Tag: Super Bowl

Do You Believe in Magic

Saturday morning and here we are in the Lost Apartment as New Orleans slowly shakes off it’s blizzard break and returns to what passes as normalcy around here. As I look outside this morning after sleeping really late this morning (I was tired, okay?), the snow is almost completely gone. Yesterday after work I did go to the gym, and we did go to Costco, so I was pretty worn out when that was all completed and didn’t get anything else much done once we got home. We got one of those pre-made Costco pizzas (they really are quite good) which made for an easy dinner, which we ate while watching LSU Gymnastics; they were off last night, alas–but were also missing some of their best athletes. We’d started watching Prime Target on Apple Plus (queer main character? Oh hell to the yes, thank you very much), which we are also enjoying, but…I don’t think we watched anything other than news clips after the meet ended and before we went to bed? I also did my usual Friday chores around here, too–yay, me. Today I need to write and I need to run some errands. I wanted to go make groceries today, but am thinking I may need to wait for a few more days, after the stores are able to take deliveries and restock their shelves; even Costco looked a little picked over yesterday–we still spent over four hundred, and I forgot to look at the price of eggs–and there wasn’t too much traffic, despite the highways and interstate still being closed. I am pretty sure the city is back to what passes for normal around here today. Its cold outside, but sunny and the sky is blue, so whatever bits of snow that are left from the blizzard (it still feels weird saying that, you know?) will most likely melt off today.

It’s been quite a year already, and it’s not even fucking February yet. 2024 seems like it was last century already. This weird past week, though, as I said the other day, was a much needed respite, a forced period of rest for a city still reeling from starting the year with a terrorist attack, with both the Super Bowl and Carnival still on the horizon. I feel like I also kind of needed it, myself–I feel a lot more rested than I did last weekend, of course, and I do think returning to the office on Monday is a nice return to my usual routine. I need to work on the book this weekend as well as some other writing projects that need doing, and of course there are always chores to be done. I did the bed linens and two loads of laundry yesterday, got the sink all cleared out, and finally was able to do some more cleaning around here, too. Tomorrow I’ll walk back over to the gym for another workout–my shoulder and arm are tight and sore a lot more these days, so I am taking it easy for another week before advancing the workout to the next step. I am getting some exercise in, I am burning calories, and so my physical goals should be much easier to achieve this year than in years past. I am feeling more centered than I have in years.

It was also delightful this morning to see that Madison Keys won the Australian Open; good on you, girl! The US even had a man in the semi-finals, too. I’ve not been as big a tennis fan lately as I used to be; the Williams sisters and Rafa retiring left a big gap, and I don’t know many of the players as well as I used to. I guess I’m kind of a homer when it comes to international sport…but it just seems like there’s not been any newer players coming along with the kind of charismatic star power the Williams sisters (and Rafa) had. I really don’t follow figure skating as much as I used to, either; Paul and I primarily focus on US ice dance, of all things; who knew that would gradually become our strongest discipline? We’d even forgotten that US Nationals were this weekend (congratulations to Amber Glenn for winning again), but now that we do know, we can actually watch this weekend (thank God for streaming, right?).

The world continues to burn to the ground all around us, and what else is there left to say? The surrender of everyone to MAGA, from corporations to celebrities to the press, the capitulation in advance, went exactly the way it did in Germany in the 1930s. That’s yet another reason why I think being a writer in these trying times means being an activist. My books, my stories, about queer life through a crime or horror lens, kind of are important in that regard, and as I get older and I become more and more progressive (yes, I am going the opposite direction of the trope that everyone becomes more conservative as they age; hey, don’t blame my generation for the fucking Boomers who sold out everything they believed in after college) I find myself dancing around things in my work. And yes, I do want MAGA voters to suffer, and am saving all my empathy and sympathy for the victims of MAGA voters. I have no sympathy for mediocrities who need the state to made them feel better about their snowflake loser selves, and laughed excitedly about how they were fucking us over. I’m supposed to not want them to suffer the consequences of their actions? People who enjoy the suffering of others and voted for inhumanity? You can miss me with that kind of moral superiority, and if that’s you, just because you think you’re morally superior doesn’t mean you actually are.

And your education certainly doesn’t make you more intelligent and more moral than anyone else. All that means is you knew how to perform for professors by giving them what they wanted, kissing their ass, and not questioning them–which I did all the time, earning their enmity, and the little Napoleons in college English departments aren’t very interested in opinions other than their own correct ones, and punished me accordingly. (I have more publications than all of my professors, across all disciplines.) I don’t like to talk myself up (sing out, Louise!) because it seems arrogant and egocentric, and I don’t like those parts of my personality very much, but yes, I do have more publications than all of my instructors I’ve had throughout the course of my life, so…forgive me for interpreting essays, stories and books differently than a boring Lit professor’s1 (or writing teacher’s) dogmatic devotion to closing their eyes to any new interpretation. I’ve also always felt that you don’t learn by memorizing things; you learn by examining them, thinking about them, and evaluating. Theory is great, but implementation is far far better and way more important.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back at some point.

  1. As long as I live, I will never forgot my Shakespeare professor, talking about the many versions of Hamlet Shakespeare wrote, and how in earlier drafts Queen Gertrude was complicit in the murder of her husband and how that changed. The professor insisted that Shakespeare did this deliberately; which made Hamlet’s dilemma even worse–could he trust his mother? I raised my hand, and pointed out that at the time Hamlet was put on, James I was king of England, and his mother was believed to have been a party to his father’s murder, and married his murderer and the parallel was too close for comfort. He dismissed this with a condescending wave of his hand and said, “Shakespeare was an artist and wouldn’t worry about such mundane things” to which I replied, “several months in the Tower of London and running the risk of being hung for insulting the King isn’t a mundane thing.” That was the last day I went to class, only showing up for tests, and my paper was “Murderous Mothers: The Parallels Between Queen Gertrude and Mary Queen of Scots”, for which I did a lot of historical research. The paper got an A, and I also got one in the class, and I never really trusted professors again after that. ↩︎

Bad Case of Loving You

And it is now Saturday morning in the Lost Apartment and all is well. Sparky and I are the only creatures stirring for now, and it’s kind of nice. It’s chilly again this morning, but that’s fine; all I have left to do this weekend is go to the gym and make groceries, and I haven’t decided whether to do that today or tomorrow; probably today so I can get it all over with and won’t have to leave the house tomorrow. Decisions, decisions. I need to do some writing and reading this weekend and some cleaning, too–I’ll have to make a list at some point.

Yesterday was a very good day. I was a little sore and achy–still am–from my return to the gym on New Year’s Day. I got all my work done, and then we made a Costco run; which wore me out and after getting home, lugging all of it inside, and then putting it all away did me in. I did read some more of Winter Counts, which I am really enjoying and hope to finish this weekend. I do have some emails to answer this weekend, and I slept deeply and well last night–Sparky didn’t annoy me out of bed until about eight thirty this morning, so that’s super cool and nice as well. I do feel rested, which is kind of nice, too. There’s no rush for me to run those errands today, either; I can run them at any time today I so choose. No college football today–and I doubt I’m going to watch any more of it this year; I am not only not a fan of any of the final four, but if I had to pick the four teams I absolutely wouldn’t want in the finals, it would be these four (there are a few that can be swapped out for Texas, and I don’t mind Penn State–but ‘not minding’ is a lot different than “that’s who I’m going to root for.” As far as I am concerned, the season is over. The Super Bowl is in a few weeks, which means getting home is going to be challenging for the next few weeks as they start closing streets in the CBD to get ready for it all. I don’t care about that, either–as long as neither the Bears nor the Cowboys nor the Falcons are in it.

I did write some yesterday, too–which was enormously pleasing. I have things I need to do this weekend, and right now I frankly don’t want to do something of them, but might as well get them out of the way. I’ll probably finish this and read for a while, to finish waking up and everything and ease my way into the rest of the day. We did watch LSU Gymnastics last night; they ran away with the meet against Iowa State, and they looked terrific. They were also getting dramatically underscored, which was puzzling, but they still won by over three points. I then spent the rest of the evening watching old clips from Game of Thrones, which I still kind of miss. When the show was firing on all cylinders, it was really was extraordinary; the production values, the acting, and the writing was all en pointe, and provided some of the best scenes of television ever produced. The Battle of Blackwater Bay? The demolition of the sept? The battle of the loot train? The Battle of the Bastards? The death of Ramsey Bolton? Lady Olenna Tyrell’s final dagger to the heart before expiring? The collapse of the Wall? Arya wiping out House Frey? The character arc of Sansa Stark? It really was exceptional television, even if they did blow the final season–and that is just a smattering of the show’s great moments; there are too many to really list. Paul and I were actually talking about rewatching the whole series again–the plots and subplots were so interwoven and plentiful that there’s a shit ton we do not remember about the show to begin with. But…time. The show last eight seasons, every episode is at least an hour long, and who has that kind of time? Maybe when I retire I can make the rewatch A Thing.

Stranger things, after all, have happened. I’d also like to rewatch The West Wing, if for no other reason than it was my comfort watch during the Bush II administration.

I’m also doing much better with my time issues; I am trying not to be motivated by the clock anymore and worrying about wasting time because I have so much else to do. I don’t have that much else to do anymore, thank you very much, and now that the anxiety is under control, I don’t get as frustrated as I used to or get stressed out as much: I don’t have TIME for this! used to run through my brain every time I would get delayed or stuck in traffic or something, and it’s really nice to not have to deal with that anymore. The solution to the Super Bowl street closures is simple–take the Interstate home from work every day, even though the bridge traffic always backs up. I used to tend to get very frustrated and stressed out every time I took the Interstate because of the bumper-to-bumper back up; now I don’t care and can just sit there and listen to whatever is playing through the stereo in my car. (I also forget it has a working CD player; I should start listening to my old CD’s in the car.)

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines and read for a few hours before deciding how to divvy up today’s tasks. Have a lovely Saturday wherever you are, Constant Reader, and I’ll check back in with you again later–or tomorrow morning.

Yes, I am definitely pushing my boundaries with the social media puritans, aren’t I?

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. ↩︎

I Got My Mind Made Up

Woke up to a new year! How exciting….although it doesn’t feel any different than yesterday, other than I don’t have to go into the office today, which is awesome. And of course, as soon as I signed into social media, I saw DM’s and posts asking me if Paul and I were “okay”, which was puzzling, so I went to NOLA.com and I guess there was a terrorist that attacked Bourbon Street last night, driving his truck into the crowd and shooting at police officers? I just saw where the attack occurred–Bourbon and Canal intersection–because I was wondering how that was possible since all the blocks are blocked off to traffic all night, so I knew it had to be an intersection on Bourbon Street, as those are only places on Bourbon you can have a car, or drive. How terrible–and I bet they lock the whole city down for the Super Bowl; shades of the 2002 Super Bowl here after 9/11–when I was coming home from training a client and was stopped at Poydras Street so the military (complete with tanks) could parade from the river to the Superdome in an act of theater designed, no doubt, to make us feel safer; it had the opposite effect on me. It just made me think about how I missed the days where we couldn’t imagine something like that happening.

Yeesh, indeed.

My New Year’s entries are generally about my goals for the new year, and I always explain why I have goals instead of resolutions–everyone inevitably breaks their resolutions, so I’ve never felt they were as important as setting goals for the new year. I don’t always achieve those goals, but they have been enormously helpful in the past and it really feels like I’ve done something when I accomplish one of the goals, or the goal makes positive change in my life, which is always very pleasant. One goal is to continue not participating in the legacy media, by never clicking or putting eyes on their broadcasts or articles. I will never subscribe to the Times or the Post ever again, and I do feel this goal is one that can be set and is completely attainable.

Another goal is to not do any emotional labor for anyone or anything that isn’t Paul, Sparky, my dad, or myself. I’ve been pretty good about that throughout 2024, and it is definitely one of the better things I did this past year was close myself off to other people’s problems. I am going to continue to not attend mystery conferences and conventions this year, and one of those important goals is to not financially support places that allow rampant homophobia and then do nothing when things are reported to them. I’m certainly not taking shit from anyone ever again in this community, so my decision to stay away and not participate in the community anymore is probably for the best for all y’all, because I’m calling this shit out now whenever it happens and since most straight people prefer no conflict, my calling shit out and calling out people for trying to gloss over outright homophobia from now on isn’t going to be fun for people anyway. Heaven forbid the racists and sexists and homophobes be made to feel uncomfortable, but it’s okay for us to feel unwelcome, uncomfortable and unwanted. Maybe we can start calling them convocations instead of conferences and conventions, since keeping Klan attendees is more important than keeping the people they target. FUCK ALL THE WAY OFF. And racist Bouchercon attendees? Feel free to go be racist on Bourbon Street at one in the morning and see how that ends for your skank ass. And for the record, hate is what leads to things like the attack on Bourbon Street last night, so by all means let’s keep encouraging that kind of behavior by glossing it over and acting like it’s not a big deal and it’s just “free speech” until someone is killed. American hatred, I swear, is like kudzu.

The most important goal for the year is to focus more on my writing career and give it the energy and the oxygen it’s always deserved but never got from me. I’ve always felt like I’ve always made my writing the lowest thing on my priority list, and that juggling between day job responsibilities, life responsibilities and the writing itself (let alone the promotion side of things) has always ended with me feeling like my writing isn’t a priority; part of the problem I have always had with saying no to people and to doing things is that fear and anxiety so controlled me and my actions for so long that I’d always end up making it the lowest priority–and “friends” who’d blithely dismiss my “well, I have a book due” with “you always get it done” aren’t really friends; any friends who’d want you to put aside one of the most important things in your life to do something for them aren’t really friends. Writing is what makes me happiest, and not writing always makes me miserable. Part of the depression of the last year or so was enhanced because I wasn’t writing–and whenever I tried, it was hard to get words down and they were terrible; I did some pretty terrible writing this year (as I am finding as I edit these first six chapters of the next Scotty; I did some work on that yesterday after work which was cool) and plan to do some more today, too. I need to get the ebook of Jackson Square Jazz edited and sent to the formatter–BIG priority, especially since it’s the twentieth anniversary of the trade paperback and its Lambda nomination (the hardcover came out the year before). I need to get my website finished, and I need to learn how to do promotion in the digital age, don’t I? Kind of sad that I’ve been doing this for twenty three years this January 20th, and still don’t know what I am doing. I also want to push myself more with my writing going forward, too. This Scotty is a tricky one, since I want the entire thing to take place between the arrival of a hurricane’s first bands and have the story finished before the final band passes and the storm is completely over.

I also need to be better organized going forward, and need to stay on top of things better. I need to file as I go and clean as I go–thanks again, McDonalds, for burning that into my head–and that includes cleaning out the attic and the storage space so I can stop paying for it. My memory is pretty much gone these days, so I need to be better about making lists and consulting them (they don’t do any good if you never look at them), as well as doing things when I get home and I am still in work-mode from being at the office. It doesn’t hurt to feed Sparky, file stuff, do dishes and so forth before writing or reading. I also need to be better about reading; if I read for an hour or so every day I’ll gradually get through that TBR pile for sure. I also need to be better about keeping house.

I know I say this every year but I am going to be healthier this year, and by that I mean taking better care of myself. After Mom died, I intended to be better about all this stuff, but I’d also injured myself so I couldn’t go to the gym either. And I did get some of it taken care of–I got hearing aids so I can hear better and finally spent the money to get my teeth fixed–and of course I needed about a full year to completely recover physically from the surgery. But if I stretch every morning when I get up, and if I go to the gym two or three times per week, and take walks on the days I don’t go to the gym–I’ll get healthier. Sounds easy, doesn’t it, but the reality is much harder to stay on track. I’ve also noticed in the last few weeks that I am not as groggy and tired as I was getting up so early for such a long time; I think I am finally adjusting to it, and I am not always tired when I get home from work, either.

All attainable and doable, I am pretty certain. So on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines and get some things done around here so I can head over to the gym. I am going to read until it’s time to go to the gym. Have a great day, Constant Reader, and I’ll check back in with you again at some point.

I Care

How is it only Wednesday? It feels like it should be at least Friday by now, doesn’t it?This has been the longest week, seriously. It’s cold again this morning–in the forties–and the rain has stopped. The bipolarity of winter in New Orleans is something I don’t think I’ll ever get used to, no matter how long I live here. I don’t feel tired this morning, but the cold does make me want to get back in bed again and burrow beneath the covers. I was all kinds of warm and comfortable under my blankets this morning when the alarm went off, and by the second beep Sparky was up, trying to get my attention to get up and feed him. I don’t feel worn out, but I don’t think I’ll make it through the afternoon without my energy flagging. Ah, well.

I even left work early yesterday for my podiatrist appointment, and the good news is the toe has healed perfectly and he was most pleased with not only how quickly it healed but how properly as well. His absolute delight when he looked at was very clear. (Apparently, I am some kind of medical marvel of healing; Paul heals pretty fast, too–how many people are discharged the same day they get a hip replaced?) But that’s a good thing, and there was some callus where he’d cut the nail and the scab had been, so he got rid of that with an exacto knife (it didn’t hurt at all) and then I was done and walking out to head home. I wasn’t even super-tired when I got home, but I worked for a while and that wore me out enough to finally put it all aside and relax for the rest of the evening. I hate that I am not catching up as quickly as I would like to, but that’s life, you know?

I also keep forgetting the Super Bowl is here in February, which will make getting around the city so much easier. Yay. And of course, there’s a massive facelift (or at least temporary patchwork) being done to New Orleans to get ready for it, so you never know what detours lie in your future.

I also watched Matt Baume’s documentary about Lance Loud, the gay son of the first reality TV show, An American Family, from the early 1970s on PBS. we didn’t watch it, but everyone was talking about it, and I remember hearing about the gay oldest son, and how the marriage ended in a divorce. I think my parents thought being filmed for a television show was exploitative and kind of gross? My mother certainly wasn’t one to get into reality shows–she even stopped watching soaps about twenty years ago. I was never really sure why, but Dad has told me over and over again about how deeply conservative she was (trust me, I knew but it still came as a surprise–I always thought it was Dad and she was just trying to make him happy. Ah, the things we are led to believe as children but never really give much thought to…Dad became more conservative because she was so conservative), so I have to assume the soap thing (I used to watch them with her when I was still in school) might have had something to do with that? I know my sister stopped watching them because they encouraged you to root for adulterers. My grandmother also used to watch them when I was a kid (I actually think she was the one who got me and my sister started on Dark Shadows), but also stopped. Anyway, it was an interesting documentary, and I learned a lot more about Lance Loud than I’d ever really known before, other than he was the gay son on that show.

The tale of Robin Hoody keeps getting more and more interesting the more information that comes out about him, and I keep being more and more amused at the way the country has almost completely united (see what I did there?) behind him. That really should tell everyone about the mood of the country, shouldn’t it? I keep being amused at how the story is being reported, and how much resources the NYPD expended on searching for this person while no one is even talking about the immigrant stabbed to death by racists on the same day in the same city, and certainly the NYPD isn’t making that a top priority. I’d love to see the price tag for justice for a health insurance executive, and why the NYPD and the media made this into such an insane priority. Yes, by all means, do tell me about how everyone is equal in the eyes of the law! And of course, the more information that comes out about both shooter and victim, the more noble the shooter sounds and the more awful the victim was. The media was certainly unprepared for the way people reacted, and the fact that the media so completely misread the mood of the country makes you wonder, again, just how shitty they are at their jobs; and the right-wing grifters attempt to frame this as a right-left issue blew up their faces…as some angry Americans slowly began to realize the media they consume manipulates them to make money, and people saw it as more of a class war kind of thing that apparently everyone has just been waiting for to happen.

And that’s what has the elites and their puppet media terrified. They cannot allow the country’s division to heal and anyone who is not an elite must be persuaded to fight a culture war when the real problem is and has always been the class war the billionaires have been waging against everyone else since Ronald Reagan was sworn into office in 1981. I also think a lot of the angry people are recognizing that they voted in the rule of an oligarchy and are not very happy about that, either. For the record, I don’t have any sympathy for those who voted for this and now have regrets. Too little, too late, too bad, so sad. You voted to make people suffer, and sadly, you’re also one of those. I can’t even begin to tell you how horrible those people were before the election, and how they absolutely refused to listen to anything anyone had to say.

And the newspaper coverage and most editorial commentary has shown how deeply out of touch they actually are from everyday citizens, and how they prop up the elites at every possible turn. Imagine if the media hadn’t gotten sucked into the cult of Trump in the 1980s and started turning him into a celebrity for no good reason. Seeing them trying to lead ‘the resistance’ after doing everything they could to reelect him (so much for that “liberal media bias,” right, Richard Nixon?) is not only craven, but disgusting and people are starting to see very clearly what our “news media” actually has become: completely incompetent and not good at their jobs. The news shouldn’t be a for-profit business, just like health care should not be.

And on that note, I am bundling up and heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and here’s hoping the rest of this week flies by.

Screenshot

Da Ya Think I’m Sexy

Lundi Gras, aka Orpheus Monday, and I have taken the day off from work. I have to make groceries and lay in supplies since we’ll be trapped in the neighborhood except for a brief six or seven hour window after Orpheus and before Zulu tomorrow morning. I am up early because of PT at ten this morning, and here’s hoping I can get this done before it’s time for me to fly. It looks like a lovely day out there already, which means a hopefully lovely night for parades. Orpheus is my favorite night parade, mainly because I love Ole Smokey, the Orpheus train float, which is gorgeous. Orpheus also throws a shit ton. I did very well at Iris on Saturday morning, and while my endurance was sapped, I am glad I started going to parades again this year after missing last year. My moods this year are all over the place, since this is when Mom was in hospice last year. The anxiety medication works, of course, but even it isn’t strong enough to conquer grief, I guess.

I worked on the house yesterday a bit but my mind was too fatigued to read, which was a real bummer. I want to write this afternoon after I get home; time really slips through your fingers the older you get. I do need to work on the house some more today as well. We also streamed more of Abbott Elementary, keeping track of the Super Bowl on my phone. I did watch the boring first half, so gladly changed the channel when Paul came downstairs to take a break from working. Ironically, the second half turned out to be a lot more exciting, with the Chiefs winning in overtime 25-22. That sound we all heard last night was MAGA heads exploding. They are still exploding this morning–especially the MAGA christians (lower c deliberate, not a typo)–who’ve decided that the only Black woman in the Kelce suite (Ice Spice), who was wearing an upside down cross, is a Satanist because of it. The horrors! Satanism!

I’m sure it has nothing to do with her being Black. Might as well include a side of racism, right?

Fucking idiots. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Have fun in hell, apostates. I do love calling them on their sanctimony with a Bible verse. 1 Timothy 2:12 is my favorite when they’re women…

But then again, we’ve known they were dangerously stupid morons since 2015, and every day is a new lesson in their dangerous stupidity.

Heavy sigh.

I did do some good scribbling in my cool new journal yesterday as well. It’s always lovely when you’re starting a new journal, with all those fresh and clean pages to fill in, and there’s always a bit of sadness when I finish the old one. This last one was red, and one of the things I need to do either today or tomorrow is transcribe any notes on any story or book or essay that’s written in there that I haven’t already. I think I’ve managed somehow to get everything from the early part of the journal done, but you never know. If I don’t transcribe them, I need to at least put sticky notes on important pages so they are easier for me to find.

My memory continues to suck royally, but the lack of anxiety about it is nice (thank you, new medications!). I’m still trying to adapt to this new world for me; and of course I worry that my lack of anxiety is going to be a problem with motivating myself to write. I don’t think I’ve actually finished anything since the change in meds, but that was also correlated to my surgery and the recovery and the loss of stamina/endurance….which has me wondering how long I’ll be able to last at Orpheus, especially since I’ll be exhausted from PT this morning. I just checked the weather and it’s going to be windy and chilly tonight, in the low 50s, which is also unappealing.

Sigh.

Ah, well. It is what it is, I guess. So I am going to put on my PT clothes, finish my grocery list, and get a little more cleaned up before leaving for my appointment at PhysioFit. I will probably be back later. One never knows.

Hot Stuff

Sunday morning and everything aches. I went out to Iris yesterday by myself (see previous post) and had a lovely time. It was indeed a gorgeous day and a wonderful reminder of how much I love everything about Carnival–and why I put up with the challenges of living inside the box; because once you are safely home and have parked your car, the convenience of the parades being only a half-block away simply cannot be beat. I got a lovely haul of beads, caught numerous plushies and cups and various other toys–including a super-hero Iris cape–which I gave to the children who were near where I was standing. I also gave away a lot of beads. Despite my gradual exhaustion that came on slowly, it was marvelous and despite having to spend the rest of the day in my easy chair (and still feeling the muscle fatigue this morning) I do not regret going out there, just as I will not regret going out there for Orpheus tomorrow.

I guess the Super Bowl is tonight and I also suppose we may end up watching. I don’t really care about either team that much, honestly; I lived in Kansas so I have a connection to the Chiefs, and I also lived in California and San Francisco is the motherland of my people. Of course, I’ll wind up rooting for Taylor’s boyfriend because it is fun watching the MAGAts lose their minds over this. I also love that “liberals” have now ruined football for them. They can’t root for Taylor’s boyfriend so they’ll root for the queer homeland and Nancy Pelosi’s team?

Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! Eat shit and die, MAGAts. You don’t own football, either.

Paul stayed up late Friday night working and so he was asleep until shortly after I came in from the parades to find a toy for Sparky on our doorknob from the neighbor ladies; it’s one of those serpentine tunnels for cats, and Sparky loves his already. I think I’m going to get him some more toys once i get the house back into some semblance of order. I am going to try to work on that today and work on some writing as well; I also want to spend some time reading Lina Chern’s book, which I’ll probably do after I finish this post. It’s quite good actually, despite my taking so long to read it–which definitely should not be seen as a criticism of the book, which will get its own entry at some point. Once he got up we watched My Best Friend’s Exorcism on Prime. It’s based on the Grady Hendrix novel, and I do need to read his work. (I really loved Paperbacks from Hell, which was his first book, about the horror boom of the 1970’s thru the early 1990’s.) He’s also openly gay, and the movie is terrific. It’s set in the 1980’s, and while I was a teenager in the 1970’s I was only in my twenties during the 1980’s, so all of it–cultural references, clothes, the music–was also pleasant nostalgia for me. (The 1980’s was a difficult time for me, but I really need to confront that decade and my memories and move past them at some point.)

I then showed Paul the pilot for Abbott Elementary, and we then binged the entire first season and well into the second before it was time for me to call it a night. This show is amazing, and I had always meant for us to get around to it. I’m glad we finally are watching, because the cast is fantastic; the writing is sharp, crisp and funny; and the characters are fun and interesting. Highly recommended, and looking forward to getting back into it before watching the Super Bowl (or not. I can certainly follow the game on social media).

And on that note, I am bringing this to a close. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader, and I’ll catch you again later.

It’s Raining Men

The first song I ever danced to in a gay bar was, quite naturally, “It’s Raining Men.”

I never said I wasn’t a stereotype, did I?

I was twenty-one the first time I ever set foot in a gay bar. (If there were gay bars anywhere near me in Kansas, I had no idea) It was in Fresno, California, of all places; where I spent the 80’s and which I often lovingly refer to as “Topeka in the Valley.” It wasn’t much of anything, really; a small building on Blackstone Avenue, I think just past Olive, and near the off-ramp for the new cross-town highway in an attempt to alleviate traffic on the main streets of the city (it may have been further north). The bar was called the Express, and someone I worked with–the first obviously gay man I ever knew, and certainly the first one who was out and proud and not ashamed of it–took me one night after work. I was nervous as hell. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, and I remember it was dark and crowded. There was a bigger front room with the bar, and there was a smaller dance floor further in the back. We arrived–I didn’t recognize the song that was playing–got a beer (he got a vodka and cranberry), and then the next song started up. I didn’t know it, had never heard it before, but he dragged me out onto the dance floor and yes, the song was quite a jam. I loved it, and rather self0-consciously danced my ass off (I always loved to dance). My friend later told me the song was by the Weather Girls, who used to sing back-up for Sylvester, and it was called “It’s Raining Men.” The song was utterly ridiculous–it still is–but those powerhouse vocals, the driving beat, and the absolute joy in the idea that all you had to do was “rip off the roof and stay in bed” so a hot man will drop in from the sky for you? How could gay men not embrace the song? I bought the single at Tower Records a few days later, and every time that song played, I’d be out on the dance floor. Even now, when I hear it, I always think back to that first night I went to a gay bar.

HIV/AIDS was already a thing, but we didn’t know much about it in Fresno; it seemed like something new and scary but maybe no worse than some other new diseases that had been discovered in the 1970’s/early 1980’s. The rare yet terrifying information and reporting on it referred to it as GRID. It eventually claimed that co-worker who took me to my first gay bar, and his roommate, who was the one who told me years later that the co-worker (whose name I cannot recall, I just know it started with a K) was in the hospital, dying. “It’s Raining Men” always reminds me of him; always takes me back to that first time when I so nervously paid my cover charge and flashed my ID and walked into my first ever gay bar. There was another gay bar in Fresno, the Red Lantern, that was in a much shoddier (“dangerous”) part of town. (Gay bars, back in the day, were never in the best neighborhoods. Tracks in Ybor City in the early 90’s–when I lived in Tampa–was also not in the best neighborhood. Ybor City did begin gentrifying before I moved away, but originally? Yeah, not the best neighborhood.) I went there a few times as well–made friends there, made friends in the other bar, too. I lost all those friends, of course, and their names and faces are also gone, more lives lost to the mists of time in my memory. It seems a bit shameful to not be able to remember the names and faces of the first people who knew a part of me I’d never let anyone see before, but they also didn’t know me in that I kept the other part of my life secret from them.

It’s very strange, because I decided to google the gays bars of Fresno while I was writing this and apparently the Express closed in 2013? I don’t think it stayed in the same location–according to the site I found it had also been called “708” before becoming the Express again; who knows what that was all about. But the Red Lantern is still there on Belmont Avenue, in the same location; how wild is that? That’s a pretty long-lived gay bar for a place like Fresno, really. I remember in Houston there was JR’s, and Heaven, and maybe another one there in the Montrose district. But I didn’t start spending a lot of my weekend evenings in gay bars until I moved to Tampa. Tracks in Ybor City and Howard Avenue Station were the two primary gay bars when I lived there; and there was Bedrox on Clearwater Beach–which was the gay section.

And of course, there are gay bars everywhere in New Orleans. I haven’t set foot in one in a number of years, and may never do so again. I’m old; spending the night dancing would end with me in the hospital, or needing days to recover.

I don’t know what gay bars are like now because I’ve not been a part of that culture for a very long time–we haven’t even done condom outreach during special weekends in the bars in years anymore–which is why it’s hard for me to write about Scotty being still a party-boy. His age in the book I just finished and turned in is roughly forty-three or forty-four; after Katrina when I had to actually pick a time for the books to have been set (Katrina couldn’t be ignored), I decided that the Southern Decadence where Scotty met both Frank and Colin was in 2004, Jackson Square Jazz was that Halloween, and Mardi Gras Mambo was Carnival 2005. Scotty had just turned twenty-nine in Bourbon Street Blues, which meant he was roughly born in 1976, which works with the other timelines, making him twelve or thirteen when the Cabildo caught fire the last time. While the other books can be more amorphous, obviously Who Dat Whodunnit was set in January of 2010, right before the Saints won the Super Bowl. With the pandemic starting in 2020–which I will deal with at some point–this one had to take place before the world shut down, so I am thinking it’s May of 2019. I don’t want to skip ahead a year to the pandemic, so Quarter Quarantine Quadrille will be further in the future. I kind of want to do Decadence again in another book–with Scotty older but not much wiser–but am not entirely sure. I also would like to really do a Scotty Halloween book, and maybe even a hurricane evacuation one, I don’t know.

I am, however, very glad that I did write those first three Scotty books, when I was enmeshed in gay bar culture, because I’m glad it’s preserved in fiction. That world is gone now–washed away when the levees failed and the city rebuilt. Someone once told me I was the only person to document that pre-Katrina gay male existence, of going out to bars and being promiscuous and dancing all night long and drinking too much and occasionally dipping into party drugs.

I’m also kind of glad modern gays don’t have to use the weekends and gay bars as a place to let loose and be as free and gay as possible, which they couldn’t do during the week. Friday nights were always a relief, a respite from a cold and unloving world that judged us harshly and wished us harm.

I don’t miss the bright lights, the cigarette smoke (that’s how long it’s been), the stench of male sweat and the smell of poppers in the air as the deejay spins another banger. I mean, I do, but not in a sad kind of way; those memories are lovely and they make me a little wistful for the days when gay bars weren’t clogged with bachelorette parties and obnoxious drunk straight girls. But those weren’t the good old days, really; we had no rights and our sex lives were against the law; the few legal protections we have now were goals back then, something we could strive to achieve sometime in the distant future. I certainly never thought Lawrence would decriminalize my sex life and Obergefell would make it legal for Paul and I to marry; I never thought those things would happen during my lifetime. I didn’t expect to see an openly gay member of the Presidential cabinet; out queer characters as leads in television shows and movies–none of these things seemed possible to that closeted twenty-one year old who walked wide-eyed into the Express and went out to dance to “It’s Raining Men.”

I had no idea what the future held for me or for my community that night. In some ways I wish I could let that kid know everything would be okay and his life would turn out so much better than he ever dared dream…but knowing might change things, and I wouldn’t want to change anything that would take away the life I live now, because I love it.

Start Me Up

I’m driving back to New Orleans today, planning to stop by the hospice on my way out of town. I have to work tomorrow, and while yes this is difficult and hard, the rest of the world didn’t stop turning and I can’t wallow in misery, as much as I would love to do just exactly that. Mom is still hanging on, but it could be any moment or it could be days; there’s no way of knowing. She’s no longer responsive, and I do absolutely feel like the worst person who ever lived leaving today; that guilt is probably going to hang around for a while. But we’ve gotten a lot of things worked out, I was here and was able to say goodbye, and I will probably cry a bit when I leave the hospice and get in my car to drive home because I won’t see my mother alive again. I’m extremely grateful that I was able to get up here (thank you, thoughtful employer and credit cards) to say goodbye. I am extremely grateful for the rest of my family, who live up here and have born the brunt of everything since the initial stroke several years ago (more guilt to live with for however long I have left), and for taking such great care of both of my parents. The hospice is wonderful and their staff–I can’t imagine doing this kind of work; it takes a special kind of person, and they are very good at it.

And I think my job can be hard sometimes. Get over yourself, bitch.

I also want to thank those of you who emailed, DMed, or responded to either the post here or wherever on social media you saw it. The kindness and generosity was appreciated, deeply. I know I am not always the most gracious person in the world (as I have taken to saying, “my life has been nothing more than an endless series of awkward social interactions”), and in many cases I don’t know how to react or respond to other peoples’ kindnesses to me and wind up muddling through somehow and giving offense. I don’t know when you’re supposed to say thank you or send cards, and am always certain that whatever I wind up doing is the wrong thing. I have no social graces or etiquette. I can’t make decent small talk which is why I always wind up drinking too. much at parties and conferences, and my inevitable knee-jerk response to any situation in which I feel tense or awkward or uncomfortable is to become a clown of sorts; and one thing I realized while up here this week is my sense of humor comes from my family. All of us–my parents and my sister–have this dark sense of humor, and we tease each other mercilessly; my nieces and nephews are much the same and their spouses have acclimated to our strange family dynamic. I recognize now that I developed my quickness (I am hesitant to label it as wit) with retorts and rejoinders as self-defense within my family.

And apparently people think I’m funny. I’ve been told that enough times that I have to actually start owning the label, even though I don’t think I’m particularly funny; I guess it’s because I’m not trying to be funny? It’s just how I am; and it isn’t something I actually trust. When I think about being funny, I inevitably wind up not being funny because I’m trying too hard. I also am worried because now people think I am entertaining and that’s another kind of pressure to put on someone who already suffers from anxiety that amplifies when I have to speak in front of an audience, whether as moderator, panelist, reader, or speaker. Oh, God, everyone thinks I’m going to be funny is the kind of thought that makes my palms, underarms, and feet get damp. Sometimes I think I should just relax and let go and not worry and fret so much, but then–that wouldn’t really be me, would it?

I’m tired this morning–drained physically and mentally–and am dreading the drive. It’s apparently Super Bowl Sunday, so I don’t imagine there will be a lot of traffic on southwest bound highways, and I should get to New Orleans well after today’s parades end so getting home won’t be an issue. I think once I depart I am going to have to get a latte from Starbucks or something to really help me wake up and be alert. I’ll be listening to Carol Goodman’s The Stranger Behind You in the car on the way, and I am not really sure what the grocery situation is going to be once I get back home–but there’s a two day respite from the parades so I should be able to make groceries over the next two days. I guess I’m not really in the mood for Carnival this year, which I suppose is no big surprise; I was already kind of dreading this before Mom’s massive stroke last Wednesday (was it only five days ago? Really?), and now it is something I just have to endure for the next nine or ten days before Ash Wednesday. Yay. And I also have to figure out what I am supposed to be doing and where I am with everything in my life–I honestly don’t really remember anything. And of course I have to go into the office tomorrow morning, too. Heavy heaving sigh.

Ah, well, this too shall pass–and on that note, I am going to start packing. Have a great Super Bowl Sunday, Constant Reader.

Who Dat Whodunnit

Who dat? Who dat? Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?

I am a very proud member of Who Dat Nation, and have been since we moved here in 1996. I never really paid a lot of attention to the NFL before moving to New Orleans; I vaguely was aware of who was good and who wasn’t–and I knew very certainly that the Saints had routinely been one of the worst football teams, consistently, in the league since they were formed in 1966. You couldn’t not be aware of how hopelessly bad the Saints were, year in and year out. I always root for underdogs–a particularly American trait, I might add, which is another good essay topic (how we always root for underdogs, especially in our entertainment–film, television, books–but in the real world we either look the other way or actually pile-on. We all feel bad for poor bullied Carrie White in Stephen King’s Carrie and hate the cruel kids…but how many of us ever stood up for some kid being bullied in school? My experience as the bullied is NONE.)–and so I always wanted to see the Saints somehow turn their program around. Paul and I always watched the games–or had them on–when they aired; there were many times the games were blacked out locally because they didn’t sell out the Superdome.

Three things were inevitable in New Orleans: hot summers, termites in the spring, and the Saints would suck in the fall. When we first moved to Louisiana LSU was also in a downturn slump; some seasons they’d win, some they’d lose, but they were rarely, if ever, in contention for the conference title. I had a Saints ball cap and a Saints T-shirt, of course, but I was an idle fan of theirs for a very long time.

As with so many other things, my attitude towards the Saints was completely changed by Hurricane Katrina.

It was the best of times.

It was the craziest of times.

Well, what it really had to be was the end times, which was the only logical explanation for what was going on in the city of New Orleans.

Pigs grew wings and nested in the branches of the beautiful love oaks everywhere in the city. Some thought the pilot light in hell had gone out, so that icicles hung from the noses of shivering demons in the realm of the dark lord. Others started watching the horizon for the arrival of the Four Horsemen, for surely the Apocalypse must be coming. Surely the earth was tilting on its axis. Maybe aliens would land in Audubon Park, or the Mississippi River would start flowing backward.

Anything and everything was possible, because the Saints were winning.

GEAUX SAINTS!

People who don’t live in the South don’t really understand how important football is down here. Football is more than a religion in the Deep South. I’m not sure what it is–my mom claims it’s because the South lost the Civil War–but it’s true. On Saturdays, when the colleges play their games, the entire region comes to a complete halt. People live and die by their teams–whether it’s LSU, Ole Miss, Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Georgia or Tennessee–and how they face on Saturday. I myself grew up cheering for the LSU Tigers–even though attending Vanderbilt was a family tradition on my mother’s side. Whenever Papa Fontenot gives me crap for dropping (well, flunking is probably a more accurate word) out after my sophomore year, I give him a withering look and reply, “Maybe I’d have done better at LSU.

That always shuts him up.

I don’t think even the Saints organization knew how much the team actually meant to New Orleans until they tried to move the team after Katrina.

Everyone knows the Superdome was damaged by Katrina and the aftermath. I’ll never forget driving back into the city in either late September or early October and seeing it as I came around that curve in I-10 just past Metairie Road and the cemeteries; I wrote in Murder in the Rue Chartres that it resembled a half-peeled hard-boiled egg. One of the saddest things for me about seeing the wreckage of the Lost Apartment was finding my beloved Saints ball-cap lying on the rug in the living room and consumed by black mold. It seemed so symbolic of everything that had happened to us and our city.

Obviously, the Saints had nowhere to play home games and arrangements had to be made. Some games were played at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, others in San Antonio–and San Antonio made it very clear they would be more than happy to give them a permanent home.

It felt like the Saints organization was not only stabbing New Orleans in the back, but the entire state. I know I took it very personally; the city had supported and loved that team through decades of mediocrity if not outright suckage, and now when the city is at its lowest point, they’re going to move to San Antonio? But the NFL wasn’t having it–Tom Benson always made it seem like it was his decision, but the NFL was committed to New Orleans and wouldn’t let the Saints leave. The Dome was renovated and fixed in record time; the season tickets for 2006 sold out for the first time in years, and the new Saints–with our new coach and quarterback–debuted on Monday night football against the hated Atlanta Falcons. I wasn’t even aware of it, I was paying so little attention to everything going on around the country and world, to be honest. I ran my errands that day and noticed Saints flags were everywhere and people were wearing Saints jerseys and there was this strange sense of excitement in the air. Paul and I were living in the carriage house and we only had this tiny little black-and-white television, but we watched that night. And when Steve Gleason blocked that punt and the Saints recovered in the end zone–we both cried as we jumped up and down and screamed. (Everyone remembers the punt, but the entire game was amazing from beginning to end.) People call the blocked punt “the moment Louisiana healed,” and maybe they were right about that…but all I knew was for the first time in over a year we had something to be excited about, cheer about, and be proud of–and the Saints made it all the way to the NFC title game, so close to making it to the promised land of the Super Bowl.

I’ve been a rabid Who Dat ever since (2005 I also switched my first college allegiance from Auburn to LSU, but that’s a story for another time.).

And that magical season when the Saints not only went to, but won the Super Bowl? I had to write about it. I had never lived in a city that won a championship before, and let me tell you–it was insane in New Orleans that season, insane–as were the play-offs and the Super Bowl. I cried when Tracy Porter picked off Peyton Manning in the fourth quarter and ran it back for a touchdown to ice the game, and I cried again when the clock ticked to zero and the impossible had finally happened: the Saints had won the Super Bowl. It was so noisy that night; cars were honking their horns all night long, the streetcars rang their bells non-stop, and people were just chanting and cheering all over the city. We could hear the crowd at the bar on the corner, we could hear our neighbors, it was just insane and celebratory. Paul and I to this day have regretted not getting dressed and heading down to the Quarter to see it all; when will that ever happen again? The Saint may win a Super Bowl again, but it will never be the first time ever again.

I remember later that spring a friend asked if I thought the Saints would be good again the next year, and I just smiled. “I don’t know and I don’t care. All I know is we finally won the Super Bowl and I can die happy, and I think a lot of us feel that way.”

The Saints are New Orleans, and New Orleans is the Saints. (I also am a little disappointed in myself for forgetting that A Streetcar Named Murder is actually set during football season; I didn’t mention it once and that’s a significant flaw in the book, honestly.)

So I decided to write another Scotty book, set it in that period between the Saints winning the NFC Championship and the Super Bowl so I could document that time, and I also decided to bring the other side of his family–the Bradleys–into the mix and give him a cousin who actually was on the Saints team and kind of a dick.

It was around this time, when I was planning or writing the book, that same-sex marriage was in the news a lot. Several suits were winding their way through the courts, and public opinion–thoroughly anti-queer in 2004 when it was on the ballot on a lot of states–was starting to swing back the other way. There was an incident at a beauty pageant when Miss California (her name escapes me now) was asked by Perez Hilton (who shouldn’t be judging anything, frankly) about same-sex marriage. She had to say she was against it, and even apologized, saying “I’m sorry, it’s how I was raised!” as the crowd began booing and jeering. She didn’t win, and I actually felt like it was kind of a shitty question to ask, but on the other hand, California had passed Prop 8 in 2008 (which was kind of the catalyst for the public opinion change, I believe). I also have always believed the old “it’s how I was raised” is a copout for bad or unpopular opinions–most white people are raised racist, after all–and questioning and reevaluating values and beliefs you were raised with is part of the maturation process of becoming your own person. But I was willing to cut her a break–she was young, it was a “gotcha’ kind of question, and kind of unfair–until she doubled down and decided to became the Patron Saint of Homophobia, following in the pumps of another runner-up pageant queen who became the face of hate and bigotry, wrapping it all up in religion and “concern for children”: yep, the hateful old bitch Anita Bryant herself, may she burn in hell for all eternity. She didn’t last long–its hard to paint yourself as a martyr for family values when you’ve been caught sexting (and recording yourself masturbating to send your man–and that was the end of that. I decided to make the reigning Miss Louisiana a homophobe who got that question at Nationals and is now dating Scotty’s cousin the Saints player–and he brings her to Christmas, with the end result that she gets slugged by Scotty’s mother and their family storms out.

And the night the Saints win the NFC championship, she’s murdered.

It was fun because I got to involve a megachurch in Jefferson Parish (there actually is one), and a sordid history of her own that the beauty queen was keeping secret for her own reasons–(coughs LESBIAN coughs) and even got to bring some more past characters back into the mix, like Emily who worked at the Devil’s Weed, and I had a lot of fun with this look into the other side of Scotty’s family (the one I am working on now also deals with another branch of relatives).

And I got to write about the Saints winning the Super Bowl, which was even more awesome. This was the book where I really thought I was done with Scotty. The year after it came out, at the next Saints and Sinners, was when I was asked if I would do another Scotty book; this was when I made my famous reply, “if I can figure out a way to include Mike the LSU Tiger, Huey Long, and his deduct box into a book, I will write another Scotty book.”

Of course, later that night it hit me like a 2 by 4 across the forehead, and I made some notes that eventually became Baton Rouge Bingo.