Some potentially good news about Our Lady of Good Counsel. I should have been at this march, but I misread my e-mail and thought it was happening today instead of yesterday. I'm not crazy about the pastor-sharing plan -- I like Father Pat and would much prefer to keep him as our full-time pastor -- but, assuming we don't get some hateful fanatic priest, it would certainly be preferable to closing the church altogether.

Weather permitting -- the events take place in a partially-covered courtyard, so a heavy thunderstorm could shut things down -- Chris will be cooking again tomorrow at St. James Cheese Company on Prytania, this time from noon to 5:00. Here is his menu. Due to scheduling conflicts, he probably won't be able to do this again for a while (if ever), so if you're local and miss his cooking, do check it out.

Speaking of missing Chris' cooking, we were talking about the Delachaise a couple of days ago and I mentioned that, from time to time, people have accused me of liking and even seeking out drama. He was surprised because he knows that drama is one of the last things I want in my life. I told him (and will tell you now) that while I don't enjoy drama, I'm not afraid of it, and I think people sometimes mistake that for drama-whoredom. I actually dread drama and try my best not to start it, but if someone starts drama with me, I'll give it right back to them -- usually more than they bargained for. Well, I've long said that if you want to be a cook in New Orleans, you have two choices: you can work for Brennans or you can work for idiots. This isn't true across the board, but it's true far more often than it should be. Even if I don't start out thinking Chris' bosses are idiots as I did with the Delachaise owners, I usually come to that conclusion sooner or later, which is why with his next job I think I'm going to reinstate my former policy of not commenting on the place at all -- no positives, no negatives. Since he has his own blog now, he can talk about it as much or as little as he wants to, and since he's not a hothead like me, he probably won't say true-but-tactless things about the owners getting drunk and scratching their balls.

It's not loaded. Please don't sic PETA on my ass.

Frankie insisted on the grainy, B/W, assassin-in-the-newspaper filter. He also says his next victim is going to be a certain ferret-faced little social climber who co-owns a trendy Uptown bar and -- in the latest dramatic twist to this increasingly stupid story -- has been telling his wine guys to discourage other restaurants from hiring Chris because of Chris' alleged "unreliability" and "family problems." Of course, the wine guys just grin and nod as one tends to do in the presence of a loony, then call Chris to laugh about it.

I'm thinking of contacting one of the trash TV networks and pitching a reality show called Delachaise Wives. God knows there's enough material there to rot the brain of anyone who enjoys that sort of thing. In the latest development, one of them finds it necessary to pose as an expatriate Delachaise fan who just happens to have meticulously gleaned my blog for material to provide personal insults couched in smarmy fake sympathy. (In a nutshell, I'm a has-been druggie who takes advantage of my poor, stupid readers' generosity and blows money on guns and designer cats while whining about how poor I am. Maybe I'd be less poor if the owners of the Delachaise paid Chris the money they owe him -- or, here's an idea, had paid him what he was worth in the first place instead of using his talent to subsidize their drinking -- but never mind.)

Ah well ... if I was married to an abusive alcoholic whose bar couldn't even make a Top 85 list, I guess maybe I'd want to pretend I lived in Belgium too.

Here's a very simple message for Evan, Trace, Ed, and Joanne. When Chris departed, you told R.J. that you dreaded seeing what I would write about your place. Until the anonymous posts started, I had no intention of saying anything other than that Chris had left. Despite the hundreds of petty roadblocks you threw in his way (e.g. Trace, the Delachaise's nominal "designer," refusing to lay out and print the menus because she and Evan had had a fight), the job was a wonderful opportunity for him and I truly didn't want its aftermath to turn ugly. Believe me, I'd be really fucking happy to never think about any of you yuppie wetbrains again. There are only two (2) things you must do to get me to shut up about you and your place forever. Both of them are things anyone with a modicum of class would already have done without prompting, but since it's you, I'll spell them out:

1. Pay Chris the rest of the money you owe him.

2. Stop making cowardly anonymous posts on food message boards, blogs, etc. in which you pose as impartial customers who just happen to be building up the Delachaise by taking potshots at Chris. If you have something to say about Chris' tenure at your establishment, find the balls to say it under your own name. Even if you had the brains and/or verbal skills to disguise your intentions, you still give yourselves away by saying the same things over and over in posts that purport to be by different people. The major reason Chris left a job he had enjoyed and thrived in is because he couldn't stand to work for stupid people anymore. If you want to make your previous acts of stupidity look like drops of spit in the ocean, then by all means just keep talking.

=================================

GLOSSARY FOR THIS ENTRY, in case the addressees don't have a dictionary handy:

Meticulous (adj): Careful; thorough.

Glean (v): To gather slowly and patiently.

Nominal (adj): In name only; named as a matter of form, rather than due to any actual value.

Modicum (n): A moderate or small quantity.

Tenure (n): Period or term of holding a position.

Spit (n): Fluid produced by the salivary glands; also, what the one cocktail (a bourbon & soda) I ever ordered at the Delachaise tasted like.

That was the sound of me LAUGHING MY ASS OFF at the fact that the Delachaise, whose owners and their wives (the latter mainly in anonymous posts on local food boards) are often heard loudly proclaiming their joint "not a restaurant but a great bar with great food," was considered notable by the Times-Picayune for the departure of their excellent chef, but did not make the paper's 2008 Bar Guide (85 Great Places to Drink). It's OK, though; not even being among the city's eighty-five (85!) best bars won't prevent them from scratching their balls and getting drunk.

(P.S. The food is still very good at the Delachaise, and I don't mean to discourage anyone from going there to eat. I just don't think it's as great a bar as they think it is. In fact, I think it's easily one of the most annoying bars I've ever been in.)

At least one anonymous poster who shows every sign of being the wife of one of the Delachaise's owners has been posting erroneous information about Chris and his menu on local food boards and blogs, most notably here, in the comments on a post by the always-excellent Kevin Allman (though I am not sure where Kevin got the idea that the place was called "The Delachaise Hotel").

As I said in these same comments, Chris and I would like for this split to continue amicably, if only because Chris' fine sous chef R.J. Tsarov is now running the Delachaise's kitchen and we want to see him do well. Chris is the sort of person who will take the high road no matter what. I, however, am not, and if people connected with the Delachaise begin spreading needless misinformation about Chris in order to cast themselves in a better light, there are certainly some interesting stories I could tell.

We're just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl
Year after year
Running over the same old ground
But have we found
The same old fears?
Wish you were here.

Every morning I wake up and wonder
What's gonna happen today
You see it your way
I see it mine
But we both see it slippin' away.

When all you can do is quote old-ass, cheesy song lyrics, you may as well just go hang yourself in the closet. Good thing shotgun houses don't have closets. And that I have kittens. And that I successfully resisted the Duma Key e-files, and now have the book in hand.

I hate it when my LJ friends hint at great drama in their lives and then say "But I don't want to talk about it." But I don't want to talk about it. Being screamed at for roughly a third of the day and ignored for the rest of it by your life's partner who seems to have (probably justifiably) lost all respect for you does tend to put a damper on that excess chattiness.

Apparently it is my lot in life to blog my ass off today. I was going to wait until tomorrow to post this and see if cooler heads (say, mine) prevailed, but what the hell; I've got a lot to do tomorrow and may not even get to the computer until late, and I know I'm still gonna want to say it.

Of all the correspondence I get, I think my least favorite is from the strangers who think they "know" me. I don't mean the readers who just say "I feel like I know you from your books," which is kind of nice, but the ones who actually believe they do know me, frequently better than I know myself. And my least favorite subset of these is the people who want to tell me about how I'm Denying My Inner Darkness by no longer writing horror. They're like some kind of reverse Jesus freaks: "But ... but ... if you keep writing this stuff, you might go to Heaven!"

I've gotten several such e-mails from fans (ex-fans, I guess), but yesterday was the first time I've gotten one from a professional. I suppose it's mean of me to write about this, because he apologized afterward and I told him there were no hard feelings, but tough shit: these things get in my head and go round and round and bother me, and I've got enough crap going round and round in my head already these days, and if you're going to put more crap in there, you just might hear about it here. Big deal; as the Australian girl's badge said, "I don't care about your blog," and that goes for mine too, so don't worry about it overmuch.

Anyway. A few weeks ago this editor sent me an invitation to contribute to a horror anthology, and I said sorry, no thanks. A few days after that he sent another e-mail saying look, you don't get it, we REALLY NEED YOU in this book. I almost didn't bother writing back -- I tend to feel one polite "no" is sufficient -- but more fool me, I sent a reply saying no, again, my schedule's full and I'm not writing much horror these days anyway.

So yesterday I get this MULTIPAGE E-MAIL about what a TRAGEDY it would be if I, the young genius who wrote Exquisite Corpse (I mean, thanks, but also oh, please) were to Deny Her Dark Side Forever More by no longer writing horror, and -- this is the part I really like -- especially in light of the tragedy that has befallen New Orleans. He's worried that I might deliberately and willfully neglect a project of serious exploration that is ultimately guided by my inner darkness.

Serious exploration. As if Liquor and Prime and Soul Kitchen and the related stories were, you know, just goofy larks. As if I somehow didn't mean them the way I meant Exquisite Corpse.

It is absolutely no one's business whether or how I plan to deal with the recent events that have befallen New Orleans in my future fiction. For the record, though -- and as I've already stated here -- I do plan to deal with them. For a short time after the storm, I was comforted by the idea of writing about a version of New Orleans where the tragedy had never happened, but that soon came to seem callous and irresponsible. I can't ignore an event that will shape the city for the remainder of my lifetime and probably beyond. I do plan to deal with it in the Liquor books, and the way I do so won't be funny or cute or light-hearted, though there will probably be elements of humor in it, since that's one of the ways my current characters deal with things. It also won't focus with a voyeur's loving eye on the Gorgeously Iridescent Ichor seeping out of the corpses floating through the Lower Ninth Ward, even though this guy might think I was being more "true to my inner darkness" if it did.

I wrote back, briefly. Probably I'll regret it. Among other things, I mentioned that there is this guy Stephen King, perhaps you've heard of him, who's spoken repeatedly about how he never sets out to "write horror" per se: he tells the stories he needs to tell; maybe, just conceivably, that's what I'm doing too? And always have been?

I really wish someone could explain to me why some readers think moving away from fiction that can be labeled "Horror" means you are NEGLECTING YOUR INNER DARKNESS. And, furthermore, what makes them think my "inner darkness" and whether I choose to explore it is ANY OF THEIR FUCKING BUSINESS.

I mean, how does "I'm not writing much horror these days" equal "I will only ever write again about sweetness and light and happy bunnies"? How is their reading experience, hell, their entire outlook, so narrow that they think "darkness" only appears on the horror shelf? Excuse me, but what the blue fuck?

Liquor, I'll admit, was an almost purely fun book to write. Prime had some rough moments, some things that were hard for me to face, and Soul Kitchen contains some parts that were as difficult to write as anything in Exquisite Corpse, though they're not nearly as, you know, gooshy. Dead Shrimp Blues will deal in part with how the Cajun shrimpers of the Louisiana bayou are being driven to poverty, despair, and even suicide by the destruction of their livelihood -- now there's a barrel of laughs for you.

But even if I was writing Pat the Bunny, whose business would it be if I just wanted to have fun? Whence this attitude that because I gave readers one book that made them feel a certain way, I somehow owe them another one? No, you know what, I can understand that attitude even if I resent it. What I can't understand is how they dare to turn it around and say I owe it to myself to do what they want, not what I want.

Every once in a while, a reader's "enthusiastic" response to a book is enough to make me wish I'd never written the damn book. I hate feeling that way, and it doesn't last. But mostly I hate that some stranger's words can make me feel that way, even for a little while, about something I cared for and labored over and was proud of.

I'm a hypocrite now, because I told the editor "No hard feelings" and now I'm writing this. But I lied; there are hard feelings, not toward this guy personally, but toward the whole attitude that "mainstream" fiction can't explore anything dark or mysterious or dangerous. It's nothing more than an equally obtuse reversal of the mainstream idea that horror can't possibly be serious or of high quality. At the end of the day, it's the same small-mindedness dressed up in different costumes, and I call bullshit on it all.

Saints win! I don't like this trend, though, of people in San Antonio trying to prematurely claim the team, holding up banners saying SAN ANTONIO SAINTS and such. No better than a bunch of goddamn vultures if you ask me. Worse, actually, because vultures are made for a purpose and they serve it; they don't gloat. I've always liked the fact that the New World vultures' Latin family name, Cathartides, has the same root as catharsis; by cleaning up the world's carrion, they provide catharsis (cleansing) for the very earth.

I almost got in a fight today! We drove up the road to Bogalusa to get some things at the Wal-Mart -- and can I just say that once this crisis is over, I hope never to step foot in another Wal-Mart? They came through admirably in the aftermath of the storm, but I am as sick of them as I've ever been of anything. Due to the fact that it's just over the Louisiana state line, Bogalusa does have daiquiris and Catholics, but it's still firmly in Bibleland. Anyway, as we pulled into the parking lot, I saw an SUV with one of those "MARRIAGE = (STICK-FIGURE MAN) + (STICK-FIGURE WOMAN)" bumper stickers. I rushed over and started defacing it with my handy-dandy Sharpie, which is admittedly a shitty thing to do, and something I wouldn't normally stoop to -- the moron troglodytes have as much right to express their ugly opinions as I do to display my SUPPORT ALL MARRIAGES bumper sticker -- but today I was just not in the mood. As I scribbled, a dough-faced grit princess walked by and said, "I'm awna call the cops!" "Go ahead, redneck," I said. She turned around and looked at me, and I gave her my Shaquille O'Neal game face, and she went on into the Wal-Mart to buy her industrial-sized package of diapers or whatever, and I went on into the Wal-Mart to buy my carpet-covered cat tower, and that was that. I kind of hoped I'd see her again so I could say, "Where's those cops?", but probably it would have been unwise.

So that and the Saints' win were my big excitement for the day. It's a pathetic existence, it really is. Tomorrow we'll drive to Kenner and spend the night with my dad, and Tuesday morning we leave for CHICAGO, CHICAGO, CHICAGO.