Dangermond.org

I tried to ride my bike out to the lakefront this morning but when I turned to the left to avoid the Marathon, I ran smack into the runners, and when I jogged to the right I ran into them again – there was no getting around the race as it was running down every artery around City Park there was. But I finally made it to the lakefront and when I got there it was so windy that I wondered what the fuss was all about. Then I decided to come back down West End to avoid the marathon and I was riding along and all of a sudden I had this vision of after Katrina when the neutral ground on West End was this mountain of debris because that is where it was all stacked before they could move it out. Imagine miles of this mountain of flooded house bits all piled up – and now nothing – there was something surreal about it.

Then I turned right to get back to Mid City and I detoured down Catrina Street where I used to live about a million years ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The tiny cottage houses were ballooned into bigger houses and there were still houses that were defunct from the flood. I tried to remember what I was doing when I lived on Catrina Street and then I remembered I was 23 years old and I drove a red Spitfire – the street looked as if it had undergone a science experiment as it had buckled up and dipped low on the sides so my tiny car was always in peril of tipping over. I had been commissioned to work on the opening of a jewelry store in Lafayette by an inlaw of mine who was at the time an outlaw and though I know he was using me as a pawn for his tricks, I enjoyed driving to Lafayette about 90 miles an hour in my Spitfire on the weekends scouting out locations and getting renderings drawn up and having “meetings.” My boyfriend – the first love of my life – was in the nuthouse having had a mental breakdown (he was 16 years older than me) and I had started seeing who was to be my first husband.

I remember when I was moving out of the Catrina house to move across the lake in with my husband’s parents, I had this feeling that life’s current was moving me in a direction and I wasn’t quite sure what was going on as things were just happening so fast. I cried a blue streak when my washing machine was loaded on the truck – I can’t explain it, it was the same meltdown I had right before and after each marriage I had. The first marriage was the washing machine, the second was over an emerald ring that I ended up giving to my sister, and the third was over a dress that I wanted to buy for my wedding. It was sort of this guts out cry fest and really now I know what might have been the problem – FEAR.

I rode down Canal Boulevard back to the bayou and by that time the Marathon was calming down a bit. The day was sunny and cool and I was in a mood of something, something like the full moon is want to bring out of all of us, a sort of reckless abandoning of all the lessons learned in the past and a comfort that I don’t have to have a tantrum but actually say, that bothers me. I don’t like that. This makes me feel uncomfortable. There are some benefits to maturity after all.

They changed the route for the Mardi Gras Marathon and thereby cancelled an entire block party tradition. Every year my neighbor would hang his banner that said “You’re About To Take a Turn For The Worse” and we’d all stand outside in pajamas drinking Mimosas and handing out cigarettes and beer to the runners.

A friend stopped by with his daughters, one who is in sixth grade, he said that she wanted to interview us because she had been assigned a paper to write and all of the topics were so banal such as Do You Think Zoos are Good or Bad and she asked to pick her own topic and decided she wanted to write about Same Sex Marriage.

If it just happens that the world is going to end, could I just say one more time AMEN – we won the Superbowl!!!! Yes, indeed.

There are lots of theories swirling around about the Mayan calendar and the now ubiquitous 2012. I’ve heard apocalypse and I’ve heard that we are in a cycle that is ending, and we are nearing the narrower part of the funnel and that as we enter this phase, everything is speeding up to supersonic speed and that is not just catastrophes like the earthquake in Chile or the near miss Hawaii just had, it is composed of grand scale events like good and bad and indifferent all happening back to back and that as we approach 2012 it is going to pick up speed and that we have to be ready for what is to come.

How to prepare?

Well from what I understand, evolve is a good word of the day. If you could move towards enlightenment and love and kindness then you might be on the path already but more importantly if you are someone who can live with uncertainty and not knowing that is what would arm you best and who better than us here in New Orleans to lead the nation into the new cycle?

The websites that are appearing remind me of Y2K and other phenomenon that have surfaced in my timeline, the unrest and the disturbances in the field only seem to underscore the tentativeness of all we know and understand. Which brings me back to this – how could we be the only beings in the cosmos? How is that possible?

Eating animals – another thing that is very disturbing. How do you reconcile all that you know with all that you do? Pretty heady stuff. And this is what happens when you don’t have a glass of wine on Friday night or Saturday night to hold all of these ponderings in abeyance.

All of the cliches you hear your whole life are sort of true. My mother told me that my life would change at 25, 35, 45 and that turning 50 I would know what it meant to be woman, and that the years that followed would be fabulous. She knew her stuff. The other things like you don’t know what it means to be a mother until you are one, life is short (but wide), youth is wasted on the young, and on and on, all true.

Tonight the full moon has been visible in the sky since early this morning – and I have noticed it calls to people in different ways – some beat their breast, and some walk an inch off the ground.

Today I went through my to do list – laundry, put the gargoyles up that have been down since the side of the terrace needed repainting, walk Tin and Loca, drop a note off for Harold at the American Can about Tin’s birthday, try to clean up my desk (not), and then a surprise visit from a friend with his two little girls, who decided they wanted to feed Tin.

And before you know it – Saturday is Saturday evening and the moon that has been an outline against the backlit sky is now front and center bold and glowing in the gloaming, and even the dusk is sneaking away very fast.

The little girl said to me, “What do you do?” “Do you make a lot of money?”

She has nearly four decades to figure out what I know and by that time, she will not care about those questions anymore.

I was wishing my dear friend a happy birthday today and gave her an illustrated copy of the Tao Te Ching – there are only so many people who would really appreciate this book in my life and she’s one of them. It’s of course the one translated by Stephen Mitchell but I said this book has been a constant companion on my bedside for more than two decades.

She said her horoscope was stellar this morning – that something was going to happen big and she just had to sit back and wait and let it happen. Ah, how perfect a horoscope on your birthday when you are in receipt of the Tao.

And how I hope the very best for her and that she sees her horoscope come alive asap.

I was able to get out and walk both Loca and Tin today as the weather warmed up a little and I was working on something early and wasn’t able to take Loca out on schedule. Spring is coming – I feel it in my sinuses as much as in my soul and all I have to say is Amen – we are sick of the cold and I could have just kicked Punxsutawney Phil right back into his hole when I heard that he had seen his shadow. I read that this has been the warmest winter on record which confirms climate warming and yet it feels like the coldest to me.

When we were at the Big Lake in City Park, school kids from Metairie Academy were having a picnic on the lawn banks of the lake while seagulls were looking to snatch whatever they could from the peanut butter sandwiches. [I should not complain about winter when school was cancelled in NY due to snow today.] Tin threw his hand up and said “Ah, Bah, Dah, Ah, Uh, Ca” – I think what he meant to say is this:

Wow, look what a gorgeous day it is and I haven’t heard the wind chimes in a while since Mom went back to work and look at all the seagulls and kids and one day we’ll take one of those little boats out and I will sit here and have a picnic lunch!

I learned from my brother my dad’s cousin passed recently and it made me so sad – losing the old men in my life. My dad and uncles have been gone for a while and now my dad’s fun loving cousins who were younger than my dad are all getting up there. I supposedly look exactly like their grandmother who was my grandmother’s sister. I sent a note to my cousins about how he will be missed in my life but never erased from my memory. A fun loving, happy man.

Then the same day my Black and Gold lame dress came back from the dry cleaners – this is my playoff dress I bought at H&M in New York when the Saints first went to the playoffs. I wore it in St. Martin on a company trip as we watched the playoffs in the lobby and I chanted Who Dat to people who had no idea what I was saying. Now everyone knows what Who Dat means. Meanwhile, my cousin twice removed (daughter of the brother of the cousin who passed)’s son (okay so three times removed for the son) had a bar mitzvah I couldn’t attend because it was when we adopted Tin – anyway he sent me a thank you card that I received just as my dress came back and in the note it said in all caps WHO DAT.

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

Years ago when I started asking my mother to keep a journal at certain times and I too started writing down our conversations, I realized I saw beauty in the absurd, the incongruent. It has stayed with me, this fascination for how life seems so black and white to a lot of people and how much it is technicolor to me. If you live in the black and white, you are many spectrums short of a rainbow is my motto. Take for instance that on Fat Tuesday, we left the house as a lion, a scarecrow and the Tin Man in search of Dorothy and Toto but instead we found rolling down Royal Street the Wizard of Oz complete with a curtain on his scooter. Wonders never cease.

But more importantly let’s be for real, take the absurdity of a conversation I had recently that I am still digesting, in it I learned so many things, and some of them absurd. In this conversation I learned my sibling phoned my family to spread the word of my blog (which I say great, welcome to my world) but it was to show others how “horrible” I am. But here is the absurd thing, the hoopla is all over that old chestnut of being accused of something I never did but was tried and convicted for without so much as a deposition, and in the end I learned  – this is incredible – the reason why these people believed me capable of doing what I was accused of doing is because my sibling had done this so many times in the past – WTF? Absurdity #1

Absurdity #2 – I have written about being victimized by a numbskull who was in turn believed by family members who (should) know me and then was ostracized and then how I moved on and filled the space they had vacated with people who love and support me and thereby found my new family. So for those who come to my blog for the first time, they will find a happy person, and yes there is still residual hurt and anger over a four and a half year stand off and the unfair treatment but I learned that suddenly after being victimized that others feel that I am victimizing them by telling my side of the story (let’s not forget I was never allowed a voice in this at any point). Stand by your aunt – not.

Absurdity #3 – As a complete aside I learned I was wrong about my saying that being a lesbian had anything to do with anything because everyone accepts everyone else here in this family but just “don’t do it in front of the kids.” What? As a friendly family member said this morning – must.protect.the.kids – are you serious?

So I conclude this absurd lesson with the Tao I read this morning – #20

Stop thinking, and end your problems.
What difference between yes and no?
What difference between success and failure?
Must you value what others value,
avoid what others avoid?
How ridiculous!

Other people are excited,
as though they were at a parade.
I alone don’t care,
I alone am expressionless,
like an infant before it can smile.

Other people have what they need,
I alone possess nothing,
I alone drift about,
like someone without a home.
I am like an idiot, my mind is so empty.

Other people are bright;
I alone am dark.
Other people are sharp;
I alone am dull.
Other people have purpose;
I alone don’t know.
I drift like a wave on the ocean,
I blow as aimless as the wind.

I am different from ordinary people.
I drink from the Great Mother’s breasts.