Category: Carnival

Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go

I overslept this morning, which is really fine; I feel very rested, which means I needed the sleep and my muscles, which have felt tired all week, don’t this morning; so there you have it. I have some errands to run in the early afternoon, and I also have some writing to do today; I need to finish a chapter in the WIP and finish one in the Scotty. I should probably do so organizing and of course, the Lost Apartment is a mess. I also need to revise two short stories, whose due dates are rapidly approaching. Next weekend I will be in Alabama for the Murder in the Magic City/Murder on the Menu events, and the next weekend is the final parade weekend of Carnival (yes I am missing the first weekend for the first time in years). I do hate missing the King Arthur parade; I have lots of friends and acquaintances in that one, so I generally get buried in beads. I can’t believe I agreed to miss that weekend, but I also was so busy making sure it wasn’t the final weekend of Carnival that I didn’t notice.

Stupid, stupid, stupid Gregalicious.

Heavy sigh. I finished watching the first season of Black Sails last night, both at the gym and then when I got home after; I am, as I have said, really enjoying the show. I can’t quite figure out why I didn’t like this show when I tried to watch it several years ago, but I am really enjoying it now and glad I gave it another chance. I suspect I didn’t pay enough attention to it as I watched, and you kind of need to pay attention. There’s a lot going on, there are a lot of cross-plots, and lots of scheming. I don’t think I much cared for the way the women were treated in the first episode or two, either; it appeared that the women were all whores or mistreated terribly by men. But that’s not the case; the women are stronger and smarter than the men, and Eleanor Guthrie, who runs Nassau, is developing into quite the cold-blooded manipulative she-devil, which I am also rather loving. And of course, you can never go wrong with a hot, sweaty men in tight leather pants. My favorite, of course, is Tom Hopper, but Zach MacGowan, who plays Captain Charles Vane (and also played Roan on The 100; I thought he looked familiar) isn’t a slouch either.

Zach-Mcgowan-main

I also read two short stories last night, both horror, to keep the Short Story Project going.

The first, “Minuke,” by Nigel Keale, is from a very thick book edited by Marvin Kaye called Ghosts:

The estate agent kept an uncomfortable silence until we reached his car. “Frankly, I wish you hadn’t gotten wind of that,” he said. “Don’t know how you did: I thought I had the whole thing carefully disposed of. Oh, please get in.”

He pulled his car forward and frowned. “It puts me in a rather awkward spot. I suppose I;d better tell you all I know about the case, or you’d be suspecting me of heaven-knows-what kinds of chicanery in your own.”

As we set off to see the property I was interested in, he shifted the cigarette to the side of his mouth,

“It’s quite a distance, so I can tell you on the way there,” he said. “We’ll pass the very spot, as a matter of fact, and you can see it for yourself. Such as there is to see.”

This is a ghost story, or more properly, the story of a haunting;  it was originally written and published in 1950–which makes the story sixty-eight! It’s also told in a classic horror trope that is hardly used anymore, because it’s become cliche–someone is telling the story of what happened to someone else, a disinterested party. Stephen King has used this method a time or two; most notably in his novella “The Breathing Method” from Different Seasons, and sometimes in short stories. It’s a very classic trope–Dracula is an epistolary novel, after all, told in diary entries and letters. But at the time “Minuke” was originally published, horror wasn’t considered a form of literature and as such tropes hadn’t evolved into cliches quite yet, and it’s a well-told tale. The house of the title is merely a bungalow, built in the housing boom of the post-war era, and therefore its tenants are the first to live there; it is too young of a house to have a haunting, and yet it does. It turns out, you see, when the foundations were being dug, they came across some ancient Norse grave markers…(of course, at the time the story was written Poltergeist was many years away in the future, and the ‘never build on an Indian burial ground’ theme hadn’t become deeply engrained in the culture).

(Aside: the collection Ghosts is a gorgeous, leather bound edition with gold inlay and a ribbon page marker that I purchased for a few bucks off a sale table at Borders many years ago; I don’t know why I’ve never dipped into it before, but it’s going to definitely play a role in this year’s Short Story Project.)

The second story I read was “Fallen Boys” by Mark Morris, from Best Horror of the Year Volume Three, compiled and selected by Ellen Datlow, and originally published in Jonathon Oliver anthology The End of the Line:

When the child screamed, Tess Morton felt guilty for having to repress the urge to snap at it. She was aware that it wasn’t Matthew Bellings who should be punished, but his tormentors, and yet the boy’s cry of pain or distress was so whiny that it grated on her nerves.

The reason she felt little compassion for the child was because she knew it took almost nothing to provoke a wail of complaint from him. Matthew would cry out whenever someone barged into him in the school corridor; whenever a football was kicked towards him in the playground; whenever a classmate flicked a paper pellet at him, or snatched a text book out of his hand, or pushed in front of him in the lunch queue. Indeed, the merest slight would cause Matthew’s red-cheeked, strangely wizened face to crumple, his mouth to twist open and that familiar, toe-curling bleat to emerge.

This story, about a class field trip to an abandoned tin mine (now open as a tourist attraction and advertised as an education experience for children), is predicated on a horrific truth about bullying that we don’t like to acknowledge or understand; one that Stephen King exposed and explored powerfully in his own debut novel, Carrie. 

When we read accounts about bullying, and how teachers and other adults look the other way, we are horrified by it; when we read short stories and novels about bullying  our hearts naturally go out to the victims and we loathe the bullies and their enablers; long for their comeuppance, and are infinitely satisfied when it does come. But that bears no resemblance to the reality. That comes from the emotional distance, and the pleasant lies we so often tell ourselves, the lies about who we are as people, and how we would behave in certain circumstances–we identify with heroes and see ourselves as heroes; part of the brilliance of Stephen King’s work is he so often lays bare that horrific truth that we aren’t all heroes.

Take Tess Morton, the teacher taking her kids on this field trip. The story is completely told from her point of view. She knows that kids are bullying Matthew, and she also knows that as the voice of authority she has to try to put a stop to it. She does try, but it’s not taking because Matthew himself irritates her and sometimes she herself wants nothing more than to give him a good slap. This is the same way Miss Desjardin, the gym teacher who stops the shower assault on Carrie White in the opening scene of Carrie, feels about the victim; she has to punish the girls who did it, but Carrie irritates her, she wants to smack her a good one, and she understands why Carrie is bullied.

This is also why school–the hallways, the playground, the cafeteria, the gym–is so scarring for so many people, because they are so evocative of Lord of the Flies or The Hunger Games.

This is a great story; Morris builds his suspense beautifully, and the denouement is rather sudden when it happens–more than a little reminiscent of EC Comics, but it’s also rather satisfying.

And now. back to the spice mines.

Stay in My Corner

We binged the Netflix series Dear White People last night, and got so involved we couldn’t stop watching; it was one of those shows where you say “oh, just one more won’t hurt” and then it’s over and you’re saying it again and then “well, there’s only ONE left” and then it’s over and you just sit back and think, “wow.” Full realized characters, incredible acting, and the writing? Stellar. Again, it was told from almost everyone’s point of view, so you got to know everyone and their backstories, especially with each other. It was funny, provocative, timely, and diverse. Obviously, my favorite character was the young gay writer, coming to terms with his enormous crush on his hot but straight roommate, trying to figure out who he is while navigating the murky waters of a college campus and institutionalized racism–but no one had an issue with his sexuality. His also gay editor at the independent campus paper got off a line that has me still laughing–and it was repeated by another character in the same episode: “Labels are what keep people in Florida from drinking Windex.”

I finished reading a book yesterday, started a couple more and put them in the donation pile after a couple of chapters, and really was at a loss for what to read next; and finally settled on Victor Gischler’s The Pistol Poets. I did a panel with him years and years ago at the Louisiana Book Festival–really liked him, thought he was smart and funny and engaging–and then read his book Gun Monkeys, which I also enjoyed, and always meant to get more of his books. Sometime last year something reminded me of him, and I finally got some more of them. It has a great opening, and I am looking forward to spending some time with it today, as well as some cleaning, writing, and editing.

The other day, I wrote about the character of Jerry Manning, who appears in Garden District Gothic, and how much I liked the character. I also used him as a character in The Orion Mask–which I had somehow forgotten–and in fact, Jerry is the catalyst for that entire book. I had already created the character of Jerry for the Paige book I’d intended to write, and I liked him so much I actually introduced him to readers in The Orion Mask.

The Orion Mask 300 DPI

I had the idea for that book a long time ago; I’d always loved the romantic suspense novels of Phyllis A. Whitney, Victoria Holt, and Mary Stewart (although I would argue that she wasn’t a romantic suspense writer, simply marketed as one), and of course, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is one of my favorite novels of all time. One of the reasons I loved that style of book so much is because they were not only mysteries, but there was a Gothic feel to them, stylistically and mood-wise, and I always wanted to write one. (I had already published what is my personal favorite of all my novels, Timothy, and really wanted to go back to that well again.) I originally came up with the idea for The Orion Mask many years ago; when I came to New Orleans for Mardi Gras the first time in 1995, only in all my notes and so forth it was called The Orpheus Mask;  the driving idea was a murder that happened a long time ago, and rare, valuable Mardi Gras masks had something to do with the crime. After moving to New Orleans and becoming more knowledgeable about the city and its history, I realized the Krewe of Orpheus was actually too new–plus, I couldn’t really use an actual Mardi Gras krewe. I still wanted to do the book, though, just wasn’t sure how to make it all work. I also knew it had to take place outside of New Orleans; for the story to work, the majority of the action needed to occur at a mansion in the countryside.

Fortunately, there are plenty of those. I was already using one for Murder in the Arts District, that was based on a sort of hybrid of Houmas House and Oak Alley, and thought, oh, what the hell, I’ll just use the same place for this book, too. It is fiction, after all. I’d created a fictional parish as well–Redemption Parish–for that first book, and had based a small town near the plantation on Breaux Bridge, just off I-10 between Baton Rouge and Lafayette that I’d visited with some friends from out of town years ago, but the town never really appeared in that story, so I could really use it for this book. But I still didn’t know how to connect the masks in…and then we went to Italy, and while we were there we went to Venice, and you cannot escape the Carnival masks or the Murano glass there. As we walked the cobbled alleys of that remarkably beautiful city (I so want to go back), it hit me in a flash: someone from Venice who worked with the glass came to America, to Louisiana, and the plantation not only was a farm but also produced glass, using the same techniques made famous by the Venetians, and they could have produced masks for the Kings of the major krewes of Mardi Gras made from the glass. I invented my own, now-defunct krewe–the Krewe of Orion–and everything fell into place.

My story, of course, which was about a young man whose mother died when he was very young, and who was raised by his father and stepmother, completely disconnected from his mother’s family and only comes to see them as an adult, which starts the story, didn’t really have the right hook I needed to get started. Why would he suddenly, after all these years, finally get in touch with his mother’s family?

And that’s where Jerry came in. Jerry, looking for another true crime to write another one of his books, has discovered the murder/suicide involving my character’s mother. I named the character Heath Brandon, after a friend of mine, by inverting his first and middle names (I’d actually given a character his actual name before we met; it was very odd because his name was so familiar to me when we met, but we’d never met before, and then one day I realized I had actually written a character with that name, but I digress.). I put Heath into another fictional city I’d created for another book, Bay City (based on Tampa), and had him work at the airport at an airline ticket counter (a job I’ve actually had), working for the fictitious airline I created for Murder in the Rue Dauphine and have always used ever since whenever I need an airline.

I sat up in a strange bed, wide awake, my heart pounding.

 Disoriented, I looked around in the gloom, not sure where I was or what had woken me up from my already restless sleep. I shivered. A storm was raging outside as my mind began the process of clearing out the fog. Wind was whipping around the house, rattling the windows and the French doors.  The rain was coming down in a steady stream. As I sat up further in my bed, lightning lit up the room, and I recoiled in horror. The brief flash of illumination had exposed the shadow of someone against the curtains over the French doors. I bit back a scream as I wondered if there was anything within reach in this strange room that I could use as a weapon. My eyes were still seeing spots as thunder shook the house as I remembered there was a table lamp on the night stand next to the bed. As my vision cleared, I could see through the gloom that the doorknob on the French doors was turning. I reached my hand out to the table and fumbled for the switch on the lamp. I found it and clicked it on, filling the room with bright yellow light.

I thought I heard footsteps running away along the gallery.  I threw the covers aside and climbed out of the massive bed. I dashed over to the fireplace on the other side of the bed, grabbed one of the brass pokers, and carried it over to the French doors. I flipped the lock off, turned the knob , and the wind immediately grabbed them out of my hands. They slammed against the walls and swung back. The wind pushed me back a few steps. Curtains moved away from the walls, and the canopy over the bed rippled as I struggled to latch the doors against the walls. Once this was accomplished, I tried to step out onto the gallery. Lightning flashed again as I stepped out onto the wide gallery. I wrapped my arms around me and wished I’d put on at least a T-shirt. The wind was blowing the rain onto the gallery, and the heavy drops were splashing my legs with water as I looked through the gloom in each direction.

I didn’t see anyone.

My heart still pounding, I closed and locked the doors again before heading back to the bed, still holding the poker in my hand. I put the poker into the bed next to me and slid underneath the covers. Maybe it had been a dream, maybe there really hadn’t been someone out there on the gallery trying to get into my room, and it was just my imagination working overtime. There wasn’t anyone out there, you fool, I scolded myself, you’re just a little off balance—but it’s understandable. It isn’t every day you meet a family you didn’t know you had a month ago. I switched the lamp off and pulled the covers back up to my chin, and lay there, staring at the canopy over my head.

It was hard to believe it had only been a month since I first noticed the bald man sitting in the airport lobby, and my entire life changed.

The bald man was Jerry, of course, and he tracked Heath down as he investigated the long ago murder/suicide, and it was Jerry who set the stage for Heath to come back to the family estate, Chambord, and  find the truth about what had happened all those years ago, about his mother and the Orion mask.

Writing the book was a lot of fun, and I’d love to do another, similar style book at some point.

I had thought about giving Jerry his own series, or his own stand-alone book; and when I started making notes I realized something: he had been a personal trainer/stripper (so had Scotty) and he came from a repressive small town and a white trash family (Chanse), and thus was basically repeating myself, which is one of my biggest fears. So I shelved the idea…but it runs through my mind periodically because the idea is a good one. I may have to write it about a different character, though.

Heavy sigh.

And now, back to the spice mines.

 

Shadow Dancing

I woke up feeling well-rested this morning, and even before the alarm went off (not MY alarm, but still a win in my book). It’s Friday, and I have survived the three day work week after Mardi Gras. Huzzah! Or perhaps I am getting ahead of myself–but waking up rested on a Friday morning and not feeling tired is always a win in my book. Huzzah indeed!

I didn’t write anything yesterday, but I can still blame the post-Carnival malaise, can’t I? Although I have been getting a lot of cleaning and organizing done, which is always a plus, and makes me happy. I also got some things from the Container Store–little trays that attach to the wall, to hold things like shampoo and so forth in the shower. Looks so much better than that horrible metal rack thing hanging from the shower railing. I also hung another one in my bathroom downstairs to hold my shaving supplies to clear up space on the sink. I still have two left, and am not sure what I am going to do with those. I also bought a new hand vacuum, and actually mounted the holder myself in the bathroom on the wall. SO butch.

I’m currently reading a cozy named Peaches and Scream by Susan Furlong, who also did the Alabama library weekend with me a couple of weeks back. She was really nice and funny, so I bought a copy of this first book in her second series and I am enjoying it. I am also looking forward to reading Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies, and once I finish that I am digging out Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad; I am going to see him speak on Thursday night and am really looking forward to it.

And the Tennessee Williams Festival/Saints and Sinners is just around the corner. Sheesh, where did this year go?

All right, back to the spice mines. Here’s a hunk for you, to start off the weekend right:

Telephone

The Carnival hangover continues.

I worked twelve hours yesterday, including bar testing last night, so that could account for feeling drained this morning. It’s probably a combination of the two–long day, post Carnival malaise–but I only have to get through today and tomorrow and then it’s the glorious weekend again, which is quite lovely. These abbreviated work weeks always feel somewhat off, much as I love long weekends. I started work on Crescent City Charade yesterday morning but didn’t get very far; I am thinking it wasn’t smart to try to get it going in the wake of Carnival–smart or not, I am not beating myself up because it didn’t come easy. I do have those days when nothing really comes out on the page, and it really can’t be forced. (I mean, it can, but it usually ends up being such garbage it has to be completely redone or thrown out; on the other hand sometimes when I force it, it’s hard going at first and then it truly gets going. I can usually tell the difference, though, and I could tell yesterday wasn’t going to be one of those good days of work.)

In other good news, my editor liked Wicked Frat Boy Games, which was absolutely lovely news to wake up to. Now I just have to go over her edits. Hurray!

Paul and I are watching Big Little Lies on HBO and we’re enjoying it so far; great performances not only by the actresses in the leads (Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shaillene Woodley, Laura Dern) but also good roles for the supporting males, and the kids are also pretty good. It’s beautifully shot, and the suspense is doing a slow build. Paul did comment that it seemed a little Real Housewives of Monterey-ish to him, but I suspect that any film or television vehicle driven by women interacting is going to feel that way for a while.

I do enjoy the Real Housewives, I’ve never denied that; it’s a fascinating phenomenon, and as ‘staged’ and manipulated as these shows can be (the Lifetime series UnReal did a really great job of tearing away the veil on these sort of shows; the first season was fantastic; I didn’t watch the second season but from everything I’ve read it wasn’t nearly as good as the first; I may go back and watch it at some point when I have time–I crack myself up); Alison Gaylin wrote a wonderful y/a ebook about a young girl whose family had a reality show called Reality Ends Here which I highly recommend. I explored the ‘real housewives’ in a Paige book called Dead Housewives of New Orleans (no longer available; long story) but because of rushing and publisher deadlines and so forth I wasn’t able to make that book all I wanted it to be, so I am rebooting the concept and making it the Scotty book I am working (or not working, as the case may be) on, but it will be vastly different in this incarnation. Pretty much the only thing that is going to stay the same is the background set-up of the book; a reality show about social climbing upper class New Orleans women. I really want to get this right, you know?

And on that note, I am going to get my day going.

Here’s a hunk for you, Constant Reader:

G. U. Y.

I love James M. Cain.

I generally give one of his books a reread every year; Double Indemnity is a personal favorite, although I also have soft spots for Mildred Pierce, Serenade, Love’s Lovely Counterfeit, and, of course, The Postman Always Rings Twice. I’ve not read all of his books, partly because I don’t ever want to be finished with the entire Cain canon, but also because many of his lesser-known are no longer in print. But yesterday, after I finished Lori Rader-Day’s sublime Little Pretty Things, I pulled out The Butterfly and read it in a little over an hour. (Many of Cain’s works are really short.)

She was sitting on the stoop when I came in from the fields, her suitcase beside her and one foot on the other knee, where she was shaking a show out that seemed to have sand in it. When she saw me she laughed, and I felt my face get hot, that she had caught me looking at her, and I hightailed it to the barn as fast as I could go. While I milked I watched, and saw her get up and walk all around, looking at my trees and my corn and my cabin, then go over to the creek and look at that and pitch a stone in. She was nineteen or twenty, kind of a medium size, with light hair, blue eyes, and a pretty shape. Her clothes were better than most mountain girls have, even if they were dusty, like she had walked up from the state road, where the bus ran. But if she was lost and asking her way, why didn’t she say something and get it over with? And if she wasn’t, why was she carrying a suitcase? When I was through milking, it was nearly dark, and I picked up my pails, came out of the barn, and walked over. “How do you do, miss?”

And so this is how Jess Tyler, abandoned eighteen years earlier by his wife, meets his now grown youngest daughter, Kady.

Cain’s novels are all relatively short (I think Mildred Pierce is actually the longest, at least of the ones I’ve read)–which is interesting on its face; many of my favorite writers (Cain, John D. Macdonald, Megan Abbott, Margaret Millar, Charlotte Armstrong) write short novels–and The Butterfly is only 118 pages long. The book is set in Appalachia; West Virginia, to be precise, and Cain’s grasp of what life is like for poor rural Southern people is spot-on, as he always was with every book. He also manages to get across the poverty, and the acceptance of that poverty, across without using vernacular; Jess says “hollow” instead of “holler,” as an example. It’s also amazing how he managed to get this book (or any of the others, really) published at the time he did; the subject matter seems a little bit much for the time. If Mildred Pierce is an opus on motherhood, and the strain of loving a child who is a monster; The Butterfly is the obverse, telling the tale of paternal love for his child that crosses that line that shouldn’t ever be crossed; from love to lust and desire. It’s quite chilling and disturbing, but also quite good because he makes it understandable, which makes it all the more chilling and disturbing.

The book was eventually filmed, as so many of his novels were, but this film was notorious as the screen debut of Pia Zadora. I’ve never seen it, actually–the only Pia Zadora movie I’ve ever seen is Voyage of the Rock Aliens, although I’ve heard The Lonely Lady is so bad it reaches epic camp proportions–but now I am kind of curious.

I also started reading Donna Andrews’ latest, Die Like an Eagle, yesterday while waiting for Paul to come home so we could go to the Parades.

And happy Mardi Gras to one and all.

Speechless

Yesterday afternoon I received a text from my supervisor letting me know they’d given out all the condoms for the weekend, and therefore I do NOT have condom duty today; instead getting a lovely four day weekend. How great is that? So I can spend the day doing whatever I feel like it–although I will most likely be cleaning and organizing, maybe writing. (I did, after all, start writing Crescent City Charade yesterday…) I am also probably going to get out the good camera and take a walk around the neighborhood taking pictures of the Bead Trees. Tonight is the end of Carnival for Paul and me–we never do anything on Fat Tuesday–so with the Proteus and Orpheus parades tonight we ring down the curtain.

Pretty cool.

We also decided to spend the day yesterday in recovery mode; skipping the parades and just chilling out inside. I cleaned the kitchen and got the laundry caught up before repairing to my easy chair, where I finished reading Little Pretty Things by Lori Rader-Day, and started The Butterfly by James M. Cain (which I intend to finish today; it’s only 118 pages).

The walkie-talkie on the front desk hissed, crackles, and finally resolved into Lu’s lilting voice: “At what point,” she said, “do we worry the guy in two-oh-six is dead?”

The couple across the counter from me glanced at once another. Bargain hunters. We only saw two kinds of people at the Mid-Night Inn–Bargains and Desperates–and these were classic Bargains, here. The two kids, covered in mustard stains from eating home-packed sandwiches, whines that the place didn’t have a pool. The mother had already scanned the lobby for any reference to a free continental breakfast. We didn’t offer continental breakfast, not even the not-free kind.

I slid their key cards to them, smiling, and flicked the volume knob down on the radio before Lu convinced them they’d prefer to get back in their car and try their luck farther down the road.

“Which room are we in, again?” said the woman.

“Two-oh-four,” I said.

“And you said we could go to Taco Bell,” cried the little girl, five or so. A glittering pink barrette that must have started the day neatly holding back her corn-silk hair now clung by a few strands. She threw herself at her mother’s feet and wailed into the carpet. “But they don’t even have a Taco Bell.”

This is Lori Rader-Day’s second novel, and I bought it in Alabama a few weeks ago when I was there with her. I’d run out of things to read that I’d brought with me, and the amount of time it took me to finish reading this wonderful sophomore novel has nothing to do with the quality of the book or its writing; it has everything to do with my lack of time the last few weeks because of Carnival. It was wonderful to have the time yesterday to sit down in my easy chair with a purring kitty and finish the second half of the book, savoring the twists and turns and the writing. I do have Lori’s first novel The Black Hour in my TBR pile, and I am looking forward to her new book, coming out this spring, The Day I Died.

Rader-Day’s main character, Juliet Townsend, is the heart of this exquisitely dark novel about lost chances, bad choices, and how incredibly easy it is to spiral down into the hopeless darkness of poverty and failure. Juliet was an accomplished distance runner in her small Indiana hometown of Midway when she was in high school, always finishing in second place to her best friend and teammate Maddy. Now, years later, after they missed running in the state championship meet, Juliet works as a housekeeper at the run down Mid-Night Motel just off the highway, living with her withdrawn mother who has never recovered from her husband’s death–which also resulted in Juliet dropping out of college. And then one night–the week of their high school ten year reunion, Maddy shows up at the Mid-Night; successful and beautiful and rich–and later winds up dead.

The mystery aspects of the book are quite good, but Rader-Day’s real strength is character. The tragedy of Juliet’s life–the missed opportunities, the road not taken, the sustained drudgery of her job and the concurrent poverty, and not knowing how to get out of it–is detailed in painful precision, and echoes the situation of so many people, who once had bright futures but circumstances beyond their control dragged them down into the hell of the paycheck-to-paycheck life; the not knowing where your next meal is going to come from, the praying nothing goes wrong with your car because you can’t afford to get it fixed or to get a new one, the death grip that all the horrors of high school can still hold on to your head some ten years later…but Juliet, in wondering who could have killed her old best friend, starts remembering, starts looking into things, and starts kicking over some old stones that might best be left undisturbed.

Wonderful. I highly recommend this.

Marry the Night

Four parades today: Okeanos, Mid-City, Thoth, and Bacchus tonight. I am not even remotely as tired as I was yesterday morning; the fact Endymion takes a different route, which allowed us to take the rest of the day off after Tucks yesterday probably helped a great deal. I woke up this morning feeling rested. Spending the evening getting caught up on our television shows helped a great deal as well. And the left-over Deep Dish pizza from That’s Amore? It ensured there was no hangover last evening after the effects of the day drinking wore off, which was truly lovely. So a deep-dish pizza is definitely going to have to be on the prep list going forward.

I do enjoy Thoth. Paul wants to take the day off and rest up for Bacchus tonight; I don’t know whether I will skip any parades. We usually don’t go to any on Fat Tuesday, so that would mean all we have left to attend would be Bacchus tonight and Orpheus tomorrow. And since I am feeling rested…we shall have to see, I suppose.

Of course, I could just spend the entire day inside relaxing and reading. Maybe even doing some writing. There certainly is some cleaning necessary, I’ve let the entire apartment slide these last few days, and usually it’s the weekend where I make up for my lack of cleaning during the week, or the things I let slide. But I am going to try to get the laundry done this morning, and maybe some of the kitchen. But relaxing in the easy chair also sounds terrific. We shall see. I do want to finish my Lori Rader-Day novel, and I think I’ve chosen my next book as well. Tomorrow I am going to walk about ten miles again for Lundi Gras outreach (yay), so maybe resting today isn’t such a bad idea. I don’t know. We’ll see how I feel. But as I glance around at the mess in my kitchen, I know I probably won’t let that stand.

I have to say yet again how much I love Carnival. It occurred to me last night that probably the reason New Orleans is such a progressive city in a sea of red is because of Carnival; when you’re standing out on the parade route, you see everything: people of every size, shape, color, ethnicity, sexuality; probably the most diverse of crowds, and everyone is getting along, hanging out, talking, chatting with total strangers, hanging out and just having a good time. It’s very hard to ‘other’ people when you are around them all the time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still possible to do so, of course; racism and sexism and homophobia certainly exist in New Orleans, but somehow it doesn’t seem as ingrained here as it is in other places.

Then again, I’m a white male, so I tick two of the boxes on the Privileged Card.

In other hilarity, one of the reasons (there are many) I’ve not started working on the new Scotty book (tentatively titled Crescent City Charade; that may not last) is because I start each Scotty book by satirizing the opening of a famous book (my favorite was Mardi Gras Mambo: “Last night I dreamed I went to Mardi Gras again.”) and I’ve not been able to figure out one that would work. Yesterday morning, as I sipped my second or third coffee and Bailey’s, it hit me like a 2 x 4 across the face, I looked it up, and it’s perfect.

So maybe this week I will get started on it. Who knows?

And now, back to the spice mines.

Here’s a shot from the parade route yesterday:

Bloody Mary

I wish I had some Bloody Mary mix in the house. That sounds absolutely perfect this morning, but alas, I am making do with Bailey’s in my coffee. It’s IRIS SATURDAY, Paul’s and my favorite parade day, and it is stunningly beautiful outside already, 63 degrees with a high of 79, not a cloud in our gorgeous sky, the sun is shining–how does it get better for standing out on the street screaming for beads while day drinking?

It doesn’t.

Last night I was so tired I almost wept out there on the parade route–despite being that deep tired you can feel in your bones and joints, I was out there till the bitter end of Morpheus last night. Despite the agony, though, I had a great time. I love Carnival, I truly do. It just amazes me that every year we have this ENORMOUS event, and even if they didn’t throw anything (as if, who am I trying to kid) it would be fun to people watch, if nothing else. And there’s no escaping Carnival; even if you don’t want to participate, it’s so ubiquitous you have no choice: you have to just give up and go with it otherwise you’ll make yourself crazy. I walked over ten miles yesterday, between going to and from work as well as walking around in the Quarter passing out condoms, and I’ll have to do that again on Monday. Sigh. At least Fat Tuesday is a holiday and I don’t have to work; and it’s a short work week. Huzzah!

I also heard from an editor this morning I submitted an essay to that she loved my essay, which was finished while I was in Kentucky and so I wasn’t sure if it was any good or not. YAY, ME! I am very excited about this, as you can probably imagine: good news about writing is always welcomed in the Lost Apartment. Being a writer is so bipolar, really; you go from highs of “wow I am really good at this” to horrifying, depressing lows of “why do I bother I so clearly suck at this.” It’s undoubtedly why so many of us drink.

Xanax is also helpful, I find.

I am going to try to get all this laundry done and finish cleaning the kitchen before Iris arrives…and I already have a lovely, pleasant buzz from the Bailey’s. Huzzah!

But I still wish I had a Bloody Mary.

Here’s an Iris memory for you:

Love Game

The streak is alive! We got another shoe last night at Muses! Although, truth be told, Paul gets the shoes for us. I don’t think, over the years, I’ve gotten more than two total, if that. Paul is a shoe monster, though, and this year’s is an LSU shoe!

It will go nicely with our Saints shoe.

It is incredibly beautiful today; the high is going to be 80, the sun is out, it’s only slightly humid and there’s a lovely cool breeze as well. There are three parades tonight, and I am doing condom duty at the table this afternoon (again on Monday; with the weekend free for parades and so forth). I hate having to walk home up the parade route; I don’t know if it’s the weather this year or what, but MY GOD is it crowded on the parade route this year. There were so many people out there last night for Muses that the street couldn’t even be cleared for the high school marching bands. I can only imagine what this weekend will be like out there; particularly for Bacchus on Sunday night. We will definitely be out there for Iris and Tucks tomorrow, and will again skip Endymion tomorrow night; I haven’t seen Endymion since we stopped walking up the parade route to the Quarter during it. Saturday night we’ll just hang out at the Lost Apartment and catch up on our TV shows and get rested for Sunday’s all day debacle.

I am so tired already.

Marathon, Greg, not a sprint.

I was so tired yesterday. I had to stock the house since I can’t use the car again until Wednesday (and won’t be able to get to the grocery store until Thursday, since I have a long day on Wednesday) and by the time I got back home I was so tired I could barely function. I did some laundry and the dishes and repaired to my easy chair, desperate to read my Lori Rader-Day novel but I was too exhausted to focus and only got only thirty pages done. Then I walked to my favorite pizza place in the world–That’s Amore in Metairie OPENED A LOCATION IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD–and got us a Chicago-style deep dish pizza…ate two pieces, and actually took a NAP before Paul got home.

But we’re almost there…the finish line is in sight.

Applause

So, I went to see my doctor for my annual check-up and I am HEALTHY. My blood pressure is good, heart rate good, I’ve lost a total of nine pounds since the last time I saw her (and I only started trying a few weeks ago, with time off for Carnival, of course), I’m sleeping well–everything is remarkably better than when I last saw her six months ago. She also gave me a referral to a cardiologist, since we have recently discovered, thanks to the hemorrhagic stroke my mother had just before Christmas, that a congenital heart defect runs in her family (and may be why her father died in his sleep when he was in his late thirties). If I do have it, they may have to to preemptively put a stent in to correct it and prevent me from eventually having a stroke. Yay. But hey–it’s better to know so you can do something about it rather than just having a stroke, right?

I am going to give full credit to my good health to NO DEADLINES.

After work tonight I will have to walk home up the parade route–always fun–and tonight’s parades are Druids and Nyx. Druids is kind of dull, but Nyx is usually fun. I also have tomorrow off so I can run errands and stock our larder since I won’t be able to move the car again until next Wednesday, and of course, tomorrow night is Muses, after two others. Will this be the year our shoe-streak ends? I am a little concerned that it may be. We’ve had a really great run with shoes, though, so can’t really complain too much should a drought occur. But since I can’t move the car, I took the streetcar to see my doctor and then took it all the way back to the Quarter so I could walk the rest of the way to the office. It was a lovely ride–I really should take the streetcar more and go explore, just you know, go see things and play sight-seer in my own home town–and I got to read some more of my book (seriously, peeps, I know it’s taking me a long time to finish it but Lori Rader-Day’s Little Pretty Things is REALLY GOOD), which I hope to finish tomorrow. I’m not sure what to read next; I will certainly keep you in the loop, Constant Reader.

I have been obsessed by a true crime case lately; one that I am peripherally connected to (a friend knows one of the people from the case); which is kind of weird, when I think about it–I also have a connection to the whole Bobby Durst The Jinx mess; again, through some friends. I won’t talk about the case much–it involves a closeted millionaire/entrepreneur being brutally murdered, and the police had arrested a gay porn star for the crime…only to release him recently. I don’t want to write it as an actual true crime book; I’m not a good enough journalist to do something like that. But I think it’s an interesting basis for a novel, and I am chewing around ideas on how to do that–because there are several different angles to take and all of them, at least to me now, are fascinating and interesting. I’m just toying with it for now–I have a couple of other books I’d like to write first–but this part of creating a book, brainstorming and thinking and wondering what point of view you want to have, what you want the book to say–is so much more fun than actually writing it.

Ah, well.

And on that note, back to the spice mines.

Here’s today’s hunk: