Catching Up

Lots of stuff going on lately, and so little time to write. The days slip away uncounted. I can’t stand that. So here are some things that have gone down over the last five days or more.

• Xy made a trip to the north shore with Persephone and Daisy and Lavender to visit the splash park there in old Mandeville. They also stopped by a furniture store in Slidell; while Daisy was shopping Xy gathered some tadpoles and aquatic snails. Next thing I know she’s set up an aquarium on our kitchen table and added some goldfish and water plants. I said, “You’re turning this place into a frickin’ menagerie! Wasn’t the rabbit enough?”
• Our former neighbor Jesus replaced our screwed-up lattice panel near the front door of our house. He said he would do the job two months ago, and I had kind of given up hope. And to top it off he also installed a door there — that door has been missing for years, since old Dan’s crucifix-rig disintegrated some time after Katrina, I think.
• Xy tried her hand at painting the posts under the deck. Unfortunately she’s kind of sloppy — splatters and drips everywhere. I’m not the most fastidious person, but I’m taking the paintbrush back. I did the second coat myself and also got the new lattice work painted. I like bold rich colors but this is a pale lavender, so pale it’s almost gray.
• Speaking of Lavender, we celebrated her first birthday Sunday. There were pony rides on the neutral ground. Persephone wasn’t terribly interested in the ponies, strangely enough, but it was still a fun party.
• I gave a talk and led a walk along the Lafitte Corridor to about 30 kids as part of a summer program called Job One, run by the Alliance for Affordable Energy and the Louisiana Green Corps.
• I’ll admit I get a little misty-eyed when remembering the moon landing. It’s not nostalgia, exactly, as I was only two when that happened. It’s more the grandeur of human achievement or something like that. Yet at the same time I do have mixed feelings about the whole space program. I’ve heard a bunch of lunar-themed songs lately, as DJs commemorate the event, but I think the best one is Gil Scott-Heron’s Whitey on the Moon, which expresses my misgivings eloquently and is a hoot to boot.
• Aftre three weeks of bureaucratic delay, I finally got my annual letter reconfirming my employment. Hooray, I still have a job. Even got a decent raise. In this economy that’s saying something.
• I do occasionally read books outside of my club selections. It took me a few months, chipping away at lunch time, but I finally finished Goth: Undead Subculture which the library purchased on my recommendation. Fascinating stuff. It’s the first and only collection of serious academic essays on the subject. I don’t usually read much academic writing, and this was heavy going in some places, but overall I think it’s pretty accessible. I think what I found most provocative is simply the idea of subcultures themselves as somehow resisting mainstream culture. I don’t know if subcultural studies is an organized field of study, but I think I’d like to learn more about it.
• In case you’re in the mood for a weird link, here’s Oxidation Paintings by Mambo.

Also, the weather has been lovely for this time of year, by which I mean highs in the upper 80s and humidity below 50%. Is this really July in southern Louisiana?