A writing exercise and some crying

In the bathroom of my first New Orleans apartment, I’m sitting on the toilet, doubled over with my head resting on the rim of the claw-foot bathtub. I am crying because D.S. doesn’t love me. The floor is dirty putty-colored tile with a matted navy blue cotton rug.

That was my second claw-foot tub. The first was in the haunted house in Memphis, where I slept in the front room with the door closed and was afraid to get out of bed in the dark. I laid awake and listened to the ghosts dance in the attic.

I resented that the house didn’t belong to me. At night it belonged to the ghosts. By day it belonged to the glamourous wreck of a landlady, who had left all of her furniture and furnishings behind to go live with her boyfriend. Her gutter punk daughters still had keys and would sometimes stay there with their grungy boyfriends, or use the kitchen to cook for Food Not Bombs.

It was the last home of Miss Martha, my smoky moody tortoiseshell cat. She had cancer, and I could only afford so much chemo. But I felt unforgivably guilty when I gave up. At the end she spent most of her time curled up on the dining room chair. One day she wouldn’t come eat and that was the day I knew I had to take her to the vet, to put her “to sleep.” In the car, she livened up enough to cry and fuss, and I felt even more guilty and almost turned around. I held her when she died, and I never was so close to death before, or since. It was ten years ago and I’m still crying as I write this.

My ex-husband came over to help me bury her in the backyard because I couldn’t afford to have her cremated. He had to open the box and look at her stiff, fake-looking corpse.

Within six months, both Hank and Petunia were running around that same house all young and sassy in their puppy- and kittenhood. I don’t know why I did it. I just set myself up for twice the pain.

Accentuate the negative

Some things I will not miss about New Orleans:

-the constantly recurring sinus infection I have only in New Orleans

-the general level of filth and all the trash in the streets

-the car-destroying potholes

-the endless public works projects that chiefly involve digging a big hole in the street in an inconvenient location, letting it sit open for several weeks, then filling it in only to dig another one the next block down.

-the street flooding that comes with only a medium rainstorm, and all the mud left behind

-the sensation of being chilly and sweaty at the same time on spring and fall nights

-feeling greasy and sweaty most of the time, despite showering two or three times a day

-the people who hang out at major intersections soliciting donations for their church and disrupting traffic

-the third-world postal service

-hurricane evacuations

-the lack of public curbside recycling (we pay a private company to pick up our recycling!)

The daily panic attack

Since I discovered the wonderfulness of wellbutrin, I don’t get obsessed over men and I rarely cry. However, right now I wish I could cry because after you cry you feel better, at least a little bit, temporarily. I am so stressed out and worried about not having a job, and so dejected about the constant stream of rejection.

Okay, I didn’t get into Stanford and I didn’t get a scholarship from Georgetown, but I’m still at a top-tier law school. I’m not in the top ten percent of my class, but I am in the top third. I’m not on law review, but I’m on the board of a well-respected journal. But I feel like a loser because so many employers have rejected me out of hand based on the not-on-law-review, not-at-the-top-of-the-class thing. I know, rationally, that I will find a job and that I shouldn’t panic and that I should stay focused on what I want. I know that half of my class will still be unemployed at graduation but we all will be employed a year from now. But things are very tense at the moment.

I can’t bear to talk to my parents because they are in such a frenzy of worry about it. It seems they are worried even more than I am, which is unhelpful and insulting. I prefer my friends who seem to take it for granted that I will get a job, so what’s the big deal. That’s probably the right attitude, but no one knows what this is like, to be in a scary amount of debt, all my savings gone, 7 months from my 40th birthday, and no fucking job.

I can’t cry, so I eat or spend money instead. The former is especially unhelpful when I don’t know when my next infusion of cash will arrive.

Miss H, junior pervert

My kindergarten teacher told us to draw a picture of our family, with crayon on manilla paper. I drew my family naked. My mother with her big boobs. My sister was a short little stick figure. My dad with beard, glasses, and an arc of pee from his penis. One of my classmates was egging me on, a blonde girl from a family that I would later think of as poor, white-trashy and frighteningly subversive. I thought I was daring and hilarious. I wondered if I would get in trouble when the teacher saw my drawing, but I wasn’t really scared.

We giggled maniacally while working on our drawings. I can’t remember whether my classmate’s family wore their clothes. I’m pretty sure that I alone was wearing clothes in my family portrait. It was the mid-seventies and I can remember something like a red turtleneck and stockings under a plaid jumper, mary jane shoes.

We turned the pictures in, and the next day the teacher gave them back with gold stars. Everyone had a gold star. She had written something like “nice job” on mine. She couldn’t tell that my family was naked. She apparently didn’t notice that my dad was peeing. Or maybe she did know and did notice and she laughed to herself or thought that I was a budding little perv. It’s quite possible she couldn’t tell because we were kindergartners drawing stick figures. But my kindergartner’s eye could clearly see the clothes in my classmates’ drawings and the lack of clothing in mine. I was disappointed that the teacher didn’t pick up on that.

When I got older, I was afraid of the blonde girl and didn’t talk to her anymore. When I got to grade school I never would have had the nerve to draw my family naked.

I don’t know what this says about my screwed-up psyche, but it isn’t a bad memory at all.

A letter

I have a highly recommended book called Writing Alone and With Others, with exercises that I plan to start using to spur my daily writing. Darcy is writing actual stories, while I write lists about what annoyed me today. However, today I wrote a letter in response to Cary Tennis' column on Salon.com. I don't normally post letters on such websites, but this advice seeker reminded me of myself 15 years ago, and I thought Cary and the other commentators were too hard on her:


Dear LW,

I’m sorry Cary and everyone else is being so hard on you. I don’t think you deserve it.

When I was 20, I met a basically good guy. I married him when I was 23 and divorced him when I was 26. I was ambivalent about the whole thing to begin with, but I married him because he loved me and I thought I should love him back. I married him because I was young and inexperienced and the world seemed scary as hell, and he was a good guy who seemed to offer some comfort and security. He was a good guy but he was just not the right person for me. By the end I couldn’t stand the sight of him. I hated the hair on his back, he was too short and he sweated too much.

Several years later, I was hot as hell for a short guy with hair on his back. But with the ex-husband, these were symbols and symptoms for the ways he was not right for me. I came to realize it was cruel of me to marry him in the first place, and even crueler to stay with him when I couldn’t appreciate him in the way he deserved.

So I think you should strongly consider divorce, for the sake of both of you, but I have some caveats. For one thing, there is absolutely no correlation between how good a man looks, or how tall he is, and how good he will be in bed or in a relationship. In general, you have to accept the uncertainty that you will end up in a happy, permanent relationship with someone who suits you better. Maybe you will, and improving your own mental and emotional health will certainly better the odds. Or maybe you will be alone in 10 or 15 years. I’m an introverted loner, so to me being alone is far better than being in a bad relationship or even an okay relationship. If it’s important to you to be in a relationship a man, you will have to adjust your expectations. But I think you got married too soon. Date a variety of men, and make a wiser choice when and if you marry again. And then stick with him.

Why?

Why do I talk to my parents about my job search when I know I'm only going to feel bad about it? And why should I feel bad about it anyway? I wish I could get a grip on this shit already. I think the problem is that I resent having to reassure them at such a stressful time for me. Shouldn't they be supporting me, not vice versa?

Actually, it's not that hard to understand the problem. My dad made such a huge deal about my interview in New York. He bragged about it to all of my relatives and his friends. I didn't get the job, which was truly for the best. I would be completely at peace about the whole experience, except that my dad has made it an embarrassment for me and himself.

People say, "he's just proud of you." But fuck that. Neither one of them have any clue about what law school is like or what I've gone through. They didn't do it, and they can't take the credit. They have no right to be proud OR disappointed in me. They can be in awe of me, or they can have quiet respect for me--those are the only acceptable options as far as I'm concerned.

And let's not even discuss the ruckus they're raising over graduation.

Once again, I sound like a bitch. Once again, I know I'm going to regret my standoffish ways when they're gone. I know very well that they mean no harm whatsoever. But even the smallest contact with them undermines my sanity.

I am a bad person

Mr. M sends me one or two-line email messages a couple of times a week. I didn’t intend to blow him off, but I haven’t responded to a single one of them. The latest one just says “How’s tricks?” Now, if it doesn’t seem urgent and I don’t have anything particular to say in answer to the question, I’m probably not going to answer right away. I’m going to file it away in my head to email Mr. M. But before I get around to it, he sends another. And then it starts to get annoying. If we wanted to talk to me, he could call, but he doesn’t. We broke up and didn’t talk for awhile, then he called and we had one unpleasant phone conversation, when I told him exactly why I was mad and why I was through with him as a boyfriend. But, considering all we’ve been through and the unusual nature of our relationship, I said I hoped we could be friends and that I wouldn’t keep harping on my complaints. He called again a few days later and we had a perfectly friendly conversation. We exchanged a few emails. But he never called again, he just keeps bombarding me with these one-line emails that I don’t answer. Which I didn’t intend to not answer, but which have now become so annoying that I don’t want to answer.

My mother does the same thing, only she doesn’t email as much and I somewhat more deliberately avoid responding when she does. But she won’t call. She’ll just get her feelings hurt that I don’t call her or respond to her pointless email.

It’s wrong of me not to call her, I guess. I know I’m going to regret keeping her at arms length. And it makes me feel like I’m a bad person that two people who I know want to talk to me won’t call me. But it also makes them seem like passive annoying weenies that I don’t want to talk to. I’m not sure how I became such a bitch. But I know I get along better with people who are not afraid of me!

My sheddage, let me show you it

The Secret History

I’m re-reading the great Bennington novel, “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt.

There is a secret Donna Tartt-Miss H history: She was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, where I worked as a newspaper reporter for one year. She went to Bennington for her undergraduate degree. I got an MFA from Bennington’s writing seminars. After “The Secret History” came out, I went to hear her read at the Brentano’s Bookstore in the Oak Court Mall in Memphis.

My friend Jerome swears and remembers to this day that I described her as a “short bitch in a black dress.” This cannot possibly be true, though, because I remember very clearly that she was wearing a soft pink double-breasted pantsuit with black-and-white men’s style spectator shoes. Her hair was black and cut in a short bob; and she was small and pretty. She was something like the characters in her book, with an affected elegant eccentricity. I envied her, so probably the vitriol in Jerome’s memory was accurate.

I’m still sort of envious, because she writes a novel a decade and maybe one magazine article per year, and she still gets to be a natty dresser. “The Secret History” has a cult following and I’ve heard she sold the movie rights, so I’m sure it still brings in income. But she must have a trust fund or a patron of some sort. The second novel “The Little Friend,” was pretty good (as far as I remember) but not as much of a popular success. It was set in a small town in North Mississippi much like Grenada (where she grew up, just down the road from Greenwood but out of the Delta a bit).

And of course, “The Secret History” is set in a small, expensive and exclusive college in Vermont which is called Hampden in the book but which is Bennington in every detail. I’ve stayed in those dorms and eaten in that cafeteria. The book is about a small group of students who accidentally kill a townie, purposefully kill their friend, and more or less get away with it. To my knowledge, no one I knew at Bennington killed anyone--except themselves. Liam Rector, a poet and the director of the program, killed himself last year. One of my teachers, Lucy Grealy, died of an overdose that might have been intentional. It’s that kind of place, filled with creative and overly sensitive people with little to distract themselves from their own melodrama.

I’m not really of Bennington, but I’m glad I had the chance to spend some time there. It left some subtle but lasting marks. And a big tuition bill. I’m not as brilliant or as elegant as Donna Tartt. Or as mysterious. But the truly brilliant are always unstable wrecks, in my experience. I envy what they can do. But I am stable and well adjusted, relatively speaking, and there’s something to be said for that.

I know you want to read about the constitution and environmental law

I’m in the middle of writing a paper, and it’s been frustratingly slow going. At the moment it’s an even bigger source of stress than the job search or the car dilemma. I even had a sexual dream about the very sweet but fairly schlumpy professor who assigned it. In the dream we discussed the paper, among other things.

The paper is about the constitutional foundation of environmental law, or lack thereof. As you may remember from your junior high school civics class, the federal government is one of limited powers. The federal government is meant to regulate just a few things--including interstate commerce--and the rest is left to the states. From the New Deal until the mid-90s, all three branches of the federal government took an expansive view of interstate commerce. Federal statutes regulating such things as labor, guns, and the environment were enacted under the commerce clause. But in 1995, the Supreme Court started to put new limits on how far congress could go under the commerce clause. Under the now more limited interpretation of the commerce clause, it seems that many federal environmental laws could be vulnerable to constitutional challenge. The big pollution control laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act are probably safe for the most part, if only because these statutes have caused pollutants to become items of interstate commerce. For example, cap and trade programs under the Clean Air Act allow industries to trade the right to emit a certain amount of pollutants.

On the other hand, the Endangered Species Act seems quite endangered itself, especially considering our even more conservative and less environmentally sympathetic new Supreme Court. Endangered species just don’t have the direct relationship to commerce that the court is now looking for. The Endangered Species Act is hugely important, not just for the sake of threatened creatures, but because it can be used as a tool to halt development that may be harmful in many other ways. The very first significant case involving the ESA was the famous or infamous snail darter affair, when a huge dam that was already close to completion was stopped because it threatened a homely and insignificant little fish (and other probably more important but less protected things).

The most simple and elegant solution to this problem would be a constitutional amendment saying that congress has the power to preserve and protect the environment. Unfortunately in this case, passing a constitutional amendment is a long and difficult process. Remember the ERA? But if someone asks you if you would support an environmental amendment to the constitution, you should say yes.

Vanity, they name is Miss H

Someone make me stop spending money. I’ve got some cash on hand, but it has to last indefinitely. I’ve got a internship-ish thing lined up for after the bar exam and before the results come in, which will pay a little bit. I am confident that I will get a real job, but I don’t yet have one. It’s obvious that I will have to replace my car. This calls for conserving cash.

But I’ve been on a spree. No individual expenditure looks that bad, but they add up. The trip to Colorado was a good deal, because the journal will reimburse me for about 75 percent of the plane ticket, and the condo was free. And hell, I didn’t ski, which saved me lots of cash. But I paid too much for the rental car. I got a massage. I bought a purse at the Coach outlet--a great buy, and I love the purse, but it wasn’t exactly necessary. I wanted to take pictures and didn’t have a camera so I bought a digital on sale at Target for $140. I spent $70 dollars on jeans because I was hating all my old ones. I bought a garment bag because I didn’t have one and I needed to bring suits to the conference. I bought an emergency pair of dress boots because my pumps weren’t going to work in the ice and snow. I bought new sandals. I bought a few books at the Tattered Cover in Denver. I bought new bras (very necessary). I bought a new bottle of the very expensive skin treatment I’m addicted to. I bought expensive conditioner and hair pomade (my hair is looking much better). And I’m having laser hair removal. Vanity seems to be a theme here.

A few weeks ago, the author of sanquinaryblue posted about our collective growing obsession with looking young and flawless and most of all NOT OLD. I want to write about this at greater length, but for now I am going to admit that it seems important to me to look good and NOT OLD. This is about vanity, but it is also about being a beginner in a whole new career when I’m about to turn 40. Because I have to get a job so I can pay for all the clothes and beauty products, and a new car.

Maybe my love for BMW doesn't make me a bad person after all

Toyota Prius proves a gas guzzler in a race with the BMW 520d

Moral rectitude

I hate instant messaging because I like to think carefully about what I write. Unlike when I’m talking and any old thing comes out of my mouth.

Someone told me via instant message that she was talking to a potential sugar daddy. Little did she know the typing paralysis she was inducing by telling me this.

My mother is living in my head, and she is shocked and offended by the very idea a sugar daddy. She does not approve. My mother is very judgmental, disapproving and frightened by so many things. She is a woman of moral rectitude. She is good, honest, innocent, and easily shocked. Her best and worst qualities are intertwined. I hate her knee-jerk judgments and the way she disapproves of everything that is outside her limited sphere of experience. But there she is, living inside my head.

If we can muzzle my mother for a second, what do I really think, and what do I want to say to my friend? It seems like a questionable idea to make a deal with a sugar daddy. I wouldn’t feel right about it, personally. But I really don’t know anything about what’s going on. If maybe she likes him. If this might be a way for each to get what they need. People are complicated, they have all kinds of mysterious and deeply rooted needs and desires. Most importantly, other people are not all like me. A good friend would be concerned but not judgmental. She would say, so tell me about this. What’s this about? And she would listen.

The mother-in-my-head thing is related to the perpetual-older-sister thing. On Mardi Gras, drunk and high with my sister, I’m still the responsible one keeping her out of trouble. That’s not a bad thing. My sister considers me a good influence. My mother-in-my-head has kept me from bad situations and experiences. But she keeps me from experiences. If the path of excess is the only road to the tower of wisdom, I’m not going to get there.

Also somewhat related, after the first week of the writing contract, it is obvious that Darcy is truly a creative writer. She is an artist, but I am just thinking thinking thinking, always in paragraphs. I’m not saying that in the way of judging myself harshly. It is what it is.

Girls who wear glasses

I’ve never skied. I was going to give it a try on this trip. However, I’ve had a contact lens emergency. My lenses were dried out after my very long trip in, and I tore off a piece of the left lens when I was taking them out. The next day I was determined to where them anyway, but the torn one was very irritating and ended up migrating behind my eyeball. Then I tore it even more while extricating it. So I am wearing my glasses, which are not quite the right prescription and offer no clear peripheral vision. I think this impaired vision makes skiing seem a bit too risky. Plus, it’s flipping expensive to get a lift ticket and rent all the equipment and get a beginner lesson. Instead, I spent my money on a massage, but more on that later.

Despite the limited vision, I’m kind of liking my glasses. I guess I’m less inclined to hide my wonky intellectual librarian side these days. Tina Fey is an inspiration--she’s smart, funny, fortyish, glasses-wearing and hot. And, even though I still prefer Obama, I appreciated her pro-bitch, pro-Hillary rant.

So I didn’t ski, I just rode the gondola to the top of the mountain. It was perfect--natural beauty without pain or injury. And today I got a Swedish massage from a young, adorable, strong-handed young man with a Northern European accent (perhaps actually Swedish?) I didn’t want him to ever stop. My favorite thing is when he pulled on my arms and fingers. I can’t explain why that feels so good. When it was over I could barely stand up. In short, it was better than 95 percent of the sex I’ve had. A regular good massage from a strong-handed man, coupled with weekly swing-dancing, could fulfill my need for physical contact and attention from men. I’m still hoping for good sex, but massage and dancing make it easy to resist unsatisfying, uninteresting regrettable sex.

Brrr

Colorado

I love arriving in Denver, especially coming from New Orleans. I love the way Colorado is flat, flat, flat and then Boom! MOUNTAINS. Everything looks clearer and you can see forever. I realize that in New Orleans I am living in a haze of pollen and mold spores. In Colorado, my sinuses clear up immediately. But then all the moisture is sucked out of my skin. Colorado is magnificent, but the cheap and ugly development looks even worse in such a setting.

I asked for a full-size rental car, and I got a Hyundai Sonata. It’s relatively big but the engine isn’t very powerful. Plus, at first I thought it only had one forward gear (drive) and thus I couldn’t downshift. So driving over the mountains was scary. And then it started to snow! I missed the BMW.

I’m staying in a condo with five other law students. It’s nice and big, though. More importantly, it’s free--one of my classmates is an ABA rep, and they’re picking up the tab. I think my journal is going to reimburse me for part of my plane ticket. And I get to attend the conference for free in exchange for a little bit of volunteer work. So it should have been a cheap trip, but it’s turning out more expensive than I thought. For one thing, I was groggy when I got in and somehow allowed the rental car rep to sign me up for insurance on the car, thereby doubling the price. (forehead slap). We won’t have the condo on Monday night, so I’ll have to get a hotel room or maybe stay with my cousin for the night. I’m not sure what I’m going to do on my free day. Attempt to ski for the first time ever? Go explore the Rocky Mountain National Park? Or go poke around Denver? (311)

Oh lord, stuck in O'Hare again

Holy Christ, every time I fly I’m shocked all over again at what an ever-loving pain the the ass it has become. I’m waiting for a plane in Chicago. I’m going to Colorado, and I’m looking forward to it even though the main event is an environmental law conference. I was supposed to be on a 5;40 a.m. non-stop, but I missed the flight even though I was at the airport an hour early, at 4 fucking 40 a.m. So I got a seat on a flight to Chicago that left at 6:35, and I still almost didn’t make it because the security line was so long. I ran to the gate in my socks because I didn’t have time to put my shoes back on after TSA got done with me. I was the last to get on the plane and I barely made it.

I went to bed after midnight, got up at 4 a.m., and lightly dozed on the plane. I’m exhausted, but I am writing my words before I try to nap in the airport. Or go get a 10,000 calorie Cinnabon, one or the other.

Yesterday I skipped my constitutional theory seminar, but I went to my swing dance class even though I hadn’t yet packed for my trip. Af ew years ago I took a swing dance class with Al & Cathy at the Rock n Bowl. They were cute. Al was a slight man with a black pencil moustache, dyed black. Cathy was a chipper blonde have been on the Lawrence Welk show. They taught enough to allow you to function on a dance floor, and they also taught old-school gender relations etiquette, like how men should ask women to dance but not monopolize her dance card, and then offer to walk her to her car when she was leaving. It’s kind of ironic that I met the psychopathic misogynistic med student at the class.

Anyway, now I am taking a better, real-deal swing dance class. We have made it beyond triple-step, triple-step, rock-step and are learning to jitterbug. It is the greatest thing ever and a spectacular antidote to law school, which I will write more about later. But for now I am past 300 words and the Cinnabon is calling.

Crazy nutty freaky nature

People are sometimes surprised that I’m trying to make a career in environmental law because I don’t seem like a tree-hugger. Because I’m not really a tree-hugger.

However, I’ve been watching and re-watching the BBC’s Planet Earth series, which has been a profound and even spiritual experience. But it’s more complicated than a wonder-of-nature feeling. The wonder-of-nature thing is the starting point. The series brings out like nothing before the jaw-dropping amazingness of our planet and its crazy assortment of life. Holy crap, nature is beautiful and cruel. So many kinds of creatures, such an infinite variety of expressions of the life force. And yet all this beauty and variety is all in service of two things: eating and procreating. Penguins standing around at the South Pole all winter freezing their asses off to protect their eggs and give the hatchlings a head start on whatever great resources there are to exploit at the South Pole. Snow leopardesses, pure gorgeousness in motion, in motion for the sake of killing something to feed their overgrown helpless cubs. Those poor, poor seals just trying to get some dinner for themselves, instead become dinner for an enormous and completely terrifying shark corkscrewing its whole huge body out of the water. All life wants is to keep itself going. Other than that, there doesn’t seem to be a point.

And yet probably the most touching thing is to see those animals who can easily get enough food and raise their young, who have time to play. Animals goofing off and enjoying themselves are so wonderful. When you get the eating and fucking out of the way, all this energy is freed up for new and better things

That raises the issue of humans, we with far too much left over after eating and fucking This series seems so profound because it represents humans exhaustively documenting and celebrating the planet we are simultaneously destroying. I can see why people get cynical and misanthropic and start thinking that things would be better if humans weren’t around.

But if we weren’t around, would nature know it was beautiful and amazing? Do you think the hippopotamuses would film the giant crocodile snatching the baby gazelle? Do you think dolphins wonder about what’s outside where the water ends, and contemplate the beauty and cruelty of nature? Do polar bears look at the stars and think, what the hell are those things? We are the only ones who do those things. If we disappeared maybe some other species of ape would eventually get to the point of looking around and trying to figure things out. If they evolve to that point, is it also inevitable that they will fuck things up like we have?

Beneath those questions are another level of freaky existential questions. Like: why does anything at all exist? Where did it come from? What is life and where did it come from and what’s the fucking point? But I can’t do anything with those questions other than ask them. And to posit that maybe the point of human life is to look around and try to figure it out. (530)

The contract

Darcy left New Orleans before The Thing but has recently moved back. She is a friend and ex-roommate of my ex- underage quasi-paramour. Since she returned, we have hung out a few times and a friendship seems to be developing. She is a writer who is trying to figure out how to balance the writing with making a living. This is a dilemma I am familiar with. We have made a contract that we each will write at least 300 words a day for at least five days a week for a month. If either of us breaks the contract, we will have to apply for a job at Hooters. This is a particularly harrowing possibility for me, because I have no doubt that the Hooters recruiter would laugh my middle-aged ass out of the room.

Lucky for me, I am a writer of creative non-fiction. By definition, that makes me at least a little bit of a narcissist, and for a narcissist it is easy to write 300 words a day about yourself and your ever-so-interesting thoughts. By the end of this sentence I will be almost to 200 words.

Darcy and I made this contract at the Saturn Bar. I like Darcy an awful lot, and I like the Saturn Bar an awful lot, too. Lately I have been having more positive New Orleans experiences and have found myself second-guessing my decision to leave.

But every day I also find a reason to get the hell out of here. Today I was tired of my mopey-ass roommate and my too-familiar neighborhood, so I went to work on my paper at a coffee shop across town on Frenchman Street. It so happens that the ex-underaged-paramour used to work at this coffee shop. When I got hungry, I walked down to Decatur Street in the Quarter to have lunch at Coop’s Place, a bar that also serves very good food. I had red beans with fried chicken and a cup of gumbo, and it was scrumptious. Sitting next to me were two drunk middle aged construction workers who glommed on to me. They were both the type who used to be be good looking before they became middle-aged drunks. They were having an endlessly repetitive conversation that they’d obviously had on many previous drunken afternoons:

Drunk 1 (the smarter, more talkative drunk): I’m just saying, I love my daughters, man. Fuck everyone else. I got two daughters in Chicago, they’re both in the National Honor Society. They’re smart, you know? I guess I did something right.

Drunk 2 (the more belligerent, coon-ass drunk): Man, shut up. I’m tired of listening to you.

Drunk 1: Fuck you, man. I love my daughters.

Drunk 2: Shut up or I’m gonna hit you.

Drunk 1: Yeah, go head and hit me. Yeah right. See what I got to put up with. I gotta live with this motherfucker and work with him. He can’t do shit without me, I gotta watch him all the time. You’re laughing, yeah, fuck you. I’m sick of this town, man. People down here are stupid. I miss my daughters in Chicago. I’m gonna call my daughters. (He then gets out his cell phone but can’t seem to figure out how to dial it, leaving us all to wonder how his daughters would feel about getting a Sunday afternoon drunken phone call from dad.)

They were almost charming in their drunken fucked up doofus way, but they were also a New Orleans stereotype of Sunday afternoon drunks. I’m not picking on them for being drunk on this particular Sunday afternoon, but it seemed apparent that they were drunk on most Sunday afternoons and other afternoons as well The bar was full of regular Sunday afternoon drunks and the kind of New Orleans characters who essentially live in bars. It was a relief, it felt clean, to walk out of there and get away.

My beloved BMW

was sideswiped, scraped and gouged by a utility truck while parked around the corner this afternoon. It's so sad. The thing is, it's perfectly drivable, it just looks like crap. The car is now 13 years old, has 185K miles on it, and has some kind of front end issue and a few other incipient problems. It doesn't seem like it makes financial sense to spend a lot of money on it. It also doesn't make sense to buy a new car while I'm unemployed and living in a place that's so hazardous to cars. I think the sensible thing to do would be to take the insurance money and put it in a new-car-someday fund, while I continue to drive my defaced car at least until I graduate and move away. But the sensible thing bums me out.

I kind of want to spend the money to fix everything because I'm fond of the car. Maybe it's not that silly to spend $5-7K to make it almost-like-new instead of spending two or three times that on a late model used car that isn't even a swell-o BMW. But there's that 185K miles. I know those engines regularly make it to 250K and beyond. I know you can replace an engine for far less than the cost of a new car. So how far does it make sense to go down that line? Till I can afford a super cool new 1-series?