a difference.

When you stop believing that, you contribute to the end of the world.

Yes, I know. I have sent you this same message from too many little kitchens in too many parts of the planet. But I keep doing it because that is what I believe and hope --- HOPE --- that you will begin to believe it, too.

The name of this magazine, "G21", is short for "Generator 21" -- generating energy, in other words, for this new century. A generator is only as good as the actions it provokes.

I am counting on you to help me believe that this effort has been worth it. You know in your hearts what needs to be done.

What I Shall Work On This Week

1. To get my hand back in by writing for other publications again.

2. Finding that Writer's Garrett.

3. Mo' Money.

---

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

Search www.g21.net [ ] Our Link Partners the Web for

ROD AMIS has published this magazine since 1990. It first appeared as a hardcopy 'Zine. In March, 1996, he launched it here on the Web. Rod was a Contributing Editor at Suite101.com, where he wrote the " 'Net Publishing" feature. His work has been featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, NRV8, and at WebLab's Reality Check site. Rod was also a contributing writer on technology for Faulkner Information Services. He wrote on Web issues for MethodFive.com's Hyper newsletter.

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 had Day Jobs working construction. Mostly renovations of old New Orleans structures, houses and 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. Right now our Resident Philosopher has joined the pantheon of New Orleans bartenders, works construction when he can find the right fit and still doesn't know when he'll have a "permanent residence" that he likes.. In his spare time, he chases women in the manner that a fly pursues a spider.

Rod lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. This town is eroding his normal sense of driven purpose. 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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