So I wanted to talk to my two major JKT friends today (yesterayjhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhn

Pardon me, that was a guest appearance by Junior on the keyboard. As I was saying:

(yesterday, now). I called Joel Fletcher from the cemetery, and he was on a train. Later on I went over to Dr. Kenneth Holditch's house and had a cocktail with him and his friend Curt. Joel knew Ken from Ken's teaching days at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now UL-Lafayette), and got to be friends with Thelma Toole after A Confederacy of Dunces was published; he is the author of the excellent memoir Ken & Thelma. Kenneth became a good friend of Thelma's after Confederacy's publication. After our visit, I was hungry, so I stopped by The Clover Grill, where I don't think I've been since I moved out of the French Quarter fifteen years ago. I was never all that crazy about their burgers-cooked-under-a-hubcap, but the one I had tonight was ... well, its being The Clover Grill, I have to say "fabulous." As well, I heard two excellent quotes from a black queen:

"But she liked the Buddha, because the Buddha's feminine and butch at the same time."

and

"I spent $20 on red velvet cake."

Today would have been John Kennedy Toole's 70th birthday. I brought flowers to the cemetery and had a late lunch of semi-edible supermarket sushi with him.

( Ducoing/Toole Family Tomb )

After that, I paid a brief visit to some other friends. This is the first time I've visited the Casamento family mausoleum since Mr. Joe was entombed. He died in Oxford, MS on August 29, 2005 as a result of stress from Hurricane Katrina and being away from New Orleans.

( Casamento Family Tomb )

And for comic relief after all those graves, here's a picture of Chris and Junior reading the funnies last night:

WWOZ is playing James Booker all night in honor of his birthday on Monday (which is also John Kennedy Toole's birthday; Booker was two years younger*). Listen to streaming audio anywhere in the world.

*I called the DJ to inform him of this amazing fact, and though he seemed properly amazed, he reported it on the air as also being John Kennedy "O'Toole's" birthday. Sigh.

Everything had been going so well. Then, last night, we went to Celebration in the Oaks. I remembered that this ended in tears last year, but I thought I was in much better shape now. This year I couldn't even get worked up enough for tears; I just shambled numbly through Storyland and the Botanical Gardens, barely seeing the colorful statues and rides I used to love, not rejoicing that the water-damaged Flying Horses (carousel) were once again operational, not caring about the lights or the spectacle or the happy faces of children, not feeling the magic one damn bit.

"It's like putting jingle bells on a rotting corpse," I said to Chris.

"That's not a fair thing to say," he told me, and he was right. The only rotting corpse in the vicinity of City Park last night was me. I have allowed my imagination and my spirit to rot to the point where I can barely stand to be around the things that used to inspire me (cf. the final scene of D*U*C*K, set at Celebration in the Oaks:

As they walked into the Botanical Gardens, an endless array of tiny lights seemed to stretch before them, multicolored and dazzling, repeated in the long reflecting pool. Stars were never visible in the night sky here, only the purple glow that hung over any brightly lit city, but this must be how they would look if you could see them. Things to count, even though counting them all was impossible. Things to wish on.

In the panoramic shimmer of lights, water, and sky, Rickey thought he could glimpse the future: true love, great food, Bobby Hebert coming to eat at his restaurant, the Saints winning the Super Bowl, the city of New Orleans standing whole, strong, beautiful forever.

This now reads so much like a failed magical spell that I really should have known better than to go to the damned thing. As it was, I ended up where I usually end up, at the statue by the wading pool, which you can find posed with a smiling 12-year-old John Kennedy Toole in the Toole collection at Tulane:

I don't think we have much longer. A week, maybe two. William is eating and still has great life force, but if we'd gone by life force alone, Colm would still be alive and shitting happily all over our new house. He (William, that is) is too weak to jump now, even just onto the bed. [Edit: I was wrong about that, at least -- I wrote this, then went back and found him on the bed. He's always a little stronger than I think he is.] I appreciate the donations people have sent, as we have to take him in for subcutaneous fluids every other day now and it's $20 per time. I'm not asking for more, just sending thanks publicly as I may not get to my e-mails for a few days. I may learn to administer the fluids at home, but the vet says he'd be a difficult cat to learn on because he's so thin, he has very little loose skin, and the needle tends to slip out even for the experienced vet techs. Also, he has never liked being picked up or held -- it makes him do what we call the Funky Chicken. He loves lap time and coziness, but only when he wants it.

I'm grateful for the manuscript I am currently editing. It gives me something to do besides read. Wait, that probably doesn't make any sense. Of course I am reading it, but it's a totally different kind of reading than the usual. I'm quite sure I use a different part of my brain to do it. Besides -- as ever when I need comfort -- all I want to read for pleasure is Stephen King, and I'm running out of books of his that I don't know by heart.

I realized while rereading Misery for the nth time that the last time I read it, right after the storm, I didn't have sciatica yet. I imagined Paul Sheldon's leg pain as my back pain, but now I can get right down to those rotting pilings with him.

Oh, and I thought of the best name ever for a New Orleans funk band: Green Cap Mother. Two bottles of Dr. Nut for the reference. I'm going to start a virtual version of it with Benny Grunch, Johnny Vidacovich, and the ghost of James Booker. I will play the triangle.

"Occasionally you really do learn something new every day" (which I'd clap my hands with glee to see immortalized on metaquotes or similar) is an example of what I call Divine Stupidity, one of the things that makes New Orleans great. The finest example of it in fiction is, of course, A Confederacy of Dunces. Ring Lardner, despite the handicap of not being from New Orleans, was also good at it, and it is a form I tried to employ with mixed results in the Liquor books. However, possibly the finest real-life example I've ever heard is a quote from a lady caller on a local afternoon talk radio show. I know I mentioned it on this journal before, but that was a few years ago, so I wanted to share it with newer readers:

"Osama [bin Laden] might be dead, but he might be pretending like he's not."

Readers have e-mailed me with tales of weird Ambien side effects and suggestions for alternate sleep aids. I probably sound like I'm complaining about my Ambien-induced hallucinations because it is my nature to sound like I'm complaining about almost everything, but I'm actually kind of fascinated by them. It has been nearly twenty years since a drug caused me to hallucinate, and it's interesting to experience it again without having to commit to it for hours and hours or deal with the speed-tinged intensity of LSD and psilocybin. While it's odd and slightly disturbing to sleep-cry and sleep-write, I'd rather do these things than sleep-drive, sleep-eat (I have a friend who gorged on sweets and wiped her chocolate-smeared hands on her sheets while apparently knocked out on Ambien, behavior a million miles away from her quiet, elegant, slightly diffident waking personality), sleep-fight, or any of these more active side effects. And I'd much rather have the side effects than the dreams that were plaguing me a few weeks ago.

On a related subject, I like having the dreams about the Liquor world even though the characters are usually annoyed with me, cursing me rudely, and pushing me out of their way. They have every reason to behave that way toward me, and it's reassuring to think their world goes on without my writing about it. I've seldom found a scene more upsetting than the part in Peter Straub's In the Night Room where ( spoiler alert for IN THE NIGHT ROOM )

This filled my heart with horror because I have always worried that Ignatius, Irene Reilly, Burma Jones, Patrolman Mancuso, Santa Battaglia, et al. were floating in some limbo, never knowing that they had joined the ranks of literature's greatest and most beloved characters. Well, I am not dead yet, at any rate.

I commemorated Independence Day by removing "United States" from the "Location" portion of my profile and substituting "Tanzania." Readers should understand that I've never actually been to Tanzania or anywhere in Africa. For me, it (especially in its previous incarnation, Tanganyika -- see the comments on John Kennedy Toole in my bio) symbolizes a location imagined by people in "real" places as a remote, benighted backwater, which seems more apt now than ever. Since August 29, 2005, it has also symbolized a certain state of mind, one I doubt I need to explain to readers of this journal. As it has become increasingly obvious over the past twenty-two months that south Louisiana is no longer considered part of the United States by its government* or many of its citizens**, I see no reason to celebrate this holiday, though I may deign to light off a few snakes if it ever stops raining.

These days, here's the first image that comes to my mind when I think of an American flag:


(Sept. 2, 2005: Milvertha Hendricks, 84, waits in the rain with other flood victims outside the Convention Center in New Orleans. AP photo.)

*References have actually been made to how we should "appreciate the generosity of the American taxpayers" by federal officials who (A) evidently have no idea how little of that money has actually reached us and (B) appear to have forgotten that we still are American taxpayers. As well, a Texas congressman recently questioned New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin's assertion that the failed levees were federally built; apparently the whole Army Corps of Engineers thing had escaped him and he thought they were just a few little piles of dirt we'd flung up ourselves.

**To those of you who do not feel this way -- which I hope includes most U.S. readers of this journal -- thank you so much for spreading the word that we are still here and insisting that we still matter. We appreciate it more than you know.

It's going to be a rainy week, and I'm currently forced to be of two minds about the rain. On the one hand, it's great for my embryonic garden. On the other hand, water is getting into our electrical system somehow, and almost every time it rains, we lose another power source. We currently have (A) no use of our dishwasher; (B) our washing machine running on a 50-foot extension cord; (C) no working outlets in the bedroom or bathrooms, (D) one working outlet (out of three) in my office, and probably something else I'm not remembering. My real estate agent already has a good electrician on the case and he's coming back this week, so I expect the problems will be fixed, eventually, at little or no expense to us. What makes me angrier than our personal inconvenience is the fact that the seller -- a St. Tammany Parish woman who apparently makes a practice of buying rundown houses in poor neighborhoods, fixing them up, and flipping them -- very likely allowed substandard work on the wiring (or just didn't bother to check it out one way or the other) because she expected to sell the house to (A) poor, ignorant people who would have no idea they had any recourse against the shoddy work, or (B, more likely) someone who would rent it out and then ignore their tenants' complaints. While the electrical problems suck hugely, I'm glad we got the house, because while we are fairly poor, we are not ignorant, we have no intention of putting up with this, and we are completely prepared to holler fraud if the problems aren't solved pretty soon. As incredible as it may seem, a great many people in this neighborhood (and other poor New Orleans neighborhoods) would have no idea that they had any recourse in a case like this. They aren't stupid, but they are largely uneducated, they've been treated like garbage for much of their lives, and they seem far likelier than us to simply accept whatever ripoff bullshit the world throws at them.

Living in this neighborhood is twisting my mind a little. Sometimes it's a nuisance -- way too many people ringing our doorbell wanting money for nothing, simply because we are white and therefore, of course, rich -- but I've learned a lot and have a lot more to learn. Theoretically, I knew that people in New Orleans lived like this, but I'd never lived right among them, had them in my house, gotten to know them. Some of them seem to accept that their lives are cheap, maybe even worthless to anyone outside their immediate circle. Some of them try to hustle and get ahead, but the ways in which they do so break my heart --for instance, Eddie, whom I mentioned before. He's a smart guy, resourceful and able to get by on very little, but his big ambition is to get a steady job as a dishwasher in a restaurant, and that's probably one of the best things he can hope for, because despite his natural intelligence, he has no real credentials for any of his skills (electricity, plumbing) and can barely read. Another product of the New Orleans public school system. I know it's considered liberal claptrap to blame the schools, and it probably is at least somewhat -- what about the personal and family responsibility? -- but I can't even begin to imagine where I would be today if I'd started my education in a school that had few decent teachers, no art programs, no air conditioning, ceilings falling in, mortal danger in the halls every day, frequently not even toilet paper in the bathrooms. Basically, they start these kids out telling them in as many ways as possible that they don't matter. They have already failed at least two generations, probably more. There are a few indications that they're trying to improve now, but how much can they do if the resources just aren't there?

On a completely different note, I've not been writing or even thinking much about it, but I have been thinking about what I want from a publisher if I ever do decide to publish again. I don't know as much about contemporary big publishing as I probably ought to, but it seems to me that a few very large houses have been splintered into a thousand "divisions," and many of these so-called divisions are total bullshit. For instance, Three Rivers Press (which published the Liquor novels) is a division of Random House, but it's a tiny, powerless division with no money, helmed by a reasonably bright, utterly conventional-minded Kleen Kampus Koed type (that would be Carrie Thornton, the editor whose note I shared with you a few weeks ago) who was likely given the top job because of her willingness to obey the sales department. "The author says it's not a murder mystery? Hell, what do authors know? Call it a murder mystery, maybe it'll sell a few copies." "Yes, Your Highness. Shall I eat the peanuts out of your shit now, or rinse them off and put them in the junior editors' break room?" There must still be a few editors out there who are smart enough, ballsy enough, and ferchrissakes old enough (nothing against youth and its vigor, but I am so FUCKING weary of answering to 24-year-olds who are going to leave the business in two years to have a baby) to have some decision-making power of their own. If I do publish again, I want either a real megapublisher like Delacorte Press (now itself a division of Random House, if I'm not mistaken, but one with some heft) or a good, stand-up micropress like Subterranean. My agent would probably tell me that as long as I'm making a want list, I may as well add a pony that shits gold coins, and he's probably right. Still, one of my life's resolutions is never again to get involved with a publisher chintzy enough to ask me to drive from New Orleans to a book signing in Atlanta. (No, I didn't do it.) No in-betweens, none of these tiny little bullshit lines whose idea of a "big" book is something called More Smoothies For Life. No kidding, that appears to be Three Rivers' lead summer title. I wonder if it'll be able to capture that "elusive foodie market." I see where they're also publishing Ann Coulter's new book, which I hope means Coulter is on her way down in the world -- she's gotta be, if she's having anything to do with a rinky-dink outfit like Three Rivers.

Hey, at least they had nice covers. I still think Liquor, Prime, and Soul Kitchen are three of the prettiest books I ever published. They would have been a lot prettier if more people had seen them, but never mind.

I don't know. Maybe I'll want it all again someday and wish I'd never said all these things right here with my face hanging out, but right now, it all seems so stupid and useless that I can't believe I ever took it seriously. Not the writing itself, I was always serious about that, and still will be if I decide to do it again ... but it's hard to fathom the fact that I was once naive enough to think a big publisher might be "on my side" or care about "building my career" or give a tenth of a damn about what happened to me beyond the number of titles -- excuse me, units -- my name could move.

Of course, back in the glory days of publishing we had editorial gems like Robert Gottlieb (who still maintains that he would have known if A Confederacy of Dunces was worthy of publication, and never mind that Pulitzer), so I suppose it has always been a bullshit business to some extent. Even in the sixteen years I've been involved with it, though (since I got my first Dell contract in '91), it seems to have gotten stupider, more demeaning, less about the books. I suppose at least part of that can be blamed on the fact that something like 2% of Americans read one or more books per year for pleasure.

William is sitting here beside me, seeming to feel fine for now. We're spending a lot of time with him and just waiting for the lab results to come back, though I doubt they will hold any surprises. I'm answering very few phone calls or e-mails right now except the bare minimum I must take care of for business (what business, ha-ha? Mostly eBay), but I do appreciate the fact that they are coming in, not to mention all the posts on prime_liquor and nextroundsonme. You folks have mostly been good to me far above and beyond anything I deserve.

By the way, I meant to create this post's icon (from a button I have) to go with last week's Long Scary Post About Writing, but I never got around to it until today. Anyone who is expected to suck up to morons or be considered "unprofessional" -- writers, retail slaves, service industry workers, just about everybody who wishes to make a living, I guess -- is more than welcome to steal it. [Addendum: I thought it was legible, but some people thought otherwise. It says "I suppose saying FUCK YOU would be unprofessional," and if you want to make your own, more zoomed-in icon of it, you can find a larger version here. I'm glad to know my vision is still somewhat keener than I thought it was.]

I just learned that my favorite New Orleans musician, James Booker, shares a birthday (December 17) with my favorite New Orleans writer, John Kennedy Toole. Booker was born two years later and also died tragically young.



I went inside a FEMA trailer for the first time today. My neighbor Ms. Sue, who used to watch our animals when we'd go out of town, is living in one behind her uninhabitable house. The trailer is tatty and minuscule, with barely enough room for even a tiny thing like Sue, who's my height and at least twenty pounds lighter. She can't cook because she's afraid of the propane. She can barely even fit in the bathtub, which looks more like a soap dish. She has her two dogs, but the eight cats (out of twelve) she was able to recover after being forcibly evacuated by boat several days after the flood are living in the house because there is no way to safely keep them inside the trailer. I sat with her for two hours and listened to how all she wants to do is sell the beautiful house that's been in her family since 1933 and move away from New Orleans. I wasn't sure I believed her, but I could hear that her heart was broken.

Not that anyone has complained, mind you, but I should point out that the fact that the goofy tourist in my earlier entry had a Midwestern accent is not meant to suggest that Midwesterners are any goofier than other types of tourists. However, because of the following passage from Ignatius J. Reilly's JOURNAL OF A WORKING BOY, OR, UP FROM SLOTH, the quintessential French Quarter tourist will for me always be a Midwesterner:

A group of tourists wandered along the street, their cameras poised, their glittering eyeglasses shining like sparklers. Noticing me, they paused and, in sharp Midwestern accents which assailed my delicate eardrums like the sounds of a wheat thresher (however unimaginably horrible that must sound), begged me to pose for a photograph. Pleased by their gracious attentions, I acquiesced. For minutes they snapped away as I obliged them with several artful poses. Standing before the wagon as if it were a pirate's vessel, I brandished my cutlass menacingly for one especially memorable pose, my other hand holding the prow of the tin hot dog. As a climax, I attempted to climb atop the wagon, but the solidity of my physique proved too taxing for that rather flimsy vehicle. It began to roll from beneath me, but the gentlemen in the group were kind enough to grab it and assist me down. At last this affable group bade me farewell. As they wandered down the street madly photographing everything in sight, I heard one kindly lady say, "Wasn't that sad? We should have given her something." Unfortunately, none of the others (doubtless right-wing conservatives all) responded to her plea for charity very favorably, thinking, no doubt, that a few cents cast my way would be a vote of confidence for the welfare state. "He would only go out and spend it on more liquor," one of the other women, a shriveled crone whose face bespoke WCTU affiliation, advised her friends with nasal wisdom and an abundance of harsh r's.

Strange happenings are afoot. Literally.

Chris has misplaced his bank card. He's convinced he hasn't lost it or left it at a store, but we couldn't find it anywhere in the apartment, so we went out to search the car. I reached under the front seat and found not a bank card, but a set of toenail clippers I immediately recognized as the Holy John Kennedy Toole Toenail Clippers. I knew they were these and not some random set of toenail clippers because the H.T.C. are much older, larger, and heavier than the ones sold today. They're engraved with the words "Gem Hand Ground." I'm sure they were common in the '50s and '60s, but I've never seen another pair like them.

"How on earth could these have gotten here?" I asked Chris. "They're supposed to be in a blue cardboard box inside my jewelry box."

"I don't know," he said. "They must have fallen out while we were moving or something."

I doubted this, because I look at them often and was convinced I'd seen them since our move in October ... and the jewelry box is one I found in the Sav-A-Center parking lot after we moved in. Still, it was the only explanation I could think of, so after castigating myself for my apparent carelessness with such a precious object, I put the H.T.C. in my purse and went about my errands.

About an hour later, I got back to the apartment. The H.T.C. were still in my purse. I went over to the jewelry box, opened it, took out the blue cardboard box, opened it. There were the H.T.C.

I went to my purse, opened it ... and there were the H.T.C.

Apparently they have spawned.

And Chris' bank card is still missing. He's wondering if perhaps Ken needed money in the afterlife, took the card, and replaced it with a second, identical pair of H.T.C. By all accounts, Ken always was a joker.

(Fortunately, most of our money is in my bank account.)

Joel Fletcher, are you out there? If you have any alternate theories on this, I'd appreciate hearing them.

Things I did for Halloween '05:

- Dressed in Saints gear and ghoul makeup and carried a sign, one side of which read THE GHOST OF PLAYOFF CHANCES PAST, PRESENT, & FUTURE, the other side of which read HERE COMES MR. BENSON, a football-related joke that unfortunately turned out to be incomprehensible to anyone under the age of 70.

- Switched back to Wild Turkey from my summer gin-and-soda.

- Saw a fire-juggling voodoo ceremony/celebration/tribal throwdown in the middle of Decatur Street.

- Drank tequila out of a coffin.

- Slightly made out with a beautiful black girl who said she moved to New Orleans two weeks ago (brave soul!) because my books had convinced her that there were hot gay men making out on every corner. I assume she's been staying in the French Quarter or Marigny, since she says so far her illusions have not been punctured.

- Offered an acquaintance $10 to go over and gouge my annoying ex's eyes out of his skull. Well, the fucker kept LURKING near me, and here is what a moron he is: (A) He thinks he is some kind of ninja, and (B) he was DRESSED as a ninja for Halloween. I mean, if you think you really are one, you don't dress as one, do you? In the end, the aforementioned beautiful girl ended up going over and tormenting him in ways I know not what.

- Got publicly flogged by a cat o'nine tails made of Mardi Gras beads, which left bead-shaped bruises all over my thighs and butt.

- Cried on the way home when "Free Bird" came on the radio.

- Got gold glitter all over myself, my bed, and every item of clothing in my new apartment.

- Put James Booker's "St. James Infirmary" on infinite repeat and fell asleep with it playing until 3:30 AM, when I finally woke up and turned it off.

I guess I sorta needed to let off some steam after eight weeks in Bibleland.

In some ways it was a melancholy Halloween in the French Quarter, and in some ways the best one ever: the crowd was tiny, but everyone was either local or here to help in some capacity, and everybody was relaxed and talking to each other, and you could see more than ever that New Orleans is wounded but very much alive.

Today, of course, we took pink and white carnations (no traditional chrysanthemums in town yet) out to the Ducoing/Toole tomb; also picked up some BBQ from a truck selling it out of the Claiborne Avenue neutral ground and picnicked there as we usually do. We'd already cleaned the tomb on Sunday, though it didn't really need it after all; apparently a crew came through the cemetery and power-washed everything sometime between the storm and now, because it was gleaming. After the picnic, with very little warning, I climbed onto the front shelf of the mausoleum and put my face against the marble and just fucking bawled. I really didn't know I was going to do it. I was thinking of the loss of the city since A Confederacy of Dunces was written, of the parts we've driven through at night that are still spooky and black and dead, of Ivan and the other cats whose fates we may never know, of the unfamiliar stink that none of us will ever forget, of the diminished crowds in the cemetery today, of the regular people who lost their lives or were carried away to some foreign place and will never return to New Orleans. It was comforting in a way; I could almost feel Ken and Thelma patting me on the back and telling me things would be "awright" eventually. But I wonder. Oh, I wonder.

Checked my PO box yesterday and found that it is indeed working: it was almost like Christmas on Halloween. I got a beautiful book of Australian bird paintings, some other books from a different Australian reader, a generous check that had been sitting there since September 7, and a bunch of sweet cards and letters. Also got a check for two eBay items, Swamp Foetus and Used Stories, from Ryan Stanford of Los Angeles. Ryan, I have the items now, but I can't remember if I e-mailed you and told you to cancel the check, so I don't know if it's still good or if I should still send the books. If you see this, drop a line and let me know, would you?

Also, I won't have Internet access (even dial-up, since I refuse to pay two Bellsouth bills) at the new apartment until cable service is restored in our neighborhood or our landlord gets his wireless network hooked up, so I'll be relying on the wireless services of the coffeeshop a few blocks away, and entries may be a bit spottier than usual.

Great night out in the city last night, exactly the sort we'd been needing for a long time. We went to Clancy's, which is very much an Uptown seersucker scene, with our friend Harry T and ate and drank and got maudlin and made toasts to the new New Orleans. Harry T told old cop stories and tales of growing up as a Seventh Ward Creole, which is a whole other thing from black or white and not something I am equipped to explain here. It was great to see him (he was in exile in Houston with his elderly parents) and good to be in the midst of a loud, brash, crowded New Orleans scene. Slowly but surely, we're coming back.

Jarvis DeBarry has an excellent story in today's Times-Picayune about the mysterious they who populate New Orleans speech. As far as I know, they are common to black, white, and every sort of local speech in between, even though it is impossible for an outsider to determine precisely who they are. The custom is used to wonderful effect in A Confederacy of Dunces: after Ignatius has plundered the box of jelly doughnuts from the bakery, Mrs. Reilly offers one to Patrolman Mancuso: "Have a nice jelly doughnut. I just bought them fresh this morning over by Magazine Street ... Look, they got a few left." She doesn't mean that the bakery had a few left, but that the mysterious "they" have allowed a few doughnuts to remain in the box (though, as it happens, Ignatius has sucked out all the jelly, leaving them sad, withered things). My theory has always been that "they" consist of the cloudlike cavalcade of saints who hover around New Orleans, Catholic and otherwise, constantly invoked, bothered without surcease, and frequently cursed. "They" run things, and "they" take care of the details. After all, who but a saint could be expected to know or care whether "they" got any ketchup in the refrigerator?

We are at my mother's house in central Mississippi. We bugged out at 1:00 this afternoon, battening down the hatches as best we could and bringing only our dog and our oldest cat, Colm, who requires daily medication. I'm absolutely sick about the ones we left behind, ashamed of having abandoned ship, and doubtful that I will ever see my home again. However, we caved in to pressure from our mothers, who can accomplish what 10,000 e-mails and radio warnings screaming "YOU'RE GONNA DIE!!!!!!!" cannot.

It took us eight hours to drive the approximately 80 miles here and I am exhausted. The only cool part was that as we drove through Bayou Sauvage, we saw about a hundred Magnificent Frigatebirds hovering low over the highway. You seldom see these birds over land unless a hurricane is coming or has just passed. These appeared to be all females and juvies -- I guess the men ride out the storm and send their families inland.

Besides the two animals and a few clothes and toiletries, here is what I brought:

-- My computer.

-- My copy of A Confederacy of Dunces signed by Thelma Toole.

-- My copy of When the Saints Go Marching In signed by Buddy D.

It's at times like these that you find out what you really cherish, I guess.

Fuck.