Once Again, Late

O little lamby eyed children, I meant to post something about the start of Carnival on its actual start date which was Jan 6, but somehow a week has snuck past.  It happens.

So Happy Carnival.  Carnival is the season that leads up to Lent and which finishes with Mardi Gras.  The general idea I was always fed was that it was a chance to get all the wildness out before Lent, a season when you’re supposed to be all pious and godly and pruny faced and give up shit in order to show your neighbors what a good christian you are.  In reality I assume it’s simply one of those pagan holidays the Church gobbled up to get the pagans in the pews.  Surely, at this time of the year, after you’ve been snowed into some hut with a bunch of other stinky vikings, all of whom eat far too much cabbage, you are ready to cut loose and so here we are with some patched together holiday.

I moved to New Orleans in 1980 specifically so that I could live there during Mardi Gras.  I had come to visit during Fat Tuesdays in college and had such a good time, basing my life on the idea of being in town when the holiday hit seemed like a brilliant idea.  And it was.

I always wanted my costume to get me to look like this.

Inevitably it looked more like this.  Minus the striking head piece.  Mostly just a bunch of feathers and construction paper wadded up somewhere around me with some bananas and dirty feet.

I had no idea before I got there that there was an entire season of parties and parades and shenanigans that led up to the actual day of Mardi Gras, but once I found out about Carnival I plunged in with wild enthusiasm.  There is, or was, an air of giddy good times al over New Orleans during Carnival.   Any fuck up is shrugged off with an air of helplessness and the statement “It’s Carnival.”  Of course the street is suddenly closed because of a parade.  It’s Carnival. Of course you can’t get into your favorite restaurant because it’s closed for a party where people wear paper plates on their faces.  It’s Carnival.   Of course some former trick shows up at your doorstep and wants to spend the weekend.  It’s Carnival.

And that was the real thrill of the season for me: a substantial uptick in the amount of sex to be had, and I was already busy with a considerable quantity of boy pussy even without the whole “It’s Carnival” bit added in.

Mens would be so swept up in the Bacchynal of it all, I was able to snag creatures as heavenly as this.  I swear.  And then we would move along to the next one.

When I lived there. I can remember 4 bars, just in the French Quarter, that housed back rooms devoted to anonymous, but high quality, sex.  I would strike out late in the evening confidant I would spend the next four or five hours getting blow jobs and butt fucking strangers and thought nothing of it.  It didn’t seem louche or strange or sordid.  It was Carnival.

Like this.

On one fine Mardi Gras afternoon, I fought my way through the crowd up to the balcony around a bar called Lafittes in Exile.   There was a wall of men hanging over the railing which provided a shield for me to get down on my knees and go to town on this cute, cute boy’s wiener.  I had only really got rolling when an employee tapped me on the shoulder, not to berate me, but to ask that I take it inside.  I was annoyed.  I found out later from friends who worked there, it was simply a duty that got handed out to patrol the balcony and stop nasty business from getting out of  hand.  The job was called Cock Cop.

I don’t know why they bothered, it was never that uncommon to run across a couple of guys engaged in sodomy in some doorway.  Ah, l’amour.

Or this.

Of course all that’s done and gone and I feel sorry for the queers of today who missed it.  But, oh whatever Saint blessed me with the idiotic idea to come live in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, my most sincere thanks.

Saint Buttus Fuckus, we give thanks for your many gifts and for protecting your devout followers from STDS.  Amen/

Monumental

Earlier this summer, there was a sudden rush to finally, finally rid several Southern cities of the statues that littered them and which were memorials to the Confederate side of the Civil War.  The side that lost, but that held on to a grudge that still lasts.

Most of them had been nominally erected by the widows and mothers and children of men who had marched off, but never came back.  That is, granted, a sad motivation, but just behind the respectable shield of grieving for the dead was the horrible reality of what those men had died for.  Those idiot boys had gone to war to protect the institution of slavery

Growing up as I did in Texas in the 1950s and 60s seemed to be the end times for sentimentality over the Civil War.  The passionate,Victorian era clock-winders that I had read about or seen in movies were all gone.  I went to a white elementary school, but integration had found its way into my unimportant little burg by the time I entered middle and high school.  The circle of losers and nerds who comprised my friends had black members; my parents seethed that I had black friends.  The century of the war ending happened the year I turned 9, and to a 9-year-old, a century is the definition of forever.

And then boom, this summer, we are suddenly back to Great Lost Era of mrpeenee’s Ninth Year.  I had seen the statues and memorials and ignored them.  Considering they had lost, the South had a mania for enduring no one would forget.  OK.  Won’t forget, got it on my to do list.  Only, I never once considered what we were be excoriated to remember.  I had black friends in a high school named for Robert E. Lee, the major commander of the southern forces.  I had more immediate things to ignore.

So now the statues have been removed, some by work crews who had to disguise the company’s name and their own identities because the tempest over that removal was so hot.  And now all that’s left behind are the bases, or plinths, they rested on.  There is a much lower pitch struggle over how to deal with them.

I say leave them, now as memorials to the struggle a lot of right-minded people fought over more than a century that their generals and statesmen graced them and that they were a constant source of irritation and pain to the descendents of the slaves those men fought and died to make sure remained slaves.

Even with the monuments gone, no one is going to forget the Civil War or the guilt America bears for allowing some men to own other men in the first place.  Several of the plinths are very attractive in their own right and with the statues gone, all they are is sort of sad.  Leaving them standing empty is not some defiant, sore loser gesture against the fight to remove the shameful memorials but as a salute for a long, grinding fight that was finally won.

I’m proud of the people who fought that fight and congratulate them.  Maybe they should have a salute for all they did.  Maybe they should have a monument.

Boo

Two years ago, I was visiting New Orleans. As I was walking over to visit my dear old chum Magda, I stumbled onto a parade.  It’s New Orleans, parades happen like that.  It was the Crewe de Boo.  Halloween, you get it?  Anyway this evening, I was going to the drug store and once again ran into the Crewe de Boo.  It’s possible they’ve been just parading around nonstop for the last couple of years.

Interestingly enough, the visit that included that original serendipitous parade viewing was also the one where I decided to buy a house here.  And so why am I in town now?  Because I am selling the house I bought.  What a coincidence, huh? The act of sale is next week so I have to go and be all serious and stuff as well as pack up.

When I got the house originally, part of its dilapidated condition included a half ass little addition to the back that we referred to as Granny Clampett’s Wash Shed.  Amazingly, the door knob was this copper plated Art Noveau charmer.

I announced I had bought the house in order to get the knob, a bit of blather Magda remembered when it came time to rip the shed down and so he pounced on the knobs and saved them for me.  We consequently used them for cabinet pulls, but I am not about to allow the new owners to benefit from dear Magda’s recycling efforts so I removed them and will take them back to San Francisco with me.  I have no idea what I might use a pair of semi-antique dor knobs for, but I’m sure something will come to me.   Earrings, possibly.

Bloody Moon

And you know what else?  Living in San Francisco means not only that we’re the center of the disaster movie universe, but also that the tattered remains of the hippie era refuse to die here.  Proof?  Sunday evening was both a Super Moon (a full moon with “the closest approach the Moon makes to the Earth on its elliptical orbit, resulting in the largest apparent size of the lunar disk as seen from Earth,” thank you Wikipedia, and a term I never remember running into until recently and now which seems to turn up as regularly as a Dame Edith Farewell Tour) and a full lunar eclipse, a so-called “Blood Moon” because of the red color it takes on.  Naturally all the hippie-wiccan-Burning Man types and others who don’t keep their pubes trimmed were wild for the prospect.

This being San Francisco, the fog blew in right at sunset and obscured the whole thing.  All the pagans were terribly disappointed, poor dears.  It’s just as well, I had planned on sacrificing a goat, but they were all sold out and Saki absolutely refused to cooperate.  I had hoped that the ceremony might help unload my house in New Orleans which STILL has not sold.

What is wrong with these fatheads?  It’s a great house and I’m throwing in all of my exquisite taste that I lavished on the dump for free.  I don’t know, I suppose it’s just bad moon ju-ju.

Goats. Never around when you need them.

I Hate Writing. I Love Having Written.

In an almost charming back-and-forth in the comment section of Cafe Muscato , Diane von Austinburg and Muscato were griping about my lack of writing, blogging, mash notes, whatever, so I’m ripping off a portion of an email I JUST SENT to Diane as proof that they’re full of baloney.  There.

to wit:

“I had a dream some person stole a baby and then I was reprimanding them for this and then, I don’t know, they died? Maybe? Anyway I wound up with the baby and was terribly confused.

Did I tell you about the path o’ destruction I found here when I came home? A busted window, a broken lamp, a hole in the office closet door, my keyboard and mouse replaced because the old had “gotten fried,” and the dried remains of some mysterious fluid splattered all over the upper stairwell and hall. Secret Agent Fred blamed Saki, Saki took that “Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t” attitude cats are so fond of. I’m not sure I believe either of them.”

See?  I write.  News you can use, gossip, and slander all rolled up with possibly prophetic dreams.

Speaking of dreams:

Also, while I’m recycling old emails to friends who don’t deserve them, here’s part of one I dashed off to Night is Half Gone’s Jason while we were ducking and weaving in New Orleans last month:

“two of my neighbors blipped up on Friday and tried to be trouble to me, but I charmed them into fucking off. Later, I mentioned to the contractor and one of his minions “I got 99 problems and that hag ain’t one of them.” Both of the guys seemed gratifyingly amused, less amusing was their attitude of complete astonishment that I could paraphrase rapper thugs. Bitch, what you looking at, I am down.”

I’m telling you, epistolary.

Everybody Needs Friends

I enjoyed a very amusing weekend with our beloved Diane von Austinburg (aka “Sqweetie” aka “Snarkina”) who blew in town to see my new house here and to support my effort to eat my weight in shrimp.  Infuriatingly, many of my favorite restaurants celebrated the Fourth of July by closing down.  Who gave them independence?  God love Diane for putting up with my dithering pretty much the whole time she was here about whether to sell my house in New Orleans or the one in San Francisco (and believe me, I understand that sentence wraps up “White People Problems” pretty neatly so there is no need to bring that point up in comments.  Shut up.)

The problem of course is that each city is irresistible.  I know how incredibly lucky I am to own a house in each, I just can’t afford them both.  San Francisco is rich, smart and beautiful, New Orleans is like the terribly charming boyfriend who drinks too much and is always on the edge of going to jail.

As I kept whining to Diane, I am unaccustomed to indecisiveness, since being simply arbitrary is part of my charm, and waffling back and forth between the two was just irritating.  The last afternoon she was here I finally landed on staying San Francisco and letting go of the place here since who in their right mind would surrender San Francisco having worked so hard to establish a toehold there?

Also aiding in the decision was the simple fact of living here for last month has vividly reminded me what a wet hell a Gulf Coast summer is.  Plus, every major street in town is ripped to shreds as the city has leapt into the only attention they’ve paid to the infrastructure since I lived here in the 80’s.  Driving is crazy-making, a series of spirals into hell.  I was foolishly trying to get just to the other side of downtown with Night is Half Gone’s Jason and at one point had to ask “Am I in a lane?”  The only possible answers were “I’m not sure” “Sort of” and “No” and each were equally correct.  I don’t want to live some place I can’t navigate.

Mostly it was a simple case of Diane asking astutely (and no doubt worn out by my whining) “Which one is home?” to which I promptly replied “San Francisco.”  And so it is.

And I need to get back to my evil little cat. I know this looks like he’s sort of dead, but Secret Agent Fred swears he’s just rolling on the floor. I think I should go see for myself.

In Which mrpeenee Suffers White People Problems

The rug I won in a vicious Ebay auction arrived and turned out to be dreadfully the wrong color.  Instead of the brilliant marigold orange pictured, it turned out to be rust.  Ugh.  Do I look like a rust person?  And then I got the worst manicure of my life, one which actually left me bleeding.  To quote Dorothy Parker, “Damn Miss Rose.”

Wounded, I nevertheless pressed on because our dear Diane con Austiburg is due in town tomorrow and I needed some of those homey little things one needs if one wants one’s guests to be able to take showers.  Yes, there I was, BLEEDING, and yet I headed off to the much loathed Lowe’s Home Improvement Hellhole because that’s just the kind of martyr I am.

Driving over there, I noticed I was suddenly roasting hot (understandable in July in New Orleans, but the air conditioner was cranked all the way up) and sort of clammy and light headed.  So what did I do?  I kept driving.  I’m an American, dammit, and I’m not about to let a little thing like physical incapacity stop me from wheeling along in my Nissan death machine.

I staggered into Lowe’s feeling like crap on a stick.  I know there are many mens who seem to get an erection just walking in their doors, but I am not one of them.  I find the whole thing confusing and annoying at the best of times, so for a while I blamed my symptoms simply on being in the damn store.  That’s when I realized my eyes weren’t exactly focussing, which seems like something I would have noticed while driving, but no; let us assume this speaks to my superior piloting skill.

I stood in some aisle surrounded by those mysterious bits of electrical thingies (I have no idea how I wound up there, I have never in my life needed any of that colorful but menacing esoterica) trying to decide if I was having a stroke or a heart attack.  In fact I stood for quite a little while considering the two as if they were items on a menu and trying to remember which one was worse.  All I came up with was the memory of how Bette Davis’s face looked all droopy and scary after she had hers.

I decided what I needed was a good piss and on the way to the toilet, I found a cooler filled with Cokes and Gatorade, cause this is an establishment that caters to manly men.  I love Gatorade, I think it a panacea and sure enough it did seem to make me feel better, so I wrapped up my shopping and checked out.  I was determined to get that damn shower curtain up if I died en route.  Also, since it was a self check out and chaotic as something out of Dante, I refused to pay for the Gatorade and just tossed the empty bottle in handy receptacle.  Hee hee.

I suppose I could have taken a shot at an emergency room, but I’m pretty sure none of the Lowe’s employees would have helped get me to one and would have, in fact, stepped over my failing corpse if I had collapsed.  Anyway, my experience with New Orleans’ emergency rooms is that unless you’re bleeding and can include the term “gunshot” in your explanation, you’re in  for a long wait for not very much.

Now THIS, this is an emergency room I would wait in line for.

Also, by that time I felt better so I just stopped at Walgreen’s for a creme filled Twinky knock off delicacy and came home.  And now I feel fine, peachy in fact,  so either it was none of the scary things I was envisioning, or it was one of them and it didn’t particularly kill me or it really was just being in fucking Lowe’s.  Could happen.

Meanwhile, the motherfucking shower rod refused to work.  Typical.

Progress

I don’t think I made it perfectly clear earlier that not only am I in New Orleans, but I am actually living in my house here, the house with which I have been struggling to renovate for the last year and a half and which seemed like would be the death of me.

Not so.

Here’s proof:

The fabulous blue guest room which Secret Agent Fred and Diane von Austinberg each refer to as “My room.” I’m staying out of it.

Towards the rear

And towards the front. Sometimes I just turn around and take pictures.

Obviously, the kitchen. The cabinet maker tried really hard to talk me out of red, which he kept referring to as “RED.” Sometimes it’s best just to ignore people. Often, in fact.

See?

The cabinet doors are all recycled from long gone houses.

These are all living room featuring the Wall O’ Windows.

Cause every house needs a blackamoor.

The great big clock started out life in one of the big department stores down on Canal Street, at least that’s what the antique store hawking it said.

My bedroom. I call the lovely taupe “Expensive Mud.” And yes, I’m using the fireplace as a headboard. You got something to say about that?

Chinoiserie. Yep.

Reporting Live from New Orleans. Again.

Yes, I’m back in the old country once again, despite United Airlines’ vigilant attempt to keep me out.

Traffic to the San Francisco airport was backed up with one of the exit lanes off the freeway closed, cause why would you need all the lanes to the airport of one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations functioning in June?  That’s just crazy talk, right?

According to the check-in kiosk computer I arrived 43 minutes before my flight.  Turns out if you’re not checked in 45 minutes before your flight, chaos.  I finally fought my way past the ticket counter and baggage and security and fetched up at the gate 10 minutes after they had started boarding when they told me they had canceled my seat.  I explained I had checked in already up front so I could dump off my bags and queried the frump at the desk if they thought I had changed my mind between the ticket counter and the gate about coming to New Orleans.

I immediately regretted my sassy ass attitude as it was clear I was teetering on the brink of being turned away, but professionalism won out, she let me through and I got to my seat just in time to sit there for a half hour while the pilot did the cross word and the stewardesses discussed their hair, or whatever the hell they were all doing.

Anyway, I’m here now, it’s steamy, and I’ve got a big day planned for tomorrow of sitting around waiting for the cable guy to come give me some internet.  Living the big life in the Big Easy, baby.  Also, just as a blogger’s note, if you are a sloppy typist, like mrpeenee, and fumble your way through “the old country,” WordPress will correct it to “toehold country” which is actually a pretty accurate way of describing my life in New Orleans.

This is most certainly NOT waiting for me at my house, nor does it seem likely the cable guy will provide anything like it. That does closely resemble my couch, though.

Seventeen Perfectly Good Reasons mrpeenee Hasn’t Blogged in Weeks

I’m lazy.

Our dear, dear old chum Magda died earlier this month and while I wasn’t prepared to include here how sad the loss made me, I also didn’t feel like I could just ignore it either.  He was sweet as I am bitter and lovable as I am curmudgeonly and the world is a dimmer place without him.

Also, Magda was central to the house I purchased in New Orleans and its renovation.  He helped me pick out the furniture and was full of sensible suggestions about the reno and actually worked a great deal more on it than I did.  The fact that he died a little more than a week before I moved in and thus never saw the finished glory is galling, just galling.

And yes, I moved into the house last week.  Turns out moving into a house halfway across the country is hard.  More on that later.

I am not about to mess up a perfectly good manicure typing this gibberish for all you ingrates, much as I love you.

The internet has run out of pictures of attractive young men for me to swipe and illustrate my posts with.  Wait, that’s not true.

The world simply does not need another blog entry about how annoying cats who hog the whole bed are.

Speaking of Saki, he won’t get off the computer, so I couldn’t get to my blog.

If Mistress over at Infomaniac doesn’t have to blog, why should I?  I haven’t been bad.

I wasn’t feeling it.

The stupid little topknots all the stupid boys are wearing these days fills me such an unquenchable rage that I can’t concentrate on typing.

I had planned on writing while I was in New Orleans last week, but the gorgeous, enormous thunderstorms were just too distracting.  As much as I love San Francisco and our persistently beautiful weather here, I also miss the drama of a Gulf Coast storm.

Pudding.

I’ve been playing the old timey dice game Yahtzee on my phone with all my friends and crushing them in defeat has taken up all my attention.

I would think about writing a post and then think “I need a nap.”  Naps always win.

I’m still lazy.