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NEW ORLEANS - 25 January, 2004: THEY SAY THAT WHEN YOU FALL IN LOVE YOU FEEL THAT YOUR DESTINY HAS CHANGED. My initial reaction is to concur with that assessment. When I look back at each time I've fallen in love, I recognized that I consciously changed course, altered my plans based on the way being a part of us necessitated what I had theretofore believed was the trajectory for me. I, respectively, decided to change my major at University to get a Fellowship to go to Egypt; cancelled my plans to move to the beaches of Oaxaca and write The Great American Novel; decided to attempt becoming a Christian; decided to go back in business - which I swore I'd never do and; lastly, developed an interest in couture. None of these decisions were in my original plans.
Yes, I'm saying that, in retrospect, I believe I was in love on five separate occasions over the forty years of my life before becoming celibate. That will probably seem like a lot to many people, including you my putative Future Love.
I've found that writing to you, Love, in my imagined future is much more difficult than writing to the woman from my past. I have a mental image, aged in my imagination, since I have not actually seen her in years, which I relate to in some sense, when I write to Lynda. With you, I am in many ways writing into a hazy, undelineated fog. You pop up in my dreams as an Indian woman, with whom I sit sharing a meal with you and your mother, who suddenly surprises me by seasoning my food when I ask you to pass the salt. It strikes me as a subtly intimate move that carries a message of acceptance. I have never had anyone season my food. It speaks volumes or at least seemed to to me in that dream. Or you come to me in another dream as a tall sister who insists that I take you out dancing, which I do. You introduce me to a group of your friends as fiancÈe and my jaw drops. You have come to me as a very corporate Anglo woman who drives a truck with a dazzling front that slides forward, a variation on the DeLorean winged doors, a gay guy asks me about my wife - referring to you - and I explain that we are not married yet. (I can't believe I used that word "yet".) And when you rejoin me at the vehicle, which you drive, of course- because of my notorious hatred for motor vehicles, you ask me when I will make you my wife. I freak about that word "wife" used twice in one afternoon.
Barbara once told me that her idea of the best me is "married." This shocked me at the time because I remember a dinner, one of the many we shared over the years -- both loving restaurants and being served -- at which she asked me to explain to her why people get married at all.
26 January, 2004: MY NEWEST JOB is my Job Search. Got up at six this morning as usual and made a French press of coffee and began planning my activities while listening to National Public Radio (NPR's) "Morning Edition."
Showered and went to a nearby coffee shop to see what I could dig up on the 'Net from the local classified, the state university, the Mayor's Office new program called "Job1". Called the Job1 offices to get their skinny and address and went down there. On the way to that office on Poydras, I dropped in at the Holiday Inn to check on the application I put in there last week. They said I could come back for an interview in the morning. The Job1 office consisted of a room with some postings, a bunch of computers for doing Internet searches - redundant for me - and notices about hotel Job Fairs. Learned there was one at the Ritz-Carlton on Canal all day today and went down there. Three interviews and a few hours later I was back on the pavement. Fortuitously, I hope, my second interview was with a young lady I immediately recognized. It turned out that she knows my previous boss, Steve, and his wife. She kept making comments about how similar we were as she took me through the battery of personality test questions. Having given these myself back in my corporate days, acing this one was not a real challenge. I know what corporate employers want to hear. Then I met with the Food and Beverage Manager to get vetted by him. Now they do background and credit checks, something I'll invariably flunk with my awful credit history. (Let's hope that's not weighted too heavily in the process.) As it was nearing three o'clock, when my bus transfer would expire, and I felt like I had run a marathon after the three interviews, I headed home, my Future Love.
Washed last night's dishes and settled in with you.
HERE'S THE TORTUROUS THING ABOUT POVERTY and desperation: You'll have a productive day as I did yesterday and go to bed, planning on repeating it the next. Two hours later you'll awaken in the dark feeling that nothing has been accomplished. You are overcome with anxiety and the sense that you are falling deeper into a black hole - again. You can't sleep and it's the wee hours of the morning. You toss and turn and smoke cigarettes and fret and worry and soon two, three hours have passed in this manner.You know nothing is being solved by this. What can you do at - what is now - two-thirty in the morning to solve any of this?
Still you can't shut the worry off now that it is started. You are sitting up with your head in your hands telling yourself that you are simply exhausting yourself and will be worthless in the morning. What you need is sleep. Sleep is a tonic. Sleep is a tonic whose formula has eluded you, chased away by the noxious gases of unrelenting worry.
27 January, 2004: I had planned to go back to the Holiday Inn near the Superdome this morning and do my interview with them. I awakened too late. In my worryfest I chided myself that it was foolish to attempt getting a "real" job anyway, as all the corporate Human Resources (HR) departments now do routine credit checks. I recalled that we used to do those back at the Rocky Mountain News back in the '80s when I was a manager there. Even if the rest of my professional life looks sterling, my personal life looks like a minefield. The credit check, I told myself in the dark, will surely disqualify me in the world of the starched, bleached and pressed. I should just accept that I am destined to have shitty, grey economy jobs making organ-grinder-monkey wages ...
"IF YOU'RE HERE, THERE MUST BE SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOU." That's the saying, especially in and around the French Quarter, about living in New Orleans, as I've mentioned to you before, Darling. The apocryphal story goes that when the French engineer, Adrien du Pauger, was brought over to lay this city out, here at the mouth of the Mississippi, seeing all the swamp land, he said: "No way! It's insane to build a city here. It won't last." The aristocrat in charge of the project and his patron, Bienville, insisted that New Orleans must rise here, below sea level. The latter was thinking strategically, of course. Control New Orleans and you control the commerce and traffic of the entire Mississippi River, America's Nile.
"It's insane!" Pauger, the engineer insisted.
"Get busy," the Bienville responded.
This place was in the heading "Wrong" from the start. One day, everyone knows, it will simply disappear under the sea. It will be swallowed up by the Gulf of Mexico like some modern-day Atlantis. The State of Louisiana already has 10,000 body bags, rumor has it, for the clean-up effort that will take place once New Orleans is gone.
Until then, we'll limp along pretending that people can actually survive on a Mardi Gras economy.
Back in my days on the bartender pantheon, I once had a very drunken woman leer across the bar at me and ask: "So what's wrong with you?"
"Nothing, as far as I know," I responded, unsure as to the source of the non sequitur.
"Look," she continued, conspiratorially, "all my so-called friends are ignoring me. All I want is to find is someone to go out and have a medium-rare hamburger with me. Would you go out and have a hamburger with me, Mr. Bartender?"
"Well, not immediately," I responded. "I'm working right now."
"What time do you get off?"
"My shift ends at eight. If you want to come back around eightish, I'll go have a hamburger with you."
That was enough to get Mad Dog, one of my regular patrons, into the act. He had been eavesdropping this whole conversation and started egging her on.
They exchanged a few whispered words.
Before she left the bar, tipsy and weaving, she signaled me down to the end of the bar and made me promise I'd go out to eat with her at the end of my shift. I promised.
Mad Dog watched this exchange with a huge, sodden smile on his face.
The woman never returned, of course. She never returned to The Spotted Cat ("the Cat") - at least during my shift -- ever again. She was most likely, I reasoned, embarrassed about that evening and unsure what she had said to me exactly.
I see her from time to time and she greets me, but there is a distance, a shield there, most of the time.
I do the same thing myself when encountering women I vaguely remember approaching, amorously, in my own cups. I wonder if I said anything forward or inappropriate, but avoid pursuing the answer.
On the other hand, I run into women - at the most unlikely places - about whom I have vague joyful memories. As soon as I see their faces, I know that I met them at a good time and that we laughed, but still have no idea where it was I met them or what was said.
That happened just the other day at a job interview. The rapport and vibe between me and the woman in HR clicked in a joyful way. Then the mention of mutual friends confirmed that we had met each other before. I spent the rest of the evening trying to remember when and where I had first met her. I little tingle of recognition went through me, during the interview, when she ran her fingers through her hair, lowered her head, and said, sotto voce, "I'm just that way myself" in response to one of my answers.
When I awakened that night, as I do many nights after working out questions and problems in my sleep, I recalled that she had been a bartender. She was tending bar one night when I had brought a friend who had been injured in a mugging into her establishment. She had once been an EMT and volunteered to change his dressing with the materials I had just bought at the Walgreen's on Decatur Street. We had talked a bit after she did the new dressing. She told me I should look out for my friend and gave me advice about what he should do about his wounds.
Scenes like these, chance re-meetings and avoidances, happen all the time if you live in or near the French Quarter. You get used to them. New Orleans is a very small town and the Quarter is smaller still. It's not even six degrees here. It's more like two.
28 January, 2004: IT'S BACK ON THE HORSE this morning and off to the Holiday Inn to do the interview, then more pounding the pavement seeking my next gig. I figure if I keep it out there in the Universe that I need a new job, and fast, the Universe will give me the Cosmic Nudge I've been waiting for.ROD ON POLITICS
I am pleased to hear on the radio that my personal favorite, Senator John Kerry, again carried the day. Now that the campaign goes national, it should become clearer to the electorate that there's one candidate who can go to toe-to-toe with His Fraudulency and send him back to Texas.Rock-ribbed Republican conservatives are even a bit miffed at His Fraudulency's Medicare bill, which they rammed through the United States Congress, now that the new cost-estimates are out. $130 Billion (USD) more than what they voted for, from an Administration producing the largest budget deficit burden in the history of this republic?
Well, guess what, my friends? That $130 Billion figure that the Bushistas are now admitting to is only an estimate itself. NOBODY has ANY idea what this Medicare package will actually cost because NOBODY has any idea what the HMOs will really charge us, the American taxpayers footing the bill for this boondoggle, or how those senior citizens who need this health care will respond to what even members of the American Association of Retired People (AARP) consider the worst piece of legistlation for retirees to ever come down the pike.
RAHEEM got it right this week in his RADIOACTIVE column, I think. We need to focus on the fundamental issues again. We all know what they are.
As the election approaches, I recommend you ask yourself the question that former President Reagan made famous back in the 1980s: "Do you feel that you are better off than you were four years ago?"
31 January, 2004: IN MY MOMENTS OF QUIET REFLECTION, I debate my own choices and priorities with myself. I have created the list of things that I feel are important for a given day. Among them, keeping a roof over my head, the electricity needed to keep Victoria up and running so that I can perform the editorial and design chores here, which require holding on to some semblance of gainful employment. Then there are the personal health issues that have pushed themselves to the fore now that I am aging.
Having lived a life that has most recently been distinguished by its degree(s) of suffering, it surprises even me that suffering is something I now wish to avoid. You would think that I would have become inured of it. But I dread its being intensified instead. My once and future boss's wife, Pauline, made the comment after I returned from hospital that "You've probably been in pain of one sort or another every day of your life, haven't you now?" I responded with a chuckle.
I try not to talk about pain. I make deadpan comments about the teeth falling out my head, the arthritic attacks that gnarl my hands or cause searing cramps, the throbbing of the knees when rain is coming or here. Nobody gives a damn about your pain, one friend told me years ago, wisely. So why talk about it?
Then, of course, there is the spiritual dimension: the dark nights of the soul, the question of which battles are worth the fight and which to turn away from, the criticism of "friends" about personal choices whose motivation they can't suss out and how being misunderstood on that personal a level injures you. And "destiny." I have images pop in my mind now and then of those three old Greek seamstresses, one with the wool, one spinning the wheel, the last unraveling the thread and holding the knife, ready to cut you off. She smiles as she looks at me from my mind's eye. She knows I am entertaining the questions, "How? When?"
I avoid doctors because I mean to avoid the word "terminal." As a wordsmith, I find the pun in that word amusing, though. It's metaphysical in a pleasant sense, no? We are all comforted by the notion that it implies we are "in transit" as opposed to the thudding door sound (or coffin lid closing sound) of finality.
But perhaps we are not in transit at all. It is always possible that we simply go from travail and suffering to finished, over, khallas, as my Arab friends say.
We used euphemisms like "passed on" to hold onto that notion of transit, of going elsewhere, even if we are not among those who believe that we go to a Heaven, Purgatory or Hell. (It personally amazes me that we humans even came up with the concept of Hell as part of the after-life when our experience of this world is hellish enough!) Reincarnation, that classically Hindu construct, is the nth degree of this need to believe we are on a journey instead of simply a flash in the universal pan.
So, when thinking about such things, I have asked myself on a very personal level what I do believe. I don't have a problem, really, with the notion that this is simply a one shot and over deal. I have difficulty with the very notion that anyone would want to do this existence again. Why?
As to the even more metaphysical notion that there are "other" planes of reality to which our "soul" energy can immigrate, well -- science fiction is entertaining, too, but I don't believe there was really ever a Darth Vader. While I admire that boundless creativity which makes Art for us, that turns our curious questions into poetry and myth and, yes, religion, I'm not inclined to believing that when they finally close my coffin it will turn itself into a cosmic jetliner taking me on to another existence with the consciousness of my soul, wherever that is located, intact.
But yes, there have been people in my life whose personalities and sensibilities have resonated, for whom I've had an uncanny sense of recognition and connection. At my more ethereal moments, yes, I have felt that I must have known them before. At my most hard-headed moments, on the other hand, I have felt that this is just so much of the romanticism to which I am naturally inclined, a pleasing notion that serves to validate my special affinity for this person.
ROD ON JACK PARR
Indulge me for a moment, while we are on the subject of mortality, as I say something about Jack Parr. Mr. Parr died this week and I noted it with a sense of nostalgia, as he had an impact on my formative years.
As a very young man, a teenager, I was affected by Jack Parr in that I admired him and held him as a model of what it meant to be urbane. "Urbane" is not a word in common currency these days, but one I have always aspired toward as a description of what I would want myself to be considered.
The "talk" show, as Jack Parr presented it those many years ago, was about conversation and wit. For an hour and forty-five minutes, Jack Parr brought people into American living rooms who had something engaging or humorous or informative to say. He went to Albert Schweitzer's clinic in Africa. He went to the leper colony in Molokai, or he simply sat in New York talking to the most interesting people he could find. What he created was so far removed from today's late night television fare that it might as well have come from another planet. That was his art and what distinguishes him from the other personalities that the medium of television has produced.
As a child, I often thought, after watching Parr - who was not pretentious in the least but rather who was passionate, tolerant and engaged - Ah! This is what it means to be intelligent. Jack Parr could as easily talk about wanting to own a German Shepherd as the sign that he had finally made it as about philanthropy or the theatre. He would throw people off his show for a bigoted comment. He never came off as a snob, though he was a very smart man. Instead, he exhibited a curiosity and a broad-based general knowledge that was the very definition of what I believe it means to be a product of a great city and a great culture. He exemplified what it meant to be a wit.
Sarah, who bartends at Buffa's here in New Orleans, one of my hangouts, accused me recently of being witty. I demurred. I take pride, I'll admit, in the fact that some people have said that I have the gift was creating memorable and quotable phrases. But it is a crafted gift. I believe that I first came upon the ability of how to craft a phrase sitting in front of a black and white television set listening to Jack Parr.
There are people who affect our lives, who shape them, who inspire our admiration. My own list is an eclectic one, as you'd expect. Jack Parr was the first person I thought of as "cool." Robert Kennedy, of course, had a great impact on my thinking and my on-again, off-again political involvement. Malcolm X shaped my racial consciousness and helped me to deal with my rage about racial injustice. Henry Miller made me see that the best stories are based on our passionate truths and the unbridled, unbound ability to say the first thing that comes to mind. Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce let me know that it's okay to ridicule the powerful and oneself, to be bitter when it's necessary.
"Role models" is the buzzword we use today for such people, icons that we use to try to craft a life. If I had children, as I once wanted to, I would tell them to avoid people who even use that phrase to describe themselves. The best "role models", I believe, are people who simply expose their lives, their warts and inner conflicts, knowing how flawed we all are and that none of us deserve iconography or hagiography in the least.
I make a great effort to convince the younger people whom I consider my friends to avoid being like me at all costs.
Things I Need This Week
1. A single ray of Hope in a life that could easily be considered hopeless.
2. A job.
3. A means of keeping this apartment.
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.
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 looking for work yet again. 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.
Rod is "noodling" with idea of a Glass House book. (Are you listening, Timothy?)
He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.
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