Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans

Seventeen: The Coyote Bounce January 30, 2014

As I pulled off the shirt I had slept in and worn to the laundromat, the moonstone I wear at the end of my que fell off and took a coyote bounce. It’s gone, or at least hidden from my prying eyes for the moment. If you are wondering–what the hell is a coyote bounce–then you do not have tricksters in your life. Or perhaps you are a good Catholic and don’t’ believe in such things. Instead, you would pull out one of the little purple plastic prayer pamphlets of St. Anthony my grandfather was so fond of handing out. I don’t know what St. Anthony granted him, but he was a convinced devotee.

You can blame the disorganization of my cluttered rooms at the Fortress of Squalitude, or my ADHD attention span, but I’m not convinced that’s the reason things go missing in my house. This has been going on mostly since the end of my nuclear family and setting out on my own. Before that, through over a dozen years of children, I styled myself The Finderator. Whatever they were looking for, I could usually locate. Over the last several years that has reversed. Too often what I am looking for is laying out in plain sight (as they were before), but when I am determined to look for them, they are not there. I have an affinity for crows, master tricksters, and when find myself in this position instead of beseeching St. Anthony I say, “OK, Brother Crow. You’ve had your fun. Please return [whatever] to me. Thank you.”

I had spent all morning looking for the book for tonight’s poetry chat, which I set aside about a week ago, thinking I would bringing it to the Splish Splash for another read. It was nowhere to be found. Granted there are many piles of books and papers in my house, but my system of organization should pretty much guarantee it would be near the top of one. I finally found it in a filing box top full of things I had cleared out of the front room to clean and put in the back storage place of my apartment. Relieved, I went back toward the front to finish putting away laundry, and as I passed the dirty basket I triaged aside for today, that’s when I pulled off my shirt, and the stone went gone.

OK, Brother Crow

If you are a skeptic you will find an explanation. Someone recently studied and computed the mathematical geometry behind why a string left in a drawer will ultimately tangle. The universe if filled with perfectly explicable mysteries. Certainly I am not looking hard enough, not considering the shape and construction of the lost object, anything that might contribute to a logical explanation of where it went. Feel free to explain it to me over a beer someday. For now, I’m going into the backyard where I pushed the coyote pin someone gave me once, the one I wore in my hat until too many funny things happened, and light a little stick of sage on the angle bracket that serves as a censor for him.

I am sure there is an explanation for that as well, somewhere between the statistically documented but mysterious power of prayer and perhaps just the allowance of enough time and focus on something else for my ADHD brain to process the moment and realize where to look. Still, I find my explanation more comforting, as equally connected to the mysteries and laws of the universe as the most obscure details of theoretical physics. In the end we are all trying to find something, and my way saves me no small amount of math, which was never my strong suit.

Postcript: Coyote, it seems, has moved on. The pin was firmly planted in the fence board, and I don’t think any wind could have dislodged him that wouldn’t have taken the fence down. I lit the sage and left it in his place. The moonstone was precisely under a fold of the drape that separates the two rooms. And so it goes.

Sixteen January 30, 2014

A day late and a dollar short; a day missed. The story of my life. Yes, we should avoid cliches like a plague of adverbs, but sometimes you need an adverb, especially in first person, an adverb not of superfluous description but an adverb of uncertainty: “If our mother had known, she certainly would have done the right thing.” An adverb not of certainty but of doubt, a tiny spot illuminating the conclusion she most likely would have not.

Twelve January 26, 2014

Somedays are clearly intended for leisure. You wake up from a good night’s sleep but can’t quite shake off the bedclothes, drift to the couch as lazy as a dream and a second cup of coffee doesn’t help. These are the days we of course fill up well in advance with things to do, not aware that something–the final release of a prior day’s stress, a strange dream–will leave you staring into space watching the thin trickle of smoke from an ignored cigarette. I pick up a book I started avidly a few days ago, and my eyes wander around the page, unable to follow the thread of a sentence.

Even excuses and rearrangement seems to much of a bother, although my excuses for not going to the den are good. My foot still hurts, and now my left wrist, from my luge run down the icy stairs. I won’t be wrapping popsicle stick mummies today. Other things must be done, and eventually the full pot of coffee will be drunk and the day will begin in earnest. Down days are a luxury and since I became unemployed I’ve been cutting back on luxuries.

I read a long personal horoscope by a Jungian astrologer yesterday, a gift from a friend, that was so apt it was frightening. That started off a long day of introspection punctuated by frustration, nothing quite coming off as planned. One of the things the horoscope reminded me was a tendency to neglect my body, my health. Listen to your body, it counseled. Today my body is saying: chill. You’ve been under a lot of stress and I strongly suggest you lay back down on the couch, it says, or I’ll find some handy virus and put you there.

Later, I have to help my sister start sorting through my mother’s things. It is clear she is not coming back from the nursing home, and the three-bedroom apartment in Park Esplanade must go. This is not a particularly stirring task to look forward to. Those rooms are filled with things I remember from my earliest childhood, from the tiniest tchotkes to the large, much faded Afghani rug in the living room. Even the newest pieces my sister purchased, a chair and fabulously expensive couch she found cheap, are the same stern Danish modern that filled the boxy house of my father’s modernist design on Egret Street. There is something peculiarly off-kilter about doing this with the things of the living, but at 56 I recognize the inevitability of death. I’m not quite at the point of reading the daily obituaries, something my mother did before her eyesight failed, but I’ve lost friends too young over the last several years and made a point of buying my last suit in black.

Later I will take my son to the nursing home, bringing an order of my mother’s favorite Teriyaki wings from the restaurant on Bienville. I will be relentlessly cheerful for my mother and son’s sake, in spite of spending hours handing things she and my father selected to decorate their lives. Perhaps tonight would be a good time to take down the red box containing all of the letters my father wrote to my mother during World War II, something I’ve felt not quite right about doing while my mother is still alive. Or maybe that will be too much, too soon: the war-time, airmail paper as fragile and transparent as the last.

Ten: Nine, Eight, Seven… January 24, 2014

I heard it. I’m certain of it: the unmistakable wail of what must be the last Civil Defense siren in New Orleans howling noon. What fresh apocalyptic hell might this signal, or was it just an accidental misfire of memory, the passing ghost of a missleman who spent one day too many in the hole until he ate his .45? Was it just some accident of the atmosphere that carried this forgotten sound to me from somewhere in the bowels of Gentilly, a chance collision of groceries and noon?

I had just been sitting in my car listening to Oasis Champagne Supernova at an entirely unreasonable volume, composing this in my head:

If the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency ever discovers the digital signature behind a song like Champagne Supernova, the kind that fires every roller coaster orgasm cocaine pleasure center in your brain and send you straight to 11, Big Pharma will lose the race for universal Soma and we will all be deeply and truly fucked. Perhaps they already have. That would explain so much: the dumb truck cowboy Kiss spectacle of Ameriker First county rock hybrid dragging everyone back into some Stetson hat stars-and-bars fantasy land that camouflages the sterility of the ranch box big box lunch box of their daily lives; the relentless throb of misogynistic hip-hop glorifying the quick and the dead, feeding the assembly line of prison disenfranchisement.

Never mix synchronicity and portent. It’s a hell of a hangover.

Tomorrow at noon, if you find me standing outside staring into the sky, you will know why. Unless of course our own Rocket Zero is making its reentry blaze somewhere over Alexandria right now.

Six January 21, 2014

To write every day is The Work. To commit to write every day for publication, even on an increasingly obscure blog, is a recipe for intermittent failure. Yesterday there was no Six in this 365 project, the idea that I write something every day for a year I am comfortable pushing the Publish button with. In The Work, you can try and fail, put down hundreds or thousands of words and revisit them the next day, prompting sending them to the wastebasket.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
— Samuel Beckett

If you are a writer or any other variety of artist; hell if you are anyone of ambition whatsoever, if you do not have these words tattooed on your forearms where they can remind you every moment of every day, I will pause for a moment while you find a sticky note or a bit of tape and paper to put these up on the wall above your writing space, or write them in the fly-leaf of your notebook.

There. That’s better.

Yesterday was a self-inflicted failure, the temptation while unemployed to ignore the clock, to catch an early show by Dave Easley at the Maison and then his late show at The Apple Barrel. In between I met a French bassist (or perhaps Québécois; I didn’t ask) who was wandering Frenchman Street making contacts, sitting in, trying to find gigs. I met a pair of roommates freshly back from Zambia who tried to convince me that the cure for unemployment ennui is the Peace Corps. I heard a shredding modern jazz combo at the Spotted Cat, the home of swing and trad. I finished writing Five while in Check Point Charlies, not precisely the place you would expect to find quiet and a well-lit bar top. I might have gone home earlier if I had not found that bar stool, and had a long conversation about scooters versus motorcycles, exchanged stories of spills we had both taken, the merit of leathers versus the kids in shorts and sandals on the unstable mini-wheels of a Vespa on the minefield streets of New Orleans.

That is The Life, one of the several reasons we live here against all rational sense. It is also, in a way, The Work, collecting the specimens nurtured over beers that are the germ of future posts. I did not scribble in my notebook as I did last week in similar circumstances but I was too lost in Easley’s magic finger on his pedal steel guitar, in the discovery of a new sound at the Cat, in pleasant conversation. I don’t mean to let 365 make a monk of me, or what the hell would I write about?

Four: Improvisation No. 4 January 18, 2014

Memory is the steam in the mad engine of creativity. Without memory there is no story, no order to the song, no foundation upon which to build. Without: gathered fragments of flotsam, a fragile daub and wattle hut that will not stand. Even surrealism cannot function without context. The avant-garde carry the weapons of dead generals into the uncharted, following the map of memory into fields of dream. In the Maple Street Bar the juke box is moved, the old upright piano is gone, the tables and chairs swept away, but the tin roof and walls still remain, the roof the color of a well worn penny, the walls a familiar maroon, the bar the same pocked barge board varnished and polished by tens of thousands of bar rags. The studied improvisations of the Johnny Vidacovich Trio, psychedelic vibraphone pedal effects floating over the jittery LP groove of bass and drums fill the space with space, a new theory of gravity that allows for the Assumption until a young trombone player joins them. Suddenly the trad jazz ghosts of Andrew Hall’s Society Jazz Band are present, admiring the wild profusion of flowers in the formal garden they once tended on the same stage decades ago. You can feel the gleam in Booker’s hidden eye.