I've spent the last few days (daze) chowing down on a big-ass plate of invasion of privacy sauced with chronic depression and garnished with screaming panic attacks. There were demands by resident crackheads/junkies/general parasites for money and food. When said demands were refused, there were intrusions onto my property and peepings through my windows. There were threats (by me) to shoot people if said intrusions and peepings were repeated. There was lack of backup by my partner. There were, perhaps most gallingly, accusations that I was "a good Christian lady." I think things have calmed down now, and if any perforated corpses happen to be found near my house, well, that's just life in the goddamn hood.

As most of you know, I'm extremely fond of my Second Amendment rights, but this ad from today's paper cracked me up. Yes, I always take along my snub-nosed revolvers when I go hunting. I find them especially useful for the deer that let me walk right up and stick it in their bellies.*




*For the record, I'm not against hunting for food, but I don't really do it. Could if I had to, but don't feel the desire. I have been known to wet a line, but both the fish and the pelicans who mocked me will tell you I am no threat to the piscine order.

Yes, I can haz new computer! In fact, I'm posting this on it. It's nice working on something that isn't an antique. And to the friend on my list who recently complained about otherwise intelligent people using the Internet's version of baby talk, I can only say I've heard that parents raising toddlers often get so used to speaking in baby talk that they sometimes find themselves doing it even when the baby is not present. Likewise, if you live with 19 cats, it is inevitable that you will lapse into LOLcat once in a while.


My current favorite

In other news, Siegfried the Big Sweet Dummy passed an uncomfortable weekend, but is now at the vet's office having his teeth fixed; the cucumber plants are so big that I am getting scared of them; I have seen The Green Goddess with its new decor and it is going to be absolutely gorgeous; I have downloaded a couple of stupid little game apps onto my iPhone and I'm sorry to say that I can see, for the first time ever, why people get so hooked on computer games. Also, since we're too poor and I tire too easily these days for Jazzfest, this past weekend Chris and I went out to the Our Lady of Prompt Succor Tomato Festival in Chalmette, where we passed a good time and rode the Tilt-A-Whirl and ate ourselves half-sick. I shot cups with a cork gun to win two penguins and a giant pink plush rose, and Chris said I shot like a cop. "What do you expect?" I said. "I learned how to shoot from a cop!"

While planting foxgloves in the garden today, I dug up a crown and a gun.



OK, the crown might be part of a gear wheel, but the gun is definitely a little handgun.

I did go to the shooting range yesterday, but Chris decided not to go with me; he wanted to stay home and "watch politics on TV." This was hours before the debate, which I did not watch (though I had some peripheral awareness of it, since I was in the kitchen making a potato gratin* while it was on). I know what I have to do in the voting booth on November 4; that doesn't mean I have to subject myself to all that blather between now and then.

My shooting wasn't as good as last time -- my hands were shaky all day yesterday, I don't know why -- but 50 body shots out of 62 rounds is not too bad, especially considering that I positioned my target much farther away than I've previously done.

*Jeffrey Steingarten's Gratin Dauphinois from It Must Have Been Something I Ate. Most luxurious, decadent potato recipe ever.

Here is my ad of thanks for sending Junior home. It also appears in the print version of the T-P and will do so for the next two days. St. Francis didn't strike me as the kind of guy who would like to be in the paper, so I made a donation to a program that feeds homeless people at St. Francis of Assisi Church in New York.

I'm glad some saints know how to win.

I think we're going to the shooting range today. Unfortunately, Chris has decided that he doesn't want to learn to fire Big Steve after all, which dismays me a bit -- I tend to think that if you have a gun in the house, everyone who lives there should know how to use it. I'm hoping he will change his mind when he sees how much fun it is.

How did it get to be Sunday already?

I guess I must have been busy fixing the vacuum cleaner (yes! I did it myself) and setting fires in the oven (this morning I turned it on BROIL - HI to make myself a piece of cheese toast, unfortunately forgetting that the pizza box from last night was still in there. Large flames and much stinky smoke ensued. Instead of getting melted over a nice piece of whole-grain bread, my lovely Gruyère went back in the fridge to await a moment of lesser stupidity).

Currently sitting here with Chris watching the Saints try to lose to the fucking Denver Broncos. A while ago, a small parade came right past our house: two police cars, a float with royalty, music, and Mardi Gras Indians, and some second-liners trailing behind. Less than an hour later, somebody shot somebody right around the corner. The perks and heartbreaks of the ghetto ...

Which reminds me: I flamed my first anti-gun moron today. For the record, I don't think everyone who's anti-gun is a moron, but when you've got some pinhead making anonymous, sanctimonious anti-gun comments on the journal of someone who just posted about the good time he had at the firing range, it's a safe bet. It sent a shiver down my spine, and I felt that I had crossed some private Rubicon. (Chris would probably say I'd already crossed that Rubicon when he saw me drooling over sniper deer rifles in the Sunday ad supplements this morning.)

I finally got a new weedeater (my old one is currently living across the river with one of the peeps, and I don't expect to see it again in this lifetime). For the first time in months, the yard looks beautiful: the ginger grove I put in last summer is now taller than me and flowering; this year's habaneros are filling out nicely; my Jew is wandering; my passionflower vine is passionate; my potted plants are no longer choked by grass. Unfortunately, I jobbed the hell out of my back eating all those weeds and woke up this morning as stiff as a 17-year-old in a strip club. There's something vaguely, weirdly comforting about injuring yourself when you actually have painkillers.

On Saturday we went up to visit my mother and I got to fire my gun for the first time. (In rural Mississippi, apparently, you can just stick a target out in your yard and blast away at it. There's not much I like about the place, but I like that.) It feels like an extension of my arm. Perfect. And now I must make a confession: Harry, my gun guru, says that men always give their guns women's names. This is one of the few instances in which I guess I am just going to have to be girly, because my gun's name is Big Steve.

"How much fine dining can you really get away with?" -- Random quote from Chris' phone conversation, I know not with whom

Right now I should be answering questions for two French interviews, those same ones I was putting off last week. Let's see if I can chain myself up and make myself do it. The drugs should help.

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.

As are my painkillers. Drugs and guns; hell, all I need now is a few bats buzzbombing me.

I guess sometimes when you become too untethered from your own reality, floating away into space like Major Tom, worldly events must conspire to pull you back to earth. By his own choice and on his own terms, Chris is no longer at the Delachaise, and that's all I'm going to say about it until he has made his own public statement. It's wonderful having him home all the time despite the peril it adds to our already precarious financial situation, but with him wheeling and dealing and working the phones, it's much harder to drift wraithlike around the house, lulled by the silence, and doze off seven or eight times a day. Which is probably a good thing.

I left the house today, too. It was easier to do knowing Chris was there to come home to. I'm supposed to be getting my gun ("Betsy's cousin") next week, too, and you can bet that will get me out of the house.

I feel vaguely guilty when I go through an Internet-phobic phase, updating my journal seldom or never; I think not so much of the public reader as of individuals: "Oh, Harry says he checks my blog several times a day, and he won't have anything new to read." "Oh, Joel reads my blog before he reads the New York Times every morning, and now he will have to settle for The Times." "Oh, that reader who e-mailed me last week said she took strength from reading the blog every day. What if I sap her strength?" And I miss everyone on my friends list, which I hope to catch up with. But there are times when I just ... can't ... look ... at ... that screen.

"I just want to be quiet."

Except that I am dying to go shooting again, at which time I want to be EXTREMELY LOUD.

I LOVE SHOOTING. I love the smell of the gunpowder, the power in my hand, the certainty that I could kill if I needed to, the way my focus narrows down to the connection between my eye and my hand and the target.

I didn't do too badly at it, either, for my first time. I shot 56 rounds and there are at least 50 holes in the target.



I owe this fabulous experience to my friend/shooting guru Harry and his .38 service revolver, Betsy. I want a gun just like her, and I have a feeling we're going to be spending a lot of time at the range.

HEY KIDS! Here's a fun game we can play. Harry says that when we go shooting, I should write names on the paper target in order to truly shoot with my heart. Here are my initial victims. See how many you can identify from their first names! (Hint: I haven't listed any sociopolitical figures past the local level. Otherwise there would be no room left on the target.)

CARRIE

CALEY

JAY

RAY

ALFRED

JO ANN

GEORGE

JACK

SUSAN

SUSAN

COURTNEY

FRED

BOZ

Dear kids, please note: THIS IS ONLY PRETEND. A correspondent recently advised me that as a gun owner, I should not talk about shooting people even in jest. I don't think I have the willpower for that, but for the sake of caution, I have not listed here any of the people I am actually thinking of shooting.

I will not list the answers here, but will confirm/deny guesses on prime_liquor and nextroundsonme.

This just in from Harry T, who's taking me shooting later this week:

When was the last time someone told you that part of your Birthday presents was going to be a box of bullets? No flowers or candy for you.

What kind of friends do you have and hang out with, old man?

I have a feeling I'm going to need a gun icon soon. For now, I'll use another phallic symbol.

I'm hating the Cymbalta this time. Am experiencing narcolepsy -- yes, actual narcolepsy, where I unexpectedly fall asleep for a few minutes or more at a time. Can't wake up in the mornings because too much coffee makes me nauseated. Actually, I feel vaguely nauseated most of the time, but that might be because I'm not eating enough. I wasn't even able to do very well at the crawfish boil yesterday, and they were some of the biggest and best ones Mike has boiled in a long time. (I had a good time, though, and not as much trouble as I expected being around people and making conversation like an actual human, though one out-of-town friend who may or may not have been a little squiffy kept trying to put me on the phone with various unknown friends and relatives back home -- "Poppy! Talk to my sister!" I just ran away whenever I saw her coming at me with a cell phone.)

Fortunately, we don't go to Grand Isle for the food. I just want to walk for hours on the beach and collect flotsam and empty myself out.

I have the trip this week and a nice birthday dinner at Commander's Palace with Chris next week, but nothing to do on my actual birthday, which is May 25, a week from today. If possible, I would like my friend HST (no, a different one) to take me to the firing range so I can fire my first shots on my birthday. However, I'm too knotted up inside to call or even e-mail and ask him. I know he is reading this, so, in the typical, annoying passive-aggressive fashion of a pheasant under glass, I am asking him here. HST, please drop me a line if you want to, though I probably won't get it until Thursday or Friday. I'll have my cell phone with me in Grand Isle too, though service is occasionally unreliable on the island. I know you are probably knotted up too and I figure blasting away at things can only help us.

My back hurts a lot, probably because I've been spending most of my time in bed rereading the Dark Tower books. I have some sort of fake-ass Darvocet from India, but am trying to save it for the trip, especially the aftermath of the car ride.

Re: shooting, I'm strong enough in my shoulders and arms from weightlifting that I don't think the weight of a .38 will bother me, but I'm worried about my hand strength, so I bought a squeezy thing. Now I can't stop playing with it.

That is my one-week-before-turning-41 report. I know it reads pretty bleakly, but hey, next year I'll be 42 and I'll have the answer.

[Addendum: I won't be posting until I get home, either. I hear there's high-speed Internet access on the island now, but you couldn't pay me enough to sully one moment of my time there with it.]

Apropos of some slightly confused/confusing conversations on prime_liquor: In addition to my plethora of names, I pretty much answer to any pronoun, too.

I do have a question, though. If I have fallen in love with a .38 revolver named "Betsy," does that make me a lesbian?

Er, sorry about last night's ETA. Chris and I had dinner at Clancy's (which is sort of the Uptown Galatoire's, a place where you can always count on great drinks, good food, and much conviviality even if it is a bit of a "scene") with our friend Harry, with whom we hadn't broken bread in far too long. I haven't been drinking lately -- not for any particuar reason, just not in the mood -- but I cannot go to Clancy's without having a dirty Bombay Sapphire martini, and they wanted wine and I had some too, and I might have become the wee-est bit tiddly (though I did not set fire to the carpet. There was barely any danger at all). When we got home, Chris soothed me with a showing of Blue Velvet, then knocked me unconscious with the wanky might (or mighty wank, if you prefer) of Led Zeppelin's DVD.

Oh, and I got to play with the guns (before drinking, of course). I need to do some actual firing, but I really like the feel of the Smith & Wesson .38 with a Tyler grip added to the standard (smooth) one. It's definitely not too heavy for me, and my hands are not, as some have predicted, anywhere near too small to comfortably reach the trigger.

Assuming I don't find it too heavy to use comfortably (remember, I work out with weights and am pretty strong in the arms/shoulders despite being a cripple), I will probably get either this or this. I'm being advised by a former police officer who knows his firearms, so I feel pretty confident. I can't really afford either of these guns, but given that we live in Central City and don't plan to evacuate for hurricanes, I've begun to feel that I can't really not afford it either.

I happily await the day when I can tell people that if they fuck with me, I'll send them a love letter straight from my heart.

This is me today. (Well, Chris says this is me every day, but especially today.) I am not in the mood for knocks on doors, random peeing and pooing (why???), people with bad grammar trying to act intelligent, pineapple/chipotle-glazed charbroiled oysters, people who pull into intersections and stop dead, being sore all over from going to the gym in an attempt to stop being sore all over, the Neville Brothers getting media blowjobs for deigning to return to Jazzfest after only three years, Presidential candidates of any party, Wal-Mart (where I had to go to buy a new DVD remote because of the random peeing), the price of gas (which is why I went to Wal-Mart instead of driving way the hell Uptown to the nice peaceful Radio Shack on Magazine), straight people making out in public, MOVIES BEING FILMED ALL OVER THE FUCKING CITY (although they do give me something to shake my fist at), or any of the other small irritations of life.

Tomorrow night I will be looking at and handling a friend's guns in preparation for buying my own. (For the first time in my life, I feel entirely confident that I can own a firearm without blowing out either my own brains or my partner's.) I CANNOT WAIT. I may take out half the block during my first week of ownership.

Of course, I'm a petty asshole for not making this post all about Burma. What louismaistros said, OK? I'm too cranky to phrase anything well, and I doubt I could phrase it better than Louie at the best of times.