The fetish is immured in the frozen waters of Lake Pontchartrain-in-my-freezer; the chicken for the jambalaya is transubstantiated into Colt meat; the first beads of the season have been caught (appropriately, from the Pontchartrain parade); the king cakes are purchased, one black & gold, one purple, green, & gold; the house is reasonably clean; the unwashed lucky Shockey jersey is waiting in the dresser drawer; the guest bed is ready for a certain founding member of the Who Dat Mafia; the date is February 7, 2010, it's Super Bowl Sunday, and THE FREAKING SAINTS ARE IN THE FREAKING SUPER BOWL, Y'ALL.

By the time this former chicken breast is ready to go into my game day jambalaya, it will be Colt meat!

Also: Did I tell you I can haz pneumonia? Well, I can haz pneumonia. And duz. But steadfastly refuse to die until after the victory parade on Tuesday, which I will go to, even if marquisdd has to superglue me into his antique wheelchair like Freddy Lounds.

[ETA: Well, God dammit, if only I'd made a psychic Super Bowl prediction in November, I could have had this right handy in my freezer. I didn't think I'd ever eaten horse, but I've eaten Dutch "fried fast food snacks" (read: FEBO), so who knows.]

Dear LeBron, bite me. I have always said you were overrated. Dear Shaq, WHO DAT!!!

(Bonus points to Dilbert creator Scott Adams for this answer: "Saints are obviously favored by the Almighty Creator of the Universe. Colts are hoofed beasts that poop wherever they're standing. Advantage: Saints. The score will be infinity to 666.")

England, I love you more than ever today. Thank you for supporting Who Dat Nation! (This is an essential video to watch if you want to hear a bunch of Brits saying "WHO DAT!")

To make up for subjecting you to Steve Kelley, I give you the beauteous Bobby Hebert singing "When the Saints Go Marching In" ... in the style of Louis Armstrong!

(I was going to embed it so you could just click on the arrow, but I'm too stupid, technologically inept, and/or superflu-addled to do that, but the link is totally, totally worth it.)

... And then of course there are assholes like this who make me understand why not everybody felt great about the Buddy D dress parade. I assure you that Steve Kelley does not represent the Who Dats who proudly made themselves beautiful for Buddy on Sunday, and I'm disappointed in the Times-Picayune for printing this har-de-har-har oh-I-fear-for-my-manhood fratboy shit ... but then I'm also disappointed in them for making him their doesn't-get-New-Orleans editorial cartoonist, printing his know-nothing "human interest" articles, and slotting his dull, unfunny daily strip into our comics page. What did he do for you, Times-Pic, have all his teeth pulled or something?

But away with him. We will overcome the assholes and make it to the Promised Land.

I've read as much of the Amazon/Macmillan crap as I can stand (if you don't know about this and want to, this seems a good link to start with). All I can think about is A) how bitterly I railed against Amazon all those years ago (about totally different stuff; not claiming prophecy here, but I did tell you they were evil) and B) how everfucking glad I am to not be in this business anymore. Or at least to not currently be in this business. Traditional publishing is falling apart, it wasn't working for much of anyone but especially not most of the writers, and I for one am thrilled to see it happening. There will be some lean years for writers, but hello, what else is new? There will also be a major paradigm shift (or several) in the release and distribution of books over the next several years, and I selfishly hope that if/when I have a new book I want to publish, something more tenable than what I now think of as the Three Rivers Press model (after the single most incompetent "big publisher" I've ever worked with) will have come along.

I'm not opposed to self-publishing, but I'm not personally interested in it for a number of reasons, and I don't think it in its current form will be the new paradigm that replaces the old. I could be wrong. Honestly, I've spent the past three years thinking about the publishing business as little as possible, so I'm not the best source for this stuff. I really signed on to remind people of the Butt Title Game. This may or may not have been invented by greygirlbeast and tjcrowley; I first learned it from them. You simply take the title of absolutely anything and replace one of the words with "butt." To wit, my early ouevre:

Lost Butts
Drawing Butt
Exquisite Butt
The Lazarus Butt

And then there's New Era PZB: The Value of Butt, followed by Butt, Butt, and Soul Butt. (Just doing the novels here; short stories, with their often-longer titles, can provide even more fun. "O Death, Where Is Thy Butt?", anyone?) For a certain kind of person, this never gets old. I'm using it to distract myself from having missed the best parade ever in the history of New Orleans yesterday.

If you can stand up, you can go to the parade.

I couldn't stand up this morning, at least not without swaying alarmingly, and so I missed the greatest parade ever in the history of New Orleans. There are lots more videos on YouTube if you search for "Buddy D dress parade," but this one has a good view of Bobby Hebert in his black and gold gown and long princess wig at 4:07. I know there's no point in beating myself up for catching a virus, but ... still ... I should've made Chris push me in the one-handled wheelbarrow or something.

Please respect the fact that I don't want to hear how hateful/shaming the parade supposedly was; I already had that argument on Twitter. This parade honored Buddy Diliberto, one of the great small-s saints of my life, a man who harbored hatred for none. I love trans women. I love trans men. I love drag queens. I love men in bad drag. (I am married to a man who sometimes does bad drag.) I find these four types of people mostly mutually exclusive. If you disagree, you have a whole Internet in which to do it. Right now, you're standing in my living room.

This editorial by Richard Campanella is the best explanation I've found of just what last week's and next week's Saints games mean to New Orleans, and why it reaches far beyond just football. We don't necessarily expect to be "America's team" (never having really felt like part of America, especially after 8-29-05, that would be strange and disorienting to us), but we do appreciate that people elsewhere are rooting for us: non-football fans, even Vikings fans (by and large, the classiest bunch of NFL fans I've encountered) and fans of our most hated rivals such as the Atlanta Falcons.

Still, I know the Bless You Boys don't feel we "deserve" to win the Super Bowl because of the federal levee failure, any more than I appreciated the Amazon "reviewer" who didn't care for D*U*C*K but urged readers to "cut [me] some slack" because I'd been through Katrina. Those of us who have stayed to rebuild are strong in our love for the city and have had to develop layers of toughness we never expected; we don't need anybody to cut us any "slack," and I don't believe the Saints do either. Please, just acknowledge our resilience, take a look at why we love this place so much, and if you can bring yourself to do it, cheer us to the win on Super Beauxl Sunday.

[ETA: re: "We don't need anybody to cut us any 'slack'" -- well, nobody except "Bob."]

I remember the first time we drove back into New Orleans after the levees failed.

Tired, sad, and scared half to death of what we might find at our home, we came in across the Causeway, and the sight of the skyline simultaneously lifted and pierced our hearts. At the skyline's own heart was the no-longer-white curve of the Superdome, torn open to its skeleton, our symbol of hope become a symbol of helplessness and death.

Standing in the middle of the Dome last night, Coach Sean Payton said, "This stadium used to have holes in it. This stadium used to be wet. It's not wet anymore. This is for the city of New Orleans."

I have no more words. Except, of course, WHO DAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! If you want to read about the game, the fans, and the joyful eruption of the city, there's lots of great coverage on nola.com. I'm going to lunch with my favorite Whodat.







All pics by marquisdd. Thanks again to you and Ben for sharing this great night with us!

Today I had energy. Extra spoons, as they say. I used most of it to start cleaning out my garden, which took a huge hit in our recent freeze (three days, a minor matter for northern gardens but a 20-year freeze in New Orleans). I think some of it (e.g. my huge grove of variegated ginger, which desperately needed pruning anyway) will come back, but a lot of stuff is gone, including my pencil cacti and a 5-foot poinsettia I'd grown from one of last year's Christmas plants. Well, the yard was looking shaggy and crowded anyway. This opens up lots of new planting space, and I've still got pansies, foxgloves, roses, mint, parsley, cauliflowers, carrots, bok choy, and a few other things that didn't mind the freeze at all.

In other news, our most recent addition comes from louismaistros and waifnola, who wanted to keep him "in the family." I give you Mr. Deano Bonano Morningstar Marbles, familiarly known as Deano:



As you can see, he's having a very hard time settling in.

I know I have to stop looking at stuff about Haiti, but I feel guilty when I do. In the worst times after the federal levee failure, I had this feeling of "How DARE people be going on with their normal lives in other places?!" Now here I am, going to the doctor and making groceries while they bleed and starve. I have blogged. I have tweeted. I have linked. I have given money I couldn't really spare to Doctors Without Borders. I have shed tears. I have no skills or physical strength that would make me of any use if I could actually go to Haiti. I know I have done what I can. I know I need to leave it alone for a while. I know I'm flashing back, and I know this should not be about me. I keep wondering about the people whose pictures I've seen. I keep thinking how much the crowds sleeping in the streets look like the desperate people abandoned at the Superdome and Convention Center.

I had to stop following a fellow Saints fan on Twitter because he said we should keep the money here, not send it to Haiti. A New Orleanian said that. It made me so ashamed. For anyone who wasn't reading back in September/October '05, the only reason Chris and I were able to return to New Orleans after evacuation (our house was uninhabitable) was because people from all over the world, readers of this journal for the most part, helped us with donations. It was about the best thing anyone has ever done for me. Our story was repeated thousands of times in thousands of ways. Thank you, people, for being willing to send your money and give your efforts to the Third World then. Please do it again now if you can (to help Haiti, not me, I mean).

Haiti, you are in my heart tonight, but maybe more importantly, you are in the pit of my stomach.

The smacked and crumbled buildings, the people running or standing around dazed, the broken furniture lying in the street, the tweets direct from Haiti and from people with family there, hoping for any scrap of information ("19hr no sleep won't close my eyes until I hear something about my loveones in PORT-AU-PRINCE") -- it all looks so, so, so horribly familiar. This is the help link I trust most so far, as it was recommended by louismaistros, whose wife took religious training in Haiti and knows it well.

New Orleans has deep connections to Haiti. Learn about them here (thanks to @NOLAjewelry504 on Twitter for this).

If you pray, then pray, but whatever you do, please help if you can.

I'm reading The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi, an account of the decades-long search for Italy's most famous serial killer. It's more interesting than Shake The Devil Off and not nearly as offensive (possibly only because I'm not from Florence), but if even a tenth of this tale is true, then poor fictional Rinaldo Pazzi's hunt for Il Mostro in Thomas Harris' Hannibal was a model of simplicity, elegance, and textbook police work compared to the real case. On the other hand, the authors make some very strange claims with no substantiation -- for instance, an exhumed drowning victim is said to be "instantly recognizable" following five days in the water and seventeen years in the grave. Maybe there's something in the Tuscan soil I don't know about, but that sounds like an uncannily well-preserved corpse. At any rate, I seem to be having odd luck with true crime books lately.

I've only been to Italy once. Chris and I spent three weeks there, which is the longest I've ever visited a place all at once, and though we had a wonderful time, I learned next to nothing about the place except that it is extremely confusing. On paper it makes no sense whatsoever; the government changes every other month or so, there are dozens of bizarre political parties, and the citizens don't give a damn for any of it. Yet they live deeply civilized and coherent lives, are one of the world's great cultural meccas, and eat as well as any people on earth. I particularly admire their dislike and suspicion of the Pope (all popes, not just the current one) despite being a largely Catholic country that has produced more popes than any other.

New Orleans' character is greatly influenced by the Italian immigrants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but those were almost all Sicilians. They brought red gravy and St. Joseph's altars and superstitions that meshed well with the plethora already surrounding the city. We didn't get to Sicily or any other part of southern Italy on our trip; we stayed in the north, visiting Milan, Venice, Florence, and Bologna. (Chris fell in love with Venice, which creeped me out with overtones of Lovecraft and Thomas Mann; I fell in love with Florence, which he thought was "too modern"; we both loved Bologna, and neither of us cared much for Milan, though to be fair we mostly saw it while being ferried around by publishing people in a week-long, cold, heavy rain.)

You know one of the great things about writing a blog entry? I started this in one place, ended up in quite another, and have no clue how to tie them together -- but I don't have to!

[ETA: A couple of pages later, they cite a newspaper story about the "saponification of the cadaver." I forgot about adipocere (link SFW but possibly disturbing). That could in fact render him recognizable after seventeen years. They've taken adipocere bodies out of the wall ovens in some local cemeteries whose features were clearly visible, if somewhat foamy. OK, I think I have actually made myself a little nauseated.]

As part of my resolution to regrow some of the metaphorical skin I lost in 2009, I am finally, after all these years, opening this journal to comments from all registered LJ users. No anonymous comments, as I'm not actually a masochist. I'm also doing this partly because I spend a lot less time online than I used to and seldom get around checking my various communities for questions, but please be warned, I'm not particularly into talking about writing or (my) books these days. I can't promise to read or answer comments in a timely fashion. Nor will I argue about stuff I don't feel like arguing about, even if I make sweeping generalizations and unfair claims, which I probably will. This is still my living room (I actually do most of my posting in bed, but I can't invite you all into my bedroom without sounding like more of a pervert than I mean to be). Trolls will be banned without comment, and anyone who feeds them repeatedly may also be banned without comment. And of course I may decide next week that I hate the whole thing and go back to friends-only comments, or none at all.

Honestly, though, I doubt things will change a great deal. Anybody who wants to can already talk to me on Twitter, which has been fun and at least 99% non-traumatic.

Today there is another cat-shaped hole in my heart. When I die and they autopsy me, they'll surely wonder at the dozens of cat-shaped holes.

This morning we found our Greta dead behind the sofa. She was about 11, but she hadn't been sick, lethargic, anorexic, or any of the other things cats usually do to let you know they're in trouble, so I took her to the vet for a necropsy. It turned out that she had advanced cancer of the spleen, which Dr. Scott said is often asymptomatic and painless. The tumor ruptured her spleen and she bled to death sometime early this morning. I've read that bleeding out isn't a bad way to go; you're weak, then high, then gone. I hope so. At any rate, the necropsy settled my mind that we couldn't have done anything to help her and that her cause of death isn't anything that can affect the other cats.

We're having her cremated, because she always hated the cold. We got Greta from the Southern Animal Foundation, a good animal welfare group/shelter that used to be neighbors with my vet. They knew I loved black cats and asked if I'd consider taking a beautiful black kitten who was semiferal, as they knew I'd be willing to work with him. When we came to get Ivan, the kitten, they said, "Oh, you've just got to take the mother too, she loves her baby, she cries whenever we try to take him away!" So mother and son came home with us. It was winter then too, and we were living in a big old drafty house, and mother immediately abandoned her son in a downstairs closet and plopped herself down directly in front of the bedroom heater. Ever since then, we called her Crack Momma. But she was a sweet girl, jet black and beautiful, if somewhat coffee-table-shaped (she liked her food).

Ivan died after the federal levees failed and we couldn't catch him. He didn't drown, but was exposed to something poisonous, probably water. They're still the only two cats out of all the dozens I've had that I've found dead at home. It's a shock, but in Greta's case, also a little reassuring -- she didn't have to be prodded and needled, and the other cats got to see her and know what happened. They're sticking close tonight.

When I was 23 myself, it amazed me that T.S. Eliot had written "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" at 23. Now it makes more sense to me, because of the refrain "There will be time ... " Only a young person really believes that, I think.

R.I.P., Greta, 1998 (?) - 2010. We love you.

I can't believe I just paid $25 for Ethan Brown's new book Shake The Devil Off, an account of the 2006 "voodoo shop" murder/suicide, only to find out I apparently joined the media frenzy that savaged the reputations of the young murderer and his victim:

"After Katrina, Addie enthused to a reporter that 'we've been able to see the stars for the first time.' After she was murdered, Addie's remark about the stars brought a nasty rebuke from New Orleans novelist Poppy Z Brite, who wrote on her blog that while 'I feel bad for the girl ... I can't quite forgive that remark about how beautiful the stars were over New Orleans in the nights right after the storm. Stars are horrifying things in general and should never, ever be seen over New Orleans. Our night sky is supposed to be purple.' While it was understandable that New Orleanians sought to distance themselves from the gruesome tale of Zack and Addie [yes, I've always sought to distance myself from gruesome tales - PZB], surely these two young people had lives that did not need to be attacked at any opportunity, and sad ends that did not deserve to be ridiculed." ( -- Ethan Brown, Shake The Devil Off)

All very noble, Ethan. I'm not sure how disliking a starry sky qualifies as attacking and ridiculing, but let's leave that. Instead of arguing the point, may I bring to your attention that I did not recently publish a 286-page book about Zack and Addie's lives and, primarily, deaths, a book that meticulously details how the blood poured out of Zack's mouth after he jumped off the Omni Royal Orleans deck, how Addie's charred legs in a roasting pan, severed head, hands, and feet in a stockpot, and garbage-bag-wrapped torso in the fridge were found in the couple's squalid Rampart Street apartment, graphic descriptions of the police photographs you looked at, and exactly where and with which tool (the tub, a saw) he cut her apart? I don't see any notations in the flap copy or acknowledgements about your donating a portion of the book's proceeds to groups for Katrina recovery, troubled New Orleans youth, or a similar cause, so I assume you're profiting (such as book profits go; I don't say you're getting rich) off Zack, Addie, and readers' desire to know the gory, painful details of how they lived and died. No doubt you're doing it to try to understand and tell their side of the story and all sorts of other compelling reasons. As everything seems to do these days, it reminds me of a Stephen King story, in this case "Apt Pupil" and its young boy drawn to Nazi atrocities*:

"'Anyhow,' Todd said, "the library was real good. They must have had a hundred books with stuff in them about the Nazi concentration camps, just here in the Santo Donato library. A lot of people must like to read about that stuff ... I really did do a research paper, and you know what I got on it? An A-plus. Of course I had to be careful. You have to write that stuff in a certain way ... All those library books, they read a certain way. Like the guys who wrote them got puking sick over what they were writing about.' Todd was frowning, wrestling with the thought, trying to bring it out. The fact that tone, as that word applies to writing, wasn't yet in his vocabulary, made it more difficult. 'They all write like they lost a lot of sleep over it. How we've got to be careful so that nothing like that ever happens again. I made my paper like that, and I guess the teacher gave me an A just cause I read the source material without losing my lunch.' Once more, Todd smiled winningly." ( -- Stephen King, "Apt Pupil")

So you go ahead with your bad self, Ethan Brown. Smile winningly at your signings, and keep telling yourself, as your flap copy rather startlingly claims, that you have discovered how these two young people's lives could have been saved. We'll hope your book makes certain that Nothing Like That Ever Happens Again. I'll just stay over here nastily rebuking people on my blog.

But remember this, Ethan: Both you and I have profited from writing about severed heads and bloody limbs.

Mine were fictional.




*I'm aware that I have invoked Godwin's Law here and thereby lose all the Internets. I can't help it; that's what the damn story is about.