Dangermond.org

I’m missing G – haven’t seen her in a while because I’ve been caught up with travel and L and LaLa and such. My days and nights can’t seem to encompass all I want from them. I haven’t had a chat and cocktails with T in a while even though she is right down the hall from me. Another T called on Sunday and said it had been a while since we saw each other. I haven’t been to Bacchanal for Saturday wine tastings or Sunday evenings and seen Chris and everyone there. I ran out to see my mom on Sunday and felt then like I had short changed her visit as well since I was in a hurry to leave after only arriving. And I haven’t seen either Abby or Abby Lane or my little J-man since before New York and now I’m off to New York again on Thursday.

Not enough hours in the day to devote to the ones I love and myself – sigh.

Last night I went with Lance to Applebee’s for a snack before seeing “Harsh Times” starring Christian Bale. The movie was more of a character study than plot driven – and in the end Bale’s character didn’t change or incur an epiphany – he actually kind of lost steam portraying a cold-hearted violent man scarred by war and killing, who then breaks down and cries when he finds out his Mexican squeeze is pregnant because he almost killed her when she told him – what goes on?

It made me dream violent dreams – my mother getting hacked to pieces – all sorts of horrid images of death and blood and gore.

I’m done with violent films – all they seem to do is pepper my memory banks with graphic images that have no purpose in my life except to shadow my mind.

Julio is sanding the floors at the LaLa and he will put the first coat of stain on today. I’m going with the Ebony stain that Nick used on his mother in law’s floors because I really liked those floors the first time I saw them. Julio tried to talk me into the natural red pine color – and it is rich and warm – but I like the ebony stain. Steve suggested I go with the natural wood color only because the ebony was related to Nick. But BJ is the one who helped me decide – he said the ebony would be its own thing and even though he and Danielle decided to go with the natural wood in their home in San Francisco, he thought it sounded like the best option for me.

Michael is painting all the doors that took Ken a million years to cut and hang. Meanwhile Ken is painting the upper terrace because the painters (Peter has been recovering from minor surgery and major depression that his LRA money was so low) have been a no show.

Giovanni is covering the pillars with a smooth concrete finish, which is giving it a more polished look and also helping to infill where some of the bricks had all but disintegrated. Dave wanted him to start on the front brick landscaping but I’m not ready for that yet because not sure of design right yet.

Michael painted one piece of the addition with the Strawberry Fields and it looks terrific. The vertical tower of the addition will all be this color – kind of a reddish terracotta-ish color. More red than orange. The office is Rust color and when you look into the office from the terrace it does kind of clash to see the orange within the red but not too noticeable anywhere else.

Everyone seems to be focused on the lines around my eyes. I stopped into Saks while in NY to spend a small fortune on wrinkle cream and the woman behind the counter, only two years younger than me, with not a line on her face, said “you have good skin, but, um, the lines around your eyes need help.”

L and I were talking about cosmetic surgery as he just visited a friend whose wife wouldn’t come downstairs because she had just had some. I told him everyone is getting these mini face lifts and he said he could definitely see lines around my eyes.

But the end all and be all on this subject as usual comes from my mother, who has a way of cutting through the small talk – she just showed me a photograph of me in high school (almost 30 years ago!) and said, “Love this picture, because I can see your eyes.”

Then of course there is the mirror, which shows me a 47 year old woman these days – whose lines are deep around her eyes and mouth – too much laughing, too much expression, too much reading (I squint).

If the LaLa wasn’t sucking up all my disposable income, I might feel this overwhelming need to run straight to the closest plastic surgeon and see about these damn lines around my eyes. And yet, L also put Lucinda Williams’ song “Lines around your eyes” on a CD, so maybe I’ll just listen to this for another couple of years and buy my lines some time:

Lines Around Your Eyes
There are things about you that make me wanna scream and shout
There are things about you that make me wanna lock you out
But there’s a little thing that drives me wild
Something that happens every time you smile
I can’t get over the lines around your eyes
Lines around your eyes everytime you smile
And the way you touch me darlin’ just drives me wild
Sometimes I don’t know what we’re fightin’ about
But that don’t mean we can’t work things out
Cause I love you darlin’ and the lines around your eyes
SOLO
I put my car in gear and I headed down Highway 10
I was leavin’ here, I was never comin’ back again
I got about as far as the Texas line
I still couldn’t get you off of my mind
Cause I can’t get over the lines around your eyes
Lines around your eyes everytime you smile
And the way you touch me darlin’ just drives me wild
Sometimes I don’t know what we’re fightin’ about
But that don’t mean we can’t work things out
Cause I love you darlin’ and the lines around your eyes

From Lucinda Williams Sweet Old World
Chameleon Records 1992
Lucy Jones Music(BMI)

I went by my mother’s to have dinner, but when I got there she wasn’t hungry and I wasn’t either, so we just sat around and caught up. She said her first love called the other day to check in as he is want to do these fifty something years after the fact. Her apartment was as smoky as the sports bar I was in earlier in the day when I went to have lunch with L after our bike ride. I had to leave the door open just to breathe.

Cigarettes are foul – how could anyone be healthy when they are ingesting that crap into their lungs 24/7?

Anyway, she said she wanted to call me Saturday but she knew I was going to Covington so she didn’t want to bother me – but she almost went to the emergency room. Apparently they switched her blood pressure medicine and it made her lethargic to the point of inertia – and she didn’t know if it would pass. It did, but not until the next day.

Health is so tenuous – but truly it is something to cherish more than any other factor that affects the quality of our life.

At the Three Rivers Festival, I ran across GoGo’s booth – I love her jewelry – I bought one of her cuff bracelets at Jazz Fest this year, a carved silver with green underlay bamboo design. She’s one of three jewelers in New Orleans that are so unique and cool that if you miss her at the Jazz Fest or other festivals, you can now go see her on Magazine Street. She has a Guns and Roses necklace in Elle Magazine, which is a great coup for her. I love to see talent meet success.

GoGo Jewelry
4212 Magazine Street
504.304.8458

The other two jewelers are, of course, Mignon Faget and Thomas Mann.

After carving out a financial roadmap for the LaLa and paying bills this morning, I went for a bike ride with L, mystery ex-bar pilot, and we rode through the Marigny and the Quarter. We stopped at a used bookstore on Barracks and it was there I wondered why it seems I have no time to read in my life?

A missive from Susu saying “(my hair dryer broke, it is pouring rain, the milk went sour,….some of these things take a bit of time to remedy before you can face the world)” and just at the mention of rain, I am so glad for this near perfect day and for warm Decembers.

Yesterday, I ran the Crescent City Classic (5K) in 29.10 – my best time so far in a race. That’s right, I’m slow, but I endure. When I came across the finish line, there was no one around to say “atta girl” – so I patted myself on the back and walked home.

Afterwards, I drove uptown for Maria to blow dry my hair and then dropped the Bean at L’s house, so she could hang with Nellie and Max and the man of mystery and I could go across the lake to the Three Rivers Art Festival. Downtown Covington was like a strange town I’d never been to before – when I lived there in 1983, it was a sleepy place – now blocks and blocks were crowded with artisans and artists selling their work and bars and restaurants and shops.

We had a cocktail with L’s parents – a handsome couple who when I first met them made me remark to L – where were you when I wanted to (read: could) have a baby – beautiful genes. His mother laughs out loud – I know it’s narcissistic of me, but I like that quality a lot.

On a whim, we hooked up with L’s sister and went to Baton Rouge to see LSU play Alabama. Thankfully we had stadium club seats so we had, at our ready, an escape from the chilly wind – lots of eats and drinks and not to mention a chocolate fountain to dip the fresh strawberries and Oreos in.

By the time we were driving home, I could barely keep my eyes open. But this morning lying in bed, I thought about the wanderlust in L’s eyes that is there all the time – and I recognize it so easily because my father had it in spades – he had gypsy in his blood I always tell people – I have it too, but I’m much more of a hybrid – I like home base and then a wide berth to explore, but I snap back to base pretty readily, even while harboring the potential to leave home and never look back.

I came across a DVD that intrigued me since L, man of mystery, was a riverboat pilot and this occupation is rich with mythology in these parts of the world. I don’t think the movie is worth watching because even the plot description sounds one dimensional. But it made me think of another river boat pilot – Samuel Clemens – in his early writings he satirized a pilot who wrote for the Picayune called Mark Twain (which means two fathoms, a depth safe for a river boat) and later took the name as his own nom de plume. Once Twain earned his pilot’s license, he enjoyed the fine life and with his new disposable income, he began to drink in a town he described in Life on the Mississippi (his autobiographical account of his years as a riverboat pilot) as having “plenty of drinking, carousing, fisticuffing.”

Here is the PLOT DESCRIPTION for Down in New Orleans
A riverboat pilot whose outwardly charmed life masks a tortured past finds that not even the most luxurious of material possessions can help him elude his demons in writer/director Richard Elias’ rapid-water tale of redemption. From the time he was a young child, all Jack (Nathan Grubbs) ever wanted in life was to become a river pilot. Though as an adult Jack does manage to achieve his youthful dream, all the money, creature comforts, and love in New Orleans isn’t enough to make him shake the addiction that threatens to send him spiraling into treacherous waters of the New Orleans underworld. As his loving wife Gabrielle (Gabrielle Sfardini) attempts to help Jack conquer his dark past, influential shipping magnate Lars (Ed Zajac) and New Orleans drug kingpin Dickie (Charles Allen) do their best to hasten the troubled pilot’s fall by encouraging Jack to go back to his old ways. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

Sometimes I don’t want the world at my beck and call – I want to hide under a rock and just hibernate till the world stops spinning. So many good things have happened recently – the Democrats took back the House and possibly will get the Senate. Rumsfield quit. Some things have gone sideways – WalMart announced it will revert from saying Holidays to Christmas so that it has a Christmas shop not a Holiday shop and its clerks say Merry Christmas. Macy’s will do the same thing this year. Fuck Macy’s – they have decided not to support New Orleans so I don’t support them. And I HATE WalMart.

O said it best today when I said I just need to crawl in bed – she said you always go on these trips and then come back cranked up and still going – you don’t take down time. I need down time.

Now back to my cave.