Domestic Bliss

A scene from this morning:

Sonya was in the shower. John and I were sitting on the bed.

I put him in the middle of the bed, sitting up. He leaned over on his knuckles like a tiny little monkey and turned his head this way and that, studying the room. Roxy hopped up on the bed. John grinned at her and leaned forward, gurgling. Roxy came close to him, but not close enough to touch. Roxy's no fool. She likes John, but she doesn't want her fur pulled any more than anyone else.

Seen on Tulane Avenue

Driving home this afternoon I was stuck in traffic on a shabby stretch of Tulane Avenue. So I was looking around.

There was a plain grey building with a sign on the door.

"OPEN 24 HOURS 7 DAYS MUST BE 21"

A bar, perhaps? But there was no other sign, no clue whatsoever about the nature of the place.

Then some guy walks in. Videos! Magazines! Posters of naked chicks! It's a porn store! Who knew?

And then, on down the street at the intersection of Tulane and Carrollton, more strangeness.

It was a Lamborghini, cherry red and showroom new, parked in the middle of the street. Both doors were open. A number of cops were milling around, looking in the car and seeming bemused. No suspects in the cop cars, either. No suspects at all, really, though the cops were looking around as if the might catch sight of someone running away with a Lamborghini keychain in hand.

Who abandoned that car? And what pushes someone to abandon a car that sweet?

Vicious Little Creatures

"How are the prostates?" I asked one of the residents this afternoon.

"So-so," he said, "some are swollen, some are inflamed, some are fine."

"They're vicious little creatures," I told him, "but their pelts are worth a fortune."

Countryfied

I know I yap on about XM sometimes, but it is the Greatest. Thing. Ever. This morning I was listening to America, which is the old-but-not-too-old country station. The first three songs I heard:

• Blue Eyes Crying In the Rain,
  
• Rhinestone Cowboy, and
  
• Convoy. Yes, Convoy.
  

I enjoyed the hell out of it. John? He doesn't much care what he listens to in the morning. He has a stuffed frog that dangles over his car seat, and during the ride to school he berates the frog. Mr. Frog, he gets yelled at. A lot.

Bourbon Street Shenanigans

Saturday night I joined a bachelor party (already in progress) for my buddy Glen. I had already walked into the Quarter when I finally got through to someone in the party; they were at the Cat's Meow, a two-story karaoke joint that's quite popular with locals and tourists alike.

So I'm walking fast down Bourbon, dodging drunks and scowling at the bead-wearing tourists. I get behind a tall, skinny guy with his arm around a tall, skinny blonde. Two guy walks by in the opposite direction.

The guy looks over his shoulder at them, giving me a clear view of his face. He's ugly like a bucket of assholes and he's missing more than a few teeth.

"That's right!" He yelled, "you keep lookin', she's with me!" Then he grabbed himself a nice big handful of the girl's ass. She smiled at him adoringly. She was no beauty, but she could have done better.

Later, I was on the balcony at Cat's Meow, drinking and talking with Glen and his buddies. They had beads and they were tossing them to the girls that were showing their boobs, as per usual.

Down on the street a woman walks up. She looks to be somewhere in her forties, blond, thin, plain. She looks like a librarian, maybe, or a grade-school teacher. Her and her male friend are having a drink and watching the chaos around them. After a few minutes she hands her drink to the guy and lifts her shirt, revealing boobs of Kate-Winslet-in-Titanic quality. She was pelted with beads.

"She was all plain jane, dude," someone said, "but what a rack!"

Two Things

1. The crossing guard at Jesuit High School on Carrollton just kills me. It's spring in New Orleans, right? That means the mornings are usually cool and pleasant. Maybe you need a light jacket on mornings like that, or a sweatshirt. A baseball cap might be nice.
   
   

   All this week, during a string of cool, pleasant mornings when it was never colder than 50 degrees or so, the woman is bundled up like she's ready for the Iditarod.Bulky shirts, big heavy coat, scarf, fuzzy hat. She must be burning the fuck up in there!
   
   

   It's not the first time I've seen something like that in New Orleans. On a nice day around Mardi Gras I saw a little old lady working a fund-raising roadblock and wearing earmuffs.
   
   

   I mean, it's not like I'm from Canada or anything, but it never even got below freezing here this past winter. These people shouldn't even own these heavy-duty winter clothes.
   
   

   Maybe they're just sad that they never get to wear all their warm, woolen garments. Finally, they say "what the hell? Might as well get my money's worth out of this goretex face mask" and they wear it to work. And then they get shot 'cause someone thought they were a bank robber. What a town!
   
   
   
   
   

2. From TWOP's latest recap of American Idol. The reviewer is talking about John Stevens, a pasty little white kid who got in the contest with a crooner gimmick and has been woefully out of his depth since the very beginning:
   
   

   "John is going to sing 'Crocodile Rock,' the very idea of which strains the concepts of logic and reason so much that all the dimensions in my apartment convert to non-Euclidean geometry and gravity ceases to function."
   

Bath

So Sonya went to do some shopping last night and I stayed home to give the boy a bath.

He has two bath tubs, you know. One is plastic with a sticky coating so he won't slip away like a wet noodle, but it's really too small for him. I put him in that one and there's barely room for water.

His other tub is inflatable and sits down in the regular tub we have in the bathroom. It's a little too big, though, and it's slippery, too. He's hard to manage in that tub. But I keep using it!

Sonya has an inflatable tub pillow, so I put that behind him to keep him from flopping backwards into the water. I sat him in the tub, 'cause he can set up without too much help now. He immediately sent water flying and splashing with big kicks! Kick kick kick! Water everywhere! And as long as I held him up he was fine.

But if I actually tried to wash the boy he go slipping and slithering around and it was basically like trying to catch a coked-up goldfish in a big aquarium. Finally, I managed to kind of pin him in one end of the tub with my elbow while I used my hands to scrub. All the time he was kick kick kicking!

Once he was clean I fished him out of the tub and laid him on a towel on the carpet. I started to dry him off and he pissed all over himself. Back in the water! Kick kick kick!

By the time I actually had him dried off - and I couldn't find any more towels after he peed on himself, so I had to dry him with a soft baby blanket - and dressed the kid passed the hell out. He was spent.

Archaic

Phrases that you don't hear very much any more:

Latchkey Kid: I was one, once, when not every kid was one and it was an alarming development. Now all children are on their own recognizance for hours every day, free to smoke crack and have illicit sex with their classmates.

Sex Symbol: Because if you're famous now you're obviously sexy. Fame is sexy. Famous ugly people? That are alive right now? You can count 'em on your fingers.

Pretty Perfume

We stopped at a rest stop somewhere in Mississippi today to use the bathroom, feed the kid, etc. I went to the restroom. I repeat: it was a public bathroom at a rest stop in Mississippi.

And it smelled like pretty, pretty ladies perfume.

What the hell is up with that?

Politics as Usual

So I read some conservative blogs, right? And a theme that they keep repeating is the level of incivility from liberals directed towards the president. They don't just disagree with his politics, they say, but they also hate the man.

Uh, yeah. Welcome to the modern world. Did you not notice the bile and bug-eyed hatred so many prominent conservatives directed at Clinton during his eight years in office? And I'm not going to get into who deserves it more - Clinton and Bush both have faults by the bushel. That's not the point. The point is the other team's main guy isn't just the leader of the opposition; he's the enemy. Is that good? Bad? I don't know. But it's how things are.

Peter Cottontail

You know what I like? The Toys R Us commercial with all the bunnies singing in their cute little voices until the spokesgiraffe gives in and agrees to stock their product or something. I don't know exactly what they're advertising, but I love all them bunnies.

Celebrity gossip!

From Eric S. at 411 Mania: all the best celebrity gossip. Titilating! Mean-spirited!

Smells Like...

Via Gawker: some folks look back at the death of Kurt Cobain.

At the time I liked Nirvana well enough, but they weren't my favorite band or anything. I remember the day most because it was the first time I'd seen Kurt Loder lose his composure.

Those songs are college to me now - the rise and fall of Cobain tracked out over the early years of my marriage. It's good, good music and it's a damned shame.

Sonya and I were watching VH1 Classic on the digital cable this weekend; specifically, we were watching the show where they play the hair-metal videos.

"This is truly a guilty pleasure," Sonya observed.

"Yeah," I said, "they just really couldn't play this shit anymore after Smells Like Teen Spirit, could they?"

It was just what the music industry needed at the time, too: a nice bracing sonic enema, clearing away the Bang Tangos and Debbie Gibsons. Of course the industry was swamped in mediocrity soon enough - it was like trying to empty a bathtub with a fork. Something like that would go nicely right now, I think. But would Nirvana even get signed now? They might end up as a website and a bunch of MP3s - I probably wouldn't even be cool enough to know about them.

Curiously, my vote for best album of the nineties is Hole's Celebrity Skin. Make of that what you will.

Pride?

The other day I was driving to work. I got behind a beat-up old truck with Mississippi plates containing two cowboy-hatted individuals. On the back window was a sticker that said:


WHY DO I HAVE TO HIDE MY WHITE PRIDE?

Having a white pride sticker on your truck in New Orleans is like swimming with sharks while wearing a meat suit. Brave? Maybe. Unbelievably stupid? Definitely! I hoope they didn't go to the Ninth Ward.

Chilling

Holy crap. This chick rides her motorcycle through the nuclear wasteland in and around Chernobyl. Very scary, very chilling.