I think I’ve inadvertently helped boot someone out of the military. A buddy of mine from high school found this website not long ago, and he kindly put a link to it on his homepage. Of course, now the brass are trying to discharge my friend because they think he’s gay. In their straight and narrow minds, there are certain things “normal guys” don’t look at–namely, Vogue (in any of its linguistic forms), other wangs, and websites run by gay men. Now that the war’s essentially over, I guess the whole “stop loss” project is moot.

It’s a good thing I don’t have to worry such ocular faux pas, or I’d never get to peruse my boyfriend’s brand (monkey) spanking new Penis Blog Project.

Answer the following multiple-choice question.

Today is:

___ (a) My friend Lesley’s 30-somethingth birthday.

___ (b) The feast day for several uninteresting saints.

___ (c) Tax day.

If you answered “a,” you’re obviously a close, personal friend, and I haven’t heard from you in months. Drop me a line and send Lesley a gift. Now.

If you answered “b,” you’re obviously a devout papist. Move to north Mississippi and attend tent revivals until you feel an affinity for Protestantism. Celebrate your new-found freedom by marrying your cousin or sodomizing an over-ripe piece of fruit (e.g. a week-old watermelon, not Nathan Lane before his morning shower).

If you answered “c,” you’re obviously the sort of anal-retentive fopdoodle who gets anxious when things aren’t done in a timely fashion. Do us all a favor: fake an illness at work, dump your numerous projects in someone else’s lap, go home, guzzle a 12-pack in the bedroom while listening to Aldo Nova (just that one album) cranked up to ten on the stereo, then pass out in the hammock out back.

It’s springtime in NOLA, but it feels like winter.

I’m crawling on carpet to hook up a printer.

I should go to lunch but I’ve no time for it,

Je voudrais a break from this pigfucking shit.

If only Julie Andrews’ voice wasn’t kaput, I’d have a new diddy for her.

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view from the levee wall, 4.3.03

You know, I’ve been thinking (no jokes, please). I’ve been thinking two things. The two things are these:

Sometimes, the only thing that keeps me going is the hope that one day I’ll have it all under control. I fantasize that eventually the renovations to the house will be finished, the garden will be dug and planted, all my work-related projects will either be complete or running themselves, Running With Scissors will take a long break between plays, and the boyfriend and I will go away on vacation. It’s Sisyphean, but I guess it’s just conceivable enough that my brain doesn’t stop to laugh itself silly.

New Orleans isn’t itself in winter. On my way to work this morning, I passed a girl in an old white pickup truck. She was the uber-Ninth Ward chick: a mess of dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, light eyes, wearing something with spaghetti straps. Probably in combat boots. Her windows were down and I could see the perspiration on her forehead and her two Catahoulas leaning out of the back, trying reach around the cab and lick her face. She’d obviously taken the dogs for a run down by the tracks and was headed home. Just looking at her I could tell what she sounded like, knew what she smelled like, knew what kind of cigarettes she smoked: she’s a fixture, like the praline ladies used to be, or the shrimpers are today, parked on the side of the road, selling fresh seafood by the pound. Or the vegetable man. It’s the sweat and the dog slobber and the rolled-down windows and everything about her that typify the heat and the humidity and the city. To me, seeing her is equivalent to seeing the crocus.

places i’ve been

the Sigur Ros concertThis is going to sound really faggoty (then again, I’m a faggot, so go figure), but it was jaw-droppingly beautiful, a perfect synthesis of the visual and the sonic. Good lighting, great projections, and that voice–coming out of one who looks for all the world like any old bi-curious Ninth Ward boy. Even standing for two hours shoulder-to-shoulder in a House of Blues packed with people I didn’t know, I was stunned and weepy. And I wasn’t the only one: while they were playing, you could have heard a cigarette drop. No, it wasn’t the Matthew Barney show, or even the Barney Frank show, but it was still better than the icy-cool demeanor of Barney’s, and way better than Barney on Ice.

my backyardYes, I’ve been digging again. This time, I’m serious. I’ve rented a dumpster and everything. About six inches below the level of my last efforts, I found what looks to be an old well (an educated guess, based on info from the previous owner). I’ve found more detritus, too–mostly kitchen stuff, since the kitchen used to be in the back, separated from the main house.

On a related note, the cute cajun boy two doors down told me he remembers talking to Miss Dolly, the woman who lived in the house before the previous owner–and who Jonno’s been prone to see lately. He verified that Miss Dolly was a madam, but according to him, the brothel she ran wasn’t in the Quarter, it was our house. Apparently, she and her girls kept all the sailors coming through the Port of New Orleans very happy indeed. I wonder if I’ll find some old sheepskins in the course of my excavations….

The 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers

#50: Naomi Campbell, model

The quintessential don’t-you-know-who-I-am celebrity has made headlines for her Mansonesque behavior toward bellhops, assistants and other people with real jobs. It’s easy to hate models; we’d all like to make a living getting fucked in speedboats and staying hooked on other peoples’ heroin. But a model who’s an ungrateful asshole to boot actually deserves the inevitable cruel fate of her lot: an early middle age of sagging tits, Botox, secret Rogaine treatments and fat stockbroker boyfriends with hairy backs.

— New York Press

And it gets better…

Still, I think the list is missing a couple of people. Like, where’s that asshole Midtown chorus boy who stalked me for two months, then pretended we’d never met when I finally called him on it? Where’s the part-time dj/full-time schmuck who dumped me like a hot rock ’cause I wasn’t a freaking hairdresser? Where’s that homeless guy/drug dealer who used to yell and spit at me every time I traversed 2nd and B? Where’s Chip Duckett?!

I’m beginning to feel left out. Everyone’s typing and talking and singing and shouting about war, and here I am, devoting the lion’s share of my energies to what must, at the very least, be called frivolous theatre. I know I should probably do more discussing and protesting and petitioning and letter writing, but to be honest, I’m a little overwhelmed. I mean, how did it come to this? How did we go from September the 11th to war with Iraq? Even the terminology–at least the stuff being handed down from the military–confuses me. Iraqi Freedom? If we’re going to start freeing the world’s disenfranchised (which sounds a little like commie-pinko rhetoric, if you ask me), why not start with Sudan or Myanmar? And what the hell’s “Shock and Awe”? I thought they were saying “Shokinaw,” which, I assumed, was a town in Michigan….

But back to the stuff that really matters: our show. Last night, opening night, the energy was spectacular. We had a full house of boozy spectators, ready to whoop it up like an audience of shills. I couldn’t have asked for more auspicious circumstances–especially since two of the city’s big critics were there. So you can imagine my chagrin when a man in the audience chose to have a heart attack two-thirds of the way through the first act.

At first, I didn’t know what was going on. I just heard a lot of people getting up, moving their chairs. I thought someone might have seen a mouse or a palmetto bug or something–not uncommon, in the Quarter. But the noise grew louder and became more frenzied, so I stepped out of the tech booth and looked down, and there was a man, sprawled out on the floor, surrounded by a couple of people who were, as the saying goes, doctors in the house. Moments later, someone called for the house lights, and the show came to a big fat screeching halt. We waited ten minutes for the ambulance to arrive, for the stretcher to be wheeled up and down the theater stairs, and for everyone to take their seats after the man was dragged out. And then we tried to pick up where we’d been interrupted.

By and large, the rest of the play went fine. There were a couple of dropped lines and one minor sound cue that went missing, but nothing that anyone would notice. And as it turns out, heart attack man hadn’t actually had a heart attack at all, just a bout of dizziness brought on by high blood pressure… Still, we couldn’t help feeling as though we’d been seriously upstaged. Light a candle to Saint Genesius that tonight goes a little smoother.

Sorry for the long silences, kids, but I’m in production, and we open tonight! Y’all come now, y’hear?

So he insists it‘s a parody site, but for the life of me, I can’t find the tell-tale wink. From where I sit, the webmaster’s all-too-familiar, redneck-style Francophobia, combined with crappy–but not too crappy–page design, adds up to an earnest effort to spread idiocy to the wired masses. Perhaps the guy should pull that tongue out of his cheek a bit. Or perhaps contemporary aesthetics are to blame, since irony (though not, unfortunately, Alanis Morissette) has gone the way of the Dodo.

Whatever. Even if it’s a poorly executed exercise in “discussion making” (whatever that is), you can still send similar letters to numerous other freakazoid popsicle stands along the infosuperhighway.