Tag: National Guard

Take It Easy

Ah, here we are on a Tuesday morning, and I feel okay. I’m not feeling as achy as I have since Saturday, but there’s some tired still in my legs and the hips feel tired rather than painful, which is definitely a plus this morning. I wound up having to work in the clinic yesterday instead of having an Admin day, which is going to throw this week off to begin with and make me super-tired by the time the weekend rolls around again. Huzzah?

Last night I managed to work on the book despite feeling like I’d been run through the wringer after making some groceries on the way home. I collapsed into my chair once I was finished and caught up on the news before staggering up the stairs to go to bed. I did sleep really well last night, which is always a plus, and feel good, as I’ve already noted. My coffee is going down quite well, and I’m just a little bit hungry, so will be heating up my breakfast sandwich relatively soon. I don’t feel any mental fatigue today, which is always a plus. I think I am working alone in the clinic this morning, but could be wrong; I have been before, after all. I might even be able to sneak out early today, as we have no one booked for this afternoon. We’ll see how the day goes, won’t we? (That staycation just can’t come soon enough for me, you know.)

But overall I cannot complain about anything. The work on the book is going extremely well, and I am really looking forward to getting this done finally and out of my hair. I think I am going to spend October–since I’ll have edits and copy edits to deal with–writing short stories and essays. I am terribly behind on my newsletter, and maybe I can get one sent out this weekend since LSU has a bye-week so there’s not much urgency to watch games Saturday; I don’t even know who is playing. I’ll have the games on during the day (Alabama-Vanderbilt might be the winner of the afternoon time slot) but I want to read and write for the weekend and so will probably not pay much attention–unless it’s a really good game. Looks like Texas is playing Florida this weekend, too, and Florida State-Miami is the big night game of the day. I also kind of feel like I’m coming out from under all the gloom that’s been hanging over my head almost this entire decade, you know? When my mind isn’t foggy or tired, it’s sharp the way it used to be, even if the memory banks don’t work as quickly as they used to (if they work at all); I get the spinning wheel in my brain a lot when I try to remember things.

Yesterday was the two year anniversary of Sparky’s “gotcha” day!

In other exciting news, Governor Landry admitted to a national audience that he is a failure at governance and asked for the National Guard to be deployed in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Hope they’re good at filling potholes, because you know damned well they won’t be going anywhere near the parts of the city that are riddled with crime. They’ll be stationed on Bourbon Street, and maybe Rampart and Canal as well. (I don’t think the Governor, who is all about his ambition and sucking up to the MAGA trash, is aware that he’s confessed to utter failure as a governor, while also admitting that a red state needs federal help because it can’t function properly is a hell of an admission to make; why would any other red state reelect their failed politicians after this? Because racism, that’s why.) Apparently, LSU is also going to be having a “Charlie Kirk Lecture Series.’

Which makes me not mind the loss to Mississippi this past weekend as much as I did.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader, and be grateful you’re not a higher-up in the military, letting you off the hook for the idiotic meeting in DC today.

Every Time I Think of You

It’s very cold in New Orleans this morning–in the low forties–and I am slowly waking up from a very deep and restful sleep due to going to the gym yesterday for the first time in months. I also realized something yesterday as I went through my physical therapy exercises and added a few to get the rest of my body involved; I’ve always been a bit afraid of a re-injury, and my workouts would always taper off and end whenever I would reach the point of getting to a full body, normal workout. I realized it yesterday as I was doing one of my exercises and could feel the old charley-horse thing that meant the repaired muscle was getting fatigued. You can’t overcome a fear without admitting that you have one, you know. My legs feel fatigued this morning, but overall I feel pretty good. I think the real muscle soreness generally kicks in on the second day after the workout, but it’s been a while so I could be very wrong on that score.

Yesterday was very weird. How do you deal with the aftermath of a terrorist attack on your home city? I resisted the urge to lift my embargo on legacy media yesterday (hey, we were attacked!) and doom watch them report on rumors, conjecture, and cover it non-stop with endless talk and nothing substantial. I thought it wiser to wait out the day and then consult nola.com today, once more information has been released. It’s infuriating, of course; how could someone do this to New Orleans, of all places? New Orleans, the most hospitable and welcoming place in the country? But New Orleans makes a good target specifically for that very reason; it’s very welcoming, without question and there are always crowds somewhere to target. I dread the thought of what this is going to mean for the Super Bowl and Carnival, but I imagine it will be very similar to the 2002 Super Bowl, when the military was here in force. I also was remembering what it was like when I came back home from Katrina and there was no police, only the National Guard, and it was surreal seeing a military camouflaged all-terrain truck with machine guns mounted on the hood patrolling the neighborhood. I touched on this very briefly in Murder in the Rue Chartres all those years ago, but then got into the heart of the story and forgot about the Guard being here.

I spent most of yesterday scrolling through social media1 while watching football games on television. The Texas-Arizona State was the best game of the post-season so far; maybe this next round will have better games. I don’t feel vested in it, other than just being idly curious. The Sugar Bowl was postponed for a day–and I imagine that when it does air, alot of the coverage will be about the attack. What a way to start the new year, right? New Orleans has been through a lot over the last five years or so; the Hard Rock Hotel construction site collapsed in January of 2020, and since then we’ve been hit by a major hurricane, and other buildings have collapsed. I was also thinking last night that the last few Super Bowls here have been a bit jinxed; the last one was when there was a power outage in the Superdome after Beyonce performed for about a half an hour, and the one before that was the post 9/11 one. I don’t think there had been one here between 2002 and the Beyonce bowl–Katrina had a lot to do with that–but it’s why the entire city seems to have been under construction this past year. Claiborne Avenue uptown has been torn up for at least two or three years at this point; I never use it anymore to go downtown and it used to be my go-to to get downtown from uptown…but it’s not nearly as bad as the years Rampart was torn up. Yikes, that was miserable.

New Orleans always endures, though, this improbable city that literally makes no sense. No matter how much the Right and MAGA hates Orleans Parish (84% of the vote for Harris/Walz), no matter how much they hate having to rebuild and/or protect the city–letting New Orleans sink or abandoning it–would have an enormous economic impact on the country, as boy-rapist Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert finally had to admit and sign off on the reconstruction after Katrina. The port here has always been–and always will be–vitally important to the economy. New Orleans was so vital that when Jefferson offered to buy it, Napoleon threw in the rest of the Louisiana Territory as lagniappe because all that land had no value without New Orleans...which MAGA Louisiana really hates knowing. So all you mouth-breathers from Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and so forth–keep New Orleans negativity out of your fucking mouths. Sorry you’re stupid and didn’t pay attention in your underfunded schools, but that’s the reality. The economy could take the hit of losing one of your states–but not the loss of New Orleans.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Keep New Orleans in your thoughts, whenever you can spare one, and I may be back later. You never know, and it’s a whole spanking brand new year, after all.

  1. Another reason I was able to avoid legacy media–I was getting my fill of rumors, lies, and horrible MAGA reactions to what happened so I didn’t need to give them eyes or clicks. As always, another two middle fingers raised to the complicit legacy media, may they decline into financial bankruptcy to join with their moral one. ↩︎

Just Ask Your Heart

Thursday and my last day in the office this week. I wasn’t as tired yesterday as I had been the day before, thank the Lord, but was still a bit raggedy as I got to the end of the workday. I was efficient at the office yesterday, but man, there was a very weird vibe to the day. Maybe it was the use of the National Guard on college campuses? I don’t care what you think or what your opinions, values and beliefs are we should never be calling out the military to handle “security” on college campuses. I get that the right hates college students–they always have; they cheered the Kent State shootings fifty-four years ago–and it’s just astonishing to me that no one makes the connections to the last years of the North American colonial period? It was all protests until the war actually started in 1775–the Boston Tea Party was particularly a notable one. What did the British do to maintain order in Boston? They brought in the military to quench and quell dissent, outlawed protesting and criticism of the King and Parliament…and none of it worked, it simply agitated the colonials to more protest and eventually violence. I always laugh a bit when the right wing–the ones who scream about liberties and freedom all the time–call for ending protests, driving cars into protestors, etc. They are the British in this scenario. And yes, the conservative colonists were actually on Britain’s side. It was the radicals and the progressives who defied King and Parliament and created a country.

The right to peaceably assemble and protest is imbedded in our national DNA and included in the Bill of Rights. But no one seems to care about the actual Constitution anymore (looking at you, SCOTUS), just what they think it means so they can defend their indefensible and unconstitutional beliefs and values.

I also wrote a great opening line for my future project The Crooked Y: “I hated the place they took me to after they arrested Mom.”

We did watch some more of Vigil last night, and there’s only one episode left in the first season, which will we watch tonight and most likely move into Season 2. It’s very good; it’s. a murder mystery/suspense thriller where a lot of the action takes place on a British nuclear submarine on patrol. It’s very well written, well acted, and riveting. The British are the best at crime series, seriously–and they are consistently good. I’m not sure why our crime series aren’t as consistently good as theirs are, but there it is.

I continued on my research wormhole yesterday about the French Quarter Stabber–seriously, once I get something in my head it gnaws at me until I give in–and it’s okay, I think. I feel more rested this morning than I have all week, really, and so hopefully that will carry me through the rest of the day and into the evening. I think I’ll probably just come straight home from work tonight, since i can run errands on my lunch break tomorrow, and that way I can get here and get the laundry started while finishing the dishes and doing some writing before Paul gets home. I also want to get back to reading Suicide Notes and even dipping into some poetry. (Who am I?) But I am starting to feel like I am also starting to get it; I like discovering it for myself without having professorial expectations loaded onto me–which always made me hate whatever I was being forced to read unwillingly–and I always love figuring things out for myself. Perhaps I’ll be wrong, but at the same time, everything is dependent on the reader, right, and their interpretations? It’s subjective, so therefore there’s no wrong way of reading it. It’s not like I plan on starting to write it or anything.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. I hope to have a great day where I get a lot done, and perhaps I’ll be able to finish another draft post…stranger things have happened! Thanks for stopping by–I appreciate you taking the time from your very busy day to check in.