Effluvia

Buy you a suit.

Get you a New Orleans apartment.

Freaky. The Japanese are weird.

And, in the interest of equal time, weird stuff about Japanese people.

Bygone Days
Uncensored!

75 YEARS AGO
July 17, 1925

The Peabody and Lenox Civic Clubs will build a wading pool for children in Peabody Park. It will cost $1,600.

No smarmy comment, but I wonder if it's still there. Or if it even got built.

Boss Kenny

"I own an entire apartment building in New Orleans. It's full, though. Geniuses only."

We were just outside of Jackson when the caffeine began to take hold.

I was with Sonya, The Wife, in her car - a sleek, shark-like red covertible hereinafter referred to as the Louisiana Badass. We had the top down and the pine-stinking Mississippi wind was howling around us.

I went to pour some Coke into Sonya's cup from Wendy's. The wind promptly snatched the lid out of my hands and tossed it into the night.

"Did you see what God did?" I yelled.

"God, you fool?" she growled back at me though teeth clenching a cigarette, "that was pure stupidity on your part."

"Was that a bat?" she asked, looking up into the night sky.

Later, between Jackson and Lake Ponchartrain, Sonya walked the Badass up to 115 miles an hour and howled into the steaming air around us.

"Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!" she howled.

Little H.S. Thompson for you there, kids. You like?

So we didn't find an apartment. Dammit.

The drive down was not so bad. We had lots of good tunes and the top down was nice. Until a burning ash went into Sonya's eye. We put the top up after that.

We made it to Covington, the little town on the north shore of the lake, right after midnight. As we checked in to the Super 8 the Choads, a family of itenerant goat-farmers looking for work, checked in to both rooms on either side of us.

"They're going to start having nasty, fat-people sex the as soon as we try to go to sleep," I told Sonya once the door was shut behind us.

"Something to look forward to," Sonya said, choosing to look at the bright side.

The top went back down for the trip across the lake and into Metairie, where we met George. George has an apartment in the Irish Channel that we looked at. Nice, but a bit small for our purposes.

That began a day of apartment hunting. We looked at places being renovated, new places, old places, apartments from real estate brokers and apartments individuals were looking to rent. The best of the batch was a shotgun apartment in a big house that was pretty cool, but over near Tulane and not too close to the fun stuff. I almost got it anyway, but we decided to wait. I'm happy about that.

We went to Acme Oyster House for dinner - po boys, red beans and rice and gumbo. Sonya doesn't like oysters at all and while I think the fried ones are fine I have horrible, gag-inducing memories of my father slurping down raw oyster after raw oyster when we lived on the Gulf Coast when I was a child. I mean, he'd just eat 'em and eat 'em and they look like snot on a shell and I think it's just wrong.

Then we went to the Intercontinental to meet Kathy, Sonya's boss, and her boyfriend (and my drinking buddy) Ward. We barhopped, stopping at Tropical Isle for hand grenades, then wandering down to Lafitte's for candlelit beer, then down to Decatur to sit at Molly's for a while and people watch.

On Sunday we drove around some more, writing down addresses and calling the phone numbers of possible apartments. I spent ten minutes on the payphone outside Starbucks on Magazine and I was soaked, positively drenched in sweat when that was over.

Then we came home.

It was a decent weekend, but far too hectic and stressful. Sonya thinks we might be worrying about this a bit too much. I agree with her, but dammit, we've got to find a place to live by the end of the month. Do you understand this? Live! I think it deserves a little worrying. So I'm taking Wednesday off (it's not like there's anything to do at the soon-to-be previous job, anyway) and driving down tomorrow night. All day Wednesday I will apartment shop and I when I come home I will have a new place to keep my shit. Like the guy from the Men's Warehouse says, I guarantee it.