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A white truck drove into the bayou and that is where the facts stop and the drama begins. As police, cars, people, dogs, children, bikes gathered around the tow truck this afternoon watching a diver wearing a big yellow diving helmet going up and down to attach the strings to the white truck stories began to take shape. My neighbor returned from Terranova where he heard it was a jealous girlfriend following behind her boyfriend causing him to be distracted and plunge into the bayou. Another person asked what happened to the 11 year old who was in the truck with the guy. Another cited a blue SUV that stopped and plunged into the water after the truck to save the driver and drive him to the hospital where he lay in a mysterious state. Still another said seizure.

As stories multiplied exponentially we all stood on the banks of the bayou watching the tow truck lift the white truck out of the water.

The nun said, I hope it wasn’t a suicide. And so another story began.

A woman drove up the other day and handed me my Yellow Pages. I wanted to hand them back to her but instead let her drive to the next house and marched over to the recycle bin and threw it in. Yellow Pages? Is she serious? Are they serious? Dead to me.

The Times Picayune is thrown to my front yard Monday through Saturday and the New York Times on Sunday. I read the newspaper while Tin eats his breakfast and he says repeatedly, “Mommy, what is that?” pointing to any image in the paper that strikes his fancy. “This,” I tell him, “is a newspaper that you will most likely never read in your adult life.” It is moribund.

Global recessions take five years to overcome or so says Bill Clinton, but this one that started in 2008 has been going strong for three full years. I’d like to say it is dead to me but the more I look around the more I want to stick my head in the sand. Is ambition, investing, home values going up, the middle class all a thing of the past? Are they already anachronisms?

How about the death penalty – shouldn’t that be an anachronism starting right now with Troy Davis?

Call! Attorney General Eric Holder at 202-353-1555 urge him to intercede on Troy Davis.

Yes dear readers, the evil twin is back, the one who sits around and harps about how things are all going to hell in a hand-basket. Surely there is a way out of my miasma, but which path to take? Is it the road untraveled, the road more familiar but still risky, is it non-action or bold action that is required, should we sell the LaLa and move to an apartment, should we, should I, should should should?

I don’t know and it is the not knowing that is crushing.

So I’m trying to revive the other twin, the one who is learning to yield to the unknowing, the one who ought to be embracing non thought, the one who knows that all these things will come to pass and yet none of them matter. That is the lesson I’m trying to learn but the evil twin keeps usurping all the mental real estate and crowding out the new way with the old way of worry and anxiety and dread.

If the little voices in your head are getting you down, meditate. The Dalai Lama tweeted this this morning:

The President sent me an email this morning. This morning, the President proposed the “Buffett Rule,” which would require those earning more than $1 million a year to pay the same share of their income in taxes as middle-class families do.

This proposal makes sure millionaires and billionaires share the responsibility for reducing the deficit. It would correct, for example, the fact that Warren Buffett’s secretary currently pays taxes at a higher rate than he does.

The other side is already saying it’s “class warfare” — that’s their rhetorical smokescreen for providing millionaires and billionaires special treatment.

As the President said this morning, “This is not class warfare — it’s math.”

The wealthiest Americans don’t need further tax cuts and in many cases aren’t even asking for them. Requiring that they pay their fair share is the only practical way forward. The Republican alternative is to drastically slash education, gut Medicare, let roads and bridges crumble, and privatize Social Security. That’s not the America we believe in — but many in the Republican leadership actually prefer those policies, which explains their refusal to act.

That’s why they’ll say “tax increase” over and over again, trying to muddy the waters and trick ordinary Americans into thinking the Buffett Rule will hurt them. And if we don’t speak out right now, they just might get away with it.

If the Saints hadn’t won yesterday maybe the mood around here would be different, but they did win and it seems like everyone is just up to their usual routine of daily life. It rained today. Fall officially begins this Friday although even that seems debatable according to a recent article I read. There is a meeting come up about starting a Time Bank here in New Orleans. I could throw a small rock and not hit one person around me who is not for taxing the most wealthy people in this country a little more. We have one more month to go before we can say yay, hurricane season is over. All in all I wouldn’t say it is business as usual down here in New Orleans, I’d say that we are still healing a big gaping wound but we’ve found a way to survive it without an inordinate help from alcohol and cigarettes, which is how most of us weathered the first year post Federal Flood. I see a lot of people living their lives and not expecting any great catalyst of change for the better, or for that matter, for the worse.

So while the rest of the world goes on about the grand problems of debt, war, not enough water or too much water, we are eeking out our existence here, just trying to make sure we spend a little time on the porch watching fish jump out of the water or maybe even catching one and eating it.

Years ago, when I was about to turn 50 years old, I had a TCA peel, which is an acid wash that takes a few layers of your skin off and gets you back to this baby like skin. It not only takes away old dead skin, dark patches, but it also removes for a time the fine wrinkles around your mouth, nose and eyes. Like I said, for a time, as the fine wrinkles did make their way back. A friend of mine gets this done every two years but she has a darker complexion and is often prone to sun spots more than I am.

I posted each day on my blog, showing the progress of the peel and this has turned out to be the #1 reason why people show up at www.dangermond.org – go figure. Today a production company, Glasshead in London, doing a document on TCA peels for Discovery Networks contacted me about using the images from my site. It’s the peel that keeps giving. Who would have thought that what would get me noticed after writing my heart and soul into a blog for nearly seven years would be having my face acid washed.

Whatyagonnado? Where’s the documentary about how to screw up your marriage? How to survive a Federal Flood? How to keep up good cheer in the midst of great opposition? How to renovate a house in post-Katrina New Orleans? How to switch teams successfully? How to survive the loss of your mother? How to adopt the perfect child?

I guess those topics will have to wait.

I was hell bent on putting fun back into the day in the life and so Friday we had fun, Saturday we had fun, today, maybe not so much fun. Tin woke with a stomach ache, I helped a friend with their social media who didn’t necessarily want to be all that social, and then I got a stomach ache. Oh well, whatyagonnado?

So just to be perfectly clear, tomorrow is fun day, not Monday. Fun Day. Got it?

We went to see the sneak preview of the New Orleans Afrikan Film Festival at the African Museum last night and watched Mississippi Damned, a wretching but well wrought tale of growing up poor in the South. I could add growing up black, growing up gay, growing up talented, growing up different, growing up with people who are so stuck in a pattern of life that doesn’t serve any one of them.

This is not a film you go to on date night, as we did last night, it’s a film that will leave you gut tangled, a story that will leave you sad much in the same way Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina did, and it is a reality that probably echoes through the yellow Southern pines more often than we’d all like to admit down here.

I saw so many mirrors everywhere, from Director, Screenwriter Tina Mabry looking way too much like Felicia Pearson from The Wire, to the way all families that are passionate are fucked up in the same way as mine was, is, to how alcoholism destroys so many people’s lives not just the one doing the drinking, to poverty, to kids, to oh my god make it stop. I was fascinated by how Tina was able to get her entire family to sign off on their portrayal in this harrowing tale, but she said they did it because they support her.

Even though the family held her enmeshed and caused her to stumble, it is them she still feels strong ties to much like when the NOA Fest showed the Prodigal Son and that family stayed together against all odds. My family wasn’t strong enough to stay together in the same bond – the glue, my father, thinned greatly after his death, and then by the time my mom passed, there was nothing even tacky enough to stick.

The film is available on Showtime and I believe via DVD on the site. Watch it but brace yourself, it is unrelenting and so flawlessly acted, you feel as if you are right there with these people, living their drama moment by moment.

Where else but New Orleans could you take your toddler to a music clinic taught by Shamarr Allen and the Underdawgs on Tuesday afternoon at Sound Cafe, then on Thursdays to drumming in Fortier Park taught by Angela Bachemin, and then Saturdays to a brass band in Louis Armstrong Park with Sunpie Barnes? All for free. Children here are getting a world class education.