Month: September 2005

  • It’s ever-amazing to be alive.  To realize that I remain alive.  To look at my body and marvel at how it ever got this far.  To yet sit under a blazing Sun and ponder how, some day, its glorious form of existence and my soul’s own energy will be nearer to being One.  To drink a beer and reflect on how I could never ever ‘drink it all’ and understand that there will be plenty of beer remaining when I’m gone.  To imitate god-hood, be intimate with other god-hooders: blazon new expanses of the heart, leaps of the mind, ascendancies of the psyche, and combustions of core-knowing.  See destiny as a Mobius ring and glide, glide, glide.  Scream ‘fuck’ at the least expected moments—knowing that it’s not a crime.  Take a can of spray-paint to the Art Museum and add to all the works of the Masters and watch those works come alive.  (Wait.  Backspace over that. I got carried away a bit. It’s easy to do when life is so amazing.)  To wander forsaken orchards and freely pick and munch on apples and pears and peaches from off the feral trees.  To treasure-probe abandoned farm houses and forgotten debilitated mansions overgrown with entrapping vines and exotic weeds. To stare at the night sky and watch the constellations realign, never perceptibly but in the eye of Time.  And to truly know what it is to be high.  To be high and on the verge of, if not in the embrace of, Love.


     


    Yes.  It is good to be alive.


  • "A real man's bookcase has barely the space for one book."


      - Tao Te Ching

  • Today was destined, in most almanacs of destiny, to be a day to tryst or enlist and insist.  A day of some self-indulging togetherness.


     


    But instead, once again, I spend and end it alone under the storm of the surging Sun dreaming in Dreamland, imagining poetry, lusting for drunkenness, and sticking my white lily tongue out for no reason at all.


     



    - laptop, beer, and me: 'after hours' on the balcony of Garfield's monument -


     


    I know many of you have gotten accustomed to me calling this, my dreamground, Lake View Cemetery, ‘Dreamland’.  It is not, however, customarily referred to that way by others.  The only reason the cemetery is now Dreamland is because I am the dreamer who makes it so.  There were, I reckon, dreamers here before me, as there will be dreamers here after I’m gone, who both first enacted and will someday re-entrust the attribution.  But now, as far as I can reconnoiter, I’m the only one.


     


     Dreamland


     


    What, if this life should prove to be a dream,--


    A slumber journey to a fancied sphere:


    Would the return to consciousness redeem


    The loss, eternal, of the dreamland here?


     


    What, if the scenes and friendships that seem real,


    Were but the vision of a reverie:


    Would the awakening again reveal
    The picture of the dreamland mystery?


     


    Or, would the thoughts reflected on review
    Of the dream incidents, recalled again,


    Forever pass away, as most dreams do,


    And nought of dreamland’s memories remain?


    What, if a choice were offered from above,


    To live on earth, or dwell with the Supreme,--


    Forgetting all the ties, endearments, love,


    In this strange life, if it should prove a dream!


     


    What, if the future life, too, were denied


    Returning glimpses of the dreamland shore,--


    What could the God of all above provide


    In lieu of the lost dream, to dream no more?


     


      --upon the memorial of Albert Anthony Augustus, 


                born 1860's, died 1927.

  • There’s a party in Dreamland cemetery tonight.  But I wasn’t invited. 


     


    I ran my 6 miles this late afternoon around a ring of Dreamland, headed for the gates just before locking time (5:30 pm), yet found myself, to my surprise, locked in.  The regular guards would never do that and, indeed, they didn’t.  At the gate, instead was a very rotund woman with a two-way radio who re-opened the gates for me while admonishing me that “The cemetery closes at 5:30.” 


     


    “I know that,” I declared, ‘but it’s only 5:29.”  Which it was—both on my car clock and on my cellphone, which is synched to satellite time.  And, insistently,  I held up my phone to her face and showed her the ‘5:29.’


     


    “Well, my watch says 5:30,” she huffed.


     


    “Then your watch is wrong,” I matter-of-factly stated.  “The regular guards know me well and I always get here at this time and I seldom get locked in.  So I think your watch is wrong.”


     


    “Goodnight, sir,” she said with obvious displeasure, waiting for me to pull through the gates so that she could close me out forever.


     


    So I drove out of the gates, road down the street, parked, packed a few beers into my backpack, and hopped a fence back into the cemetery.  And here I am.


     


    I know there’s a party about to start.  Why?   1) That unfamiliar guard positioned at the gate—there obviously to keep everybody out except the exclusively invited.   2) Huge decorated tents erected all about the grounds with well-dressed attendants milling as-if in anticipation...of?  3) Cars driving aimlessly around and preppy-type people darting all about in here—even after the gates are locked  and thus at a time when only the dead, myself, and Rumi (am I being redundant?) are regularly to be found.


     


     Looks like they have about a quarter of Dreamland sectioned off for a gala nighttime affair.  I imagine soon there will be spirited drinking, music and dancing, and lots of graveyard strolling all about.  In fact, I just ran into a couple of guys planting torn, numbered pieces of an artsy-type puzzle on different graves and I asked them, like a cop, what they were doing. 


     


    “You guys on a scavenger hunt?” I guessed. 


     


    “Just the reverse: we’re planting the pieces in preparation for the hunters who will collect them later,” volunteered one of the two. 


     


    Sounds like fun, no?  But since Rumi and I were never invited, we’ve now taken ourselves to a section of the cemetery beyond what they cordoned off—beyond their bounds.  Of space.  Perhaps, time too.


     


    *thinking*   It’s been a long time since I crashed a cemetery party.


     


    —this is not the eighth chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—

  • While I was running in Dreamland cemetery on this Sunday past, an old man pulled up next to me in his car, rolled down his window, and asked me “When are you going to grow up and pay your bills?” 


     


    “Never,” I yelled back laughing.


     


    *** 


     


    Today, I encountered a 40-something pony-tailed male bicycler in Dreamland who was stopped along a path reminiscing.  And he shared this with me: “As a child, I grew up here.  This was my  glorious playground.”  He just stopped talking at that point and maintaned a huge smile on his face—like the Cheshire Cat, as if the fun he had had in this playground still hadn’t yet run out.


     


    “This is still my playground,” I responded to him.  “And I’m a still child here—like you and everyone else.”


     


    *** 


     


    I’ve been seeking refuge lately in Dreamland, after the gates are locked.  Well half-refuge, I suppose.  While the gates are yet open (only until 5:30 pm now—a schedule lasting until the Spring), I drive in, park, and run as much as I can—usually to about 5:20 pm.  Then I drive out before the twenty-foot-high entry/exit gates are slammed shut, park my car in an adjacent neighborhood, and hop a low back-alley fence back in.  On foot, with loaded backpack, I’ll seek out a quiet spot (well, actually, in a cemetery after-hours, I guess all the spots are pretty quiet)—okay, so I mean a killer, inspiring, and kick-ass scenic quiet spot like on the steps of President Garfield’s monument (see pic below) and do my thing.  What’s my thing?  This very blog, for one (and I’ll put it to post from here via the satellite of love quite shortly.)  And, of course, my affair with Rumi (aka ‘the ghost-written chapters’.)  Which is still developing (as she sits aside me smiling at what I’m typing.) 


     


    “Is she (Rumi, aka Roomya) really real?” you may be wondering.  Well, yes.  I mean at least as real in terms of playful  and imaginative interaction as any ‘real’ woman has been in my life lately.  Jimmy Stewart had his Harvey.  I have my Rumi.  John Steinbeck wrote “Of Mice and Men.”  Steinbeck’s my all-forever-so-far beacon of earthly literary soulfulness, by the way.  And Jimmy Stewart in ‘Harvey”?  An unparalleled screen-cast gem!


     


    So that’s it, my friends.  Here, from the steps of Garfield’s monument, owning the Sun while enjoying a beer, I bid you a fond adieu…at least until the looseness of doom shape-shifts the unknown universe into irrepressible motion unpredictably once again!


     


  • “That last sentence of yours is so amazing,” exclaimed Rumi.  “Do you often outburst in such a stream-of-consciousness tongue-of-profundity?”


     


    “Never,” replied nfp.  “When I speak, I just speak street-talk.  All the time.  And street-wise, at that.   That last sentence—that’s how I write.”


     


    “So, in that case…you must be writing now ,” reasoned Rumi, in a quixotic reflection approximating an intimation to perfection.


     


    ***


     


    “Well, I could be writing now.” reasoned nfp wordlessly to himself, with a growing, gnawing conviction that Rumi was somewhow correct.  Rumi’s words…“So, in that case…you must be writing now ,” echoed and re-echoed in nfp’s immediate consciousness.   But if Rumi were correct, and he were merely writing, then she was just his own inner reflection and creation—and not truly the lovely creature he craved to keep him company through and beyond the storm. 


     


    In his mind, nfp imagined seeing his fingers striking the keyboard furiously, as obsessed with typing as Narcissus once was with his own reflected image in a pool.  And like Narcissus’s forgotten girlfriend Echo, as nfp tendered the prospect of a new composition—perhaps a poem or even a novel, the echo and image of Rumi started to fade, to fade, away…


     


    “But double-fuck that,” concluded nfp suddenly, silently, and with great urgency. 


     


    He realized that Rumi seemed to be having a strange effect, indeed, upon him.  Her logic, though not pragmatically compelling, was thoroughly suggestive and had led him into this bizarrely lucid, trance-like consideration.  He had known seductive women before, but none whose mere words upon hearing induced him to dream at impulse with such an abandon of right reason.  Of course, she was real, he firmly concluded.  No, no, he was not writing, he was dreaming.  Or dreaming and losing it.  But losing what?  


     


    Well, not losing her, at least. 


     


    Finally shaking off this misflight of his imagination and regaining his sense of wider world awareness, he noticed that Rumi was again watching him, much in the manner of how they first met.  And he observed that she was smiling at him with a strangely compelling smile, while her eyes were aglow with a friendly, yet piercing fierceness.   


     


    “Rapture—I’m captured,” conceded nfp in mock surrender to Rumi’s disarming attention to him.  Here under the south-facing overhang of the mausoleum, nfp now drew a little closer to Rumi, to within the cuddle of a breath, both out of attraction to her and to avoid the victimizing wet of the storm still beating down upon them from the north.


     


    “Dreaming alone again were you?” admonished Rumi.  “Or writing an unfinished story?”


     


    “How else to dream but cast alone to drift?” rebounded nfp.


     


    “Yes, but in the land of Dreams, surely there can be more than one dreamer adrift,” soothed Rumi.  “And if two empty dream boats that have been sailing listlessly for a million years should happen to bump and lock and drift together—going nowhere, but together—what need be there to ever drift and dream alone again?  Unless, of course, one of the boats, imagines itself un-empty and bent upon purpose, and decides to cast off from the other so as to continue its lonely sojourn…”  


     


    nfp was really enjoying Rumi’s reasoning: very zen and employing a sense of multivalency unknown to most classical Western-type thinkers.  He decided to play along with the imagery she had invoked, but challenge the premise: “Yet if we are empty boats adrift, dreaming, when we chance meet, what have we to give each other?  Would it not be better for us all to load the store of our dream boats with gifts and riches that we might barter and trade, and thus lavish another with the fullness of ourselves?”


     


    “In life, given the confines of consciousness we consensually label ‘reality’, perhaps that’s adequate,” responded Rumi.  “Perhaps I need a conscious dose of your romantic sweet-nothings and perhaps you need a bit of my wake-me-up-to-reality angst.  Fine.  So we trade and then reassess our personal fortunes in the light of that relationship.   But in dreaming, the boat imagining itself un-empty is forever a cast-off, a castaway,” continued Rumi, “until it realizes it, too, is dreaming-empty like all else.  And has been so since the beginning of time.  For only then does the dream cease seeking.  And allow what must be, to be”


     


    “Then, from what store do we draw to fill one another with friendship and love, when we chance dream encounter, if we are both truly dreaming empty to begin with?”  challenged a faltering twang of Aristotelian logic out of nfp’s mouth.


     


    “There is no store in dreaming. No store at all.  That’s the point,” insisted Rumi, firmly yet gently.  “It simply invents the moment out of nothing.  What is dream love if not being entirely open, empty, and creative with each other?  And what is a dream encounter with another if not spontaneously finding the image of the God you worship therein?  And if you find the image of the God you mutually worship is Emptiness itself?   Zazen.”


     


    “I could do zazen,” thought nfp, “there’s nothing better than zazen in a storm.”  And he was about to make a comment to Rumi on the nature of that discipline when a bolt of lightening struck the Dreamland mausoleum directly atop of them and all around.  They jumped, in instinctive reaction, into each other’s arms. And, though, at first breathlessly surprised with this storm-arranged intimacy, they both began to laugh.  In fact, they fucking howled for several minutes like maniacs.  And then, growing suddenly quiet with each other, they tenderly began to explore the emptiness that constituted this dream—two boats coupled, going nowhere, together.


     


    —this is the seventh chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—


  • When Xanga first went vastly public back near the end of 2000, there were no public xang-gods to guide us; there were no obvious administrators to clamor to; there was no one at all in charge with either a face or a name.


    Abhoring an organizational void, I went to work with resources no longer available (a search that listed all blog activity by date) and searched back years into the formative non-public xanga past (1998-2000).  I found a lot of obviously phony blogs created by some person or persons to "populate" xanga, I surmise, in order to make xanga seem like a more considerably burgeoning online community than it was at the time.  Many of these blogs (janedoe1, janedoe2, etc.)  had passwords the same as their names. Bad, bad thing to do. Logging into them, I found various private "test" messages confirming, indeed, that were dummy blogs being used for development, testing, and fronting xanga with bogus personages.  They were all mercilessly assimilated by me.  (Bad, bad thing to do!) 


    But there were other pre-public-day blogs that didn't seem phony.  People were leaving each other comments!  As it turned out, I made a list of these figuring that, if they predated me considerably, they might well be the "hidden admins" or, by a term I was later to coin for them, "the xangods" of xanga. 


    Who were these individuals?  First revealed Dec. 30th 2000 to the xanga public here, they were John, Dan, Janet, Genius, Brendan.  Also, though I had yet to discover them, there were  Bob, Monsur, and Marc.  Genius (Biz Stone) is now gone from Xanga.  He eventually left Xanga to go to Blogger and has now left Blogger to go to Odeo (yes, check it out, it's different.)  I don't know how tight Brendan was with Xanga, but it appears he's no longer around either.


    But as Xanga has grown over the years, so has its staff.  As best as I can tell, here are some 'new' faces on the Xanga team:  Chrischoi, Mary, Joel, Amy, Eileen, Jon, and possibly Dave--although I think he's just a collaborator to the staff and not an employee.


    Rock on.


    - end of public service blog -

  • From the north to the west, jack-hazard flashes of lightning suddenly illuminated the sky.  The countdown to thunder suggested that the thunder cell was just a few miles away.  Pretty damn close for not having announced itself without an earlier warning.  A minute or two passed as both nfp and Rumi discussed the turn in weather prospects.  Then another, brighter flash slashed across the northern post-dusk vista.  The storm seemed to be whipping up somewhere off of Lake Erie.  And, by re-count, growing closer.


     


    “I think we’d better seek some cover,” suggested Rumi. 


     


    nfp concurred.  Although he didn’t mind running in the cemetery rain, rain could prove very harmful to his laptop and the other cybertoys  which included a second “server” laptop, webcam, digital camera, and portable webrouter that he was currently hauling around in his ever-loyal companion backpack. .  Besides, he figured,  a soggy Rumi may  prove less engaging and fun to be around.  So he started to pack up his previously-deployed gear (laptop and an unopened beer) while Rumi signaled to her dog Denton to heel and prepare to move.


     


    “Wither us?” deferred Rumi.  nfp was figuring that there were a few covered mausoleums close by that could provide shelter.  The key was to quickly assess the precise direction of the storm and then choose the mausoleum that provided the best leeward protection against the growing likelihood of a dampening onslaught.  Yet soon enough, from the north-northwest, came a sudden gust heralding the storm at hand.  To nfp, that meant that the fairly nearby Dreamland Mausoleum with its south-facing overhang would provide the optimum available protection.


     


    Nick of time.  Now there’s a hackneyed expression for you.  Although “there’s a hackneyed expression for you” is probably hackneyed itself.  In any case, both Rumi and nfp had good knees and above average stamina and neither got nicked or hacked by the assortment of landscaped shrubbery they glided though as they took a direct path south to the tomb extolled as 'Dreamland'.  As they arrived at the shelter and scurried under the cover of its south overhang, nfp reflected upon how much he used the environs and amenities of the cemetery for the furtherance of his vital life interests, while others viewed the grounds only as a repository for the dead.  Over the past several years, he had run over 2,500 miles around various cemetery loops, taken thousands of photos—many of which he put to his blog, and written hundreds of blogs—perhaps half of them poems—that he had published in cemetario  using his laptop and a satellite hook-up.  He had made some acquaintances along the way, also.  He knew all the guards, as they knew him by name.  Had encountered other artists—painters and photographers mostly—drawn to the amazing arboretum-quality of the rolling landscape and the majestic monuments erected as tributes therein.  And had met hundreds of other surprised people who had just happened to wander to the perch atop the hill by the Wade obelisk where he traditionally sat blogging like a madman while consuming copious amounts of backpacked beer. 


     


    “There’s a different energy here,” observed Rumi, contrasting their newly assumed position under the auspice of the Dreamland Mausoleum with the lean-against-an-old-tombstone perch-upon-a-hill carefreeness from which they had just fled.


     


    Even as the storm viciously assaulted the north face of the mausoleum with drubbing winds and horizontally-driven rain, nfp understood that Rumi was not referring to the weather.  “Yes, different,” he agreed.  “I have found that there’s always a certain morbid ominousness to such considerable, and obviously lavish, structures, as this, constructed to house the dead.  Except perhaps for the Great Pyramids and the Taj Majal.  Yet I’ve never personally visited them, so perhaps they would not be exceptions, if I visited them, after all.”  And he continued, “I do so much prefer the Sun and a good breeze in dalliance under open air; the view from the un-sheltered hillside while watching the sunset over lake Erie on a solemn summer eve; the ever-remixing buzz of  the sexually-driven, the soulfully-driven, and even the hodgepodge assortment of the inexplicably-driven creatures-all just venturing forth in a spirit of laissez-faire—whether they be humans meandering, dragonflies propelling, birds soaring, or alien spacecraft flying overhead—than I do a deeply shaded-shelter, seemingly damp even during drought times, such as this where we now find us meteorologically-challenged but otherwise unbefuddled.”


     


    “That last sentence of yours is so amazing,” exclaimed Rumi.  “Do you often outburst in such a stream-of-consciousness tongue-of-profundity?”


     


    “Never,” replied nfp.  “When I speak, I just speak street-talk.  All the time.  And street-wise, at that.   That last sentence—that’s how I write.”


     


    “So, in that case…you must be writing now ,” reasoned Rumi, in a quixotic reflection, and with a smile, approximating an intimation to perfection.


     


    —this is the sixth chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—

  • “Rumi,” beckoned nfp.

    ”Yes, Steve,” responded Rumi, receptive and awaiting.


     


    “What are we doing here?”


     


    “Enjoying the evening, like everyone else.  No more.  Or perhaps we’re fulfilling a prophecy.  No less.  Or just maybe we’re getting finally to know each other.  Which might just encompass the other two possibilities.”


     


    nfp typed a word on the laptop sitting upon his lap.  One word: ‘fuck’.


     


    Rumi looked and laughed.  “So you finally feel inspired?” she teased.


     


    nfp tried to think of something clever to say in response.  In his mind, lickety-second-split, he tried out: “Novel of a million readers begins with one word.” And: “Fuck is something to say to those you love.  Or intend to love soon.”  And: “’fuck’ is a variable—easily substituted for later by global Search and Replace.”   Instead, out of nowhere, he blurted out: “’fuck’. it’s a happy sound. ‘fuck’ is the happiest sound I’ve found.”


     


    Upon hearing that, Rumi bent over in convulsions laughing.  “You really know how to hurt someone’s belly, don’t you?”


     


    “That’s not the question,” replied nfp.  “The question is: "Where is your home, beautiful moon?"


     


    To that, Rumi instantly replied: "In the wreck of your drunken heart.   I am the sun shining into your ruin.  Long may you call this wild wasteland your home."


     


    And with that response, Rumi had settled all doubt in nfp’s mind.  nfp’s redirect of the question was a reference to an obscure stanza from from the master poet Rumi's Kolliyaat-e Shams-e Tabriii .  And she had responded in the spirit, if not with the exact words of the master.


     


    “She’s the real-deal—a devastatingly attractive female of vast intellect,” reflected nfp in instinctive silence. But now he wondered:  How much of the love poetry of Rumi had this Roomya actually read?  And did she, herself, write or blog at all?  And what would she think of his own love poetry, much of it inspired by Rumi, written over the past several years in virtually this very same spot where they were now sitting together—that is, if he dared to share it with her?


     


    —this is the fifth chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—


  • A view this morning of sunrise from the my backyard.  It's obviously not Fall yet. 



    Who is naming these hurricanes?  Ophelia?  Beautiful name.  Tragic end.  Let's hope the namesake in this case is inappropriate.



    On the grave of the world's "first billionaire", coins are still left by hopefuls as charms to invoke good fortune.

  • If I may interject for a moment…


     


    Blogging is one form of self-expression.  A novel is another form of expression.


     


    There are three reasons I see that publishing sections of a novel  on a blog never seems to quite work right..


     


    1)      The sequence is whacked. Subsequent chapters of the novel are always at the blog’s ‘beginning’.  And the beginning of the novel gets lost in the blog archives.  There are, of course, adjustments that can be contrived to guide the reader back to the start.  But such go against the in-the-moment momentum that underlies all blogging.


    2)      The novel form is seldom interactive; it seldom reaches out to actively involve the reader.  On the other hand, the spirit of open blogging is precisely interactivity.  Bringing the two together creates an aura of schizophrenia for the reader.  Ever known a dog that kind-of wants to bark but doesn’t really let it all out?  You know, starts the bark and then swallows it?  Such is typical of middle-age dogs suffering a prolonged adolescence wherein their mindset is “I want to bark.  I don’t want to bark.  I want to bark.  I don’t want  to bark. Etc….”  Similarly, I believe that readers of chapters of novels that have been pigeonholed onto a blog react:  "I want to interact.  I don’t want to interact.  Etc…"


    3)      The novel is parasitical by nature.  To the degree that it is successful in capturing attention, it creates an expectation.  And to the degree that it creates an expectation, it requires that the blog become devoted to it.  Before you know, your swimming pool is filled with hungry piranha, toadstools are growing in your lawn, and the sheer weight of barnacles is causing your skiff to ride lower in the water.


     


     


    Remarks upon an entirely different matter altogether…


     


    On the way to work this morning, I came up with what I believe is a novel idea for the rebuilding of New Orleans.  I may be wrong.  Perhaps the idea is already being considered, discussed.  But if not, I believe it deserves consideration.  And it is this:


     


    The problem with flooding in New Orleans is that it lies below sea level and the sea (river, lake, gulf) is all around.  An additional problem now is removing all the wreckage in order to start building anew.  One starts out thinking that perhaps the whole city should just be filled in to bring it above sea level.  But that is way beyond practical—it would make more sense to just abandon the site and start somewhere else.


     


    But why not process the wreckage into such a form that we could deposit it at the center of, say, every 3 square mile tract of land in New Orleans in order to build islands that rise above sea level and upon which hurricane-resistant emergency shelters and/or other public works can be built and serve as emergency refuge?  So all of New Orleans would be dotted with predictable hills rising above the majority of land still lying below.  Of course, additional landfill would need to be brought in to add to the processed wreckage in order to make the hill high enough to rise above flood waters.  And, of course, the government would also need to reclaim such land from other use for this purpose and that might cause some additional dislocation/relocation problems.   Yet the end result would be that every neighborhood would have its hill.   “Going to the hill” (from which you could still see your house below) would become a viable option for those who would be, for one reason or another, unable or unwilling to evacuate the city in a time of hurricane/flood crisis.


      


    How much will it cost?  How much fill will have to be hauled in to augment the processed wreckage?  How to decide  what land to reclaim for this use?  I’ll leave such mundane matters to my detractors who, no doubt (knowing doubt!), will begin to throw dirt atop this proposal.

  • Many little afterwaves of lust assaulted nfp like the batter of aftershocks that often follow an initial earthquake shaking. 


     


    Here seated next to him was this dark-haired, dark-eyed, slender-built Rumi, in his eyes a most desirable dog-walking diva.  And he hadn’t even introduced himself yet.  *afterwave of lust and anonymous power* 


     


    She was practically nuzzled up next to him like an intimate sharing an outlook.  And she was gazing down upon his laptop on his lap, and in his mind, somehow gazing through it. *afterwave of lust and fantasy desire* 


     


    With every next moment, the afterdusk of sunset was growing dimmer and dimmer.  Darkness is becoming us.," mantra-ed nfp's libido.  *afterwave of lust and darkly surrender* 


     


    And a sense of mortal time, a timeline for this or that, was, like with the onset of an awesome herb-infused high, receeding at near light-speed acceleration. *afterwave of lust an arrival of almost forever*


     


    “Hey you.”


     


    “Yes?” responded Rumi.


     


    “My name is Steve.  But I’m best known as notforprophet.”


     


    “Hi, Steve,” chanted Rumi in that utterly even-keeled, deep-voiced, drawn-out provocative kind of way that sexy women seem to have to make guys down deep inside go ‘mmm mmm mmm.’   “If you don’t mind that I ask, ‘notforprophet’ is quite a peculiar name.  You’re best known as ‘notforprophet’ for what ?”


     


    “Blogging about the internet,"  answered nfp, his words not really synching with his lascivious thoughts.  "I’ve effectively cyber-infested the entire blogging internet with my notforprophet alias.  But the underlying truth is, I often just come here to blog-write and then I post my blogs from right here via laptop and satellite connection to my weblog.  I write, release, let go.  And then return another day to start all over again.”


     


    nfp wondered if Rumi would ask him what blogging was.  Though not as common as years before, it was still not uncommon to start up a conversation about it only to learn that the other party had never heard of a blog before.


     


    “So that is what you were doing when I first encountered you earlier?”  queried Rumi, seemingly relaxed with some idea of what nfp was talking about.


     


    “Not quite.  Tonight, I suppose, I was wishing upon a star.  I was hoping for something more than just an average quickie blog to feed the world.  I was wishing truly to pierce the mystery of Life itself and reveal it to all, blogstruck, as the story of one day short of Forever.  And towards that end, I was prepping myself for an inspirational visit from my ever-elusive, sometimes-succubus, Muse.”


     


    “Oh, you lost me there,” remarked Rumi.  “Did you mean ‘ever-illusive’?    Why would a creature desiring sex, if even only sometimes, if really genuinely goodly with inspiration, find reason to not be direct with you?”


     


    “You got me.”  sloganned-off nfp in unknowing admission.


     


    “Yes, I do.” whispered back Rumi, with a cryptic sort of knowingness.  And then she leaned-back and gazed at the first-appearing stars in the constellations of the post-dusk sky.  And sighed what seemed like to be a sigh for all the Ages.


     


    —this is the fourth chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—

  • “Hey, you.”  The voice floated like a boat on a lazy river.  An empty boat that, if it bumped into you, you couldn’t get angry at because no one was aboard to blame.  And besides, you were floating along the same river, too, and were feeling too laid back to get perturbed about anything.


     


    “Hey.”  This time, the voice hung in the air like a heavy evocative evening mist, where the mist is everything: the unmoving medium, the opaque mood, and the surreptitious cover for anything to be undertaken, just steps beyond, unseen.


     


     “Hey.”  Yet a different intonation.  This voice rang clear like something sparkling, fresh like a new awakening, and it was petitioning nfp to surface from his long descent into meditative obscurity.  


     


    nfp, still semi-stuporous, reflected upwards that there was something different about this persistent “hey” voice.  Something more compelling than all the legion of other voices that had jammed roughshod into his head, all jabbering articulations, all competing as enunciations, all sliding along as indistinct phonations, as he sat awaiting ghost-writerly inspiration.


     


    Finally lightening up and coming back to some semblance of consciousness, nfp opened his eyes.  Before him, looking directly at him, stood the girl with the dog that had passed him by earlier.  She was standing a little bit down the hill from him, so that, even though he was seated and leaning against the old Wade obelisk, their eyes were about at the same level.  Her head was angled inquisitively askew as if to say “Are you there?” Her jaw was slightly lowered as if a word were about to drop.  Her left arm was upon her hip and the other was holding the dog’s leather leash folded like a strap. “Dark eyes, dark long hair, and a strap.”  That was nfp’s silent triangulation.  He always immediately triangulated everyone new he’d meet as he first met them.  And he had never before triangulated anyone else thusly.


     


    “I’m sorry. I was floating in a pool of nether inspiration and didn’t realize that you had returned here,”  nfp finally responded.  The girl had said “hey” (or so he thought) three times and so it was incumbent upon him, he reasoned after all, to reply.


     


    “I’m not returning,” the girl corrected nfp.  “I’ve been about this hillside for the last hour.  You just kind of went into a trance when I was first passing by and I was a bit worried about you.  So I lingered.”  She gave the leash-strap she was holding a quick, sharp snap and her dog, which once again had begun to wander away, returned to her side. 


     


    nfp’s eyes wandered back to the strap.  There was something about that strap, something that made it special.  The girl noticed nfp’s redirected attention and didn’t hesitate to explain.  “Oh, that whip-snapping?  Well, my dog Denton is deaf and only responds to visual cues.  But I’ve got him trained to watch me so it isn’t a problem.”


     


    “But,” nfp recalled, “before—when you first passed by—didn’t you call out to your dog, I mean Denton, ‘Come on.  Let’s go.’?”


     


    “Why do you assume I was speaking to him?”


     


    “Well, who else…” but nfp’s thought process was disrupted inexplicably.  And he felt a first wave of lust as he stared wordlessly at the denizen of dusk before him.


     


    “My name is Roomya.  You can call me Rumi,”  she answered his stare.  “I’ve seen you here before, just before dusk.  But it always has seemed like just when I’m arriving, you’re leaving.  I figure that that’s probably because you want to get out of the cemetery before they lock the gates, at dusk, for the night.  On the other hand, I find my freedom here, to wander with Denton, after the gates are locked and all the drive-thru voyeurs have gone home to watch TV.”


     


    At, after dusk?…nfp’s thought processes started churning again.  ”What time is it, Rumi?”


     


    That was a purely rhetorical question for nfp to ask.  And as he asked it, he knew it.  And he didn’t even know why he was asking her  it, anyway. Except that maybe he felt compelled to acknowledge her by her name, “Rumi.” namesake also, he recognized, of the 13th century Sufi master poet.  Anyway, he now realized that while he was ‘trancing’ that it had gotten late.  Much later than he would have hoped.


     


    “Oh, the gates are locked already,” replied Rumi.  “Look there, to the west, over the lake.  The last glimmer of sunset is well below the horizon.”


     


    And at that moment, as nfp looked at the last crimson kiss of the Sun dropping below the wake of the lake, Rumi took two quick strides up the hill, dropped the leash-strap, and slithered comfortably right aside nfp, sitting with her back also against the old Wade obelisk.


     


    nfp felt a second wave of lust as he sensed Rumi’s proximate gaze upon him.  He realized it would be so easy, now, to just take this Roomya creature into his arms.  Just to take her into his arms.  No more conversation.  No questions answered-asked.  And then he suddenly amused himself by remembering  some lines from a Gregory Corso poem called ‘Marriage’ …



    Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries
    tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
    then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
    and she going just so far and I understanding why
    not getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel!
    Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
    and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky--


     


     


    “Whatcha writing there on your laptop?”,  Rumi asked playfully, fixing her attention upon nfp’s lap-ridden business.  “Looks pretty blank to me.”


     


    —this is the third chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—

  • After drifting off to dream of other things and better, notforprophet never did reawaken.


     


    It’s somewhat sad, but it appears that the Dreamland he so loved claimed him for its very own right on his verge of novel discovery.


     


    The police, however, are treating the discovery of his cadaver atop a hillside in LakeView Cemetery as an open case.  Though they do not yet suspect foul play, it seems that he was found the next morning after his death—estimated by signs of rigor mortis to have occurred somewhere around dusk, Sep. 4th, the night before—with a laptop aside of him that was still running.  Police have confirmed with computer experts that the particular make and model of the laptop that was found aside him could not possibly have sustained its active session throughout the night without the battery going dead.  So this alone, notwithstanding the pending autopsy, has raised suspicions.  Police, at the time of discovery, mentioned to a reporter nearby something else that was curious:  the session of Word that was open on the laptop had a manuscript typed or pasted into it that was 200 pages long.  And it was unsaved.  For evidentiary purposes, one of the responding investigative officers, using latex gloves, saved the manuscript for fear that the battery would, indeed, eventually wear down. 


     


    As it turns out, this cop who saved the manuscript was himself a blogger who just happened to have read notfprophet’s Xanga blog from time to time.  The cop recognized that the locale, the modus operandi, and even the appearance of the poor dead guy matched up pretty damn well with notforprophet’s own previous self-descriptions and self-portraits posted on the blog.   So he conjectured, quite rightfully, that a Xanga Meet-Up had just been established.   Small world, eh?  


     


    After the cop saved the manuscript  with the title of “posthumous.doc”, he glanced at the first few lines.  Something about a dog and a ghost writer.  But, wait…apparently there was a girl who saw him sometime before he died.  Was she the female presence that’s also mentioned, he wondered?  The cop recognized the ambiguity inherent in the prose he was reading as ‘classic notforprophet’.    So he began to think that maybe this dead guy, that others had once affectionately called ‘nfp’, did really commence writing this protracted stream of consciousness.  But did he write all of it before he died?  The cop, not resisting his curiosity, scroll-barred to the end of the saved manuscript and read the last couple of paragraphs…


     


    .  “O God, no.  NO.”   —he gasped.


     


    Then he did something strange.  He rummaged through the bulky backpack found aside the corpse, found a floppy, took it out, and inserted it into the still ticking laptop.  And he proceeded to copy a certain file.  Then he removed the floppy from the never-say-die laptop, looked about to assure no one was watching, and surreptitiously slipped it into his shirt pocket.


     


    —this is the second chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—

  • Sitting here in Dreamland after running another 7 miles, I’m stunned with my own inner silence.  Laptop’s humming, sun is beating down intensely, I’m seated with closed eyes, yet nothing.  I wait.  And wait.  And wait…


     


    I feel a presence near me.  It’s a huge German Shepherd that a girl is walking leashless through the cemetery.  She’s at an unapproachable distance, but the dog has strayed toward me to check me out.  I was caught off guard by its approach.  It seems that I was dreaming and just woke up.  She yells “Come on.  Let’s go.”  I guess she understands that I understand that she means the dog.  But do I?


     


    My dream state was not vacuous.  There was a female presence with me.  She was typing on my laptop.  She stopped when I returned to consciousness.  I was hoping that she had written a book and left it for me in my session of Word.  Yet the page is still blank.


     


    That’s how books get written, isn’t it?  Nobody really writes those things, right?  Spirits visit and endow us with the transcripts and then strangely and mysteriously disappear.  I kind of feel that the female sprite in my dream was just getting started and that that ruin-a-good-thing dog disrupted our relationship. Damn it.  I want my ghost writer back!


     


    *closes eyes…drifts off again*


     


    —this is the first chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—

  • Understanding Killer Katrina...


     


    Although the winds of Katrina decreased and it was ‘downgraded’ to a Category 4 (145 mph) storm before landfall, the storm surge that had formed when it was a Category 5 (170 mph) storm persisted and whelmed over New Orleans.  Why?  Because nearly all the momentum built up in the water endured—energy in water does not dissipate as rapidly as energy in wind.  So for purposes of destruction, it remained a 5 as it surged into Lake Pontchartrain.


     


    Before the storm hit, I told my buddy Mike (in Arizona) that I expected 5,000 dead as a result of this storm.  We both expected New Orleans  to become a lake.  It’s funny how to regular guys like us had it all figured out, yet Mikey Chertoff, Homeland Security Secretary, even now is adamantly maintaining that the Katrina scenario that Mike and I (and nearly all the rest of you informed victims and observers) were envisioning didn’t exist and was beyond imagination.


     


    What a total crock of bureaucratic shit.  If Bush doesn’t fire this lame ass, then we must conclude that Bush stands behind this totally unacceptable self-serving alibi-ist.


     


    "There's a lot of aid surging toward those who've been affected. Millions of gallons of water. Millions of tons of food. We're making progress about pulling people out of the Superdome," the president said.


    Millions of tons of food?  2,000,000,000 (two billion) pounds of food?!    Bush had better super-size New Orleans' plumbing while he's at it.  And to have "millions of gallons of water...surging toward those who've been affected"?  Well, just a poor choice of words, in addition to the forementioned presidential hyperbole.


     


    Given the ill-prepared response by government to this disaster,  I just wonder what our government would (will?) do if…


     


    the Canary Island mega-tsunami unleashes? 


     


    an Avian-flu pandemic strikes? 


     


    or the Yellowstone Park super-volcano, long overdue, re-erupts?

  • I’ve a goal to run 21 miles this holiday weekend.  It’s a modest goal.  One of many.


     


    I’d also like to get a lot of reading and writing done. 


     


    Normally, Dreamland is quiet enough for reflecting, composing, writing.  Today, however, there are a couple of young blonde caregivers tending a group of about ten brats (Okay, some of them are cute.  I mean, besides the one blonde caregiver.)    They’re here, I gather, to observe the National Air Show in Cleveland this weekend from upon the hillside where I normally lounge after running, blog, get smacked around by my muses, etc.  The brats are essentially acting like hippies and running all around the hillside, dripping popsicles on headstones, and screaming at the top of their lungs.  It’s charming.  I think.


     


    uh-oh.  They must have heard me writing because they just left.  Either that or the sight of a madman who runs around the cemetery for seven miles, then drinks beer as he pounds on a laptop is too much for that one hot blonde to handle while she tries to martial law the brats.  And I was just starting to adjust to them.  In fact, my muse, was prepared to make a sport of the whole event.


     


    Of course, I am the interloper.  Not them.  They’re innocents plush with life who come here as cute and wee tourists.  I’m  a hulk infused with the battle-spirit and have arrived here to challenge the foundations of all that’s dear to the obstructers of one day short of Forever.  Shatter all mindsets.  Pummel all preset precepts.  Strike a blow against Death  itself.


     


    Still, I feel.  I feel for them.  I feel for you.   I truly feel for all of Life. 


     


    The only difference being that I chose ‘this’.  And not ‘that’.


     

  • I don't have the right, the permission to republish this article below.  Fuck it.  Politicians from the President of the United States on down to the mayor of New Orleans don't have the right to claim that this totally pre-envisioned Katrina disaster was 'unimaginable' and 'beyond all possibility to plan for or respond to.' 


    We now need to help the people.  But in the months to come, let us not forget the leadership we lacked for days and days and days, allowing even the most backward third world countries today to feel that their absolutely corrupt and inept ingrained leaderships are more beneficient and enlightened than our very democratic bushistic own.


    From the National Geographic***October 2004***
    By Joel K. Bourne, Jr. (prophet extraordinaire)


    The Louisiana bayou, hardest working marsh in America, is in big trouble—with dire consequences for residents, the nearby city of New Orleans, and seafood lovers everywhere.



    It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday.
     
    But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.
     
    The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.
     
    Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.
     
    When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.
     
    "The killer for Louisiana is a Category Three storm at 72 hours before landfall that becomes a Category Four at 48 hours and a Category Five at 24 hours—coming from the worst direction," says Joe Suhayda, a retired coastal engineer at Louisiana State University who has spent 30 years studying the coast. Suhayda is sitting in a lakefront restaurant on an actual August afternoon sipping lemonade and talking about the chinks in the city's hurricane armor. "I don't think people realize how precarious we are,"
    Suhayda says, watching sailboats glide by. "Our technology is great when it works. But when it fails, it's going to make things much worse."
     
    The chances of such a storm hitting New Orleans in any given year are slight, but the danger is growing. Climatologists predict that powerful storms may occur more frequently this century, while rising sea level from global warming is putting low-lying coasts at greater risk. "It's not if it will happen," says University of New Orleans geologist Shea Penland. "It's when."
     
    Yet just as the risks of a killer storm are rising, the city's natural defenses are quietly melting away. From the Mississippi border to the Texas state line, Louisiana is losing its protective fringe of marshes and barrier islands faster than any place in the U.S. Since the 1930s some 1,900 square miles (4,900 square kilometers) of coastal wetlands—a swath nearly the size of Delaware or almost twice that of Luxembourg—have vanished beneath the Gulf of Mexico. Despite nearly half a billion dollars spent over the past decade to stem the tide, the state continues to lose about 25 square miles (65 square kilometers) of land each year, roughly one acre every 33 minutes.
     
    A cocktail of natural and human factors is putting the coast under. Delta soils naturally compact and sink over time, eventually giving way to open water unless fresh layers of sediment offset the subsidence. The Mississippi's spring floods once maintained that balance, but the annual deluges were often disastrous. After a devastating flood in 1927, levees were raised along the river and lined with concrete, effectively funneling the marsh-building sediments to the deep waters of the Gulf. Since the 1950s engineers have also cut more than 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) of canals through the marsh for petroleum exploration and ship traffic. These new ditches sliced the wetlands into a giant jigsaw puzzle, increasing erosion and allowing lethal doses of salt water to infiltrate brackish and freshwater marshes.
     
    While such loss hits every bayou-loving Louisianan right in the heart, it also hits nearly every U.S. citizen right in the wallet. Louisiana has the hardest working wetlands in America, a watery world of bayous, marshes, and barrier islands that either produces or transports more than a third of the nation's oil and a quarter of its natural gas, and ranks second only to Alaska in commercial fish landings. As wildlife habitat, it makes Florida's Everglades look like a petting zoo by comparison.
     
    Such high stakes compelled a host of unlikely bedfellows—scientists, environmental groups, business leaders, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—to forge a radical plan to protect what's left. Drafted by the Corps a year ago, the Louisiana Coastal Area (LCA) project was initially estimated to cost up to 14 billion dollars over 30 years, almost twice as much as current efforts to save the Everglades. But the Bush Administration balked at the price tag, supporting instead a plan to spend up to two billion dollars over the next ten years to fund the most promising projects. Either way, Congress must authorize the money before work can begin.
     
    To glimpse the urgency of the problem afflicting Louisiana, one need only drive 40 minutes southeast of New Orleans to the tiny bayou village of Shell Beach. Here, for the past 70 years or so, a big, deeply tanned man with hands the size of baseball gloves has been catching fish, shooting ducks, and selling gas and bait to anyone who can find his end-of-the-road marina. Today Frank "Blackie" Campo's ramshackle place hangs off the end of new Shell Beach. The old Shell Beach, where Campo was born in 1918, sits a quarter mile away, five feet beneath the rippling waves. Once home to some 50 families and a naval air station during World War II, the little village is now "ga'an pecan," as Campo says in the local patois. Gone forever.
     
    Life in old Shell Beach had always been a tenuous existence. Hurricanes twice razed the community, sending houses floating through the marsh. But it wasn't until the Corps of Engineers dredged a 500-foot-wide (150-meter-wide) ship channel nearby in 1968 that its fate was sealed. The Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, known as "Mr. Go," was supposed to provide a shortcut for freighters bound for New Orleans, but it never caught on. Maybe two ships use the channel on a given day, but wakes from even those few vessels have carved the shoreline a half mile wide in places, consuming old Shell Beach.
     
    Campo settles into a worn recliner, his pale blue eyes the color of a late autumn sky. Our conversation turns from Mr. Go to the bigger issue affecting the entire coast. "What really screwed up the marsh is when they put the levees on the river," Campo says, over the noise of a groaning air-conditioner. "They should take the levees out and let the water run; that's what built the land. But we know they not going to let the river run again, so there's no solution."
     
    Denise Reed, however, proposes doing just that—letting the river run. A coastal geomorphologist at the University of New Orleans, Reed is convinced that breaching the levees with a series of gated spillways would pump new life into the dying marshes. Only three such diversions currently operate in the state. I catch up with Reed at the most controversial of the lot—a 26-million-dollar culvert just south of New Orleans named Caernarvon.
     
    "Caernarvon is a prototype, a demonstration of a technique," says Reed as we motor down a muddy canal in a state boat. The diversion isn't filling the marsh with sediments on a grand scale, she says. But the effect of the added river water—loaded as it is with fertilizer from farm runoff—is plain to see. "It turns wetlands hanging on by the fingernails into something quite lush," says Reed.
     
    To prove her point, she points to banks crowded with slender willows, rafts of lily pads, and a wide shallow pond that is no longer land, no longer liquid. More like chocolate pudding. But impressive as the recovering marsh is, its scale seems dwarfed by the size of the problem. "Restoration is not trying to make the coast look like a map of 1956," explains Reed. "That's not even possible. The goal is to restore healthy natural processes, then live with what you get."
     
    Even that will be hard to do. Caernarvon, for instance, became a political land mine when releases of fresh water timed to mimic spring floods wiped out the beds of nearby oyster farmers. The oystermen sued, and last year a sympathetic judge awarded them a staggering 1.3 billion dollars. The case threw a major speed bump into restoration efforts.
     
    Other restoration methods—such as rebuilding marshes with dredge spoil and salt-tolerant plants or trying to stabilize a shoreline that's eroding 30 feet (10 meters) a year—have had limited success. Despite the challenges, the thought of doing nothing is hard for most southern Louisianans to swallow. Computer models that project land loss for the next 50 years show the coast and interior marsh dissolving as if splattered with acid, leaving only skeletal remnants. Outlying towns such as Shell Beach, Venice, Grand Isle, and Cocodrie vanish under a sea of blue pixels.
     
    Those who believe diversions are the key to saving Louisiana's coast often point to the granddaddy of them all: the Atchafalaya River. The major distributary of the Mississippi River, the Atchafalaya, if left alone, would soon be the Mississippi River, capturing most of its flow. But to prevent salt water from creeping farther up the Mississippi and spoiling the water supply of nearby towns and industries, the Corps of Engineers allows only a third of the Mississippi's water to flow down the Atchafalaya. Still, that water and sediment have produced the healthiest wetlands in Louisiana. The Atchafalaya Delta is one of the few places in the state that's actually gaining ground instead of losing it. And if you want to see the delta, you need to go crabbing with Peanut Michel.
     
    "Peanut," it turns out, is a bit of a misnomer. At six foot six and 340 pounds, the 35-year-old commercial fisherman from Morgan City wouldn't look out of place on the offensive line of the New Orleans Saints. We launch his aluminum skiff in the predawn light, and soon we're skimming down the broad, café au lait river toward the newest land in Louisiana. Dense thickets of needlegrass, flag grass, cut grass, and a big-leafed plant Michel calls elephant ear crowd the banks, followed closely by bushy wax myrtles and shaggy willows.
     
    Michel finds his string of crab pots a few miles out in the broad expanse of Atchafalaya Bay. Even this far from shore the water is barely five feet deep. As the sun ignites into a blowtorch on the horizon, Michel begins a well-oiled ritual: grab the bullet-shaped float, shake the wire cube of its clicking, mottled green inhabitants, bait it with a fish carcass, and toss. It's done in fluid motions as the boat circles lazily in the water.
     
    But it's a bad day for crabbing. The wind and water are hot, and only a few crabs dribble in. And yet Michel is happy. Deliriously happy. Because this is what he wants to do. "They call 'em watermen up in Maryland," he says with a slight Cajun accent. "They call us lunatics here. You got to be crazy to be in this business."
     
    Despite Michel's poor haul, Louisiana's wetlands are still a prolific seafood factory, sustaining a commercial fishery that most years lands more than 300 million dollars' worth of finfish, shrimp, oysters, crabs, and other delicacies. How long the stressed marshes can maintain that production is anybody's guess. In the meantime, Michel keeps at it. "My grandfather always told me, Don't live to be rich, live to be happy," he says. And so he does.
     
    After a few hours Michel calls it a day, and we head through the braided delta, where navigation markers that once stood at the edge of the boat channel now peek out of the brush 20 feet (six meters) from shore. At every turn we flush mottled ducks, ibis, and great blue herons. Michel, who works as a hunting guide during duck season, cracks an enormous grin at the sight. "When the ducks come down in the winter," he says, "they'll cover the sun."
     
    To folks like Peanut Michel, the birds, the fish, and the rich coastal culture are reason enough to save Louisiana's shore, whatever the cost. But there is another reason, one readily grasped by every American whose way of life is tethered not to a dock, but to a gas pump: These wetlands protect one of the most extensive petroleum infrastructures in the nation.
     
    The state's first oil well was punched in south Louisiana in 1901, and the world's first offshore rig went into operation in the Gulf of Mexico in 1947. During the boom years in the early 1970s, fully half of the state's budget was derived from petroleum revenues. Though much of the production has moved into deeper waters, oil and gas wells remain a fixture of the coast, as ubiquitous as shrimp boats and brown pelicans.
     
    The deep offshore wells now account for nearly a third of all domestic oil production, while Louisiana's Offshore Oil Port, a series of platforms anchored 18 miles (29 kilometers) offshore, unloads a nonstop line of supertankers that deliver up to 15 percent of the nation's foreign oil. Most of that black gold comes ashore via a maze of pipelines buried in the Louisiana muck. Numerous refineries, the nation's largest natural gas pipeline hub, even the Strategic Petroleum Reserve are all protected from hurricanes and storm surge by Louisiana's vanishing marsh.
     
    You can smell the petrodollars burning at Port Fourchon, the offshore oil industry's sprawling home port on the central Louisiana coast. Brawny helicopters shuttle 6,000 workers to the rigs from here each week, while hundreds of supply boats deliver everything from toilet paper to drinking water to drilling lube. A thousand trucks a day keep the port humming around the clock, yet Louisiana 1, the two-lane highway that connects it to the world, seems to flood every other high tide. During storms the port becomes an island, which is why port officials like Davie Breaux are clamoring for the state to build a 17-mile-long (27-kilometer-long) elevated highway to the port. It's also why Breaux thinks spending 14 billion dollars to save the coast would be a bargain.
     
    "We'll go to war and spend billions of dollars to protect oil and gas interests overseas,"
    Breaux says as he drives his truck past platform anchors the size of two-story houses. "But here at home?" He shrugs. "Where else you gonna drill? Not California. Not Florida. Not in ANWR. In Louisiana. I'm third generation in the oil field. We're not afraid of the industry. We just want the infrastructure to handle it."
     
    The oil industry has been good to Louisiana, providing low taxes and high-paying jobs. But such largesse hasn't come without a cost, largely exacted from coastal wetlands. The most startling impact has only recently come to light—the effect of oil and gas withdrawal on subsidence rates. For decades geologists believed that the petroleum deposits were too deep and the geology of the coast too complex for drilling to have any impact on the surface. But two years ago former petroleum geologist Bob
    Morton, now with the U.S. Geological Survey, noticed that the highest rates of wetland loss occurred during or just after the period of peak oil and gas production in the 1970s and early 1980s. After much study, Morton concluded that the removal of millions of barrels of oil, trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, and tens of millions of barrels of saline formation water lying with the petroleum deposits caused a drop in subsurface pressure—a theory known as regional depressurization. That led nearby underground faults to slip and the land above them to slump.
     
    "When you stick a straw in a soda and suck on it, everything goes down," Morton explains. "That's very simplified, but you get the idea." The phenomenon isn't new: It was first documented in Texas in 1926 and has been reported in other oil-producing areas such as the North Sea and Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. Morton won't speculate on what percentage of wetland loss can be pinned on the oil industry. "What I can tell you is that much of the loss between Bayou Lafourche and Bayou Terrebonne was caused by induced subsidence from oil and gas withdrawal. The wetlands are still there, they're just underwater." The area Morton refers to, part of the Barataria-Terrebonne estuary, has one of the highest rates of wetland loss in the state.
     
    The oil industry and its consultants dispute Morton's theory, but they've been unable to disprove it. The implication for restoration is profound. If production continues to taper off in coastal wetlands, Morton expects subsidence to return to its natural geologic rate, making restoration feasible in places. Currently, however, the high price of natural gas has oil companies swarming over the marshes looking for deep gas reservoirs. If such fields are tapped, Morton expects regional depressurization to continue. The upshot for the coast, he explains, is that the state will have to focus whatever restoration dollars it can muster on areas that can be saved, not waste them on places that are going to sink no matter what.
     
    A few days after talking with Morton, I'm sitting on the levee in the French Quarter, enjoying the deep-fried powdery sweetness of a beignet from the Café du Monde. Joggers lumber by in the torpid heat, while tugs wrestle their barges up and down the big brown river. For all its enticing quirkiness, for all its licentious pleasures, for all its geologic challenges, New Orleans has been luckier than the wetlands that lined its pockets and stocked its renowned tables. The question is how long Lady Luck will shine. It brings back something Joe Suhayda, the LSU engineer, had said during our lunch by Lake Pontchartrain.
     
    "When you look at the broadest perspective, short-term advantages can be gained by exploiting the environment. But in the long term you're going to pay for it. Just like you can spend three days drinking in New Orleans and it'll be fun. But sooner or later you're going to pay."
     
    I finish my beignet and stroll down the levee, succumbing to the hazy, lazy feel of the city that care forgot, but that nature will not.

  • I’m not really in your house.


    Not really.


    My words may be on your monitor. 


    Perhaps I’ve made it that far.


    But, even then, you may not be home.


    You could be blogging from a cemetery like I often do (am doing).


    Or sitting at a cyber kiosk in a minimum security prison bored out of your skull and wondering what the fuck that asshole notforprophet’s been doing lately.


     


    My words aren’t really in your mind.


    Not really.


    You’ve opened your mind to perceptions.


    You’re digesting symbols, absorbing energy, encountering the arcanum.


    What once were my words somehow may now be activating a inner voice within.


    Does that voice sound like me?  Like you?


    Or is there no voice at all because your soul firewalls the extraneous?


     


    I’m no longer here, wherever 'here' was once.


    Not really.


    I wrote these words long, long ago.  Felt the pain, then let it go.


    Perhaps before blogging was even ever envisioned.


    Certainly before Romeo wooed Juliet.


    And now she breathes no longer.


    O evil vial,  O trusty knife.

  • As Hurricane Katrina hit, I came down with the flu.  And just as its remnants passed through and by yesterday, and the sun returned, I revived entirely and became suddenly invigorated as I took to running in Dreamland again.  Just a strange personal coincidence, I guess.


     


    The violence and lawlessness that is now epidemic in New Orleans provides the government precise support for its rationale to never announce an imminent asteroid collision with the Earth.  Granted, New Orleans is an already actualized, localized “loss of the world” for the unfortunate remaining there while the response to an announcement of an imminent asteroid collision would be entirely anticipatory and worldwide.   Still, when masses of amalgamated people face the “loss of the world”,  whether that world is the hood or the globe, whether the loss is actual or imminent, the brutality of lawless selfishness will manifest and attempt to dominate matters at hand.  And given that the lead time on announcing an  asteroid collision could be anywhere from 1 day to 15 years, the government simply will not, by proxy of an announcement, initiate an anticipatory panic that would lead to absolute terror, lawlessness, and societal dissolution.


     


    But I wish they’d have a policy to reveal such to us at least one day  in advance.  A “One Day to Live” directive that admits: “Yeah, we knew about this killer asteroid 10 years ago, decided we couldn’t do anything about, decided telling the public would lead to a panic that would usher in a Reign of Darkness and Terror, so we kept it our own dirty little secret.  Our advice to you now?  Don’t go to work tomorrow.  Take the day off.  Enjoy yourselves.”


      


    The overriding health case for the use of extra virgin olive oil.


      


    The newly-found health benefits implicit in consuming coffee.


      


    There’s 87 million internet users in China.  And nude web chats are a hot commodity.

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