Effluvia

Sonya is watching men's gymnastics, and Scott Hamilton is so gay - he's such a bitch! He's going to start snapping and calling the gymnasts "sister" in a minute or two.

It was a beautiful afternoon for driving home today - the sunlight was all golden, and it was warm with just a hint of fall cool in the air. I had the windows down and the stereo cranked going down St. Charles; it was divine. It made me want to go on a date and maybe watch some high school football. Nice.

Journals

• Bad Hair Days
• Plaintive Wail
• Humidity and Hebephrenia
• Randomly Ever After
• U9
• Fukushu
• Nature of life...
• DNA Sequencing

Siobhanorama!

Siobhan ain't got no water. And she gets laid!

From a John Harris article in the Washington Post last week:

"Truman left office despised. Eisenhower left beloved, but in slumber. Kennedy was killed, Johnson crushed, Nixon evicted, Ford and Carter both defeated. Reagan at the end was drifting into senescence, and Bush was staggering from forces he neither anticipated nor understood. Now comes Clinton, whose ordeals were more searingly personal than those of his predecessors. And he is not slumping to the finish line but sprinting."

Now that is a nice little piece of writing, right there. It appealed to me, anyway. The whole article is good, as are the excerpts from his new book, The Breach, an in-depth look at the Clinton impeachment drama. This guy is good.

So y'all know how I feel about bugs, right? Right. They should be Outlawed and then Wiped Out. I would like nothing better.

But no! Since I've moved to the fucking jungle there are all sorts of creepy crawlies everywhere. Most of them are lizards, and I'm fine with lizards. I used to play with them when I was a kid in these parts. LIzards eat bugs, so they're good.

And luckily I haven't had any encounters with the infamous palmetto bug yet; they are, simply put, roaches the size of hockey pucks. An encounter with one of those would put me out of commission for a while, I'm afraid.

But here lately New Orleans has had an infestation of love bugs. Love bugs are small, red-and-black bugs that fly about as a couple; that is, the male is attached to the female and they're doing dat bizness as they fly around. And they're everywhere.

So yesterday I'm at the gas station, filling up the Eclipse, when a swarm of love bugs settles over me and proceeds to land on me, even while they're getting it on. They land on me and greet me, as if it's perfectly okay for bugs to walk on my skin, which it is not.

On my neck.

"Hey, dude."

On my legs.

"Hiya."

On my arms.

"Hey, dude."

On my face.

"Hey, dude. We're screwin' on your face!"

I went a little crazy. I took off my Yankees cap and started beating the everlovin' shit out of the air around me, knocking thousands of love bugs to the ground. I was swatting with one hand and pumping gas with the other. I leapt around like a Watusi to keep from taking any bugs into the car with me.

Then I went to the grocery store. There was a basket outside, which I took inside with me. Just as I reached the bakery I noticed something felt odd about the handle of the cart.

It was odd because the underside of the handle was covered with love bugs. I jumped away from the basket, gibbering and hooting like Renfield, as a row of love bugs fell to the floor. Once I got under control again I used my hat to knock the rest of the bugs off the basket before going any further.

Bugs. Yuck!

I don't think Roxy feels good. All day long yesterday she just laid around, not playing and not barking. She seemed to be a little blue, as much as dogs can feel blue.

To be honest, though, whenever she was offered food or a walk she hopped up quickly enough and acted like she felt just fine. But she was up and wandering around the bedroom during the night last night, which is very strange for her.

But when I got home this afternoon she barked and wagged her tail and turned around in tight little circles, seeming perfectly happy. Maybe it was a temporary thing; she seems like a happy dog now.

From Yahoo News:

Monday September 18 03:01 PM EDT
Paula Yates, Michael Hutchence's Lover, Dies
Paula Yates, the lover of INXS frontman Michael Hutchence at the time of his 1997 suicide and mother of their child, was found dead in her London apartment on Sunday.

What a sad, sorry little chapter in rock and roll this has been. I don't think we Americans ever quite appreciated just how popular INXS was still in Australia, years after we'd heard anything from them in the states. Hutchence could have - quite literally - walked out into the street and said, "hello, need some sex here" and he would have had to pick and choose. But no, he hung himself from the doorknob while jerking off. It so didn't have to happen.

And now this. Damned tawdry is what it is.