While relaxing on my day off I was fortunate enough to catch the Keepin It Real second-line on Bienville today. It was a gorgeous day. It’s such a luxury to be in a place where you can experience a second-line in between cleaning out the cat-box and doing laundry. My neighbor and I shared some ginger snaps and did some booty shakin together. After enjoying the parade, Alvin went back to spraying pigeons off his roof with the hose and I back to my Sunday ablutions, both with the fuller sense of well-being that only a good dose of a brass band and its connections to your ‘peeps’ adds to everyday life here in New Orleans.

We all know the Saints play the Superbowl champion Colts tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. to begin the 2007 NFL season. This is possibly the most highly anticipated moment of the year so far for New Orleanians, I’m sure the streets will be eerily quiet and the sky a strange hue, ionized by the raging ecstacy of the who dat nation. Most everyone in the city will have bitten off their fingernails and ground the enamel from their teeth by kickoff time. Many will return to their jobs on Friday without the luxury of a voice.

As for the game itself, I would love to offer a gory, hyperboled prediction but I think everyone knows the Colts are very formidable opponents and that we don’t want to go jinxing things this early in the season. Therefore, I will just offer this conservative and concise prediction: Saints win by 10 points; Bush and Brees both have 200+ yard games. Peyton Manning, overcome by emotion, hometown pride, and possibly a concussion, retires from football during a post-game press conference. He rescinds this announcement the following day. Drunken Saints fans maraud local supermarkets, hoarding the collectable limited edition “Who Dat” bags of Zapp’s.

…and I bet you will too when you receive your next bill. It was like an early Christmas gift for me. It was like a cute little puppy dog all dressed up in candy cane stripes and jingle bells and a tail made of licorice. But instead of fur, it had red ants crawling all over it, and instead of licking my face and barking, it stole $266 from my wallet, then pissed black ink on my carpet and called my girlfriend a whore. I guess I’ll be freezing my ass off for the next few months, as heat is suddenly an unaffordable luxury. I don’t think my bill has ever been more than half this high.

Reading the paper is one of those normal things I should do and I really try to because you miss a lot if you only read it online, but mostly this real newspaper reading could only happen if I did other normal stuff, like sit down to eat and sleep a solid eight hours, and maybe didn’t go take care of business at city hall in my pajamas. So, I’m still in the weird post-K sleep warp, I don’t fight it, trying to ignore linear time constraints, I just get up, there’s plenty to do. It’s still an anything goes environment.

I am not a morning person, but this wee-hours time is the only time of the day it’s quiet and I can get up to speed on our city’s full spectrum fucked-upedness. It’s a luxury to be so entertained all the time. Today, I scanned what is now yesterday’s paper for the Halloween events announcement to see what’s up for All Saints Day. Instead, I found out what the Chalmatians have going on for Halloween . . .

. . . The St. Bernard Parish Tourism Department (huh?) is sponsoring this sociopathic event ~ TRICK OR TRUNK. Yep, this is how you adapt to Halloween when you don’t have any habitable places to live, I guess. “Elizabeth “Gidget” McDougall, tourism director, said volunteers are invited to decorate their cars in Halloween themes and allow children to trick-or-treat from trunk-to-trunk. . . . A DJ will play and there will be inflatables. Hot dogs and chili will be provided by Gulf Coast Bank & Trust . . ‘ Nunez Community College over there in Chalmette.

There’s so much going wrong here. I can’t stop laughing. Hooray, another day surrounded by lunatics, woo hoo! I’m gonna go get today’s paper !

If you’re having the feeling that the New-New Orleans isn’t you’re New Orleans, go to Harry’s Ace Hardware on Magazine Street. After the storm they finished the enormous task of remodeling, which was very hard for those us of us just trying to function in an entirely dysfunctional city.

Harry’s sells themselves on service you can’t get at Lowe’s or Home Depot which, if you’ve been there in the last year, you will attest, is even more of a true value. We are all tired and they really are more than happy to direct you to the location of wheelbarrows or one of those things you use to tap finishing nails into cabinet trim. They seem to have squirreled away some of their signature service energy so they would have it for us now, when we need most.
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Today ought to be special, I suppose. Memorials and celebrations and moments of silence are scheduled around the city. People from the left, right, and dead center will speak from countless podiums about successes, failures, and, on occasion, conspiracies. But honestly, at the end of the day, it’ll be just so much hogwash: decaying wreaths, empty bottles of booze, and speeches that didn’t convince anyone of anything they didn’t already believe.

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This will be my 101st post on Metroblog so I thought I’d take a moment and review some of the fine work I’ve done here. What I found by looking back through my little collection of ramblings is that I haven’t really done much in my 100 posts. hhhmmm, I gotta say, I found the whole collection to be a little under whelming. Then I was looking at Rayna’s post today and thought “wha?!?” (I don’t usually think in full words). So I thought about it and it must be like Friday night.
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I am not a fan of Jazz Fest. I don’t like eating my food over a trash can, I don’t like the weekend hippie crowd, the port o’ lets, the parking situation. But last year I made myself go to Jazz Fest because I wanted to be sure I wasn’t missing something. I mean, I can go see most of the performers I like anytime, it’s the luxury of living here. I went ahead and got a Brass Pass and I volunteered doing backstage hospitality for musicians, I volunteered at the workshops with kids during the week. It was nice. I saw Ceux Que Marchent Debout, this French funk band I love, four times while they were here but they didn’t actually play at JF. One day I went to JF during the day and saw CQMD in Lafayette at night. One day I went to Papa Joe’s jazz funeral in the morning and spent the rest of the day at the fairgrounds. Truth be typed, I kept defaulting to the Jazz and Heritage Stage. I love the brass.

So for probably another five years, I’ll be pretending it’s not happening. I am big fan of Washboard Chaz, so this one day festival will make me happy enough. Chaz Fest

‘Tis indeed the season, by just a couple of days. Already, in the driving around since Friday, I’ve seen a lot more Carnival decorations being put out. We expect the retailers to jump on it big-time, and they have. But this year it seems like an obsessive need for more individuals to make sure their Gras Groove is on. We’re certainly doing our part…

Last year’s Carnival found us living in Mid-City, a scant half-block from the Endymion route on Canal. This allowed us the luxury of an eight-hour shuffle, going from home to parade, back home to piss and get more beer, then back to the parade, over and over. We’re not quite as close to a parade route this time around, but still close enough to walk up to St. Charles. This also means we’re close enough to be gridlocked in (or out) of the neighborhood once the parades begin.

We’ve taken the liberty of decorating the homes of various displaced neighbors. They’d want it that way, we’re sure. Of those who have returned, I’m seeing decorations being put out earlier. There’s something of a predatory feeling about it this season, if that makes sense — of feeling like we’re primally REQUIRED to celebrate to ensure the existence of the species (Orleanus Whackjobus).

Things have been weird in our section of the Irish Channel the past few weeks. Not bad weird, but good weird. Much more sharing with neighbors. We socialize heavily anyway, but this time it’s like we’re nervously gabbing while waiting for Something To Happen — like the back-and-forth in the crowd before a space shuttle launch or the implosion of a building.

Despite the moonscape so many of us deal with each day, it’s a good time to be here.

Yesterday’s Times Picayune Business section had an article about developers who are trying to convert the hideous, polluted, brown-checkerboarded monstrosity known as Asbestos Plaza Tower into luxury condos. The catch is that the developers want taxpayers to subsidize their project, saying “It’s in the city’s best interest to get rid of the asbestos and mold and the eyesore.”

While many might agree with that line of reasoning, I was alerted to another potential solution from conservative political commentator Jeff Crouere, host of the raucous “Politics with a Punch”. Jeff recently praised former-gov. Mike “Big Daddy” Foster for his “remedy” to the black mold infestation of the Governor’s mansion during his term. Reportedly, Big Daddy “resisted recommendations to have the work done when he lived at the mansion. Instead, he put filters over the vents when they started spewing black soot.”

Jeff Crouere applauds Big Daddy’s thoughtful decision (my emphs):

In a poor state like Louisiana, Foster’s actions sent a signal to the people that he didn’t demand royal treatment, luxury or mansion renovations. In fact, most families in our state would have dealt with the problem in the same way as Foster did. In this regard, Foster made the right decision.

So, have we adequately considered this “air-filter option” for Plaza Tower? Looks like it could save a helluva lotta time and money.

Perhaps the city could pay for new air-filters and the developers could cover over the rest of the problems in like manner. New residents could be moving in by the end of the year, I’d suspect. Sure, the sales prices on the $350/sf condos might have to be adjusted a bit, but Louisiana would be sending a powerful “signal” to other cities that “this is how we do it, here in the ‘Gret Stet’”.