122520b

 

roses for a buck

at every street corner

now they're 5

100820b

 

Climate change
rolls another one
towards the bird's foot
third time's the charm

102619c

the water keeps rising
but we take comfort in this:
we don't live in New Orleans
the dead won't go swimming
just cause the weather is wet
they live peacefully underground
as they should
not waiting in their little marble houses
for a chance to come out and play

120417

Eel Week

It had been muggy lately,
But I was surprised to see eels wandering around downtown.
They tried to blend in, but it was hopeless,
With their wet, shiny gray skin and absent limbs.
Besides, they tried to ride the buses without paying,
And the ones driving cars were inattentive.
It was like they didn't even see the lights change colors.

Tuesday our secretary was missing;
In her place was a giant eel.
The thing had the effrontery to drive up in her car,
Complete with "ELZBTH6" vanity plate.
I gave it short shrift
and had sashimi for lunch.

Elizabeth didn't show up Wednesday either,
And she didn't answer her phone.
I was half hoping for another eel
(the first had been quite tasty)
But there was nothing, not even a shrimp.

That afternoon I noticed that
My next-door neighbors had moved out
some time during the day.
A small school of grouper had moved in and I
Suppose they bought the place,
Though how they floated the loan so quickly
I cannot fathom.

Thursday the staff at the sushi bar
across from my office
Had been replaced by a school of plaice,
And mixed in with the human students on campus were
Flounder, sole, and even a few skates
(or rays; I can never tell them apart).
They wore backpacks, t-shirts, etc. just like
the regular students,
Though the shoes just wouldn't stay on the sole.

Today I didn't see Joey from the motor pool,
And they seem to have hired a large octopus
to take his place.
Also, I'm not eating at the sushi bar anymore,
Because they've made some changes to the menu.
I can't read the Japanese characters,
But the photos accompanying the new menu items are
quite disturbing.
Next week I'll bring my lunch.

060617

Breaking Up Is Always Hard

My old ghoul friend dropped by last week.  I was surprised to see her.  Not because the last time we had been face-to-face she was in an open casket.  I always knew she'd come back as a ghoul.  She said she didn't have any other place to go, and it was almost Valentines Day, and we had had such good times when she was alive, etc. What could I do? Slam the door in her face?

OK, her death was totally not my fault.  I wasn't even there. It was a Darwin Award kind of thing. "Hey, hold my beer." Except she'd been drinking Margaritas. I don't want to talk about it. Roof boarding is one thing, but the Boulevard is six lanes wide!

“Look, I'm really sorry about what happened,” I said, “but you have to understand it changes things between us.  A lot.  For one thing, I want children.”  Not to mention what my live girlfriend would think about sharing with my ex-girlfriend! And where would she sleep? I didn't know how to put this delicately, but I wasn't as attracted to her as I once had been.

The problem was, Sharon had nothing to do but follow me around, and eat.  In life she had kept busy all the time.  She hadn't liked TV then, and it didn't hold her attention now.  I made sure to keep raw meat for her, after a couple of neighbors posted “lost dog” signs. Syl, my current girlfriend, grew increasingly suspicious about “my ghoul cousin from Iowa,” who was “visiting for a few days.”

“Sean, I've seen how your cousin looks at people, and pets.  Is her father the uncle who ran a daycare and went to prison for child molestation?”

“No!! And that was probably consensual...ok, maybe not. But she's from another branch of the family. Never met him." (This last was true.)

“And she's weird.  Her teeth are so BIG.  No wonder she can hardly talk.  Poor thing.”  That tender spirit's one of the things I love about Syl. We ended up with me promising to "do something."
Sharon needed a job.  It was the only way to keep her from wrecking my home life.  I made a few calls and discovered that finding regular employment for a ghoul can be a challenge.  Seasonal work in late October, sure, bit parts in B movies, occasional “he'll-crap-his-pants” jobs wherever twentysomethings or college students get drunk – it's not enough for groceries, and the last thing I needed was her foraging in town.  Then I saw a display of king cakes in the grocery store and had a brilliant idea.

“Sharon, I found a great gig for you.  One word: New Orleans.”

“Thash two worsh.”

“You know what I mean.  Year-round employment in the old cemeteries. It's just like living near a college campus, but it's every night and they don't usually puke on you. They take tourists in those places and they want to be scared.  Don't take this the wrong way, but you're a natural now.”

She took a little convincing, but the thing I most worried about, that she was still in love with me, was a non-issue.  

"Thawn. I know I uthed to love you, but I'm thorry. I thtayed because I had nowhere elth to go. I took adbantage ob your thympathy. I habe other intereth now."

"So you prefer making tourists wet their pants to being with me.  I guess the dead really are different." I was surprised to realize that I sounded bitter. My feelings were hurt. Rejection is rejection.

Syl, on the other hand, was down with the situation as soon as she heard about it. She'd arranged job interviews with New Orleans tour companies and bought Sharon a bus ticket before I could get over being dumped by a dead girl. 

Publ. the Simian Transcript (book), 2010 

050617b

Alt.Madison

We drove up to Madison for the wedding

shared a room with a noisy couple

marveled at the highway to nowhere

suspended in the sky.

It reminded me of New Orleans

those crazy crossing-three-lanes exits

and that jumper stranded us on the bridge

halfway through the night

At the other end of that bridge

in some other Madison

dwarves hammering out stone cars

run on gravel and water

taking the economy by storm

111416b

carnival

in the cold rain

much booty caught

Today's idle thoughts

A day after publication of my latest chapbook I got news of a sale to Strange Horizons. It has been a long time. I also got two rejections from Asimov's, as a hubris depressant. Dreams and Nightmares 99 is out in the world, and it is almost time for me to start putting together the 100th issue of a magazine that began life in a Commodore 64 computer on a card table in the corner of the living room of an apartment in a Victorian shotgun in New Orleans that is now used for weddings and other fancy functions. The first half a dozen issues were printed directly to a dot matrix printer, folded, and mailed. I don't think I will ever catch up to Space and Time.

070114

Daughter successfully moved, but it took every bit of the 4 days! More details when I have time. For now, I can report that Five Happiness, on Carrolton (New Orleans), is still a delicious Chinese restaurant. We'd been there last about 1985!

never did find keys
lost last year
old home clean

122713

I am back from a 6-day trip to New Orleans. We visited our daughter & her boyfriend & had a very nice time. We didn't do much besides hang out & shop, tho we did eat at a pizza place on St. Charles called Slice. Large & inexpensive, w tasty fresh toppings. 2 slices cost about what a good sub does elsewhere, & fill you up. Tried to see The Hobbit, but the theater was unable to perform. Of course, the story is FUBAR, but we still want to see it.



a good film
is worth a short story
what is this

100413

my daughter Karen*
as she called herself persuasively
now stirs the Gulf
not coming home to NOLA as she swore at 3
Baldwin County is her destiny




*Not her real name

New Orleans trip report

Using voice recognition software, this is a longer version of our harrowing weekend trip from Tuscaloosa to New Orleans and back. Our youngest daughter and her boyfriend had to move to New Orleans. She is a senior at Tulane and he is looking for a job. She found a very nice little apartment, which at the beginning of the summer needed extensive renovations. I wouldn't call it done, but it's certainly plenty good for living in and very cute. So we had a rental truck, my wheelchair Van, and a small car, forming a caravan for the pleasant and trouble-free trip down to the city straddling the river. They knew right where the apartment was, having been there before, and the detour to pick up a ramp so that I could get in caused no problems. But then! The 8 foot ramp was actually two skinny eight-foot ramps, the kind used to move freight in and out of trucks. Despite their length, they were way too short for the front door. The front door access is so uneven and crooked that I am not sure any kind of ramp would get me in there. There is a curb cut from the sidewalk to the paved front yard, which is only about 3 feet wide, then there are six or seven steps up to the porch, and the only way it could possibly work would be a ramp stretching from the sidewalk to the porch. It would be long and steep.

Fortunately, there is an alley, and fortunately, it is wide enough, but unfortunately, not at the end. Peeling back the fence isn't a problem, but we had to unscrew and remove the curved bottom segment of the downspout from the gutter. As my daughter's boyfriend remarked (he is confusingly named David), this don't really seem to be necessary anyway. I was able to squeak through to the back yard, and turn around, so that I could behold in all their glory the steep back steps that go up about 4 feet to the kitchen. Remember that my ramp is actually two skinny little half ramps. I can't really see my wheels unless I stop and lean way over, which isn't the best idea on a steep ramp. It was frightening, but I made it.

The apartment has been chronicled elsewhere, the heart pine floors, the 10 foot ceilings, the charmingly differentiated mantles in every room except the kitchen, und so weiter. That was Friday. I didn't go out again, because as anybody who has ever climbed anything knows, down is much harder than up. We had planned to go out to dinner, but it got too late, and that got postponed to Saturday. Take out Chinese from a pretty decent place was an excellent substitute. I got a lot of reading done (“[limit]”, by Frank Schatzing, translated from the German, an excellent science fiction thriller that is more than 1200 pages long). But I digress. Saturday dawned with more unpacking frolics for everybody else and more reading for me. All of the essential work was done in the early evening, made all the more exciting by our realization that two of the four window air conditioners were not working. Not a good time to call the landlord. But it was a good time to get out of the house and go to Magazine Street, where we ate at my daughters favorite New Orleans restaurant (so far): Ignatius. Typical New Orleans food, if slightly yuppified. And I am somewhat surprised to learn that dragon recognizes that as a word. Surprised and pleased. The food was good, and afterwards we strolled around a little bit, looking in shop windows and people watching. We were a little tired for a trip to the Quarter, which we had contemplated. We tried to go to a coffee shop and discovered that they wimp out and close their doors at 9 p.m. Nothing for it to go back home to the ramp.

By the way, in the preceding paragraph I glossed over my adventure going down the ramp to get out of the apartment. I have been using this wheelchair for a long time, but it is difficult to steer at low speeds while going sharply down. If I had gone off the ramp I would probably have cracked my skull and paramedics would have had to come back there to even get me out of the chair. I feared to the left and then to the right, but not quite far enough for disaster. But don't worry folks: there's another chance on Sunday!

Let's spoil the suspense. On Sunday I survived too. It was even closer. I don't actually scare easily, but for a moment I thought I was dead. Before we visit again we are buying a regular 2 ½ foot wide solid metal ramp that is at least 8 feet long. Maybe 10 feet (those cost half again as much as the eight-foot ones).

We got out of town two hours late as a result of waiting in vain for the cops to arrive after a minor fender bender. I was hot, and that isn't good. Finally an elderly mother in the other vehicle got overheated as well. Thank God, though I hope the old lady recovered completely when she got home. Because it meant we could call the police, say never mind, and leave. Just as well. This is New Orleans; they were never coming anyway. Turned out that the elderly mother's daughter is some sort of neighborhood matriarch, and making nice with her for more than an hour on a shady sidewalk might have been the best thing we did all weekend.

Did I mention that the lift on my van stopped working?Repairing that cost as much as a 10 foot ramp. At least I did not get irretrievably stuck, Jaws of life stuck, in 95° weather and 100% humidity more than 200 miles from home. So really we were extraordinarily lucky on this trip. When we come over the hill at the end of the trip and I see that the house isn't a smoldering ruin, I feel extraordinarily lucky every single time. I'm a lucky guy. If I had had my car accident in 2000 instead of 2003, it probably would've killed me. Technology is moving that fast. Okay, now I'm on the verge of getting sappy and so I will stop. Plus, I'm about out of time. Next: Washington, DC, Thanksgiving week, 2013! Be afraid, be very afraid.

Short Version

Typing w 1 finger today, so: concision. We moved d2 to New Orleans for her last college year. Cute shotgun apt, 1/2 a double, w liv rm in front, then dining rm, bathrm, br1, br2, kitchen, back yard ~ size of apt. Rented 8' ramp so I cld get in. Arrived in 95/95 temp/humidity to find front door a non-starter. Back door easy access from alley. After remove curved end of down spout. OMG, those 2-part ramps w air betw are scary, esp. going down! Gotta run; more later.

Hurricane Isaac

Feels different from double nics
when it's your kid
and you know the storm's weak
but you can't feel the windows thrum
can't hear the drops lash
can't see oak twigs skitter
and know you made the right decision
so far

Audubon Zoo

sun struggles up into thick wet air
gator's duckweed coat