Rod Amis - Unbound

NEW ORLEANS - 29 April, 2003: Words like bark, shush, bang, have been provided a name whose definition is words that sound like the sound they signify. I've always found that rather amusing because the word to describe these words is so obtuse. Onomatopoeia. It sounds like some form of cancer.

Speaking of cancer, I didn't mention last week while talking of my dreams of death, that I have these strange and dark growths that have appeared on one of my feet. When my (former) roommate, Ian, saw them, he imagined that it was melanoma and I joked that Black people don't get melanoma. But I agreed to see a doctor - sometime.

IN THE INSANE ASYLUM THEY NEVER LET YOU SLEEP. I have had to learn that the hard way. Luckily, I went to bed early last night. It turned out to be a wise move, as Ian woke me up at 3:30 a.m. after another of the perennial fights with Mary, insisting that I must go out and have a drink with him. Oh joy! Only one more day and any couch is a better part of the surf.

So I endured his insulting the bartender at Molly's and the cook at the Clover Grill. I endured his yelling at Mary on the telephone at 6:45 this morning. And I sat to write to you, my love, about this wonderful life.

He is hurling in the bathroom right now.

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IT MAKES PEOPLE AROUND ME WONDER that I can be so calm in the midst of this crisis. I have learned that worry never changes anything.

Rather than worry, I plan. People think that I am passive (or even passive-aggressive) but they are wrong. I have simply learned in this Earth School that being so-called "passionate" is a gigantic waste of useful energy. You could pick that up from Gary Cooper or Spencer Tracy if you paid attention to their style. Even Dean Martin exhibited the lesson, in his own way. Still waters run deep.

So I never yell, hardly even raise my voice. Histrionics are outside of my personal repertoire. I simply muddle through. I'm not always successful, as the current circumstance displays. But I don't have high blood pressure, either.

Mr. Valium, that's what they used to call me. I'd smile.

Jamaica, one of the bartenders at Molly's, said to me regarding Ian: "And you live with this guy?"

"Twice now," I responded.

"You must have a helluva lot of patience."

"The patience of Job," I said.

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30 April, 2003: It's an odd day. Ian is finally off to Baton Rouge, where he'll likely stay for a month before returning to New Orleans to find a new apartment. I'm off on the next leg of my couch-surfing hejira after cleaning his apartment. That is the last task with which I have been charged. He claims he will come down this weekend to leave money with Scott for my help with the move and for getting his place ready for the next tenant. I want to believe he will.

Meanwhile, I am here dealing with the landlord and a plumber, waiting for a key to be dropped off for the next place I shall crash and for Matt to drop by to pick up a kitchen table, end table and chairs I've inherited for my next place. Make your home, the gay psychic told me. I suppose I'm doing that ...

Even though the possible melanoma has thrown a new twist into the mix. Perhaps I shall die in New Orleans, as I dreamt.

From what I've read, the spots send out little sentries after multiplying in the area of your body where they grow. The sentries go to your lymph nodes, in this form of the disease, and then your internal organs. It's called nodular melanoma. As with the rashes I've gotten since childhood, the ones that have so often affected my hands as an adult, I seem to always have been susceptible to skin diseases. Thus, it is fitting that my final battle should be another disease of the skin.

Ian, to his credit, believes I am too sanguine about all this. He believes that I should have a biopsy next week. But I am too harried. I have agreed to have something done in about a month. The spots only began to appear a few months back; the prognosis on this species of melanoma is five years. I don't believe a few weeks will make that much difference.

In case you're wondering love, yes, this species of melanoma has a very good success rate. When it advances, most of its victims die. Being God's Own Fool, I have to believe I've noticed it early enough to be a survivor. If not, we all have to go sometime.

Ian, to his discredit, believes I'm sanguine because I'm afraid to accept the fact of my own dying. He doesn't realize, as Robin Miller did, that I've been dying for years now - I've just been doing so slowly. My sanguinity has to do with the fact that perhaps I shall finally have a definite idea of when the end will come. When I shall finally be released from a life that has been less than pleasing. There is a certain comfort in definition.

People say that you would do things differently if you knew that you only had X amount of time to live. I now know that that's a bunch of hooey. I can't see that I'll do anything differently if this is the last card. I'll muddle along as I have. I'll keep putting The World's Magazine out every week for you, my love, as I have these many years. I'll keep encouraging others to write and I'll go quietly, if being a publisher can be called quiet at all, into the night.

I don't see how I could do anything differently, considering my meager financial circumstances and the years I've invested in this endeavor.

I have always wanted to see Rio de Janeiro, yes, but I have seen so many of this planet's great cities that not seeing Rio will only be a tiny regret. I have had a rich life, my love.

Besides, I have always been curious about the white room.

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I STARTED THIS HABIT OF MINE OF WALKING when I was very young. As an adolescent, I use to walk for miles, hours long walks, watching the clouds, past cornfields planted by Mennonites, through forests so dense they overhung roads making leafy tunnels. I would walk down country roads and along highways. I would walk through woodland. This was the time that I would commune with God.

I wrote plays in my head, short stories, poetry, which I would later feverishly commit to paper. I would plot my assaults against my perceived enemies and my next campaigns in the universe open to a child.

My most fearful time in life, nearly three years ago, was when my malady was descending upon me and I felt that I was often too weak to walk. My youngest brother, Nicholas, told me during a telephone call that he was amazed that I had stopped walking then, knowing how much I loved and drew nourishment from the pastime, "I can't imagine you as other than a walking man, Rod," he said. "I have started walking now, because of you."

I was touched.

I am a walking man again, my dear. Urban walking is different, of course. But I still find pockets of beauty in it all. Sometimes, while walking, I find myself whistling jazz riffs that I compose in my head, playing out variations on a theme. Sometimes I just notice the women I pass or the other spirits of the air, flitting birds, the errant butterfly, New Orleans' ubiquitous dragonflies on the wing. I walk heavily when I have the five-pound pack carrying Victoria on my back.

I remember walking with you, down that beautiful Connecticut road that turned auburn, orange and yellow during the resplendent autumn, back in the day when people could still burn leaves and the smell of smoke was in the air, our conversations, being young and in love for the first time. Skunks used to haunt that road. Remember? Their musky smell was usually thick on the wind. Those are among my favorite remembered walks.

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3 May, 2003: MY WALKING REVERIE was interrupted by my duties at Ian's apartment and the continuing drama that seems to surround he and Mary's relationship. They got back together and broke up two more times over the past two days and I finally moved the last of his belongings into her place. I wish them luck.

As for me, I have moved to two different couches in the last few days. This latter one seems to be the one I shall occupy for at least a couple weeks. Meanwhile, I have also found a (temporary) job. It's back to construction again until such time as one of my other leads pans out or I end up on the opposite side of one New Orleans bar or another. Maybe the one with Lisa. It seems likely. I have a feeling about her ...

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VICTORIA DOESN'T SEEM TO BE A HAPPY CAMPER these days. Ever since I loaded Jaguar (the latest version of OS X), she has been behaving peevishly. If I put her to sleep, she crashes when I attempt to awaken her. There a programs that won't parse the same way in X's version of the Classic environment. I think she feels that things were just fine as they've been and is exhibiting an almost human resistance to the changes. If she continues this way, I shall take the hint and give up on X on this machine.

A BIT OF RECENT GOOD NEWS is that Viking/Penguin seems to have finally forgiven me for panning that Lives-series book of theirs last year and is again including me on their list of reviewers. They've sent along a copy of the new Jasper Fforde release to review for you this month. Expect that I shall finish it in a couple weeks, my dear.

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FASHIONABLE HAS BEEN ATTEMPTING to get together with me for over a week. She invited me to her place yesterday for lunch. I didn't make the date because I had other things going on, particularly this last move. It was also high on my agenda to see Lisa again, to get some sense on her progress toward our working together.

I am less than ever sure of what to make of Fashionable. I find her almost impossible to read. We speak to each other, at least on the telephone, every few days. Still she's like a moving target; I cannot get a bead on her. I can't suss out if you looks for me to act as mentor, temporary inamorata or what. It's troubling because I consider myself a decent detective of the human psyche. I have at least learned that Fashionable is nearly eight years older than I believed her to be. That makes her insubstantiality even more puzzling. Nonetheless, according to my rule of thumb, she's still so much younger than I as to not seriously be "in range".

I find it odd that women in their thirties seem plentiful and willing while those I seek, the ones in their forties and preferably late forties, are a abundant as hen's teeth. They certainly can't all be married or dead.

Which brings me back to the subject of Lisa. She's the only one of the women here who I didn't designate with a nickname. And she got me TOTALLY TRASHED again tonight. I left my cigarette case behind. Some people said I had done that "Freudianly." I had to go back to her bar and then there we were and the shots were flying and I was Charles Bukowski or Hunter Thompson in the cushioned world of your best cinematic and hallucinatory night/morning. (It happens with Lisa a lot.) I'm willing to defy the credo that "How many dudes have you ever known who had a date with a chick named Lisa?" but suddenly it becomes true. I don't know any. And still she invites me back to see her.

And I say, like Ulysses, "I just want someone to tie me to the mast of this ship I'm on."

And she says, "Someone else quoted that part of the story to me before ..." indicating that she knows already that she is a siren.

Bang! Boom! Whap! Onomatopoeia.

Things I Need This Week

1. Cold, hard cash.

2. A new bar for The Rod Show.

3. The roadmap to my Separate Country.

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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

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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.

Last 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 left the pantheon of New Orleans bartenders and still doesn't know when he'll have a "permanent residence" that he likes.. He's decided that maybe it's time to be an entrepreneur again. Working with "employees" and Bosses doesn't suit his temperament. 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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