Rod Amis - Unbound

NEW ORLEANS - 10 April, 2004: You know I should begin this "I'm still here."

We're in clearing the decks mode right now, Darlin'. Kick or get kicked to the curb by so-called friends who can't handle a man married to his misery, bond closer with my true friends, get up off the mat and come back for one more round. The old slugger. But unlike Rocky Balboa, my head may not be hard enough. Besides, there's no Adrian waiting on the sidelines to cheer me on.

The Book; that's what's on my mind and a lot of other folks', too. Since I'm resigned to having this travail over, the reasoning goes, why not cough out that one last Book before I bid farewell. This is probably an excuse to keep me from jumping off a bridge some sad twilit evening, but -- as I've been wont to say -- any excuse will do.

A brief commute to Mississippi last week gave me enough dosh to finally do my laundry, buy a loaf of bread, smokes, a pint of whiskey and a few black beans. It facilitated my getting a new construction job so I can pay my rent. Entergy, our local power utility, will likely turn off my electricity again on Monday, as I don't have the cash to pay them. Meanwhile, I'm owed money for the work on a Web site, so maybe, just maybe, they''ll send that along and I'll keep the lights on. If not, so be it.

I am going to be casual about the details. What happened to my resolution to make this the Year of Frivolity, after all?

ABOUT THIS EDITION

WHAT DOES G21 DO BEST? INTRODUCE NEW WRITERS. In this edition, I'm proud to say that I bring you new international voices. I guess my mission in life hasn't changed much. I'm a writer who loves writers. Maxwell Perkins on the Web.

I encourage you to give the next generation of GENERATOR 21 writers your time and attention.

In this edition we'll bring you the GENERATOR 21 premiere words of talented and insightful Kenyan writer KEN KAMOCHE in G21 NEWS. Ken's reminiscence from Mogadishu, Somalia, seems timely right now and is finely crafted. I'm honored to feature him here. Ken now resides in Hong Kong where he is an Associate Professor at the City University.

DAVID SEISER, from Southern Connecticut State University, sends us an OpEd for our RDR page. Mr. Seiser has a lot to say about the psychology of the Bush Administration. There won't be many revelations for long-time readers of The World's Magazine, but I do believe there will be something worth considering for everyone, no matter how long you've been our patrons.

FINALLY, under the "New Writers" heading, we're pleased to bring you the first installlment of a serialization from woman writer MORAA GITAA who hails from Mombasa, Kenya. In Moraa's international debut at GLOBAL*BEAT she gives us a first-hand and intimate account of the inner workings of the Kenyan judicial system.

That issue segues quite well from our lead story this week, by our veteran writer AAMERA JIWAJI, featured in G21 AFRICA. (It feels odd to call a pup in her twenties a "veteran," but Aami's been writing for G21 since she was a student at university in South Africa. Her chops have only improved over the years.) Aami's look at developments in her native country since NARC took over the government is a cautionary tale that anyone interested in African development and politics should make her piece their first-read this time out.

You'll find this a large edition because of my need to update many of our regular features, including the responses to your letters on our VOX POPULI page. Sorry you had to wait so long.

With this ambitious edition, I hope to put to rest the concern that I'm discontinuing the effort. We're still here.

ABOUT ROD & THE BLACK DOG

13 APRIL, 2004: I believe it was Sigmund Freud who wrote that those demons we attempt to suppress come back again as worse monsters. During that horrific and latest depression which I experienced most recently, I now accept, the fiction writer I have attempted over these last years to deny and repress came back at me with a vengeance. He will not be denied, no matter how much I would have it otherwise.

In many ways he was the angel with whom I've been wrestling since the onset of my malady, my hejira to Europe and my retreat here to New Orleans, the American Haiti. He must have his book and I must be the mid-wife. It is appropriate now, I think, that I have most recently been reading Fitzgerald's exquisite Tender Is the Night. Appropriate and fitting.

As I intimated in the last and most revelatory of these diary entries, the fiction writer acted as an alchemist for me. His function was to transform my own dysfunction, my sturm und drang, into something of value, something that could be used to reach your hearts in ways that even a novelistic diary like this enduring one cannot. By taking each of my impulses and giving them flesh, if only in my own mind, the fiction writer could reach toward universality as I can only reach for individuality in this journalistic format. His truth was a higher Truth, in that sense. It provided coitus, as opposed to onanism.

So I now know that my higher mission is the Book. This cathedral of words, when viewed in that psychological and spiritual sense, is a poor substitute.

Nonetheless, as I battle back from the ravages of The Black Dog's latest savaging of my soul, I must face that the (most necessary) cleansing it has effected, clearing the decks of those who looked on with the compassion of the Pharisee rather than the Samaritan, opens a new chapter for Rod the editor and publisher while finally releasing Rod the Writer from his cell. I am as much a work-in-progress as this magazine I have labored over all these years.

The last edition is the last time I shall ever mention giving this magazine up until I die. It is an integral part of my life and who I am. What I have learned most from this latest experience is that I have no intrinsic desire to alter who I am in any way. Rather I needed facing the wings of Death to be reborn as the writer who did not have my parents.

In the process, I can only hope to regain some part, some dialogue, with the only woman I have never been able to walk away from. It was my habit, during the rutting years, to act as if the women I had loved and left simply no longer existed. As you know, my dears, I have never been able to do that with her. She gave birth to our "Glass House." This time, at last, I must learn to swallow my pride and leave the door open to talk -- or "talk" in the only way we can, via this medium.

It is possible that I must face her sometime. I know that. But only after having made the needed repairs.

ANOTHER THING I HAVE LEARNED from this experience is that it is only your true friends with whom you can share your actual adversity and despair. Rather than either preach to you or scold you, they take the human(e) response of trying to touch you. Touch. Because that is the only response that acts to salve the wound. Fitzgerald states elegantly that we use the metaphor of scars, but no wounds that we suffer emotionally ever actually heal. They remain wounds. They may not fester, but they are there open and always ripe to the touch. The depth of that kind of insight is something that too many people lack. You will know who they are as soon as you expose a wound of your own.

	writelikegod.com
	When is the last time you talked politics with your dog? dogshatebush.com

I believe that is why I have become so guarded from intimacy. I have taken Herod's admonition to Claudius rather seriously. Letting anyone get close enough to recognize my actual wounds only opens me, and those wounds, to being probed. Unlike the Christ, I'm not willing to say, "Go ahead, Thomas, poke around in there."

As with this instance, when I do open up a bit, clearing the decks becomes a necessity. There are always those people who don't like it unless you're happy, snappy and sappy. It's "self-important" to admit that life is full of tragedy. It's their stock and trade to say everything is always your fault. Puritans. Screw them.

My final word on those c--ts, as the Irish say, is that the difference between their world view and that of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft is merely a matter of one degree. If it were up to them, we'd all being self-flagellating Nazis-in-training. They're the kind of people who take the freedom out of the Land of the Free. Like Snake Plitkin, I ain't having none of it. I just lit another cigarette.

FLYING OVER THE TRANSOM

17 April, 2004: THANKS TO BRAD BALFOUR, my former roomie in Manhattan and our Media Contributing Editor, interesting things fly over the transom and onto my desktop for review. He sent me a copy of this article from the New York Times that I might have missed:

March 11, 2004

Pentagon Pays Iraq Group, Supplier of Incorrect Spy Data

By DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, March 10 --- The Pentagon is paying $340,000 a month to the Iraqi political organization led by Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the interim Iraqi government who has close ties to the Bush administration, for "intelligence collection" about Iraq, according to Defense Department officials.

The classified program, run by the Defense Intelligence Agency since summer 2002, continues a longstanding partnership between the Pentagon and the organization, the Iraqi National Congress, even as the group jockeys for power in a future government. Internal government reviews have found that much of the information generated by the program before the American invasion last year was useless, misleading or even fabricated.

I've only provided you with the introduction here. Follow the link (you have to be registered with the NYT, of course) and read the whole thing. It's amusing in a not-Ha-Ha kind of way.

When I look at U.S. television news these days, I ask myself if I'm most reminded of the film "Full Metal Jacket" or of "Blackhawk Down". Chaotic urban warfare is the new order of the day and it's not like Viet Nam, thank you very much. It's exactly the kind of combat that this country has intentionally avoided since World War II. When they finally allow George W. Bush to make another campaign speech to reassure his countrymen that's everything is still "Okay," he gets a reaction like this one from Richard Goldstein over at the Village Voice:

As he wavered from one talking point to another, you could see the panic in Bush's eyes. To The Washington Post, "seemed out of sorts at times as he searched for words to answer often hostile questions and sometimes lapsed into awkward phrases." Consider his response to the first of several questions about admitting mistakes: "Hmmm. Look. I can understand why people in my administration are anguished over the fact that people lost their life." When another reporter raised the same question, his remarks made Casey Stengel sound like Lincoln: "You know, I just - I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet. " Anyone for fighting the war on terriers?

I have to pray that we only have to deal with this stumble bum for a few more months. If the American people are foolish enough to leave this man fingertips away from the football for another four years, I'll have to decamp to Mexico, the Czech Republic or some other civilized country.

Life of Rod

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

In this instance, it was my pal from Manhattan, Lars Kefferstan, and a former flatmate who made the difference between keeping a roof over my head and cigarette butts in the ashtray and jumping off the Huey P. Long Bridge. Those two and Matt, who bought me smokes and beer, a large bag of rice and came over frequently enough to ensure that I wouldn't turn on the gas and staunch the crevices around windows and doors. DC sent me a couple of bucks and a fresh copy of Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code to keep my mind occupied while I contemplated the uncertain future. An old college pal sent me the best moral support I could have asked for and expressed more eloquently than I could have the feelings I was going through. Here's a snippet:

... But there's a more acute feeling of aloneness: when those whom we love, and who love us, insist on keeping their distance -- doing their best to bring us out of our despair rather than to come where we are, understand it, and embrace us in it. That feels like the ultimate betrayal.

BETRAYAL. Abandonment. Indeed ...

I landed a construction job and took an interview with a local Web development company that offered me the chance to bid on a contract that they had nearly decided to farm out to some Web designers in Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia? Hey! Wait a minute. I probably trained those guys when I taught that course back in 2002! If things turn out well, meaning the gods and goddesses decide to smile on their child instead of fuck with him again, I'll be back to doing what I know best by the summer.

There is hope.

THE NEW ORLEANS WAY - Installment Umpteen

I HAVE WRITTEN BEFORE THAT THIS IS A CITY OF VERSIONS. You don't know about any event until you've collected every version of it offered by the interlocutors here and worked to suss out what actually happened. For example, in one version of what happened to me the morning after my birthday, I had fallen from a ladder. (Anyone who's been a painter for a while knows that you spend half your life on ladders.) This version pattern, at least for an old writer, brings to the fore the fact that so much of all of our lives -- at least the impression others take of our lives -- is the facade.

I spent late afternoon yesterday talking with two friends of mine, one of whom is probably the most attractive woman I know. She is lovely and smart and ascerbic. I know ten other men who'd love to court her as much as I do. If you went by appearances, you would believe that she is happy. If so, you'd believe a lie. She is in turmoil right now for an accumulation of reasons spanning from familial concerns to financial issues to her immigration status. (She's not from the United States.)

I bring this up because I'm taking the dawning recognition that New Orleans is one city I know of, particularly if you live in the centripedal field of the French Quarter, where facades do not hold. Sooner or later, like layers of an onion (a Durrellian metaphor) they are peeled away. As each successive layer is peeled away, the essential self and circumstances of your friends and acquaintances are laid bare. Perhaps that is what makes it such an easy city in which to write a diary like this "Glass House." Yours Unruly has been made, in the New Orleans Way, to accept the futility of trying to maintain secrets. Perhaps that is what makes New Orleans, as one other writer has put it, a "Story City". (He said there are only three such cities in the United States. I have now lived in all of them.)

It is also in the New Orleans Way that people who don't live in New Orleans wonder why anyone would choose to do so and actively encourage their friends here to abandon this place. I have had more than one person insist that that is exactly what I should do in the past few months. One "fan" of mine, long-standing, who has followed my variegated writing career here on the WWW since my days of writing daily columns for the now-defunct Andover News Network, sent me an e-mail declaring his belief that New Orleans was "sucking away your soul ..." He could well be right. Living here in Nawlins, I honestly have no way of knowing whether that is an accurate judgment or not.

I live -- or more often, subsist -- here in much the manner of all-too-many people I know who are not among the well-heeled and secure; it is a day-to-day and perilous existence in which luck counts for much more than pluck. Sex and death permeate the air as palpably as the smell of jasmine on Esplanade Avenue and disaster awaits around every street corner or some cliff ledge of concrete forced up by the roots of a large old tree that has been here since the Spaniards arrived and threatens to overturn the blandishments of mankind's war against the natural world. Birds call out songs that could comprise the soundtrack of a Tarzan movie and vines over-run stone buildings and eventually tear them asunder. We are in the tropics. That is just the way things are. Nature, embodied by the swamps all around us, does not simply encroach, it is in a constant process of swallowing us up, over-running us, reducing us to our component elements, body and soul.

The guy to whom I pay my rent came over the other day and told me that they are recruiting people who live here in New Orleans to become civilian support workers in Iraq. He said he is thinking about going over and asked if I'd consider going with him. He says that they are offering $150,000/year if you sign up to go over there. "Just think about it," he tells me. "You could go over there and work for six months and come back and live like a king over here." I laugh.

I laugh because I am reminded of the admonition from my friend Darhl, only two years ago, that I don't tell him I'm going to Afghanistan next. Matt says it would be so Rod to suddenly announce that I'm moving to Iraq.

Our judges are usually under federal indictment. Policeman are hauled in by their peers for running one scam or another in some poor neighborhood. That the cops are corrupt is so accepted here in New Orleans that civilians pose as police officers to scam elderly people out of their pension money, claiming they need the extra cash to provide better neighborhood security. At minimum, 28% of the adults in this city are functionally illiterate and everybody and his brother owns a gun. Any day now this city could become a petrie dish out of The Lord of the Flies. Who would know the difference? People in the rest of the United States would simply click their tongues, exclaim, "Tsk, tsk!" and say dourly, "Well, that's the New Orleans Way."

If you don't want to live in America, move to New Orleans right away. We are one of the poorest cities, outside of the so-called Third World, you'll find in this hemisphere.

All of that acknowledged, LET ME SAY THIS: Those people in the rest of United States are the ones who wanted to call French fries "Freedom Fries" some months back. They wanted to stop drinking (or even selling) Beaujolais, Burgundy or Cabernet, a ban on escargot and the abolition of truffles. Those people believe that adults are so incapable of making decisions for themselves that they have to close their bars at night, they ban smoking everywhere; they eat food that we'd relegate to hop slop and work sixty-to-eighty hours a week to show that they are "productive" enough to get an early heart attack. Their notion of a religious festival -- which is what Mardi Gras is, at core -- is having a church bake -sale or car wash.

Those people in what is called America don't have a jazz funeral to celebrate the lives of the people they have treasured and lost, they don't have women and men waving handkerchiefs and shaking their booties in second lines --- they make sure that the route of the limos leaving the funeral home goes on back streets so as to remain out of sight. Those people are so afraid of death they don't want to see anything to remind them of it that is not on "Law and Order" or the late night local news. When those people come down here to Nawlins on their holidays, they make it a point to visit our cemeteries because they are works of art compared to what they have back home.

Those people have streets with names like Industrial Drive and Main, while we have streets named Music, Burgundy and Bourbon. They throw parties for women who have gone under the knives of plastic surgeons rather than have gatherings of matrons wearing silly hats and chowing down on crawfish. Those people from the so-called America actually claim to enjoy snow and ice, tornadoes, earthquakes, mudslides and avalances rather than some heat and humidity which can be mitigated by something God gave us called air-conditioning. They'd rather drive in bumper-to-bumper traffic rather than walk through cobble-stone streets -- admittedly having to occasionally encounter the vomit of last night's party revelers -- to a place no more than another neighborhood away.

You can tell when you pass one of those people on the street down here because they buy and wear Mardi Gras beads all year 'round. They don't know any better.

If you don't want to live in America, I say, move to New Orleans right away.

"Wait a minute, Rod! Correct me if I'm wrong, but for a second there you actually sounded like you were defending New Orleans! You actually sounded like you liked the damned place!"

Stranger things have happened. H. L. Mencken was brazen in his dislike for his fellow countrymen, particularly after the first World War, but he could wax poetic about Baltimore. Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce ripped much of Connecticut and San Francisco society to threads, respectively. Leopards keep their spots. If you've followed my writing, I'm simply being true to form.

Reading in the park the other day, I noticed that the caterpillars are now out swarming. We all know that those who survive will become butterflies and my newest spirit familiars and bring a bit of joy to my life and a smile to my face as I stroll these rolling, tumbling, upended streets ... That is something.

"Work like you don't need the money,
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching ... "

Love,
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.

In 2002, 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 attempting to secure enough part-time work to perhaps equal the income of a single good full-time position. In his spare time, he chases women in the manner that a fly pursues a spider.

Rod barely survives 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 also has a screenplay and a(nother) proposed novel in queue.

He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.

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