My neighbor’s garage door is open all day – 24/7 – must mean Mardi Gras is getting close and that shopping cart is going to be reimagined into a fantasy world that my neighbor and his friends will live in for all of Fat Tuesday before they go back to being not so ordinary people.
Recycling comes to the City of New Orleans – sign up now for your bin. Thank you Mayor Landrieu – boo to you Nagin.
“It has been said that a Scotchman has not seen the world until he has seen Edinburgh; and I think that I may say that an American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi-Gras in New Orleans.”~ Mark Twain
Joe came to take care of some garden work for me and commented that a) he does not like my hair and thinks it does not look like me, and b) that I have certainly been gaining weight. Thanks Joe. As a matter of fact, Scott did exactly what I asked him to do – tone down the blonde, cut off the long shag and give me bang-tox (his word) and when he was done my hair look great but I wanted him to fix my face – too full, too fair. Alas, he’s only a hair stylist. Meanwhile, everyone but Joe seems to love my hair this way and maybe I’m just reluctant to see myself any other way. As for the weight, I told Joe that he needs glasses since he’s one year older than me.
But I digress on all of that because what I wanted to say is that I asked him if he was going to Mardi Gras and he said he was staying home and barbecuing because he didn’t want to get shot at. I said where do you go to Mardi Gras and he said Orleans & Claiborne. He said, “I bet you never went there before.” I just gave him a look because most certainly I have. He said, “All them kids are always turf fighting – this Ward wants to kill that Ward and on and on.” Sad but true.
Yet nothing invokes an image in my mind like those two words: Orleans and Claiborne.
When I remember I buy a Powerball in memory of my mother who every time I would go to visit would ask me to stop off and get her a winning ticket. This time when I bought it the cashier did a magic wave of his hands to make it the winning ticket and the gentleman standing next to me told me I already looked like a winner. I saw the same guy in Walgreen’s two days later picking up a prescription and he said, “There’s the winner.”
I got one number correct which is more than usual – the number 58 – hey, I’m getting closer to being a weiner every day.
So I tell the eye doctor that when I blink my eyes the frames sometimes shift in this weird way – sometimes the image takes on sepia tones and sometimes it just is a different frame with every moved slightly. He said that’s because I have astigmatism – which I always thought was a stigmatism btw – and he said my glass should work for that intermediate distance which is when I experience it. I told him I don’t like to wear my glasses when I’m talking to someone. And he looked at me through his glasses with a puzzled expression. Later I wondered if the real stigma wasn’t wearing the glasses that would correct the astigmatism.
I woke this morning after not one but three margaritas last night due to a waiter error. Seriously, I only ordered one. Meanwhile, I had to get Tin up for a doctor’s appointment and I stubbed my little pinky toe on the side of his bed while he was demanding Dizzy Gillespie’s Salt Peanuts and his drum (ruling from the crib no less). I tried to get it all back together and not lose the day and I was able to recoup it all on the way home form the pediatrician when WWOZ was playing the Mardi Gras Indians Mardi Gras music. Fabulous stuff that reminded me that despite all else, it’s Mardi Gras here and everybody’s having fun.
Finally got a moment to watch The Louise Logs, Episode #22: How to Lose Weight. I don’t want to give away the show, but do tune in – it’s a good one. Louise at her best! My favorite line from the show: “This just got mind bendingly weird.” Right up there with Oprah’s “This is getting interestinger and interestinger.”
If ever the city needed a poet who speaks for its soul, New Orleans needs one and here is one of NOLA’s finest – a posting to his Facebook page:
The phrase, “a lot of my friends are dead or in jail”, no longer evokes shock or horror”, its meaning has become tamed. Too many mentions in movies and songs; too much spotlight on the evening news. The masses have become desensitize; they quickly forget that human brains have been splattered on the façades of corner grocery stores and that red blood has stained sidewalks and street corners with the color of war? Even this sounds trite. Why beat a dead horse?
In one of my favorite Toni Morrison novels, I was forced to consider the generational implications of murder. One of the characters made a point about family blood lines. She explained that when our blood lines are carried forward, up to six future generations, our progeny will carry traces of our features and mannerisms. We will be present in the way they walk or scratch their backs. Subsequently, when you kill someone, you don’t kill only them; you kill six generations of people.
The men, women and children who are slaughtered everyday in our city are not numbers or statistics. They were not androids, or sub-human species either. They were human beings, mostly black, mostly male and mostly young, with the capacity to love, dream and imagine. Consider the tragedies that devoured them in this city’s unforgiving cycle of violence. Multiply it by two or three would be children; now, advance it to the sixth power. Pronounce their names; acknowledge the weight of their existence.