Higher Ground
On the phone with my media sources who are saying we are at a tipping point with advertising spending because there is a saturation going on with industry and media and no one is expecting any kind of robust growth any more. Oh joy. It used to be that you could look at media and it was a harbinger or a yardstick by which to measure the economy – and in doing so right now – I still contend that we are in measured growth mode and right now there are no big catalysts for anything different – so sit back and make your adjustments.
Back at the ranch, or the city that care forgot, the alarm guy called me, or rather his wife did, and she said her husband had driven by the LaLa and it looks like things are happening – I laughed – told her things are happening somewhere else or at least at tortoise speed – she went on to say she is going to write a book about post-Katrina life – no one would believe it – she said every project she has workers who don’t show up, or they show up one day and not the next, materials are no where to be found, everybody needs something yesterday. She said two of her friends’ husbands had heart attacks, another friend’s husband died of a heart attack, another friend divorced – all because of Katrina. I told her my husband and I had separated after my wanting to come to New Orleans for 15 years and now he was back in California and I was here, living with this after mess.
Then R and her mother came, who cleans my house, and she just moved back into her house on Carrollton and is cooking out of the bathroom as she waits for people to work on her house. She’s worried no one is returning but I told her I heard the old Rober’s is becoming a Walgreens and that Harry’s Ace is going to reopen as well Angela Brocatos ice cream. In one of those weird twists, she wound up in Arlington during the evacuation while we were there and I didn’t know this till later. She ended up convoying with us back to New Orleans in October and stopping with us at Prejeans to eat lunch. R asked me if because of all of this I was sorry to have left California – and I just bit my tongue because earlier in speaking to one of my favorite media sources I was looking over my notes in the database and saw what he told me last June – “Rachel, are you fn crazy, leaving Marin for New Orleans!” – I think back to that house in Marin, the gorgeous garden, the rust colored hills in the foreground and I remember feeling like a two-ton elephant was sitting on my chest and I remember calling S down the street and telling her that I was reading in my garden book about 100 tips how one woman had made an exact replica of her house to house her hose and in reading that I started screaming on the inside and couldn’t stop and I feared that I was going to implode or decay – and to think not too long later my life blew up into a million different pieces and now like Humpty Dumpty all the King’s horses and all the King’s men can’t put Rachel Dangermond back together again. And some days that is good, and some days that is horrible.
In trying to move to higher ground, some things just drag on me. In December, N told me V believed “understandably so†that I was trying to steal their children. That statement pissed me off but then stuck with me. I began looking into how true that possibly could be. Apparently, in the wild with elephants and penguins, females steal babies and scientists are not sure why. Some possible reasons could be the childless female believes she is better suited to raise the chicks/calves or it simply could be selfish behavior. In “March of the Penguins,†the movie introduces this concept but forms no conclusion – from the movie: “One of the most baffling forms of behavior of the penguin comes when a mother loses her chick, either due to its being unable to endure its first storm, or due to other reasons such as predators. When a mother loses its chick, they have been known to actually attempt to steal another mother’s living chick – presumably in order to deal with the grief of the loss. This behavior has amazed scientists, as it is an emotional outburst opposed to an instinctual behavior. I thought about how convenient a theory it would be to say that I with 10 miscarriages under my belt “went after N to get W” but you know what? – bullshit – I am a human being, evolved, not an animal, and much as Nick being a father was another dimension of him that is attractive, the fact that he was a father is the very part of this story that blackened my soul. Further, with W, it has always been a mutual attraction – just as with any two people despite our age difference – even if he, as a child, does satisfy some of my mothering tendencies – I have truly loved him more as a friend than as anything else.
I really am weary of others playing the childless card with me to justify their own theories about my motivations – as my friend BJ said – some people do things that others don’t like – some actions aren’t intentional – I still believe in love, I still believe I acted wrongly in deed, but rightly by my heart. And for all of those not in favor of me – GET OFF OF MY CLOUD!
N and the Snake, M, and T&H are all convening in Lafayette Square to see Nathan and the Zydeco ChaChas today. Hoping these ominous rain clouds dissipate soon.
The alarm guy’s wife said she has a cartoon she used to keep on her desk that is a priest and a nun talking and the priest tells the nun – god doesn’t give you more than you can handle – and the nun says, yeah but does he remember who is who? She said it was time to pull it out and put it up again.