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Email From NOLA IIx
I was cruising down St. Charles last week looking for the Bultman Funeral Home as landmark to a nearby destination and got a call on my cell. I can't drive with my reading glasses on and I can't see a damn thing, up close, without them. So if I answer the phone without saying hey Biff, hey Susie, or hey, I told you not to call me anymore, you will know I don't have my reading glasses on and am just winging it, hoping for the best.
Hello?
Jim? This is Julie (Julie a man). He is one of my employees. That's right, my caretaking empire is so out of control that I now have employees of my own.
Look Jim, it supposed to get down in the teens tonight (in Rappahannock County, VA.) and I'm worried about the cottage (because the heat went out). He did not want to be responsible for the catastrophe of frozen pipes on his watch and I gave him some soothing instructions and said, don't worry about it Julie, just do those couple of things for me and I'll be there day after tomorrow, and take full responsibility for any catastrophe. So I've been around here almost a week now and its been in the teens every night and everything is fine, no frozen pipes. I am a cool cucumber about potential catastrophe, except when the planetary alignments are less than ideal and then I may let loose with a non-traditional stream of profanities. It is an immaturity of mine I just can't seem to control sometimes. Crapshit, fuckwad, dickbutter. The planets are cool by me right now, that was just a little example.
Julie said, I got a couple of mice since you've been gone. That's two in like five or six weeks since my return to New Orleans, and I've removed three cute little broken-necked carcasses just in the week I've been around here. I'm not bragging I'm just saying, sometimes it takes the boss to get things done.
I throw them out in the bushes by the back door, as snack food for the foxes, or skunks.
The one I retrieved this morning got the blunt guillotine so good that his eyes literally popped out of his head, and they remain on the kitchen floor, even now, because I don't do eyeballs. Everybody these days, if you want to make the big money, you got to have things you just don't do, and by not doing these things you don't do, you give extra weight and importance to the things you do do. I don't think this is necessarily right or good but I'm trying to swim in the mainstream a little more these days. Be like my successful contemporaries.
I have postponed my trip to NYC by one day so that I can be here for the heating guy. He's late. I'm afraid to even go and get lunch because I don't want to miss him. I'm getting hot under the collar. It is really really hard to get tradespeople to come out here. For the sake of propriety I don't think I should go on about this. Hunger and impatience go badly together. Did the planets just shift, is there a realignment happening?
Email From NOLA IIw
As you may or may not be aware, Wednesday is biscuits and gravy day at the diner in Little Washington.
This morning the long central table was occupied by a woman's group exchanging Christmas presents.
I'm sitting alone at a table for four, facing the door, and an old local curmudgeon comes in and sits at another table for four, facing me. He glances at the table full of women and the beginning of a rueful smile comes across his face. He is midway through the complete facial machinations of the rueful smile when he makes eye contact with me, watching him watching them. With our hearts melting a little we extend to each other the old curmudgeon's nod, and I throw in an abbreviated rueful smile while he completes his.
Me and him only have them for entertainment and so we watch as they exchange gifts and open them for our pleasure. Christmas ornaments and other decorations, a sweater, some wine, some chocolate, and a dish towel is what I saw exchanged between the ten or twelve perhaps office workers.
I let my one eye go cocked and so have no exact vision but more just a sense of things, the pitch of voices, the movement of diners. I refocus for a moment and the old curmudgeon across from me is also refocusing from his own squiggy-eyed state. Both of us out of our altered states we make indirect eye contact and he's thinking of a thing that is not actually a single thing but a pure emotion based on a bunch of things from the giant pile of emotional rubble that makes up his life. Me and him are synching now and we both know it. Looks like he may have gotten a little hot sauce in his eye because I cannot think of any other reason why his eyes, which began clear, are now just slightly red around the edges, and glazed with a film of water.
I make the hasty decision not to hang around this girly-fest a moment longer. I get up hurriedly and pay my bill and then my respects to the two waitresses, and walk out into the wintery chill of a rural Virginia postcard.