Month end download...

Since it’s the end of the month it means that I have just finished another magnum opus e-mail so the blog is forced to deal with whatever random thoughts are in my head at any given moment. Here goes nothing…

1) Ok, another 90’s musical question that no one is asking: If you’re too sexy for your hat shouldn’t you at least wear a hoodie? Because otherwise you’re going to catch a chill. What do you think about that?

2) On the list of celebrity meltdowns that I wished there was a video camera present, Mel Gibson’s DUI arrest is almost certainly at the top of the list. It wasn’t the fact that he got pulled over for a DUI. It’s not because of his rants about who may or may not be conspiring to rule the world. I just want to see footage of him pretending to take a piss in a jail cell. Now that is a judge of your acting chops. It’s situations like that where you really prove that you are an Oscar winner.

3) Oh, and once again I must come to the defense of my beloved Lindsay who was so unjustly attacked by the head of the studio for her being exhausted on set. Look, that was clearly a case of heat exhaustion. Sure, the hospital treated her by giving her an injection of Vitamin B, which isn’t done for exhaustion but rather for uh, over-inbibing, but who are you going to trust? Doctors or publicists? It’s the studios fault for a) filming in Los Angeles and b) making her work for upwards of three hours a day. That’s just inhuman, no one should be forced to work that hard. Especially Lindsay since she is such a delicate soul.

4) I read this over the weekend and sadly I know that I am going to do this in a manner that will frighten random strangers. See, Wired had an article on improving your life and in the section on shortening your commute they discussed varying your start times and keeping detailed notes to determine the optimal time to drive. Yeah, I’ve already built the spreadsheets. With automated graphs. And some multivariate regression analysis. All of this to save five minutes a day. I could just move closer to work but why do something that complex?

5) Oh, and an album recommendation to close out the night. If you are into the Damien Rice/David Gray style of music you’ll probably want to check out David Ford. He’s another British singer songwriter and I saw him open for Gomez and he put on a great set. Plus, his disc is called “I sincerely apologize for all the trouble I’ve caused”, which is just awesome. Definitely worth checking out.

Last group of Nola pics...for now

Ok, here are the last group of my pictures from my Nola trip. I know that this is the equivalent of subjecting you to my vacation slides but otherwise I’ll be forced to write about Mel Gibson’s DUI tonight and none of us want that. So, from top to bottom

Picture 1: That is basically a day’s worth of work in terms of tearing down a house. I dumped a decent portion of that trash as well as I took it upon myself to do garbage detail a lot of the time. Don’t take that as being a noble endeavor on my part, it basically was an attempt in order to get outside and be able to take off the mask every once in a while.

Picture 2: The Superdome with the sign stating that it will be ready for the Saints home opener in September. If you remember the week of Katrina you’ll remember the images of people camped out on the overpasses outside the Superdome. Well, that is where this picture was taken from. You still get a little bit of a chill up your spine when you realize what happened there as you drive down the road.

Picture 3: Another picture of our handiwork including the floorboards, which I swear if I ever have to do again I am going to outsource like mad. Either that or I need to start working out because that was really, really tough work.

Picture 4: One of my favorite pictures of my favorite place in the world, Pirate’s Alley. I have a professional version of this view above my CD collection and one of the things that you notice when you compare these two pictures is that all the trees are gone. But, the most important thing is the history of those buildings. William Faulkner wrote his first novel while living in the yellow building. In the red building (directly behind the statue of Jesus) lives Declan Mulrooney, the last in a long line of mystical Irish shaman (or at least, that is who lives there in my novel). The grey building next to it is where I want to live and it is still for sale. It is a very tempting proposition.

Picture 5: If you want a sense of the devastation in the ninth ward this is it. This was a house moved a far distance off of its foundation. Just jaw dropping.

Picture 6: When I talk about gutting a house this is what I mean. We took down all of the walls and the floors until all you had left was the frame of the house. Luckily, we were able to save the ceilings in this house, which wasn’t always the case.

Picture 7: I don’t know if it will be readable but this is the front door of Pat O’Brien’s with a sign on it stating the new hours and that it is closed on Tuesdays. Now the French Quarter is back but until Pat O’s (the place you just have to stop in when you are in town) can afford to be open seven days a week, it really isn’t back.

Picture 8: Part of the group standing in front of Jackson Square. Now I have shown people my photos before and they have looked at this picture and have questioned whether or not I may have had ulterior motives in going on this trip. I can neither confirm nor deny those statements.

The five random CDs for the week:
1) Blake Babies “Sunburn”
2) Robbie Fulks “Country Love Songs”
3) Emmylou Harris “Stumble Into Grace”
4) Moby “Play”
5) Scott Miller and the Commonwealth “Upside Downside”

TGIT once again...

Hey, have I ever mentioned how completely infuriating it is to drive in the state of Kansas? Because wow, I know that they probably learned on tractors but for crying out loud it should not take me ten minutes to move two blocks. Just because it is raining doesn’t mean that you can’t move forward. I swear that I am becoming convinced that the entire state is made up of scarecrows…

Very strange occurrence of the night: As I was cleaning my apartment and organizing things I decided to throw in a random disc from the “Best of the 90’s” box set that I picked up a few weeks ago. Which meant that I was cleaning to Hanson’s “Mmmmbop.” I’m not quite sure what it means that I am in my early thirties, graying around the temples, and I do dishes while listening Hanson. I’m sure that it can’t mean anything good.

Wrestling note of the week: Triple H and Stephanie McMahon had a daughter this Monday night and named her Aurora Rose. The official statement is that they took the name from the story Sleeping Beauty. All I know is that is also a name that you would hear announced in uh, some of the more interesting clubs on Bourbon Street. (Though I don’t care what anyone else says, Rick’s does have a surprisingly good brunch…)

The Big Break comment reference: Good to hear that your sister is getting a chance at the show. I did watch the last season of the show and it is actually a really good show. It’s a good golf competition and over time you really begin to have your favorites. If you have the Golf Channel you really should check it out. Of course, your sister would have to be on the season after the girl from Australia who I had a huge crush on was on the show. I mean, I would have had an in… Or maybe not…

90’s musical question that no one is asking but should: Why can’t I touch it? Is it protected by some sort of force field?

(I’ll try to get another list of those going one of these days.)

Ugh, as you can see I am really at the end of my creativity for the week so I’ll probably just call it a post. I will do my best to get the CD together this weekend and get the pictures uploaded. It helps that this is also laundry weekend for me so I know I’ll be stuck in my apartment for hours on end. Still, since we are talking about me here I’m sure that I’ll still find a way to get into much mischief. Have a good weekend everyone.

Still the champs...

It’s random comment time!

1) Yet another victory for the Kai Badgers tonight in a thrilling, last second victory caused by the fact that I didn’t argue to change our team’s answer on a Russian author question. I still stand by my claim that Chekov is a playwright and not an author, though. Seriously, on the very last question we went from being out of the money to winning it all. Quite a rush and it means that once again I’ll be eating at the Sizzler this weekend. My best answer that helped with the victory: Who was the first runner that Nike signed to a contract?

2) My team’s dominance at the Flea Market is incredible. In all the times that I have played there we have always finished in the money and won all but twice. That just should not happen. The bigger thing is that the games are almost always like tonights in which it always comes down to the final question. Only once did we have it wrapped up before then. It’s rather stunning to think that over 50 questions we are consistently one question smarter than the other teams.

3) And yes, I know that I spent all of last night discussing how horrible it is that my job focuses on trivia. This is just one of the dozen or so internal conflicts that I am currently dealing with. My idea is that I try to learn everything that I can in order to better understand the bigger picture. How being able to quote Family Guy verbatim fits into that is a question I deal with very late at night over copious amounts of alcohol.

4) Oh, the answer is Steve Prefontaine by the way.

5) Lance Bass of N Sync announced that he is gay this afternoon. I for one am stunned that a member of a boy band is gay. I mean, who would think that of someone who is best known for highly choreographed and synchronized dance moves? But, props to the guy for being open about it and for apparently dating Reichen from The Amazing Race. See, everything really does revolve around reality television.

6) Here is my best story from the Lyle Lovett show last night and it had absolutely nothing to do with Lyle. This was an expensive show (with a nineteen piece band you have to charge a lot) so I came in with the assumption that the people there would be into the show. I take my seat, joke with the couple to my left and right at the last moment before the show starts I see the couple who takes the seats to my right. It is a guy with a woman who, and remember, this is coming from me here, looks to be way out of his league. Like a AA guy dating a major leaguer. I take note of it and sit back and enjoy the show. Or as much as I could enjoy because about every ten minutes I could see the woman flip open her cellphone to check the time. Continually throughout the show she had absolutely no interest in what was going on. To the point that they left before the encore. There is a deeper meaning to that story, I’m just not sure what it is just yet other than it might explain why I go to concerts alone most of the time.

Goods and services...

Just got back from seeing Lyle Lovett (incredible show, chills up your spine moments at times) and I’ve been wondering how odd it seems that traveling musician is a career. All he has is some stories and some songs and some friends who are incredible musicians and that is all he needs to live his life. The Ditty Bops take it to the extreme where they can bike across the country and play shows along the way and it is perfectly normal for them to do so. It just seems bizarre when you look at it on those terms.

Of course, being a musician or an entertainer has been an option for centuries from the troubadour on down. People have always needed to be entertained, to listen to stories and to have someone attempt to explain to them what life is really about. They go out and make people happy or at least have an emotional release (I’m not sure if anyone ever went to a Cure show to be happy). It is a very noble profession and I mean that in the truest sense. I have a great admiration for people who go out and tell the world their story.

The reason my mind has been on this is because of a conversation I had back in Nola. We were sitting down at dinner and someone asked what everyone did for a living. So we went around and it was like “I’m a teacher”, “I work with special needs students” “I’m going to spend the next year volunteering”, which meant that by the time I got to me I was like “I’m pretty much pure evil.”

Ok, that is admittedly pretty critical but I have to admit I have a very trivial job. It pays well and I am surprisingly good at it but basically it is a role in which I encourage rampant consumerism. The positive part is that I am making rampant consumerism easier, which can be considered a good thing when looked at in a certain light. Still compared to the people I was with a few weeks back it seems kind of silly.

(Sidebar: I am still impressed and encouraged and inspired by the people that I met while working in Nola. These are people living the life that I would much rather see myself lead.)

It ties into Nick Hornby’s “How to be Good”, which I’m reading right now. In it he discusses what does it mean to truly be good in our world. I mean, though I joke about being evil I do think that I am a good person at heart. I donate money, I volunteer here or there, I get into few arguments, on the whole I would like to think that I am a positive benefit to society in that if you replaced me with a potted plant the world would suffer. But when you compare that to what I could potentially do, all of the good that I am capable of if I would just try, well then your life suddenly becomes a lot starker and a lot less noble.

It’s strange that most people would look at a musician and go “Why don’t you get a real job” and see me in an office and go “Now that is what a young professional should be doing.” In some ways I really feel that the reverse is true. There is a way to do good in every profession, a way to make your life as valuable as it can be, I just need to put the pieces back together again.

Westward the course of the empire makes its way...

Two other notes from The Ditty Bops show that I somehow failed to mention. First, since they were dressed up like Dorothy and the Witch they had to play Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Which they did. On a saw. Damn impressive. Second, they would bring volunteers from the audience to the stage to either a) dance, b) tell stories of their obsessive crushes or c) perform karaoke and sing the song for them. It all seemed to make sense at the time. Third, I used to just run into bartenders and Kristin and Bill at shows (who I did run into and yep, they’re still together.) Now I run into people I play trivia with and that is odd because we know each other but only by team names. Again, there is something to having random people reference you as Cobra Kai.

I guess that would be three things. Not like I ever knew how to count or anything.

So since I actually had some free time tonight in between doing dishes, cleaning my apartment and organizing my dry cleaning (as you should outsource laundry whenever possible) I discovered that they are now showing two episodes of How I Met Your Mother on Monday nights in the summer. Which is sweet because there are still episodes that I haven’t seen yet and since I had taken a few weeks off from watching the show it’s nice to go back and see how my life is playing out on television. And apparently they noticed that I find playing Laser Tag way too cool for its own good. I’m not sure if I’m proud of that fact or not.

And yes, I officially can’t wait until the start of the new season. Especially since Nakomis got voted out of Big Brother, which means that I don’t particularly like anyone in the show so it’s not really worth watching. I really don’t want to have to be forced to watch Project Runway in order to get my reality show fix but it might come down to it. If I can just make it two more weeks until the new season of Celebrity Fit Club I’ll be okay.

Actually, of all of my guilty pleasure shows that one is probably the biggest one. Partly because it is the only reality show that I have found useful in that I a) learned a couple of ideas on how to help lose weight and b) it is really nice to know that I can lose more weight on my own than celebrities can when they are actually being paid to lose weight. Plus, you are down to the D level celebrities who will admit that “Yeah, I’m fat but I’ll get more publicity by doing this than by eating another box of Ding Dongs.” Sure, it’s no Flavor of Love but then again, nothing is.

(Is it me or is anyone else amazed that more people know who Flavor Flav is than Chuck D? Does that say something very meaningful about our society? Or the importance of wearing huge clocks?)

Decisions, decisions...

(Amanda Barrett of The Ditty Bops portraying both the good and bad witches from the Wizard of Oz.)

Tonight was a night of choices for me as there were two concerts in town that I had been meaning to catch. The first one I had actually bought a ticket to and that was to see Toad the Wet Sprocket. The best band ever to take their name from a very obscure Monty Python sketch. Now I had missed seeing Toad more than a decade ago when they played literally a block from my dorm room and I felt that this would be a grand opportunity to make it up and finally get to say that I saw the band behind Dulcinea. Then I found out that The Ditty Bops were playing the same night.

And I guess you can see which one I decided to go see.

I’m sorry but seeing a Ditty Bops show just might be the most fun that you can have at a concert. Of all the bands that I have seen I can’t recall a show that makes you laugh and smile as much as these two girls do. I can’t call them a rock act or a pop act because if they are anything they are an old vaudeville act updated for the twenty first century. Because they sound like something you would have heard ninety years ago with all of these harmonies that are out of left field and props just fly out of nowhere (such as the fact that the entire band and support staff were dressed up like characters from the Wizard of Oz.) All of their songs are upbeat and poppy with some really good guitar work. The band really is just the two girls, one playing mandolin and the other picking at a guitar, with a little piano and keyboards in the background. They are well worth a listen.

Plus, there are two undeniable facts. One, they are touring the country on bicycle. As in they are riding out of KC tomorrow morning at 8 and going to Warrensburg. They’ve traveled 2500 miles so far, or as they put it “1000 miles farther than the ball of twine is long.” Second, they are, well, to put it mildly, gorgeous. And that is more than enough to make me a fan.

(So E, that was the solution to one of the quandaries. The second one also seems to be solved though not in the way that I originally anticipated. Still, hope springs eternal…)

Anyway, I know that I promised to accomplish the following this weekend: a) post the remaining pictures from my trip and b) put together the new CD. And I meant to do those things except that I forgot that this was the week that they released NCAA 07 for the Playstation and well that took up most of my weekend. Because you know that I need to enter the names of all the ND players and spend a lot of time learning the playbook and getting a sense of how the team will react. My thoughts so far a) Brady tends to throw a lot of interceptions in the red zone, b) that is probably a result of my always trying to get the ball to Szamardjia in those situations, c) basically if you can get the ball to Szamardjia he will catch it, he’s like a freaking superman in the game, d) yeah, the defense isn’t looking too good, e) nice to know that I could put up 66 points on Illinois and open a can of whoop ass on Kansas, f) hey, the fact that I turned off the game while I was playing Kansas State has nothing to do with the outcome of the game. But man, do I have ill will towards that school.

As always, I’ll be spending the next week updating rosters and improving the fan signs in the game, just because you need to see in a blowout people raising signs that read, “Screw this, I’m going to the Backer.”

The five random CDs for the week
1) Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band “The Mountain”
2) Tift Merritt “Tambourine”
3) John Hiatt “The Best of John Hiatt”
4) Alejandro Escovedo “More Miles than Money: Live 1994-96”
5) Various Artists (mainly Aimee Mann) “Magnolia (motion picture soundtrack)”

No stamp without a cool theme song...

(And now, back to our regularly scheduled random programming…)

You want to get a sense of how friggin hot it has been in Kansas City this week? When I got to my car this afternoon I saw that the rear view mirror had fallen off the windshield. Yes, it was so hot that the adhesive failed. It probably didn’t help that I had been parking on the roof of the garage this week (it’s a lot tougher for me to get going after a vacation than it used to be) but still, how hardcore is that? And let me just say that it is a lot tougher driving without a rearview mirror than you can imagine. But yes, it is fixed now but I figure I’ll just continue to live by Satchel Page’s tenet of never look back because something might be gaining on you.

I had a concert going experience on Tuesday night that might be an indication that I have gone completely over the edge in terms of my music fandom. I drove to Lawrence (basically a 45 minute trip one way) to catch a 40 minute set by The Immaculate Machine at the Replay Lounge. The Immaculate Machine, a band out of Canada that I only know of because they opened for The New Pornographers last year and that I like for the sole reason that the girl who plays keyboards and sings in the band is really cute. So yeah, I think this means that I may have just gone completely insane when I will spend more time traveling than watching a band just because the vocalist has a nice smile.

They are a good band though and you should listen to their stuff. Admittedly, the Replay Lounge may be the strangest place to see a show in that the band was literally set up next to a bank of pinball machines that people were playing while the show was going on. Now Simpsons pinball is good and all but there is a band five feet from you, I’m not sure how you make that decision. (Oh, and Erik, this is another one of those shows where you and Zack played to larger crowds at CJ’s. And probably made more money.)

Finally, there is a big announcement this week that the post office is releasing official superhero stamps. Yes, finally comic books are getting their due as the legends are being represented on stamps. People like Superman and Batman and Aquaman…

Wait a minute, Aquaman is getting a stamp? WTF? How the hell does Aquaman deserve a stamp?

Let’s face it, there is no lamer hero in the history of comic books than Aquaman. The guy’s superpower is that he can talk to fish. And he can swim really well. That’s it, which might be useful if you need information from a flounder but doesn’t help in terms of saving the world. Imagine in a time of crisis hearing, “Superman, use your heat vision to cut through that door. Wonder Woman, use your lasso of truth to determine the location of the self destruct switch. Aquaman, uh, go over there and do the backstroke or something.”

(Now, Batroc the Leaper, there is someone who deserves a stamp. His superpower is that he can leap. Actually, it’s not even a power or anything. He’s just this French guy with really good hops. And that is still more impressive than being able to order guppies around.)

So just remember, when you are sending off that love letter to not use the Aquaman stamp. That’s if people still send letters. I’m sure someone out there still does. It still is cooler than e-mail and more permanent. Though permanence is not always a good thing…

Closing thoughts for now...

Note #1: For those of you who wonder about these things, I went 0 for 5 in the Notre Dame Football Ticket Lottery, which means barring a very unforeseen circumstance I won’t make it to a game this year. I accept getting a refund for the tickets I tried to purchase but can I ask for a refund on my donation as well? I mean, can’t I get at least one game? Oh well, I knew the year that I got four games would come back to haunt me eventually.

Note #2: Battling the Current Volume 2 will hopefully be put together over the weekend. For those who are new to the blog, this is a CD that basically doubles for the soundtrack of my life. Or the soundtrack to a Cameron Crowe film that hasn’t yet been made, it’s been described both ways. I’ll let everyone know when it is done and I’ll put out the request for addresses and the like so you can all get your free gift for reading whatever thoughts pop into my head on a nightly basis.

Ok, I’ll try to wrap up the New Orleans stories with a bunch of quick points. I’ll probably post more pictures over the weekend but I kind of have the feeling that the masses are just waiting to hear my opinion on the new Paris Hilton single and I can’t deny the crowd what they want. So, some closing thoughts.

1) Here is my description of the new Bourbon Street. Have you ever noticed that when you are in a packed bar with people just completely wasted all around you that you always feel safe. It doesn’t matter how drunk you are, you just feel at ease in the situation. But if you are in an empty bar and there are two guys in the corner who are really drunk you get really nervous about what might happen next. That’s basically the way that Bourbon Street is right now, it’s an empty bar with a few really drunk people in it. Whereas before you felt safe just because of pure numbers now if someone wants to make trouble there are much fewer targets around. It is really disconcerting and it is made worse by having places close at one in the morning.

2) I previously thought that I had done everything on Bourbon Street that was humanly possible and a few things that aren’t. But, I think I topped everything this year by walking down Bourbon Street while talking with a nun. Seriously, through the heart of Bourbon past all the clubs while talking to Sr. Vicki. There were so many opportunities for humor there that I basically couldn’t talk.

3) For those who know the story from last year and are wondering what happened this time: a) I didn’t run into her, b) while I didn’t specifically go out looking for her I did keep my eyes open and c) it does bother me that I didn’t keep my promise when she asked me “When you move down here, look me up.” That said, you can already tell what an ending to a story I’m working on is going to be.

4) Incredibly, if you asked me which stores survived Katrina completely unscathed it would be the tacky t-shirt shops in the Quarter. They are all back up and running like nothing ever happened (while my art gallery is only open on weekends so I was forced to stare longingly through the window at paintings I would really like to buy.) It’s amazing, some of the landmarks like Preservation Hall are still closed but you can still buy the same bad tourist t-shirt that you could a decade ago. Still, the best new shirt has to be “I stayed for Katrina and all I got was this lousy t-shirt, a brand new Cadillac and a plasma TV.”

5) We did hit Café du Monde as a group so I got to have my coffee and beignets like I always do. It does bug me that they actually cleaned the place and replaced some of the ovens post-Katrina since it was the first time that they had ever had a chance to in years. You used to be able to taste the history in that place. You don’t want a clean coffee pot, you want a coffee pot that has been working continuously for twenty years.

6) I’ll post the picture over the weekend but a) my place in Pirate’s Alley is still standing and b) it is still for sale. And yes, I was once again tempted to call up a real estate agent and figure out how many organs I would need to sell to be able to afford it. I mean, you don’t really need both kidneys, do you? Well, in New Orleans you probably would…

7) One of the best ideas of the trip goes to Julie (thanks for the comment by the way), who as we stood around Café du Monde trying to figure out where to go threw out the suggestion of Molly’s, which was awesome. Molly’s is the bar that did not close during Katrina, they stayed open without electricity and served warm drinks to anyone who would walk inside. It is a real place in the Quarter, which is a nice change after spending time on Bourbon Street. Plus, Pete threw a lot of money in the jukebox and that meant that I got to take over at one point and play Social Distortion, Wilco, John Hiatt, the Radiators and the Old 97’s. Man, that was a good night. That was one of those nights where you just got to wander around and talk to everyone as we took over the entire bar. Closest thing to the Backer that I’ve experienced in a long time.

8) I said it before and I’ll say it again, I can solve every problem in my life over gumbo and etoufee at The Gumbo Shop. If there was one place that I was very glad to see open that was it.

9) New Orleans is bruised and battered and much of the city seems to be missing. I spent a lot of time noticing what wasn’t there, like the children and the vendors and the people that gave the city it’s unique flavor. But you caught glimpses of it and you knew that everyone was trying so hard to bring it back. And the place still feels like home to me. It’s not the same city that I experienced last year but somewhere in my soul it is still my home. And I’m happy that that feeling still remains.

Ruins and rebirth...

(Top photo: My team of Megan, Natalie, EC, Julie and Keith. We lacked a fancy name but were universally considered to be the team most likely to be off searching for coffee.)

(Bottom photo: Miss Patty and sons along with a good portion of the Vincentian wrecking crew. EC is hanging out somewhere in the back of the crowd.)

Amy the lead Catholic Charities volunteer: “This is not a feel good mission. It is going to suck.”

Sometimes when you do volunteer work it is more for you than anyone else. It’s along the lines of “Let’s go clean up a park” or “Let’s paint a house” and while those are all very meaningful tasks and they take effort that most people won’t expend it is all a positive effort. This trip wasn’t like that. Our job was to basically dismantle someone’s home while they watched.

Think about that for a moment. You have worked your entire life to own this house and all of your memories are tied to this one place that you called home. You raised your kids here, you expected everything to stay relatively the same. Then you leave before Katrina hits and watch on television the water reaching the level of the overpass and know that your house is flooded. When you return it is still standing but everything inside is damaged or destroyed. And the only way to rebuild is to tear everything out and get back to the base level.

That’s where we came in. Over four days we gutted five houses down to the studs and the base floorboards and while I know that the owners (of which Miss Patty was one) were grateful for our work it must have been the toughest thing in the world to watch. Because we really were tearing out all that they had accomplished and tossing it in a dumpster and that simply was what just had to be done in order to move on.

To give you a sense of what the houses were like I would guess that there was probably a foot or two of standing water in each house post-Katrina and these houses were all raised off the ground to begin with. Each wall had visible mold growing on it to at least four feet and in some instances it reached the ceiling. All that could be done is grab a crowbar and tear out all of the walls to the studs. Which we did and while it was tough work there are always some good moments in the mix.

For example, tearing down dry wall is an awful lot of fun. Just grab a crowbar and start swinging until huge sheets of wall are crashing down to the ground (often smacking my legs and resulting in more bruises than I really want to admit that I have.) It was a nice way to get out some of that latent anger and have the thought in the back of my mind that “Wow, my dad would be really proud of me right now.” On the other hand, one of the houses was old, which meant that the walls were plaster on top of tile on top of more plaster on top of wood slats. It was brutal work just to get to the slats at which point you basically wanted to collapse and hope that someone else would take over.

Because remember, this is July in New Orleans. It is brutally hot out and you are wearing jeans and work boots and one of those protective masks that make it a challenge to breathe. After about twenty minutes you are just one big pile of sweat and are constantly stepping out to catch your breath and down another bottle of water. And while I am proud of myself for consistently churning out 5Ks on the treadmill every week I really have no stamina. That or I really have to ratchet up the workouts.

(That said, I still think I did my share of work. I wasn’t the best worker there, not by a long shot, but I still did better than I had hoped.)

Of course, all of the floors were ruined so we had to tear out the floorboards as well. And here is where I have to mention something about Amy again. Occasionally I mention something that I find that any woman can do to become incredibly attractive to guys. Like having extensive knowledge of the Star Wars universe or being conversant in college football lore. Well, I am going to have to add “The ability to tear out floorboards with her bare hands” to the list because, well, damn. That was impressive. The fact that she was simultaneously ripping into me for a) wearing a Notre Dame shirt and b) tiring out halfway through the room just somehow made it cooler.

I did avoid the job of ripping up the tile floors because, well, I’ve done that job before and it sucks. It sucked when my dad made me do it in our kitchen and if I could avoid it while volunteering I would. There was this fun moment of the women on our team ripping up the tile and I would just look over into the room and see a look of maybe not hatred but damn close to it sent back in our direction for not assisting in the effort. That is when I pretty much decided that I will stick with my trusty crowbar and rip up floors, which involves boards violently cracking and sounds really cool.

So the work was tiring and messy but fun in a weird way. And in the end I didn’t feel bad for what I had done (or really what we had to do) because of something that Miss Patty said. She said that she was certain that they were just going to demolish the house. Just bring in the bulldozer and level the entire place, it was just that bleak when you walked inside the house. But she walked back through when she had seen the work that we had done and for the first time in a long time she had hope. She saw that the roof was still good and the outside walls were fine and there was an opportunity to rebuild. There was still a lot of work to be done but she had hope. She could finally see where that next step would be.

We certainly didn’t solve the problem in a week. Gutting five houses really is just a drop in the bucket given all that needs to be done. But to know that a few people feel closer to being home again, that they have the hope that everything will be ok in the end, that is what made all of the hard work and the sweat and the dust worthwhile. That’s what we accomplished at the end of the day, we provided hope.

Thoughts on the city

Well, I got my ass handed to me again in trivia tonight. I don’t like having to pay to have my confidence rattled. I mean, if I need to be reminded that I know nothing I could just go to work. But, I do take a small bit of pride in the fact that I knew none of the answers to the Sex and the City questions. Not as much pride as I took on Friday night when I knew all of the answers in the pro wrestling category but pride nonetheless.

(Yes, I aced a pro wrestling category and was damn pleased with myself for it. Whenever I complain about the state of my social life remind me to read that last bit over again. It probably explains everything.)

Anyway, I thought that today I’d give some of my impressions on the city of New Orleans and the way things stand right now. (More pictures tomorrow, it’s too late to deal with a dial up modem and large files.) I have a feeling that most people believe that the city is either a) a barren wasteland or b) perfectly fine. The answer is somewhere in between though probably a bit more towards the former than the latter.

We’ll start on the positive: the French Quarter is perfectly fine. From an architectural standpoint you wouldn’t even know that a hurricane came through town. There is still that sense of decay and griminess but that has probably been there for the past century. Canal Street is a bit of a mess, it always is but this time it is worse. Lots of boarded up store fronts and a sense of nothing has been cleaned up for a long time.

As you move deeper into the city the devastation becomes more apparent. To get to the church that was our base of operations we would go down St. Charles Ave. and as you made your way you would see businesses that haven’t reopened and buildings in various states of disrepair. Certain areas would be fine but there was a general sense of things being off, like the streetcar not running down the center of the road. Then when you made your way into the neighborhoods things just got worse and worse. I started looking for the water line on the exterior of buildings and where we were (mainly Uptown and the lakefront by UNO) the line was up a good four or five feet on the side of the buildings. And you know the water was that high for a week.

I did spend a little time in the ninth ward and I’m still not sure if I can quite come to grips with that. Houses were just completely destroyed, just off their foundations and left untouched for nearly a year. It really just tore at your heart, every direction you looked you knew that all of the houses were unlivable and each one had that dreaded X with the date it was searched and what was found inside spray painted on the side. I don’t think I even tried to comprehend what I was seeing there, my mind found it much better to just shut off at that point.

But the biggest thing that struck me during my entire time down there was the lack of people. It is really disconcerting to walk down a street in the Quarter and not have anyone around you. What got me the most was not what was damaged but what simply wasn’t there anymore. You walk into Jackson Square and no one was there. No painters, no fortune tellers, even the doors to the Cathedral were locked. No street musicians hanging out on Royal, no kids dancing on the sidewalk, no guys coming up to you betting that they can guess where you got your shoes at. All of those things that made New Orleans a unique place and really gave the city its soul haven’t made their way back.

Here’s my best example of the way the city is right now. The good news is that Pat O’Brien’s is open and has no visible damage that I saw. Walk in there and it looks the same as it always did. Except that the piano bar isn’t open, we had a group of twenty walk in and get our own section, and they are closed on Tuesdays. When Pat O’s can stay open seven days a week it tells you how few people are in town.

But there are still good signs. The areas that we worked had people living in FEMA trailers or in houses that had already been rehabbed. I did see some of the street musicians that I remembered from last year, though they were much fewer in number. And many of the stores (including my art gallery) are back open, just in much limited hours. So Nola is coming back to life, just not all at once. And that gives me some hope.

And hope is what I will be writing about tomorrow, when I discuss more of what I was actually doing down there.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation (Part One)

Ok, I lied…

Well, maybe lie is too harsh of a word but I definitely did not tell the entire truth. Let me explain…

See, when I wrote last time that I needed a sabbatical from the blog due to the fact that I had run out of material and could not find a way to write about Lindsay Lohan again and make it at all interesting is undoubtedly true. It was also true three months ago and probably five minutes after I first created the blog. So, while I needed a break that isn’t why I didn’t write last week. The real reason is that I knew that I was going to be spending the week sans laptop and I wanted to create an air of mystery as to what precisely I was doing.

(Why? Because while I have a lot of fun letting the entire interweb know the inner workings of my life I am a little paranoid about letting the universe know when I am out of town. Yes, I do greatly overestimate the number of people who actually read these posts.)

Still, this doesn’t explain the picture or the lack of posts. Here is the story.

A few months back I got an email from the young adult group at my church. A group that I am technically a member of in that I am a) arguably young, b) can questionably be considered an adult and c) too lazy to get off of their email list. In the email they mentioned that a group of people were organizing a trip to New Orleans to spend a week volunteering in the city and helping with the cleanup and restoration efforts.

I read it and I thought, “That is something I really should do.” Then the logical part of my brain went “Dude, it’s doing construction in New Orleans in July and you’ve been injured to the point of an emergency room visit while just walking down a street. This is not a good idea.” But later that night I ended up at the end of the bar in a pondering mood and thinking about how much I love Nola and how I never felt that I did enough post-Katrina. Sure I donated but it never felt like enough. And this was an opportunity that I just could not see myself passing up. So I signed up to work with a group of people I didn’t know and without a great sense of exactly what I would be doing.

Well, last week was my week back in the Big Easy and as you can see, it wasn’t my usual trip down there. But it was without a doubt one of the best things that I have done in years. It was incredibly good for my soul (moving the needle from my being “Pure evil” to now just being “Mostly evil”) and I got to feel like I’ve actually done something useful with my life for once. True, the usefulness involved my proficiency with using a crowbar, which I know that no one reading this is actually going to believe but I am surprisingly effective at taking down drywall. It was an unforgettable experience with some images of devastation that will linger with me along with moments of rebirth and humor and just that sense of the world finally making sense that always comes over me as I walk down Pirate’s Alley on a summer day.

I have a lot of stories to tell and pictures to share, so expect to see them throughout the week. I am back, though I am admittedly bruised and battered and tired as all get out. And while this might not be what most people would do on their summer vacation it certainly was the right thing for me to do.

(Even if it meant that I missed both “I Love the 70’s Part II” and “The World Series of Pop Culture” on VH-1 this week. I am so upset about that, especially when I saw how bad some of those pop culture teams were. I mean, they couldn’t name the dog on the Simpsons? I could win that competition by myself. Oh well, at least Flavor of Love 2 is coming up next month and that will be some quality television.)

The five random CDs for the week

1) Chris Mills “Kiss It Goodbye”
2) Loreena McKennitt “The Mask and the Mirror”
3) Howie Day “Australia”
4) C. J. Chenier “The Big Squeeze”
5) The Insiders “Fate in Action”

Not so good with names...

For the record, if Slugger was arrested for assaulting a police officer I would not consider it a sign of how Kansas City is a cultural backwater. Rather, I would consider it to be the coolest thing to happen in this town since Charlie Parker left. There is nothing better than a guy in a costume taking a swing at a cop and then trying to blend in with a crowd. That is brilliant on so many levels.

Ok, announcement time. After a lot of thought I’ve decided that the posts have been a little lacking in quality as of late. Possibly due to the fact that writing five days a week, every week, for a year and a half is a bit of a challenge in the material department. There is only so much about Lindsay Lohan that one can write without having charges filed against them. So, I have decided to take a one week sabbatical. That’s it, just a week off to recharge the batteries, build up a backlog of stories, and just remember what life was like before coming home from the bar meant that I still had to sit down at a laptop and write. I’ll be back in regular form on the 16th so please come back. I know that for my regular readers (and I thank all of you) that this may be jarring but trust me, it will be well worth it.

Anyway, here is my attempt at humor before my sabbatical. For the past two years or so it has been part of my job requirements to research a bunch of other companies. Yes, despite the fact that the two jobs are so completely opposite of each other I can’t believe that they are in the same company, I still end up looking at lists of company names. And after awhile you begin to wonder just who named these things and did they have any clue about some of the other connotations. Here are some of my favorites.

Hooker Furniture Corporation: I just want to know how the admins answer the phone there. Or the sales staff. “So are you interested in some hooker furniture?” “You look to be someone who needs hooker furniture.” The possibilities are endless.

Bi-Mart: Yes, the convenience store for people who just cannot make up their minds.

Fatburger: Come for the burger, stay for the pound of lard that we ladle on top of it. I assume their company slogan is somewhere along the lines of “Yeah, our product is probably going to kill you but at least we’re upfront about it. I mean, when you eat at Fatburger you know that you might as well sign up for the heart transplant while waiting in line.”

Kum’n’go: It’s a convenience store. Honestly, this is the name of a convenience store. Yeah I know, it certainly would be an appropriate name for a few other types of stores but it really is a convenience store. I just don’t want to know what may be inside that convenience store.

Wang Computers: An oldie but a goodie. A true story from back in my days at the electric company. Back in the eighties when people didn’t have computers and had to use their fingers and toes to count it was up to the secretaries to do all the typing. And since this was an engineering group the secretary was typically the only female in the department. So, it was a big deal when the secretaries got a Wang computer for word processing. It also meant that my boss was told by his supervisor, “To make sure that your secretary has a Wang on her desk.” Add that to the fact that they could drink during lunch and smoke in the office and you know why I sometimes feel like I was born a decade too late.

And finally, my new favorite…

BJ’s Wholesale Club: Because only suckers pay retail…

See you all in a week or so. Have fun and stay safe.

Ribbie and Rhubarb and Leopold and Loeb

Earlier this week I was talking about living in Kansas City versus living in Chicago. Well, there was another event in the news that reminded me why I miss living in Chicago. Benny the Bull, the lovable Chicago Bull mascot (who hangs out with the Luv-a-bulls) was arrested at Taste of Chicago for taking a swing at the cops. And then trying to evade police by disappearing into the crowd in a bright red, fuzzy bull costume. See, you just do not get that type of action in Kansas City. Slugger doesn’t challenge a cop, that Chuck E. Cheese reject that the Chiefs call a mascot never gets taken down by a taser, the Wiz’s mascot, well, who the hell cares about the Wiz anyway.

Incredibly, this is the second Bulls mascot to be arrested in the past year. Da Bull, Benny the Bull’s assistant (and yes, the Bulls require two mascots to keep the crowd occupied), was busted on drug possession charges a few years back. Now that my friends is why I miss Chicago. Even the mascots are hardcore.

Anyway, I’m bummed because we had another second place finish in trivia tonight and there were about a half dozen questions that we had right but screwed up, any of which would have won it for us. Just a lot of second guessing and misspellings that ended up costing us in the end. Still, it was a good time though if I could just remember who the current Royals are (which was one of the categories) we might have won the whole thing. Oh well, apparently I can’t win them all.

Otherwise this was a rather calm day back in the office. There were probably more people back than expected and definitely more people back than the cafeteria staff expected. I love waiting ten minutes to order my food and another ten minutes to pay for it, it makes eating at my desk seem productive by comparison. Still, I actually accomplished real work today, which for the first day back is pretty astounding. It’s like no one should ever be expected to be productive that first day back from vacation. It should just be “Show up, clean out your email, and try not to spend the entire time wishing that you were still out of the office.” That’s pretty much standard operating procedure.

Sorry, but I’m really short on ideas tonight. Tomorrow will be better and there will be a very important announcement as well. You’ll all find out soon enough.

In the year 2011...

A week or so back I was asked to write up for work where I envisioned myself in five years. I was so tempted to write the following.

“In five years I shall have accomplished the majority of my goal of taking over the world. Nations shall tremble at the very sound of my name. Armies shall be poised to act upon my every whim. Statues of me will be raised in the squares of cities around the globe with celebrations that will make carnivale appear to be a church picnic. Mothers will look into the eyes of their newborn and pray that their child could grow up to be just like EC.

That, or I’d like to have a cubicle with a window. Right now it’s pretty much an either/or proposition.”

Yeah, sometimes honesty isn’t the best policy.

(Why yes, The Brain from Pinky and the Brain is one of my favorite characters of all time. What makes you ask?)

Oh well, the long weekend is almost over and I’m almost looking forward to getting back to work. I said almost because, well, I am human after all. I’ll look forward to going to the office when going to the office implies sitting on my couch and watching ESPN Classic all afternoon (well, except for Arliss, how the hell did that make the programming chart?) But I am running out of things to do in my apartment. I’ve cleaned and organized everything that needs to be cleaned or organized. I mean, you can even see the floor now. Not that that is entirely a good thing but you can now be assured that my apartment actually has a floor. I give it a good forty eight hours before entropy returns.

I was never able to pull off that argument with my mom. “Clean up your room.” “But disorder is the natural state of the universe. By cleaning my room all I am doing is slowing down the inevitable.” For some reason, conceptual physics is not the best tact to take in an argument.

One last random note: last week Pandora.com decided that based on my vast musical collection that I was really in the mood for Shania Twain songs. I’ve never felt simultaneously depressed and embarrassed in my life. Years of searching out the most obscure and talented artists and all that means is that I really should be listening to vapid country pop from Canada. And it’s based on a computer algorithm so you know it has to be right.

Life on the dole...

Given the oddly placed holiday I’ve decided to make this a four day weekend and I’ll have to admit, this has given me a nice sense of what unemployment is like. And all in all, it’s pretty cool. I get to hit the bars on a Sunday night, sleep in on a Monday, go shopping in the middle of the afternoon, get in a nice workout at three and then spend the evening watching wrestling. That’s about as full a life as anyone should ever want to leave. If it wasn’t for the fact that I like having health insurance and at some point I do need an income since for some reason beer isn’t free I would start truly slacking. (Whether I am slacking right now is a whole other post altogether.)

Though even with my immense amount of free time I still am not accomplishing any of the things that I set out to do. Sunday was to be clean the apartment day and specifically, organize the home office. Yes, time to put all of my credit card statements in chronological order and store them neatly by card company for no apparent reason. Well, that was the plan on Sunday but instead I cleaned every part of my apartment except for the office. And I actually like putting things in chronological order so it’s not like I considered it a difficult task.

That’s just kind of the way this weekend is going. While out today I forgot to stop by the dry cleaners (even though I drove right past it) to pick up the shirt they forgot to include in my last order. Well, more like they switched my dress shirt with a woman’s jacket and well, I a) don’t like the pattern and b) I just don’t think it would go with any of my skirts. (Jeez, I hope people realize that last bit was a joke.) So I gave them the jacket back and they couldn’t find my shirt for a day but then they did and I completely blanked about it today and now I’ll have to remember to pick it up on Wednesday or they’ll probably just throw it out. I’m telling you, I need to hire an assistant to just deal with this type of stuff.

(And this is from someone who has already outsourced a good portion of his existence. If it’s good enough for a multinational corporation it is good enough for me.)

Oh, and for those of you who are big music fans there is something that you should probably check out. They just released Richard Thompson’s “1000 Years of Popular Music” concert on DVD. It is a recording of the tour that I saw back in ’04 in which Richard literally covers all the various genres of music from the past millennium, starting with an 11th century liturgical and ending with Brittney Spears. If you like music of all kinds and can deal with a show in which you simply have never even heard of three quarters of the songs then it is a very interesting DVD to pick up. There are some great moments in there and to see one of the greatest songwriters cover “Oops I Did It Again” has a rather forbidden thrill to it.

Time flies when you are attempting to have fun

Mark the Bartender: “So what’s your story?”
EC: “Just moved in to town a few hours ago and my furniture isn’t being shipped for two more days. So tonight I’m drinking until the floor looks comfortable.”
Mark the Bartender: “Let me get you a beer.”

Wow, three years already? That story, which honest to god is true and took place at Kelly’s, just turned three years old. Here is the explanation behind it.

I moved to town on July 1 making the drive from Chicago to Kansas City with a lightly packed car (basically whatever I didn’t trust with the movers). It was a pretty uneventful trip during which you realize that there truly is nothing to see in Iowa other than the wrestling hall of fame and that Iowa is a state that is much too big by a factor of ten. Anyway, I get to town on the first and move in to my place with the slight problem being that my movers and Benchmark Furniture wouldn’t be delivering my stuff until the third. That’s a slight problem in that for the first day I didn’t even have a chair in my place. Hence, off to the bar to get to the point where I figured that I wouldn’t mind that I was sleeping on the floor. And people wonder why I know so many bartenders.

But man, three years in this place. I don’t know if I should be amazed by how fast the time flies or by the fact that I survived three years here. And I know that last sentiment is a little harsh and I had a conversation with Erik about it over the weekend. I’ll readily admit that I give Kansas City and Kansas in general a lot of crap in the blog about things like banning evolution or not knowing how to build a sewer system in which the streets don’t flood anytime it rains or deciding that they should burn copies of The Catcher in the Rye. All of which still make me wonder just exactly what is in the water in this place and which makes me buy a lot of bottled water as a safety precaution.

But that said, I think that I’ve had more fun in this town then I realized or would have imagined. I’ve described this place as a smaller Chicago with everything much more convenient. While it means that there aren’t the crowds that I’m accustomed to (and there are times when you just want to be surrounded by two hundred thousand people in Grant Park) it does mean that I’ve gotten to do more things here than I ever would have back home. I can get to basically any concert I would ever want to attend in forty five minutes and be in the front row for ninety percent of them. I can go shopping or hit the museums in a matter of minutes. And if I want to check out the bar scene that is more than easy enough.

So I guess that after three years I have finally had it pounded into me that how much you enjoy a place is based on what you make of it. And the more I try to make something of it here the better things are getting. So it is nice to know that three years later I’m glad for a few more things beyond the fact that my furniture arrived. There just may be interesting times to be had in this town after all.

The five random CDs for the week
1) The Drovers “Little High Sky Show”
2) Jimmy Buffett “Feeding Frenzy”
3) Coldplay “A Rush of Blood to the Head”
4) Gillian Welch “Hell Among the Yearlings”
5) Sarah McLachlan “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy”