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9 Days
Have nine days left. The waitress said as a question you're good when I said I was good to mean no more coffee. It was too cold in there and I was hacking up pieces of lung. At least it's not a dry cough. Need to get up on the roof and finish trimming overhead branches before it gets too hot or starts to rain again. The houseguest said someone was coming to move her stuff out today and I said that would be helpful which was the short version of a rant running last night through my mind. The rant was entitled a conflict of agendas. Those cats are fighting again. Saw a saggy titted pit bull bitch roaming free last night. Was coming around the back fence when I gave it the evil eye and it turned around. There are chew marks on my front steps looking like a shotgun blast made from dogs trying to get under the house to eat cats or what was once their food stash. Corner boys have a friend who makes drunken siren noises during their sidewalk happy hour. Remembering what the kid's mother said the other day when I asked which of the boys to men where hanging out on Dumaine. It was my subtle way to ask which of them are not in jail or dead. She told me oh so and so and so and so. But they disappear when the sun goes down cuz they afraid of those shooters coming back. Forty some odd shell casings recovered last time but no one injured. She got a ponderous look on her face then and said if those shooters had been real men they would have walked right up...and she pantomimed a gun to a head and then pulled the trigger three times. It is my goal to argue less so I did not disagree. Anyway, how would I know what is a man. Feeling some distance south of stupid these days. I bet it already got hot while I was writing this.
10 Days
Have ten days left and head cold, zero energy. Cats under the house are going unfed. They will need to start considering alternate means of nutrition. Am not sure eating each other is out of the question. Saw a helicopter fly over yesterday that looked like something out of Buck Rodgers. A dated analogy for sure. The street sign at Bienville and Rocheblave is leaning, house on southeast corner is still boarded up. Epictetus is around, just a little gray on the edges. I would like to speak to him but don't really know what to say. Am down now on bare mattress on floor, under ceiling fan. Cleaned cat hair off all blade edges on the three fans. I imagined it was irritating me and making head cold worse. Slept ok last night. Could have been worse. Used towel borrowed from nephew as a cover over my chest. It made me feel a little more secure. Dreams were a bit strange but not markedly more so than reality. Friend and excellent tenant has moved out but has a few things still in house, including a Muslim woman who apparently has nowhere else to stay. She knocked quietly on front door last night even though she still has own key. I had thought where she would stay other than here had been resolved but apparently I was mistaken. We split up the haphazard bedding and she took hers to the bedroom and closed the door. And then left out early this morning. We have agreed on a two day deadline. I wish Bernadette was here but she has gone back to New York. We stayed at my nephew's in Lakeview for about a week. Part of me wants to stay on this bed all day but staying in bed takes considerable will power. I can hear sea gulls and crows but not yet the monk parakeets. I need to drink much more water because my urine is dark yellow, signifying dehydration. Am seriously conflicted about which is more important, doing something or doing nothing. It is one of the subjects that perhaps I could discuss with Epictetus. The cats are crying, or fighting, again. This mattress is oriented where my desk used to be and the palmetto fronds in the side yard are moving in the humid air and casting upon me slices of sunlight. One of the mothers of a Dumaine child is renting sort of next door to me. I was cutting limbs from the sycamore that got topped in the 05 storm and has since grown into a frighteningly tall and bushy somewhat leaning tree when she called out to ask me was I who I appeared to be. I admitted I was knowing it would cost me (in this case 5 dollars, make note to carry more singles). She was walking back from the OPP at Tulane and Broad where she had just visited that boy who was one of that core group I used drive around the city for Sunday outings, if they cleaned the garbage from the street. Never that good at math I said oh he must be 16 or 17. She said oh no he 21. I'm not sure she was debating that he stole the car but those guns were not his. When I said I follow things around town via the Internet she seemed proud. But she thought I meant that I was accessing his rap sheet, which one can do online, and she wanted me to know that some of his thirty odd charges are not his doing. She said he asked about me sometimes, which I neither doubt nor wholly believe, and that when he got out she was sending him over here to go to work for me. I explained to her the limitations of that but said that if he got out in the next 10 days and showed up here wanting to work, I would give him some. He was in truth, as an 8 year old, a very good worker. Although I can't help remembering it I hold no grudge that he once lifted the razor knife from my tool bucket and tried but failed to eviscerate his older cousin.