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Cell Phone
I took off from work yesterday to go into Manassas and get a replacement cell phone for the one I lost, so I got that, the 666 number going again, but it has little practical use unless I leave the farm, cell phones don't work out here.
I sat out in the parking lot and checked my messages, about a month's worth. My sister was calling, not from California, but from Dallas, at our mom's house, you know just checking in but it's been six weeks since you moved from New Orleans and no one has heard from you...so me and mom are just laughing about that...
Ok, thanks Sarah, I'm working on the good son angle more than I am working on many other angles of my life that clearly need work, I have written mom two letters recently, and hope to actually be a good son someday. I have some contact numbers that work and some that don't, this I have written to mom, but at times it confuses me so we can guess what its doing to mom.
To the anonymous gangbanger from New Orleans who left me a snippy message to quit calling his beeper I have this to say--Man, f*** you, what I be callin' your bitch ass for?
To Lou in Austin--I lost your number Lou, and K's, so thanks for calling me but I can't call you back because often the # you call from doesn't show up on Caller ID.
My nephew in New Orleans called to update me on New Orleans stuff, the Canal streetcar project is a little behind schedule but they're shooting for November/December 03 and hope to have a big opening weekend party. Another big police corruption case, or two, going on, based out of Internal Affairs, just up the street from my Rocheblave house. My nephew, Ross, he didn't tell me about the mentally deranged man in the Sixth Ward, around the corner from the Dumaine house, who held off police for hours, up inside his house, and finally had to be gassed out. Or the six time suspected serial murderer who calmly turned himself in to police at the Canal and Broad area Burger King, right around the corner from the Rocheblave house, but he's a busy college professor, my nephew is, how is he supposed to keep me up with everything going on in the 4 thru 7? I check Nola.com periodically.
I had some other messages, it was nice to hear your voice.
In bed this morning, awake awaiting sunrise, I was thinking again about that flick I saw a few days ago, Code Unknown, with Juliette Binoche, about her husband in the movie, who is a photographer on periodic assignment in the war torn Kosovo, and in one scene he's just back, and at a bar with wife and two other couples, he seems a little unsettled, and there is laughter and gaiety around him while one of the husbands asks him earnestly about his work and what it's like to witness horror in a war zone and his description was one I could so relate to, how it was hard at first, but then it became easier, and in a way almost preferable to the environment he was currently occupying. I think he was talking about the ill effects of the affluence of too many choices.
Happy Birthday Mr. BC
Me and Mr. BC we built small gunpowder bombs together, flew kites, rode bikes, tossed footballs, baseballs, basketballs, tennis balls, and wiffle balls at each other. Did Yoyos, tops, and water guns every year. He threw a dart at me once. I still owe him for that one. I went to church, he didn't, and I used it against him in loosely ruled scrabble games by telling him my questionable words were from the bible.
He can draw, play music, and make tons of money and I can't.
I have ingested things he has never heard of.
He has seen things I haven't and me I've seen the same thing.
Tossing a pebble, he once knocked a BB gun out of a kid's hand.
He broke my plane on a string, he still owes me for that.
There was a song from our youth that was about a hippie trying to fit into the establishment by putting his hair up under his hat to apply for jobs and a line in the song started "Imagine that..." and when one of us began that the other would finish the line which was-- "me working for you."
At one point he began buying Mercedes Benzes. For awhile he had a twenty-year-old Cadillac with an eight-track player and a new Benz sedan with CD player, not one of the starter models. This was like 15 years ago now and I was staying with him for a few months in another big house he had up on another hill. The thing is I could never remember to put the Benz in Park. But the long driveway was pretty level at the top so the car stayed in place until I got to the front door and for whatever reason I turned around to look at the car I don't know but as soon as I looked at it it started to move. I chased it for a few feet, heroically flung open the door and jumped inside to jam the brake pedal, two feet from head on to a tree. He sicced some Jehovah's Witnesses on me not long after that, so I guess we're even on that one.
He knows what "you did it purposely" means.
He was on the Grassy Knoll in Dallas, November 1963.
He's got a great wife and three great kids, he can thumb type on a blackberry, he's come a long way, from the Badger Days, let's give him a big hand and a--Happy Birthday Mr. BC.