-> MY GLASS HOUSE
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NEW ORLEANS - 27 April, 2005: I shall probably have joined the ranks of our nation's homeless by the time you read this journal entry, my love. It became inevitable when I sent out my last "Beg" e-mail and only three people responded. I had run out of options. There were no more couches to surf and nowhere to go except the streets.
As I type this to you, I am making plans to get this computer back to Matt, do laundry for packing and figure out where to store my belongings. In the next few days, I suppose I'll also have to figure out the best places to skulk to at night and hide from the police while trying to get some sleep.
Obviously, I'm also fretting about how I shall be able to keep your World's Magazine afloat. But that is a small worry beside that of how to keep Rod alive ... how to keep writing ...
I figure I have to keep writing as fast as I can now, since I don't know when this core part of my life will be taken away.What am I supposed to do? You take writing away from Rod and there is, essentially, no Rod. That is my worry and my fear and now we are looking each other in the eye.
It is like watching a point diminish until it vanishes altogether, like watching matter drop into a black hole. New Orleans has always been my black hole.
I sent a garbled e-mail to the writers who have contributed to your World's Magazine over the last few years letting them know that I am gone for an indefinite period, perhaps forever. It was difficult to do, writing through my tears ... I probably should have gone back and edited it before hitting "Send" -- not that any of that matters anymore.
Even now, I realize that I am probably writing for no one.
30 April, 2005: It's chilling to think but this might be one of the last passages I ever write. You usually think that such an instance will come when you're old(er) and feeble, not when you're arguably at the top of your game, not when you have finally found the way to say something that had eluded you for years, were going for it. You always expect the last minute reprieve, the lucky chance, that allows you to grind on doing His work. But even cats have only nine lives. It seems I have exhausted all of mine.Dragana was right again. This place has nothing for me and Matt just wanted to be able to see it kill my soul.
I have always acknowledged that I have nothing to live for except writing ... This magazine afforded that while also allowing me to meet some of the better developing writers on this planet and give them the benefit of my hard knocks. I said "Adieu" to those wonderful children of mine in a e-mail Matt sent off for me two days ago.
It is raining today, of course. So the move will take place later than anticipated. We're trying to decide when to get my few things and this computer out of here. When I move back to the street.
"Just as I hit stride, dammit!" I hear my own words spoken aloud bouncing off the walls of the empty room. Shawn is at work.
I have no last minute schemes. I am even out of prayers.
The question now is as much how, or nearly so, as exactly when. Sometime in the next few days, I suppose. I shan't be able to handle the hopelessness very long, I already know that.
Like Ron Diener I do not want a box. I don't feel the need to leave any other footprint than this ethereal one here online. It is more than large enough, my beloved Cathedral of Words. Should Matt deem to allow you to see this last journal entry of mine, I also hope that you will ensure that my wishes are complied with, should this carcass be recovered/recoverable.
Whatever you do, my love, make certain that my brother is NOT allowed to pump formaldehyde into my veins and encase my remains in a box. I want none of that. I want none of those people to whom I am biologically bound to have anything do with my final destination, much as they had nothing to do with my journey.
The thunder in the distance sounds wonderful today. Dragana, even more a romantic than I, would say that the gods are crying today. But perhaps they are just washing things clean, I muse, in anticipation of my arrival. By rights, I should have arrived much sooner than this Spring day in another bloody century. I was never meant to grow old .
1 May, 2005: IF THE GODS WERE INDEED CRYING for me yesterday, their own Fool, today they are chuckling. The Sun has burst through the clouds and it is a bright morning, there is a chill in the air making things crisp. I have just walked back from Verti Mart, on Royal Street. It is 7:30 in the morning, I have only snatched moments of sleep this past night because of the excitement in the air.The e-mail that changed everything came from a little town near Lizard Lick. It's first line was "Come home!"
It seems I shall be living with another old man who I have never met. He thinks that I should go to the land of my father, North Carolina, and that there are prospects for me there -- At least better prospects than I had planned for myself, a watery grave.
I have said it before: I am the Blanche DuBois of the Internet. "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."
I had put out my funereal attire. I meant to be dressed all in white. Then Matt called and said he had his place to himself, as Jo was off to stand in the rain at Jazz Fest, he had beer, and I should come over. Another chance to check the e-mail. I meant to leave a few ascerbic good-byes, move my belongings out of Shawn's flat, camp on the levee for a day or two and leap into the Industrial Canal that separates the Bywater from the Lower Ninth ward.
That is now not to be. I shall be traveling across country again, continue this seemingly ceaseless hejira of my soul, to another place, another town, another life and a new adventure.
Weary as I am of this endless journey of mine, I am not yet quite weary of life, your World's Magazine, or this compulsive need to write it all down, the history of the world from one person's standpoint. So I'll take another long bus ride and see what Providence has in store for me.
The fact that I am going to North Carolina means that I shall not have escaped the American South, an area I have mixed emotions about on the best day. People tell me anecdotally that in the city of Asheville there is something of an intellectual oasis. Duke University has much to boast and I understand Charlotte has a goodly community of the tech savvy. But I know the place not at all. I was last there as a child, visiting my paternal grandfather's tobacco farm and haven't been back since.
My paternal grandfather, Alec Amis, was a tall man, expansive and untamed. From what little I know about him, from family stories, he was a notorious womanizer. He divorced my father's mother, my dear granny Leona, and she went on to marry a more upright and Christian man named Harris. She was widowed by Mr. Harris and died of senile dementia in a rest home.
My father took his mother's side in all of that. She eventually lived with us on the farm that I spent my last years with that family before taking off on my own. I never forgave my parents for sending her away to die alone, though I knew she was quite mad.
As Matt says, I'm expert at holding a grudge.
Because of my father's decision and the mystery (to me) of his life before marrying my mother, I only saw my paternal grandfather twice that I can recall, both on visits to his tobacco farm in North Carolina. I only remember parts of one of those visits. I have blocked so much of my childhood out of mind, for reasons you know too well by now, my love, that I am surprised I remember any of that visit at all.
There are only scenes in the memory. One is of being shown a building, a barn, where my grandfather cured the tobacco. The sweet smell of the hanging plants is vivid in my mind until this day. The other is of an early morning country breakfast. I was bedazzled by all the food my grandfather's new wife kept piling onto the table, ham and grits and eggs and sausages and hot cakes and hash browns and rashers of bacon. The food seemed to keep coming endlessly. And I remember my eyes bugging because I had never seen that much food on one table before. And I remember my grandfather laughing, vigorously, full from the belly, and telling us that you needed to eat like that if you were going to work hard all day.
I would never see Alec Amis again after that visit. I don't know why.
All I do know is that shortly after that Leona Harris, my paternal grandmother, appeared in the city near us. My parents would leave me and my siblings at her house sometimes. She was the first storyteller I ever knew. She would tell me the story about Mordecai, Satan's cat, over and over again because I asked for it. She would tell me about haints and root-workers, too. Sometimes, she would tell me about her father, his life during Slavery Time, and how he had killed the dogs they would sic on him with his bare hands, trying to escape. She told me that he tried to escape the plantations over and over again, so that they would beat him and eventually made him lame when they figured out he would not give up. "Your great grand was a left-handed cheese-cutter -- that was his job -- who knew no fear," she would tell me late in the night. "They had to cripple him 'cause all he ever dreamed about was bein' free."
I told Peggy about my gran' one day while we sat at the Tides restaurant in Bodega Bay. She looked at me wide-eyed. "You mean slavery is that close to you? Only two generations away?"
"Yes."
"I never thought of it that way," she said, taking my hand. "That's too close."
This morning I'll drink whiskey with a beer chaser and hope for sleep at some moment. I shall pretend there is something I can find to like about the South
I cannot dream about the new life afforded me now. I shall try that on the bus ride ...
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Road Ragings
ABOARD AN AMTRAK TRAIN, Somewhere in the American South - 2 May, 2005: Scenic? Hell, no. You're looking at the back ass of the world. Trailer parks, junk yards, print shops and warehouses, lots of trees. That's it -- all the way from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Florida (Pensacola.) It is a ticket nobody should want to buy ...
One of my biggest problems is that I've never thought of a thousand miles as too far to go. You talk eight, nine thousand miles and you start to get my attention.
The train ride, especially that stretch between New Orleans and Jacksonville, FLA, could make me join the rest of America and swear off passenger trains. The AmTrak train I was on spent as much time standing still as it did in motion. Our rails, its explained, now defer to freight trains; passenger trains must simply sit and wait until the freights have taken the right-of-way. At least the stretch from Pensacola to Jacksonville was redeemed by a brief view of the Gulf.We are now two hours behind schedule. AmTrak should be paying people to endure this ordeal, rather than vice-versa.
The Florida of my Mind is not the Florida I am seeing. I am seeing a place that is rural, impoverished, trailer-rich and unimpressive. It's no surprise that the Bush brother is governor of such a place. It is simply more of the moribund and rural Deep South. It makes for a perfect intellectual wasteland. BubbaLand.I've noticed that most of the people on this train are women, most of whom appear not to have husbands. The ones who might have husbands are making cell phone calls to explain why they'll be late returning home. There is something behind this demographic that I must cogitate over when I am not under the stress of travel, change and fatigue.
After we had all boarded the train from Jacksonville, FLA, to Raleigh, NC, there was another substantial delay. Something of a block party developed on the platform as the smokers realized they had more time to indulge and everyone else decided to just stretch their legs. I spent most of the time talking with a veteran of the second World War. He was a scrappy old man who had been born in 1929 and was still sharp and insightful if becoming more physically frail. He told me he was an Air Force vet. We talked about ex-wives -- he had two to my one -- kids, working, mistakes we had made in our lives and how our country being in Iraq was a disaster. We talked about race relations, too, after he made it a point to tell me about how the wife of a Black friend looked after his second wife while said wife was on her deathbed."You're a pretty smart and down-to-earth fellah, for a young man," he said to me and winked as he climbed back onto the train.
"You're not so slow for an old coot," I shot back.
He cackled and wished me a nice trip to North Carolina.
While I moved across country to Manhattan years ago, after living in California for twenty years, I encountered this overwhelming feeling of "home" after reaching the area around Chicago, Illinois. Something about the very landscape, the greenness of it, moved me.
I have a feeling akin to that one again now. Unlike in the Deep South -- Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida -- when I reached North Carolina, I was touched by a sense of recognition.
Even along the train route, ramshackle began to give way to manicured and refined. There was something more fresh and alive about the flora. The word genteel had a meaning that doesn't apply further South and I suddenly recalled that I once had a brief love affair with the Atlantic Ocean.
As we rolled the final miles toward Raleigh, I brushed my teeth and worked on finishing a pint of Canadian whiskey. The whiskey helps to ease some of the anxiety, the fear about putting myself in the hands of a man who I respect but have never actually meant in meatspace. What if he finds me intolerable? What if this is as abortive as when Matt called me back to Nawlins again, only to stand by and watch me get Jo'ed?
Questions and fears ... Some people have said that I must be fearless because I leap into life and these journeys into uncharted waters so blithely. Not true. It is not that I am fearless at all but rather that I can live with being afraid more easily than I can live with ennui. I have always believed that every hero, every man we call courageous, was simply a man who took fear as part of the price of discovery.
Thanks for coming back this week.
THINGS I PRAY FOR THIS WEEK
1 - Hearing Terry's voice and good health to his second grandchild.
2 - A new job, dammit! so that I can rebuild my life.
3 - That my gratefulness for Vickie's return is accepted.
"Work like you don't need the money,
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching ... "
Love,
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 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 Internet 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 resuming his hejira and accepting that it is at the core of who he is. The refuge of the road, as Joni Mitchell once sang, for our country's most "out" refugee.
He still needs to find an angel to hire him to do this magazine ...
In his spare time, he chases women in the manner that a fly pursues a spider. 
He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.
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