Rod Amis - Unbound

NEW ORLEANS - 11 August, 2004: I was thinking just last night that I was fortunate to have gone through my prime rutting season in an era when you did not have to consider that you might die from casual sex. When I was madly after every woman who gave the slightest indication that she was on the showroom floor, the worst that you could possibly encounter was gonorrhea or "the crabs." Yes, syphilis was still around, but it was not rampant. A bit of conversation with the potential recipient of my "wild oats" would certainly reveal if I was in any danger. Between the pill and IUD (intrauterine devices -- We don't hear much about those anymore, do we? OR perhaps it's just me. Living in my asexual ivory tower, I don't discuss the mechanics of coitus as I might have in those years.) the very notion of actually having to use the condoms in my wallet seldom came up.

Even in rutting period two, after my divorce, I can remember women asking me not to use one. One woman sticks out in my mind particularly. She was visiting San Francisco from Amarillo and looking for adventure. She begged me not to use the jacket. I explained -- this was during the '80s -- that I was worried about mosquitos giving me AIDS, so I wasn't going to take a chance on our one-night stand.

(Yes, even in my late thirties, I was still not above doing one-night stands.)

I did not, I'll now admit, know a lot about clamydia. The test is hellacious for males. Painful. I took that test when I was almost convinced by a woman from Switzerland to be the opposite number in a Green Card marriage. As far as I'm concerned, she still owes me for that ordeal.

As to syphilis, the only actual killer among sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) during my prime rutting years (approximately 1971 - 1978,) it was considered an arcane disease. There was a legend that it was that disease which had taken down George Washington, the "Father of Our Country." The legend worked well, as most urban legends do today, because there were few places on the eastern seaboard of the United States where one could visit without finding a house in which General Washington had supposedly slept. The operative question among the wags of our modern era, indiscreet and irreverent as we had become, was "And with whom did the general sleep here?"

By this time, of course, the last active case of syphilis that anyone could think of was in Maugham's novel Of Human Bondage.

And then came the great Plague: AIDS. If you were in any way involved in the artistic communities, you watched it take out friends, coworkers and colleagues so rapidly, so horrifyingly, that your sexual habits would change forever. Only idiots believed that it was simply a disease of homosexuals.

So while public health officials remained silent (this was the Reagan era recall) and evangelical clerics spouted venom and the wrath of God, responsible people who weren't about to give up our sex lives began vetting each other. You needed to check the paperwork (evidence of testing within the last six months showing that you were not HIV positive.) I realized that I would probably never have another one-night stand again in this lifetime.

I look back to those carefree (relatively speaking) days of the 1960s and 1970s now with wonderment. We were so damned lucky! We were probably the last generation the world will see for decades who didn't have to associate the notion of sex with that of death.

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I know that some of you are probably thinking, "Good Grief! When was the last time Rod's 'Glass House' lede was about sex? What's going on?"

You're justified.

I suspect it's part and parcel of my awakening, enlivening myself to the idea of returning to America for a while. Americans just don't have enough sex. They oggle and talk and fantasize but don't break much of an actual sweat. If I'm going to rejoin that country, leave this hoary Haiti, I have to commit to making my contribution to remedying that problem. Ahem!

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AND there is also this. I don't think I'll forget the week of 9 - 16 August very quickly. It has been one of the most hellish, apprehensive, chaotic and unusual of my life in a long time. It featured proffered money that never arrived, days without any food, fear and trembling, all the things that might make one's life a living Hell.

I was so anxious on Monday night/Tuesday morning that I could only bring myself to sleep for three hours. There was money coming from Berlin. Maybe, if I got to Western Union early enough I could rush to pay my electric bill and my power would not be turned off.

And it also featured a lot of love. I got giddy from not eating and not having more than five or six cigarettes, cadged from Matt, and decided that I didn't care. I just floated. Every truck that stopped outside of my flat I imagined would be the one with the power company guy coming to turn off the juice. Whenever anyone cooked in the neighborhood I could smell it, exquisitely, and salivate and dream about when I would be able to have a meal again. I made lists of the things I would eat when I could next afford it.

By today, good friends like Matt and Greg decided that enough was enough and brought me microwave burritos (2), beer, a jar of dry roasted nuts. I had spent my last dollar on black beans. Greg also sprang for my cigarettes of choice, American Spirits non-filtered. I was in Hog Heaven. I was richer than Croesus! It was time for me to write to you again, my love...

I can only write, of course, from the perspective of the hallucinatory world of the wholly deprived, the destitute and forgotten. In my e-mails are prayers, incantations, questions about how much longer I'll be reachable and alive. E-mails come over the transom with Subject lines like "Lights? Money?"

I find three promising jobs on Craig's List for New Orleans, all of which get back to me within 24 hours and each of which wants to hire me. I set up interviews and keep looking for more work.

Douglas McDaniel laughs in Phoenix and makes comparisons about Urizen and Verizon and suggests that I can merely sprout wings and fly to Phoenix rather than settle accounts here and take conventional transportation. When I suggest otherwise, he responds, "Let go." I suggest that I was never been enamored of Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Matt said tonight: "I'm amazed that your power is still on."

I said, "I've got a lot of people praying for me."

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12 August, 2004: BACK TO SEX: I did not mean to imply in my last entry that there is no sexual activity taking place in America. Heck, there's a town in Arkansas that has a higher rate of per capita of teen pregnancies than most so-called Third World countries. Somebody is busy. And I certainly wouldn't deny there's loads of sexual activity here in the North American capital of sex and death, this Haiti in which I reside. There's a running joke of long-standing here about Decatur Street women: if you're thinking about sleeping with one of them, don't; she's already slept with every other guy you know on Decatur Street already.

I know guys here in New Orleans who make it a rule of thumb not to sleep with any woman who has lived in this town more than a year. People change beds in New Orleans -- especially the habitues of the little riverside enclave comprising the French Quarter, the Marigny and the Bywater, the districts with which I am most familiar -- the way Imelda Marcos changed her shoes. A close parsing of the last three years worth of Glass Houses will bear out my contention.

I did not mean to imply, again, that Americans do not have sex at all. More correctly, what I should have said was that there are multiple barriers to a full and fulfilling sex life in the structure of "normal" (so you can leave out New Orleans and most of the deep rural South) American society.

Marriage is a big coitus killer. Ask any married man. If a man who has been married more than five years gets it once a week, he's lucky, blessed in fact.

People working two or three jobs or raising three or four children don't have the time or the inclination. And then there are those who are inculcated by their respective religious zealotries into believing that sex is dirty or simply numbed into the vicarious voyeurism of soft-core television or closeted hardcore pornography. There's a lot more talk about sex in most of America than actual sex taking place. We all know this.

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Once More Iraq:

What We are NOT Reading

In the September, 2004 issue of Harper's magazine, I read the report from Naomi Kline, on the ground in Iraq, this spring and early summer. Here is one short snippet that gives you an alternative view -- one you won't find in the Mouthpiece Media -- about that embattled country:

... But three hours after my arrival in Baghdad, I was finding these reassurances extremely hard to believe. I had not yet unpacked when my hotel room was filled with debris and the windows in the lobby were shattered. Down the street, the Mount Lebanon Hotel had just been bombed, at that point the largest attack of its kind since the official end of the war. The next day, another hotel was bombed in Basra, then two Finnish businessmen were murdered on their way to a meeting in Baghdad. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt finally admitted that there was a pattern at work: "the extremists have started shifting away from the hard targets ... [and} are now going out of their way to specifically target softer targets." The next day, the State Department updated its travel advisory: U.S. citizens were "strongly warned against travel to Iraq."

The physical risks of doing business in Iraq seemed to be spiraling out of control. This, once again, was not part of the original plan. When Bremer first arrived in Baghdad, the armed resistance was so low that he was able to walk the streets with a minimal security entourage. During his first hour months on the job, 109 U.S. soldiers were killed and 570 were wounded. In the following four months, when Bremer's shock therapy had taken effect, the number of U.S. casualties almost doubled, with 195 soldiers killed and 1,633 wounded. There are many in Iraq who argue that these events are connected -- that Bremer's reforms were the single largest factor leading to the rise of armed resistance

Take, for instance, Bremer's first casualties. The soldiers and workers he laid off without pensions or severance pay didn't all disappear quietly. Many of themm went straight into the mujahedeen, forming the backbone of the armed resistance. "Half a million people are now worse off, and there you have the water tap that keeps the insurgency going. It's alternative employment," says Hussain Kubba, head o the prominent Iraqi business group Kubba Consulting. Some of the Bremer's other economic casualties also have failed to go quietly. It turns out that many of the businessmen whose companies were threatened by Bremer's investment laws have decided to make investments of their own -- in the resistance. It is partly their money that keeps fighters in Kalashnikovs and RPGs..."

You should read this article, my love. It details how the "original plan" was for the Bush junta to make Iraq their neocon, free-market utopia: no taxes, no tariffs, auction off 200 state-run factories after firing all the workers and allow non-Iraqi corporations to pull 100% of their profits out of the country; the "ideal" model for multinational freebooting. If these guys had known anything about human nature, human dignity or basic -- instead of "voodoo" -- economics ...

Well, I believe you know where the logic takes us.

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A small, independent and outspoken magazine like this one can't reach you every week without the support and patronage of its readership. As our way of thanking those who have committed to keep your World's Magazine here on your desktop through their generous donations, we feature their names and cities here in our Roll of Honor. Sustaining Patrons CHERYL HILL-NATION, West Fairlee, VT, USA DARHL STULTZ, Largo, FL, USA TIMOTHY MEADOWS, Anaheim, CA, USA Supporting Patrons BARBARA ATWELL, Berkeley, CA, USA BECKY ALTEMUS, Houston, TX, USA DOUGLAS MC DANIEL, Phoenix, AZ, USA IAN CRYSTAL, Ph. D, New Orleans, LA, USA LARS KEFFERSTAN, New York, NY, USA MATT STOWELL, New Orleans, LA, USA RIC WILLIAMS, Austin, TX, USA STEVE VIVIAN, New York, NY, USA STUART ALTMAN, ESQ., New York, NY, USA TERRY TERRIAN, Sebastopol, CA, USA We encourage you to add your name to this Roll of Honor. GENERATOR 21 cannot continue and thrive without your support. Thanks in advance. To support G21, please send checks or money orders to: G21: The World's Magazine Attn: Rod Amis 4901 E. Kelton Lane, #1271 Scottsdale, AZ, 85254 To donate by credit or debit card, please go to the Western Union website by following the highlighted link. Should you donate via Western Union, please notify us via e-mail. Please make all remittances payable to Rod Amis. Again, thanks. RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT ARCHIVES. MEMOIRS OF THE INFORMATION AGE ARCHIVES. Like GOOD MUSIC? So do we! We encourage you to visit our BASIN STREET RECORDS page to find out when the best New Orleans artists will be in your area. You'll be glad you did! What are the Staff Favorites at Powell's Online Bookstore? Take a Look!

23 August, 2004: My personal circadian cycle has completely changed during this last week in New Orleans. The power company finally came out and took the electricity away. I have spent my days awakening with the Sun and the birds and retiring with them, as well.

Just the other day, I sat on my rickety balcony facing the CBD (Central Business District,) and watched the sun disappear behind a nearby rooftop. It splattered golden light across the buildings capstones and through the treetops. A flock of what seemed like a thousand tiny birds had gathered in the branches and leaves of the furthest large tree and were gloriously singing the sun farewell. There could have been no fewer than a thousand of those birds, so loud was their collective voice in chorus!

Meanwhile, to my left and on the eastern side of my balcony, a similar but strangely quiet gathering of birds inhabited another tree. There were so many of them that they blackened the profile of the otherwise somberly green treehead. I was as amazed by their numbers as I was by their relative quiescence.

I realized that I have made the peasant cycle complete now. I have moved from merely eating peasant food -- thanks to Cheryl's largesse I cooked a large pot of chicken and rice that day -- to living only with the Sun. Most nights, I don't even bother to light the two candles Matt and Jo have provided. I simply lock the door, undress and fall upon the futon palette and into a restless sleeping.

Rod's New Orleans Testament

When one passes on to the next plain, it is customary to bequeath one's treasures to those who remain behind. I can do no less with and for those I leave in New Orleans, that most funerary of American cities. Thus, here is my last New Orleans Testament. ("Can I get a witness!?!")

To MATT STOWELL, who first convinced me to add New Orleans to this hejira of mine, I leave my sense of Driven Purpose. Get those new tires, re-up that real estate license, feel the layers of Slack rolling off your soul as you mature. Remember that most people are not as stupid as you might once have thought and that they deserve the same respect from you that you expect from them. Remember that off-handed quips might cause pain or be misinterpreted. Most of all, I leave you the notion that kindness is never a sign of weakness, rather it is the emblem of true strength.

Remember: "The good of the many is more worthy and valuable than the good of the few or the one. Live long and prosper! I shall always be your friend."

To SCOTT SALIN, I leave my sincerest gratitude for your early friendship and support. I leave you with a lifelong remembrance of your biting humor and ready, hearty laughter. I leave you with the knowledge that -- rather than simply threaten to leave New Orleans, as more than one person has and will -- I left as quickly as the wings of an airplane could take me. I leave you with the suggestion that The Winged Snake God's mantle, therefore, should now pass on.

To STEVE & PAULINE PATTERSON, I leave my fondest love and respect. You were a model for me of what a good couple can be. "Two horses pulling the same load," I used to tell other people. You were the most honorable people I knew during my years in New Orleans. That is a rare commodity. I hope you will decide to vacation in the Southwest sometime. You will be welcomed and regaled.

To JAK ("Naked Jak") LYNCH, I must leave admonitions: Stay away from bandstands. Keep your clothes on. Stay away from whiskey when you are near bandstands. Keep your clothes on. I leave you with the notion that General Patton might have been dramatic but that General Rommel showed more finesse. Finesse is a good thing.

To JIM MONAGHAN, JR., I leave the relief of knowing that I shan't mention your establishment -- a nd the various and sundry goings on there -- to the world ever again.

To MARY MC GINN: I leave.

To KATHLEEN: We can always do your next cover shoot near a lake in Phoenix, n'cest pas?

To IAN CRYSTAL: "Cousin," it would seem fitting that you begin your second book before I finish and publish my own. I look forward to seeing your first lecture in Tucson. Meanwhile, I leave you my gratitude for your friendship, your support, your cynical adherence to the credos of a "Dirty, Rotten Scoundrel". But I expect more from you before you shuffle off this mortal coil.

Nyahh! I take that back! You can come to Phoenix but you're buyin' the drinks!

I have not mentioned all of you in New Orleans, I know. Some of you were so fleeting as to be episodes rather than experiences. You got to see the sackcloth and ashes following the Knight Errant of Love period. And now, it seems, I go on to be the firebird. That's part of the life of the Butterfly Soul, I suppose.

We can probably meet again in my next of these neverending story permutations.

Thanks for coming back this week.

THINGS I NEED THIS WEEK

1. Closure on the debacle that has been the fund-transfer from Berlin

2. To get back to the second "Glass House" book at long last.

3. A burst of senseless optimism.

"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. He did stints as the Resident Philosopher at three separate gin mills in that city in the French Quarter and the Marigny, earning his stripes during two successive Mardi Gras seasons. 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 now looking for creative ways of biding his first month in Phoenix before going on to being Editor of a dead-tree newspaper. In his spare time, he chases women in the manner that a fly pursues a spider.

Rod has finally engineered his Snake Plitkin "Escape from New Orleans" He will be in Phoenix, Arizona, before the end of the week. He feels like dancing in the street! Wish him Luck.

Rod plans publication of the first Glass House book before the end of the year and is already working on the second, sequel, manuscript.

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

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