Rod Amis - Unbound

NEW ORLEANS - 14 September, 2003: The past is always more glorious, safer, more heroic, more manageable than the confusing and unruly present. This is so because we have had the time to rationalize the events and concerns of the past. When we think back on the incidents of our lives, they become part of a revisionist narrative meant to explain their result: the person we are today, the author of a personal history. When relating our pasts to others, as in done by politicians and moguls in "authorized" memoirs and autobiographies (as opposed to "unauthorized" biographies), we have the benefit of rationalizing everything done or said as being part of the larger result. We never reveal what we actually thought or felt at the time because it would only mar the narrative and reveal that we were as confused and uncertain in that distant present as we are in this one.

No matter where we are in the timeline of existence, the future is always either filled with hopes or threats.

I think the foregoing is why I have devoted most of this diaristic journal to what I think and feel right now. It cheats me of the chance for rationalizations later on. Every week, exactly what was on my mind and what I feel is there for everyone and myself to see. I can't come back ten years hence and claim, "I did this because of that..." So this effort is also an exercise in my atavistic attempt to uncover "The Truth".

One of my favorite movie lines of all time is mouthed by Jeff Goldblum in the Lawrence Kasdan film "The Big Chill":

"You can go for weeks without sex, but you can't go a single day without a rationalization."

So I am not saying that this diary is completely without rationalizations. There are many, but fewer than would be superimposed over the story of myself given the benefit of recounting it years after-the-facts.

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LAST WEEK, I had planned to segue from my general comments about the areas of the world where GENERATOR 21 has been most successful into a specific discussion about my concern with the AIDS epidemic. Deadline pressure - meaning I had not completed my exposition on the topic and was committed to launching on the 11th, as promised - precluded that.

Long-time readers will recall that this magazine was the direct result of the AIDS epidemic, in the sense that the death of a personal friend from that scourge prompted the birth of this effort. The "Reader's Digest Version" is that I went back and read Steven Bland's letters to me during the last two years of his life, many of them worshipful - more so than I deserved - and took them as an indictment of my own literary and artistic effort to that date. (Even recent readers are aware of how many of my actions are motivated by an overweening sense of guilt and shame.) His image of me as the courageous scribe willing to cast comfort to the winds in favor of my art prompted me to attempt to become more of the man that someone on his deathbed would say they admired.

Out of that came the journal you are reading today.

Steven's two year debilitation, his weekly, handwritten letters to me over the last two years of his life, visiting him at Lennox Hill Hospital in New York scant months before he died, brought the AIDS epidemic home to me with an immediacy that no other experience had. That is why, after his mother called me at the newspaper where I was then employed to inform me of his death, I went back and read every one of his letters.

It was a searing experience that marks everything I have done subsequently.

During my period of catching up on The New Yorker during the past two weeks, I came across Michael Specter's excellent article, "The Vaccine" [3 February, 2003] in which this passage is found reporting on his visit to Seth Berkley, who runs the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI):

... His office has a spectacular view of the city, and its one free wall is covered with a giant map of the world. "You have to ask yourself what on earth the people on this planet are doing," he replied, in a typical burst of unhinged honesty. He limped over to the map. "if you stand back and think about what the world will look like a hundred years from now, and you look at even the most conservative numbers, you will see that in the end only a vaccine will matter. Nothing else. The projections are that bad - in Africa, India, China, Russia - yet the world has just not gotten serious enough. Even now, we are still fooling around on the edges."

A lot has been said and written about the problem of AIDS in Africa, especially during the last few years, if for no other reason than that the African continent has borne the brunt of the deaths. But that is about to change. As Mr. Berkley predicts, we are only beginning to see the devastation due for the Asian continent, particularly India, China and Russia. The projected numbers there are far worse than those of the Black Plague, they make the Holocaust look like a cakewalk. Yet, when we look at governmental budgets for the problem they are slimmer than Kate Moss. Pharmaceutical companies aren't going into vaccine research in any serious manner because there simply isn't a foreseeable profit in it - and they are in the business of profits not altruism.

Which only leaves organizations like IAVI, who are in the unenviable position of having to go to Third World countries and ask them to encourage their people to be guinea pigs, on the one hand, and on the other they have to go to organizations like the Gates Foundation (which has, laudably, been a leader in this area) cup in hand.

I bring these facts up because even today, in the year 2003, I run into young adults - both hetero- and homosexual - in their late twenties and early thirties who don't remember the last wave of deaths in this country. They didn't lose personal friends or hear about the devastation of the artistic community during the late 'eighties and early 'nineties. So they say to me, "Oh, that's something that happens to other people. I don't worry about H.I.V. or AIDS. I still have sex the old-fashioned way."

Because I am decades older than these people are, after my jaw drops, I forego the lecture. I simply suggest that they look at the data out there on unprotected sex. I don't want to come off as preachy, after all. But I am quietly appalled. I've been talking to living proof of the next upsurge in the number of deaths here and abroad.

AND, as mentioned in reference to the Magic Johnson interview here in New Orleans during the Essence Festival, even people of my generation in the Black community here in America are taking a laissez faire attitude to the epidemic. The Black community has always had a high level of denial about AIDS anyway but now people in their fifties are being both sexually active and cavalier in their behaviors. For a community already burdened with shattered families, a biased criminal justice system and high youth mortality, that kind of behavior is simply suicidal.

I encourage you to read the Specter article. It explains how the future of humanity could depend on the blood of group of prostitutes in Kenya. We are becoming more interdependent every day...

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16 September, 2003: DURING MY DATING YEARS, a girlfriend I had confided to me that I reminded her, physically, of a lion. Before I decided whether or not to feel flattered, I asked her if lions were well endowed.

"Some are, some aren't" she responded.

"Then I wish I reminded you of a horse," I cracked wise.

A few years later, when I created my first fictional detective, I punned and named him Harry Trotter.

That was an anecdote apropos of nothing.

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My being the story, as in the article about my case in New Orleans' Gambit continues to have unexpected consequences.

A friend dropped over two evenings ago, after I'd returned from downloading my recent e-mails, to inform me that my name was appearing in the local paper for the second time in three weeks. I was curious as to why.

This time it was the "Letters" page. Bill Purcell's e-mail, which he had copied me in on and which I put on last edition's VOX POPULI page was there. Unexpectedly, there was also a missive from my former Editor (Andover News Network) and good friend Robin Miller. Those of you on the nerdy side probably know Robin as "roblimo" on the Slashdot Web site. He also edits Newsforge.com. Good guy. He has written a number of articles for GENERATOR 21 over the years, too. He wrote to the Gambit:

I am the same age as Rod Amis. I am white, and I have known him for a good number of years. ("Reasonable Suspicion?" Sept. 2). Indeed, he worked for me during the dot-com boom. More than once, I have handed him small sums of money, and he has handed me similarly small sums. These transactions were all on the order of "Hey, I'm going to the corner store. Want me to pick something up for you?" Friends and co-workers do this sort of thing all the time - unless, apparently, they are New Orleans police officers.

Rod is the most unlikely drug dealer imaginable. He is a quiet, bookish person - a writer, not a thug. A police officer who wastes time arresting someone like Rod while criminals are out and about is wasting taxpayers' money, as is any prosecutor who wants to put him on trial. Perhaps New Orleans has a huge budget surplus. Bradenton, Fla., where I live, certainly doesn't have law enforcement money to squander on such tomfoolery.

I was amused to see myself described as "bookish", a word that isn't bandied about much these days - perhaps because there aren't many of us bookish people left.

The same evening that I read Robin's kind letter, I also spoke with Katy Reckdahl, the reporter who wrote the article. She told me that an editor at the Gambit was interested in having me write for them, on spec. I plan to submit my first story to them in a couple weeks. I joked to an acquaintance here: "Just goes to show you: I've been writing professionally, off and on, for nearly thirty years now; but to get my first writing gig in New Orleans, I had to get arrested first."

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MY JOB GIVES ME ISOLATION, right now I'm the only person working on the house. Steve and I trust each other, having worked together on projects over the last two years. It gives me time to think, it provides a Zen of work that adds a balance to my days.

The work now is the tedious dismantling of things in preparation for rebuilding. I'm prepping for the electricians, taking out the final walls, removing fixtures, doing the grunt work of filling huge orange dumpsters with broken sheetrock, fiberglass insulation, broken wood, cinder blocks and taking variable moments to try appreciating the beauty of the day(s). I labor in silence. I grunt and groan and pound and pull alone.

On some projects, working on the library shelves and cabinets of the house, for example - one of those with the wheeled ladder to moves along the stacks - I feel like an Old World craftsman, working slowly and meticulously by hand. I take pride in my work. It would amaze many of my closest friends that I am so good at detailed, hand work. But renovating houses has become part of my life since I moved to this old city. Some people think I'm good at it, so they hire me again.

It's good honest work that a man can look back on and know he has left something behind that bears the imprint of his skill.

I have always been a working class man at heart. I shall probably always be...

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I went to Checkpoint Charlie's, at the corner of Decatur and Esplanade, to do my laundry tonight, after work, and make the Final Payment to my attorney. I frequent Checkpoint's (as we call it here in my circle) because I have a great deal of respect for the manager, Steve. With few exceptions, most of my other friends revile the place. But I think Steve does an exemplary job with the resources he has at hand. That he has been such a consummate professional for seven years at the helm of this place speaks volumes to his skill. It also says that he understands the concept of moderation more than most of his patrons or subordinates. He's a great juggler. He's a laid-back guy. I consider him one of, if not the best, bar managers in New Orleans. I've told many people that over the last year.

My solicitor/advocate, Evelyn Adams, has gone through a difficult move, is applying for work with the District Attorney's office on Thursday, and seems to be having a hard time of things. When she arrived to receive her money, she did not look well. I am glad that our time together is nearly over. While I'm deep in debt and dirt poor, I lead a more "stable" life than my advocate does. She brags to people that I am her first innocent client. I worry for her more often than not. I am glad that she has been so supportive of me, and hope that she does get a "real" job, but I also worry about the influence of the lifestyle she leads.

Other people worry about my lifestyle, of course. I am a great one for straddling worlds. In the midst of the dot-com boom, I was a highly paid columnist for multiple publications and a nay-sayer about the hype these publications believed they had hired me to reinforce. Here, I bartended while denigrating the very job for being a form of abject prostitution and pouring gasoline on a raging fire, while also advocating for the "life of the mind" - something few in New Orleans contemplate, if they could translate the concept into something acceptable in the bon temps roulez philosophy at all. So I am used to having people wonder about the mission of "Truth" I am on. They wonder about my bohemianism and iconoclasm. My spots.

As Edward Said has said more eloquently than I, being a dissident intellectual is putting oneself in a state of perpetual exile.

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18 September, 2003: ON POLITICS, I have to say that I've always enjoyed the satirical bent of New York Times Opinion writer Maureen Dowd, even while acknowledging that she is not above taking cheap shots. I got more than a few chuckles out of her 14 September article. She quotes recent polls showing that Albert Gore still ties His Fraudulency among Americans as their choice for President of these United States of America and lists a litany of reasons why that remains so. I can only suggest that you read it for yourself.

Meanwhile, I found the Independent (of the United Kingdom)'s, Robert Fisk more than exercised in his screed for Counterpunch's 11 September edition. Listen:

Who could ever have conceived of an American president calling the world to arms against "terrorism" in "Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza"? Gaza? What do the miserable, crushed, cruelly imprisoned Palestinians of Gaza have to do with the international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania?

Nothing, of course. Neither does Iraq have anything to do with 11 September. Nor were there any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, any al-Qa'ida links with Iraq, any 45-minute timeline for the deployment of chemical weapons nor was there any "liberation".

No, the attacks on 11 September have nothing to do with Iraq. Neither did 11 September change the world. President Bush cruelly manipulated the grief of the American people--and the sympathy of the rest of the world--to introduce a "world order" dreamed up by a clutch of fantasists advising the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld.

The Iraqi "regime change", as we now know, was planned as part of a Perle-Wolfowitz campaign document to the would-be Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu years before Bush came to power. It beggars belief that Tony Blair should have signed up to this nonsense without realising that it was no more nor less than a project invented by a group of pro-Israeli American neo-conservatives and right-wing Christian fundamentalists.

But even now, we are fed more fantasy. Afghanistan--its American-paid warlords raping and murdering their enemies, its women still shrouded for the most part in their burqas, its opium production now back as the world's number one export market, and its people being killed at up to a hundred a week (five American troops were shot dead two weekends ago) is a "success", something which Messrs Bush and Rumsfeld still boast about. Iraq--a midden of guerrilla hatred and popular resentment--is also a "success". Yes, Bush wants $87bn to keep Iraq running, he wants to go back to the same United Nations he condemned as a "talking shop" last year, he wants scores of foreign armies to go to Iraq to share the burdens of occupation--though not, of course, the decision-making, which must remain Washington's exclusive imperial preserve.

The man sounds a bit upset to me.

But, by my lights, he wasn't as upset as Gary Leupp in the same journal on 13 September. Professor Leupp teaches in the Department of History at Tufts University and is the coordinator of their Asian Studies Program. Here's a snippet of what he had to say in Counterpunch's 13 September edition:

"[The sponsor of Sept. 11] was Saddam Hussein. Ever since the Gulf War, he's been trying to get back at us. Maybe it was Osama bin Laden's people, but my feeling is it was Saddam Hussein behind it. He footed the money." -- Spc. Clint Brookins (23, Clio, Michigan), fighting back in Baghdad (AP, Sept. 8)

In late August, the number of US troops killed since May 1 reached 138, the same number that had died between the attack begun March 20 and Bush's triumphant declaration that the war was over. This was a depressing statistic (and it of course rises every couple days), but the Washington Post reported an equally depressing one September 6. Two years after 9-11, 69% of Americans surveyed said they believed that it was at least likely that Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

I shouldn't be surprised. National Geographic reports that 85% of young Americans (18-24) cannot identify Iraq, Afghanistan or Israel on an unmarked map. 56% cannot find the Indian subcontinent, dangling there so conspicuously into none other than the Indian Ocean. Only 19% can name four countries that acknowledge having nuclear weapons. Fortunately, a whopping 70% can identify the Pacific Ocean, but that's probably just because it's the biggest thing on the planet. These numbers are not just embarrassing but dangerous, because in such a sea of ignorance swim Bush's neocons, buoyed by it, empowered by it to send U.S. troops to their deaths in a war to conquer and occupy a nation that had nothing to do with 9-11. Repeat: nothing to do with 9-11. Repeat: nothing to do with 9-11. Repeat: nothing to do with 9-11. Repeat: nothing to do with 9-11.

But the only way to maintain adequate domestic support for the ongoing war in Iraq is to promote that fiction, which means to deliberately and cynically exploit ignorance. Worse, to exploit racism and religious intolerance, in the form of "essentialism," the notion that all members of a particular community (in this case Muslim Arabs and anyone the benighted thinks might look like one) are essentially the same, for all practical purposes. All working together, collectively, "to get back at us," as the good soldier puts it. All culpable for the sins of their members...

I received a copy of a letter from another concerned professor, this time at a state college, along these same lines in my "IN" box this week. You'll find it on our VOX POPULI page in this edition.

I don't think I have to comment on any of the above items, submitted for your consideration, because you already know my thoughts on these issues. All I can do is paraphrase the now-historic question that Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan asked in the 1980 election campaign debates: Do you feel that we as a nation are better off today than you were four years ago?

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So let's move on the to circus in California. I received an e-mail from the Arianna Huffington's campaign telling me that she is going on with the fight, though the courts haven't concluded whether the gubernatorial election will happen in October of this year or March of next.

How precious. This gets sillier by the moment and only glaringly shows the depths to which the consumerist version of representative democracy have fallen. I still encourage friends in my former home state to choose Arianna, but that doesn't mean I don't think this entire exercise is a travesty.

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21 September, 2003: I sit listening to one of my favorite works by American composer Philip Glass tonight as I complete this entry. He's one that I know most people find redundant. I had a difficult time with "Einstein at the Beach" myself. But when he gets a piece he can sink his teeth into, he produces interesting work.

I've listened to this particular piece a number times while working on the magazine, but I believe it sets the proper tone for what I'm attempting to accomplish on these pages. We should be both "with it" and detached. While the whole magazine paradigm requires a large degree of topicality, I also believe that we should have exposition that doesn't show its time. Universality, if you will.

The Plan is to complete this "Glass House" when I hear what the judge in my case has to say tomorrow. My attorney says that I'll hear "Case Dismissed". I am superstitious, as every artist shoudl be...

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22 September, 2003: The ADA in charge of my case greeted me this morning, "Good morning, Mr. Amis. I have good news for you gentlemen. I apologize, Mr. Amis..." The District Attorney's Office announced that the State of Louisiana would not prosecute my case. They also withdrew the motion to file writs. The judge announced that I was no longer under the jurisdiction of the State of Louisiana, my case was dismissed and I was free to go. The best thing, from my opinion, was the apology from the District Attorney's Office. The next best thing was hearing the words: "You are free to go. Case dismissed."

I have cleared my name, my Darling. Yayy!

I am informed by my attorney that six months from now I can have the public record of the arrest expunged. It will cost me another $200.

Things I Want to Do This Week

1. Start my "After the Case" life.

2. Find a lover.

3. Plan for paying my rent.

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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. Our Resident Philosopher is back to working construction again for a boss he likes. It's tough on an old man, but bills need to get paid. 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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