Effluvia

The Japanese: not at all like us.

Headline: inmates accused of smuggling heroin in burritos.

Aw, hell no. Get a rope.

What?

The finest comic strip going: The Boondocks.

Nice box.

Bad baby names.



Journal Roulette

Life of a Startup Fool - Oh, God - inspirational quotes. Though I find the design compelling.



Siobhanorama!

"Hecuba."



Two Years Ago
Clitterific. Green beer. A naked guy.

19 March 2001
Texas Dust

Weird news from last week: Wednesday night there were some pretty powerful thunderstorms, okay? Before arriving in New Orleans, these storms crossed Texas. There, they picked up a great deal of red Texas dust and deposited it on southern Louisiana, along with several inches of rain.

Now, back in Memphis storms would cross Arkansas, pick up dust and lay it on the Delta all the time. Hell, we didn't even need storms - just a few days wind out of the west would do it. I've woken up to a car covered in red dirt many times before.

However, this has apparently never happened in New Orleans before. The media was abuzz with talk of the mysterious red dust, and the coworkers gabbled about it in a frightened and confused manner. The noon news programs all had to address what it was and assure the populace that it was not pollen, Martian cocaine or fallout. New Orleans, collectively, is dumb.




Sonya's parents were in town this weekend, which was fun. We did tourist stuff and ate a lot. These are good things. I was the first person to kiss the piece of the blarney stone at Silky's, so I'm gonna have good luck and exceptional deceptive skills for...what? For life? The rest of the year? 'Til next month? No one knows.

Anyway, we were on our way back from a long day in the French Quarter. I knew there was a parade in my neighborhood, but I kind of pictured it as a small, people-walking type parade that would certainly be over with by the time we got back home.

This was wrong.

We got to Magazine and were blocked by hordes of people and the first of many, many Blaine Kern floats - monstrous, double-decker things. We parked the car and Sonya's parents got to participate in a real live New Orleans-style parade.

At St. Patrick's Day parades, though, they don't just throw beads - though they do throw many beads. They also throw potatoes, carrots, peppers, onions and especially cabbages. Bags and bags of cabbages. Huge heads of cabbages.

For the record, you can't catch a cabbage like it's a tennis ball. It will take your hand off. After every single finger on both my hands had been bent back at a ninety degree angle I decided to rethink my cabbage-catching strategy. You've got to move your body to catch the cabbage, corralling it against your chest and using your arms to trap it. Like catching a football kickoff. Like that. I saw my father in-law catch several one-handed, actually, but they could turn even him around. Big cabbages, folks.

When we finally got home, heavy with beads and cabbages, the spiky cast-iron fence in front of our apartment was covered with cabbages, impaled like so many of Queen Elizabeth's enemies. Very impressive. I was glad I moved my car before the parade.




So I went to the bookstore last week, right? And I got two books: William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses for My Little Reading Group and Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I started reading a bit of the Faulkner on Firday night, and it was okay. You know, good, I suppose. It's capital L Literature. Then, Saturday night late, I started in on Genius. I stayed up late reading it, then spent the majority of Sunday finishing it. I really liked it. It was sad and howlingly funny and it read very real, if that makes sense. It had the immediacy that fiction sometimes lacks. It's like, "this shit really happened!" So I liked it. Then I tried to go back to reading the Faulkner.

And the Faulkner just laid there. It just laid there like a used condom in the Wal Mart parking lot in Piggott, Arkansas. Pathetic, distasteful.

I think one of the main reasons that Faulkner has always left me cold is that his characters are, to put it bluntly, trash. White or black, they're common. This doesn't impress me much, because I've got lots and lots of relatives like that. If Faulkner's characters were alive now they'd live in trailers just outside of small towns. They'd smoke lots of marijuana and make crystal meth in their bathrooms. Occasionally they'd have to move out of state until the warrant expires. If you've never known people like this I'm sure it makes Faulkner's work that much more interesting, at least from an anthropological point of view. Grow up hearing better stories about these same people, though, and it's not so endearing.




I was watching the wrestling earlier, and there was this thing called a "hardcore championship match." The hardcore championship, apparently, is on the line twenty-four hours a day, so the champion must be ever vigilant against attacks. Also, the challenger pushed a shopping cart full of deadly objects (a stop sign, a garbage can, ax handles) to the ring for the match.

"They can use any weapon in a hardcore match," the announcer said.

I got to thinking about this. If any weapon is allowed, right, then shouldn't the champion start carrying a gun? The other guys would be much less likely to mess with you if they knew you might kill them.




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