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The Who released this song in 1978 and how appropriate because that was the decade of my coming of age. I had a brief encounter of the good kind today and was reminded that who I am right now is not really who I ought to be. I had this feeling before, the same person caused it, and today I had it in spades.

I used to be a maverick, a renegade, a rogue player hearing the beat of a different drum but I moved to California and everything went awry. I needed to make money to afford to live in “paradise” – something I had never contemplated in earnest before – so I gradually started letting go of my dream to be a fiction writer – then I needed to buy a house because I was about to be expelled from my apartment due to dot.com greed – so I more firmly embraced “the” way that was being offered to me – and even when I woke and felt the earth being shoveled on my premature grave (read: I was in Marin County), I ran home as fast as I could and lo and behold, I was met by a changed world – a world underwater – my new reality had a steep new price tag – so stay the course I did – I couldn’t escape even here in the City that Care Forgot – despite obstacles – despite desire – despite the inside me that still was at war with the outside me.

Who am I?

Walking along the lagoon and looking at the immature herons with their snowy white plumage waiting to change to dark, I thought about Loca and how happy she seemed walking in the park on this fall morning. I thought how we have animals at three stages of life. Loca is a puppy who wants to chase just for the chase, she doesn’t care what, or why, or when.

Bam Bam is in the prime of his life, he has not lost the desire to chase, but he does it with the least amount of exertion, positioning himself strategically to be able to bat Arlene or Loca on the head without having to move an inch from his perch.

Arlene loves the sprawled position, preferably near a corner or a piece of furniture to avoid getting stepped on, she has bitemares dreaming of chasing, of past chases, and she sometimes puts the moose in her mouth, a vestige of days gone by.

I noticed as my mind was contemplating these stages that Loca was being so sweet and quiet and I wondered why. Then I spied it. She had snatched a Popeyes chicken wing left behind near a picnic table and I could see the tip in the corner of her mouth. Normally, she will relinquish what she has on command, but this morning she was having none of it, she WANTED that chicken wing and had been savoring it instead of crunching it, knowing that if I heard the bones grind between her teeth I would have snatched it away from her seconds before. I wrestled it out of her mouth and she looked at me with eyes that said, “Why’d you have to go and ruin a good thing?”

I was walking along the park this morning and Loca and I ran into the friendly Airedale. When the two dogs meet, they crouch down on their dog knees and army crawl towards each other. The Airedale is 4 but acts like Loca’s 1.5 years of puppiness.

I woke to a gorgeous fall morning and lying beside me was a Croatian princess (although she looks like a young prince), Bam Bam was sitting on the Saarinen ottoman that we now have to bring in the room for him, Loca was banging against the cage, and Arlene was sprawled out on the cold marble floors in the bathroom.

To say there was a song in my heart would be an understatement. So when the Airedale’s mom turned to me and said, “Have a great day!” I thought how nice that have a good day has now morphed into a superlative more appropriate for my mood.

When I was young I had a recurring dream that I was standing in a grassy meadow looking up peacefully at the full moon in the night sky. In my peripheral vision a small plane appeared and suddenly my heart started racing and then the plane collided with the moon and a nuclear holocaust erupted. This was my cold war dream. If I had looked up the dream in a dream book, looking up plane crash as I don’t think dreams carry the plane colliding in moon variety, I would have thought my dream was about losing control.

Yesterday, I noticed at the gym a flyer for a dream interpretation seminar. Learn what your dreams mean, the flyer said. I tend to move in and out of ascribing meaning to dreams but most of the time I think they are mash ups of the bits of information that are coming into the subconscious mind.

I was in my reformer class yesterday evening and was on the Cadillac with my feet in leather straps, suspended from the top bar, holding on to the metal poles. My instructor said, “This reminds me of a dream I had last night.”

I looked at her awkwardly as I was holding on for dear life.

“You weren’t in it,” she said. “I dreamt that Tulane’s campus was under water. Completely submerged.”

These are our new dream mash ups here in New Orleans – we dream we are moving underwater, that our city is underwater, that our pets, our friends, our houses are submerged under water. A dream book may say these dreams of being underwater are about being overwhelmed, but I believe we dream of being underwater because it’s a sign of our times.

What a beautiful fall day here on the bayou – the light has that quality that Faulkner described as he looked at it through his glass of whiskey and the bayou is ripe for the pelicans to return. There is a nice dry breeze blowing through this city and we are all the grateful for it.

When you’re ship comes in, will you be ready? I got head hunted for a $1 million a year job this week – and while it was flattering, it made me take a good look at where I am.

In a discussion about matters of life, T said if she were offered 20% more salary but it meant 20% less time with me, she wouldn’t take it. I said I wonder if most successful men (and women) would say the same. When you put your career first, ahead of love, ahead of having children, ahead of friends and good times, are you happier? More successful? Do people just “go for it” knee jerk because they think they are supposed to, even if they don’t want to?

Pick a part a million dollar offer – will this improve the quality of your life right now? Will it give you more time with your loved ones? Will it save the world?

The answer my darling readers is a resounding no (in case you were questioning it). Everything weighs in. Come on, don’t you know the old adage, no one on their death bed regrets not having spent more time at work.

I can’t say I would have reacted this way twenty years ago, and maybe that is the best part of age, but I readily admit today a million dollar offer holds no sway over my happiness and that is a good sign.

A real good sign that something, nay, many things, are working for me.

LaBruzzo considering plan to pay poor women $1,000 to have tubes tied
by Mark Waller, The Times-Picayune
Tuesday September 23, 2008, 10:40 PM

Worried that welfare costs are rising as the number of taxpayers declines, state Rep. John LaBruzzo, R-Metairie, said Tuesday he is studying a plan to pay poor women $1,000 to have their Fallopian tubes tied.

“We’re on a train headed to the future and there’s a bridge out, ” LaBruzzo said of what he suspects are dangerous demographic trends. “And nobody wants to talk about it.”

LaBruzzo said he worries that people receiving government aid such as food stamps and publicly subsidized housing are reproducing at a faster rate than more affluent, better-educated people who presumably pay more tax revenue to the government. He said he is gathering statistics now.

The true thing about aging is that as the world speeds up around you, other things seem to take longer and longer. Getting over an injury, getting over a heartbreak, and so on. In all the things that should be in reverse, you’d think for life’s lesson purposes you should experience these extended, thoughtful getting over periods when you’re young and have plenty of time – instead, it is given to us later in life, when we feel like we don’t have time to waste.

I’m trying to find balance in my life between job demands, physical exercise, fun, girlfriend, family, friends, and ME. Lord knows it is not easy. I keep laying out a plan, I’ll do this first, then this, and then schedule this for this day, and well the whole thing just comes crashing down as soon as you have got everything all laid out like a grid and Person #1 changes their time, then Person #2 can’t change their time, and well, it’s an endless game of musical dates and you know who usually gets short shrift – MOI!

So right now I’m getting off this computer and going down to vacuum. Then I’m going to 409 the guest bathroom walls because every time I walk in there and see the scuff marks caused by crazy animals, I want to bang my head on the wall.

The roses are not getting deadheaded today. The plants that are half lying face down in the dirt from Gustav and Ike are just going to have to remain that way until I can get to them.

The walk around the bayou with Loca to enjoy one fine autumn afternoon – forget about it.

However, I did manage to sneak in a moment to just close my eyes and be happy. I urge you to do the same.

I took mom to the airport so that she could go see my sister. On the way, she told me that a psychic had told her a while back not to put her money in the banks because there won’t be banks in the future and now, see.