Radar Intelligence.
The internet is always slow in New Orleans when it rains. It does not matter if it is AT&T or Cox. Neither is any better than the other.
It has not rained for a few hours so let us use this bandwidth to say some words out loud. They are fun to say: Clepsydra. Oriflamme. Cuirass. Aigrette. Maniple. See? They are wonderful words.
I am the kind of man-of-mystery who trickles along the grooves of New Orleans like water in a clepsydra.
I stole that sentence from a book review in the Wall Street Journal today. Now you know why I sometimes chuckle when I read the Journal—it is often full of pleasant words I do not often get to use in conversation. I am only writing about this so that you will look up what a clepsydra is. Now you know.
I am just living history. Like a soldier’s life, it is a lot of boredom until the bombs start coming in. Then, it is pandemonium with no rules except to do everything you can to kill the other guy or be killed, and, even worse, everything is totally random on the first-person level. The fog of New Orleans is not as life-or-death as the fog of war but it is just as predictable. Every day in New Orleans is a variation on a theme, until something happens.
There is no impending doom right now that I can detect through my tires on the pavement and my ears bent as I trickle along the grooves of New Orleans like water in a clepsydra. The levels of dysfunction and discontent, and overall happiness with life in general, these seem right about normal.
I am going back to read the Wall Street Journal. I am waiting for something very important to happen so I am just killing time, waiting.
It is not just living in New Orleans that has distorted my sense of time and urgency. Much of my professional time, like much of my personal time, involves siting around, waiting for people to show up. I took up my current profession after I moved to New Orleans.
I am not a drug mule. I am a professional ne’er-do-well.
New Orleans is a perfect place for people who are dreamy and aimless. I used to be considered an underachiever in New England. It is no wonder I have gone native in New Orleans and become even more so. Showing up is half the battle.
We live in a city that encourages polishing vices into something acceptable, for profit, as long as good memories are the end result. Vices, by definition, bring misery, not happiness. We live in the one city in all the world that Care forgot.
The squeaky wheel does not get the grease. It gets replaced.
Who knows what will happen next? As long as the sun comes up tomorrow, who cares?
The view in the sky this morning was a promise that, thus far, has been delivered.
Some things are best left private. Other things are always available for paying customers…