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Overheard in New Orleans:

Random stranger: (walks up to a couple who are obviously deep into each other and have that about-to-get-it-on look) I'll sketch your picture fa two bucks!

Guy on date: Sure! Here's two bucks.

Random stranger: Sketch her? You? Both you?

Girl on date: Oh, no, don't. Not me. Go sketch that bike or something.

Random stranger: Hey, wait, man, are you two gonna fuck later?

Guy on date: (smiling) Yeah, we are.

Random stranger: Listen, you gotta do dis. On da way home, stop off at da Walgreen's, get some ice cream or yogurt, and eat it all off dat pussy. She love dat I promise!

Guy on date: Oh...okay...thanks...

Random stranger: Sho you don't want dat sketch, baby?

Wow.

It's been a pretty long fucking time since I've been in hear, yeah?

"People change. Feelings change. It doesn't mean that the love once shared wasn't true and real. It simply just means that sometimes when people grow, they grow apart."

Not sure I can say it better than that.

Oh, I didn't talk about this thing

Big irresponsible kid? Sure, I am.

Good morning, world. I've not touched this place since March. That may well be the longest I've avoided reading LJ. Or posting. Or whatevs. I'm doing well, all things considered. There was a time where my current situation would have driven my mania all the way to Timbuktu, however I'm apparently above that these days. In fact, dare I say I am happy, sometimes deliriously so. So wrap your head around that one.

New Orleans is still my home. I was laid off on July 1, either the result of my age and salary, or my lack of giving two shits about the corporate world. It's likely a mix of the two. I'm still jobless, a predictable outcome of my living in the Republic of New Orleans. There is no tech here. I'm pursuing other means at this point. Translated, I'm digging for some jobs in the film industry while finally chasing that elusive dream of self-employment. Yes, I finally found something the world wants and it's terribly sweet. That begs for a separate post, which I will get to later. Sooner than later, just so you know.

Well. I guess that's about it. I have to help someone with their laptop in a bit, a task that I've still not shaken off. I'll get back to my rants about tech dependencies, but for now, you know that I'm alive and well.

Let's get it on.

Penguin

Wondering how mad she'd be if I bought a motorcycle on eBay without asking her.

Yeah. Probably that mad.

18 Yellow Roses is my new favorite sad song. That's Bobby Darin for the less hep out there.

So where do we continue? Work? Nah. Had my fill of that. You know the drill.

Already bitched about the family.

How about drinking? I'm not talking cranberry sierra mist, which, by the way, is a kickass mixer. This is drinking drinking. I won't lie. I imbibe. I hit the bars. Bars are neighborhood. Bars are mid city. Bars are da french quatah, uptown, downtown, riverbend, jefferson, garden district, and "kennah, brah." Bars are landmarks. "It's three blocks past avenue pub." Bars are big game, pregame, postgame, away game, and I'm game. Bars are live music. Bars are jukebox. Bars are cheese fries.

Bars are New Orleans.

Of course I drink. Don't be silly. Why not? I could kill brain cells in a number of illegal ways. Okay, one illegal way. Look, I'm middle aged, right? I hate saying that, but there's history. I've already had my benders, sauced real good-like. Mind-erasers come to mind. Or they don't, actually.

Now there's the thing. That losing a little memory? You know, one tiny little episode of not remembering just how funny you were. Or you were a jackass. You're kinda rolling the dice with me. It's an ugly condition known as blackout. I'm not supposed to have those any more. Did last weekend, though. Kind of spooked me since. Can't get out of my head that i was OUT OF MY HEAD. I'm too old for that shit.

But...if you really want to know...I'll tell you what happened.

Spent Saturday around the corner, watching the Tigers display their unique skills in having talent but not knowing how the hell to use it. Drank a few beers. Had a visit from Mr Green. Game ends, we decide to go to the last night of the last Oktoberfest at Deutches Haus. This place is, or was, a German heritage center located in an early 20th century telephone exchange. It's been there for decades, since before WW2. The place is great. But not great enough to escape the gargantuan footprint of the new VA hospital in lower mid city. It's destined to be a parking lot.

We hit the festivities, and the party was big. Probably a couple of thousand? And some dark ass beers. I had a glass left from the SPCA beer fest a couple of weeks ago. So, five bucks for this big honking schooner of beer. Strong-ass dark motherfucking beer. Somewhere toward midnight, we left. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the last thing I remember.

We rode over to a joint in our hood. I frequent the place. I am known in the place. The hot bartenders LOVE me in this place. I always have friends in this place.

I was a stinking drunk in that place on Saturday night.

Yes. Start imagining the fun. Slurring and drinking and laughing and drinking and...what else? Really? I did that? Tis fuzzy, fuzzy. Fuzzy like an angora sweater in a paper shredder. I remember nada. I found evidence that I snacked at home. Found the empty wrappers at least. Passed out...er...slept till 10:30, which is hella late in my house. Tried to rewind my head and could only get so far. Not good. No, not good at all. Talked with two of my friends, but didn't really get any comments. However someone outside our circle told me a couple of things. Wicked things.

Egads. It was the DRINKING!

So.

Anyway. That's been on my mind this week. Don't know where to stow that. I'm questioning myself on all kinds of levels. Maybe a self-imposed sobriety would be of help? Hard as hell in the turn toward Christmas, starting with Halloween on Sunday. Oof. I'll be questioning my questioning.

Maybe I'll just have a drink and not worry about it.

Here's another one. I wrote this in August, the start of something much bigger. This is as far as I got.

Good way to catch up, though, huh?

+++

Often, I am humbled by the actions of humanity. Facing the middle of my life has been a challenge if not a struggle. At it's worst, I am speechless with grief, swimming in a deep sea of regrets, depression and sadness. At it's best are startling moments of clarity, epiphanies of the highest order. For the past five years of my life, I've lived three entire existences, three rivers poured one into another, then another. Despite the colossal curves thrown to me, I have persevered to this day and stand tall. However, I have fallen as of late, finally relenting to the sad state of affairs that surround me. As hope builds, despair washes away.

I was tracking the mess in the Gulf of Mexico for a while, confident that our government could put some fix in place, an enchantment to ward off the oily monster. I gave that up, if anything to clear the mud out of my journal, but mostly to throw away my obsession with disaster. In some respects, that was a pretty smart thing to do. 100 some-odd days in, hundreds of millions of theoretical gallons have risen from the ocean floor, the Gulf Coast economy lies in disarray, and hope has been reduced to a paper cup of the same promises we drank five years ago. That's nothing I really wanted to dwell on anyway. I chose to look inward, try on some introspection. My summer has been a criss-cross of trips to the Farm. The fig crop was terrible this year, by the way. The worst I've seen. We have a sugar thing now, but that's another story. In these visits to my parents, I've spent much time gazing into space. Actually, the space was really acres of country grass rolling under the wheels of my father's Dixie Chopper. Go look it up. Big motored hell-mower with a cup holder.

I've been in Colorado since Friday, at a big disaster recovery facility just outside of Boulder. Jho knows precisely what this was like, but for the uninitiated, here's what I do for living. I'm the guy who backs up a company's servers to tape. More to disk lately, but that's beside the point. Well, all that data, it's got to serve a greater purpose than just replacing files deleted by clueless executives. Formally, it's called business continuity and resiliency.

That's a great word, isn't it? Resilllliency. Rolls right off the tongue.

Continuing my story, disaster recovery testing. That's why I'm in Boulder. It's pretty boring, mundane work. I mean, it's a challenge in the sense of hard work but it's sucky just the same. I sit my big penguin butt in an uncomfortable desk chair and run data restores to servers that are being rebuilt to prove we can rebuild them. Sounds pretty easy, right? For me, it really is easy. But sweet cheesus, it's repetitive tasks that are pretty much the same thing every time. Every problem looks like every other problem. The know-it-all server admin tells me to run a restore job, in a particular order, from a particular time, to a particular place. Bleh. Can you see where it's boring as all hell? To make things worse, this is all taking place in a really beautiful town. The leaves are changing here and the inner mountain ranges are dusted with snow. The roads, they call to me, saying "Penguin! Penguin! Come drive these winding switchbacks deep into the hills, up into the mountains, where the majestic peaks reach to the heavens and the air is sweet like high fructose corn syrup!" No, not really. They don't say anything about peaks.

All that adventure waiting for me and I'm locked inside a room with no windows, no 3G reception and too many eagle-eyed executives for me to kill time playing Angry Birds. Yeah, that's on Android now, and I really dig it. I digress. I'm all up in the stuffy command center, fielding the questions of the clueless, outshining my coworkers in such a grand manner that they cover their hideous faces, fearing the world will discover their shameful souls. Hey, that's kind of poetic sounding, isn't it? Meh. Anyway, me, in a room, hating what I'm doing, even though I excel at it and the customers simply love me. Such is the conundrum of the Penguin.

Topping all of this drivel? I've lost 6 days of my life to a pain-in-the-ass assignment. Those are 6 days in which I missed my daughter's soccer game and my dad's 66th birthday, time I could be building my new back porch and landscaping a new backyard. Say what you want about our digital age shrinking the world around us, but the electric ether cannot replace my tactile life. Wages and recognition don't make up for it.

I know. I'm bitching again.

Anyway, the work is done. I fly home tomorrow. Waking early though, for a special reason, as fate may have handed me a small compensation for my suffering. NatGeo's King Tut exhibit is in town. Perhaps I get to have a little awesomeness after all.

Sat, 02:21: Finally leaving for the hotel after performing some minor miracles that I'm sure the Vatican will refuse to recognize. Check it: 35 hours

Fri, 05:42: Seriously, I'm short on customer diplomacy at 4:30 am, so quit yer bitchin and let me fix the damn servers, Haji.

Wed, 10:42: My flight landed 35 mins early!!! Hello, Colorado!

Group finds contaminated oysters, despite state, federal assurances

Liars, one and all. We pray at the altar of oil and greed.

Jon Stewart is the best commentator on television. This is longish but Mr Stewart truly skewers the Beckster

Beckith Faire. I love that.

Breaking Bad? Out with the meth. Mad Men? Pussies with nice ties.

What's AMC got for you next?

ZOMBIES!

First, let me say that I don't consider myself affiliated with any one party or philosophy, instead steering by common sense, life experience, and my ~~questionable~~ personal values.

That said, you know exactly why I don't like a camera-hogging, fish-trawling wannabe like Sarah Palin. Not. At. All. To me, she's still riding a wave from two years ago, spearheading what will be a terrible crash of the ~~Republican~~ Tea Party this November. For all of the attention she gets from anti-incumbent voters, Palin represents precisely the opposite agenda: ride the establishment for all it's worth. Again, my opinion, so...yeah.

This video, courtesy HuffPost, so very illustrates the immense, hypocritical douchebaggery of media darlings in politics. Appeal to the voter's anger and convince them you know what you're talking about. Get a TV show, suck some head on FoxNews, and jiggle her eye-winking assets, you've got a star.

All that said, you'll understand exactly why I love moments where she can't speak with any conviction without crib notes on her palm. After toting the TLC cameras around on a faux-commercial fishing trip, she's confronted with Kathleen Gustafson unrolling a banner reading "worst governor ever". Kathleen, a local teacher and wife to a "real" fisherman, let Palin know exactly what she thought. Kathleen called like it is: "You're not a leader, you're a climber!" Facing a camera-hogging reality star playing up the pretense of actually caring about commercial fisheries, Kathleen was good and pissed. Thus, the banner. Palin, ever the idiot, decided to walk right on up and talk to her, jiggly winks and all. Notice how Todd and Co try to block the one guy getting video of the encounter. I'l note here that following this exchange, said entourage tore down Kathleen's sign. Please read the full story on HuffPost.