So far

"Home. Home is where I'll be.
Pick me up and turn me 'round.
I feel young. Born with a weak heart.
I guess I must be having fun.
The less we say about the better.
Make it up as we go along.
Feet on the ground, head in the sky,
It's ok. I know nothing's wrong.

"This Must Be The Place ( Native Melody)"-Talking Heads

I turned 50 earlier this week. I have to admit that it wasn't nearly as bad as I was prepared to endure. I got the usual and predictable cards and e-mails calling attention to my infirmity and impending senility. Folks have been taking me out to eat. According to my calendar, I won't have to buy lunch or dinner for the next week or so. That's pretty cool. My brothers and I played golf together last Sunday up at Mountain Ranch. That's me up in the right hand corner! These things are subjective and reasonable minds can differ on such matters but I don't think that I look too bad for an old coot.

Steve Martin said he was depressed upon turning 50 because it meant that his life as a productive artist was pretty much over. Which may bode ill for the soon-to-be released movie Shopgirl. Anyway, I guess I didn't brood over this consideration overly much, being neither productive nor an artist. Besides, when I got to thinking about it the past 50 years, I was comforted by the knowledge that I have done some pretty cool stuff. Here are some of the stuff I've done in the past 50 years:

I've caught touchdown passes. I once won a 5k completely hung over. I was a pretty good baseball player until I saw my first real good curveball when I was 16. I knew when I was whipped. I played competitive tennis up until the body started falling apart on me. There is a reason nobody in their forties is on the ATP tour. I took up golf in my forties. My goals were to get good enough to play with my buddies, with my brothers and in the church golf tournament. Admittedly, lofty goals these are not. But how many people in golf can say they have attained a goal? Without lying that is?

I have met the following people: Pete Maravich, Elgin Baylor, Keith Jackson, Donna Douglas (you know, Ellie Mae from the Beverly Hillbillies), Bill Clinton, Mike Huckabee (the obese one) and Mike Huckabee ( the svelte one) David Pryor, Dale Bumpers, Vic Snyder, Frank Broyles, Steve Shields, both the current and former Roman Catholic Bishops of Arkansas ( I even share a birthday with the former. He's getting on up there. But then again, so am I), cabaret chanteuse Susan Douglas (she reminds me of a squirrel on crack) Walker Percy's brother Phin and his son Will. I'm sure there are others. But I am already getting forgetful here in my dotage.

With mine own eyes I have seen the following: Elvis Costello, Van Gogh's "Self-Portrait", Renee Richards, the Rolling Stones, a tennis match between Pete Sampras and Todd Martin (They split sets-Sampras won in a tiebreaker), Bruce Springsteen, Ytzhak Perlman, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks at the Diner", Kiss (I am so ashamed), and Squeeze.

I saw Matt Jones complete that hope-to-Jesus pass that beat LSU. I saw Darryl Strawberry take a ball off of the wall in right field at old Ray Winder and gun a Traveler out by @ 3 ft. It's still just about the damnedest thing I've ever seen. I once saw Reggie Jackson just evaporate a pretty good fastball thrown by Jim Palmer. I saw Ron Guidry pitch that same night. A little guy. Surely to God no man that small has thrown a ball that hard since Koufax. I saw my friend Phil hit a wedge 141 yards after telling us that he was gonna do it because he was pissed. I saw Kenoy Kennedy once tackle some kid from Kentucky so hard my brother and I thought he had killed him. He didn't.

I once had a piece of paper autographed by Lew Alcindor. I lost it. I could kick myself.

I saw two of my friends die horribly. One died of melanoma. The other had AIDS. If there are worse ways to die, I don't want to see them. Myself, I should have been killed 9 times over myself. Testosterone, alcohol, females and motor vehicles are a way dangerous combination. If that wasn't bad enough, I once talked a mugger out of blowing my head off with a 9mm.

I have been lucky beyond what I deserve. And I know it.

I used to sing with the Symphony Chorus . I have sung the tenor aria "Every Valley Shall Be Exalted" from "Messiah." It ain't as hard as it sounds. I have sung for countless weddings and funerals. I prefer funerals. Sad as they are, you know that at least one person in attendance won't be bitching about the music. I used to be the Cantor at a Catholic Church here in town. Not many people knew I was under the radar being a Methodist and all. I don't sing much anymore.

I would rather play golf.

I can state without hesitation or fear of contradiction that I have gotten more late night calls from drunks than the front desk at the Bridgeway. One of my buddies used to get hammered and punch in area codes at random until his fingers stumbled across a place where he knew somebody. He would then ask Directory assistance to call the numbers for him. Unfortunately, 501 got dialed in a lot in those days. A guy I hadn't seen in 20 years once called in order to threaten to kill me for allegedly stealing his girlfriend in college. Or guys wanting to talk sports. At 2 am. A woman to whom I was engaged once called wanting to know "what happened to us?" I told her that she left me and moved to Texas and hung up. I still get calls late at night. Just not from drunks. This is an improvement.

I have loved and lost. Losing sucks. Then again, last time I looked nobody was dead or nothing. So it goes.

I have the best friends a man could have. Included in that number are a bunch of females who, in equal measure, stay on my ass and worry about me behind it. I have 4 great nephews. I have 3 adequate brothers. I have a little girl across the street who likes to come over and sit with me on the porch swing. I have enjoyed the happy sounds of little boys playing in my back yard.

I have also enjoyed robust good health. I have never gone without. I know, I really, really, know how blessed and fortunate I have been these last 50 years. Like everyone else I wish I could get some "do-overs." As the old communion rite goes, "I have done those things I ought not to have done and I have left undone those things I should have done."

And the rembrance of these things is grievous unto me. They really are.

I have been blessed. I am, for the most part, content with how the first 50 years have succeeded each unto each.

Home. Home is where I'll be but I guess I'm already there.

I come home. She lifted up her wings.

I guess that this must be the place.

I can't tell one from the other. Did I find you or you find me?

There was a time before we were born if someone asks

This is where I'll be.

So far so good. There's room for improvement, God knows. But so far so good. The less we say about it the better.

But hopefully, God willing, and for the foreseeable future, this is where I will be.

My Sunday Feeling

Yesterday was one of those "red-letter" days for a sports fan like me. At pretty much the same time, depending on what channel you lighted upon, you had LSU-Florida, Penn State-Michigan, and Notre Dame-Southern Cal ( Talk about a game in which it was hard to pick someone to root for. Or root against for that matter. Worse than the LSU game even.) And over on the baseball side, you had the Astros against the Cardinals.

The football games were all hellacious contests, all of them coming down to the last few seconds. Folks that were displaced or otherwise not in front of a TV were getting in touch with me to get the latest skinny. Marge was texting me on the way home from Oxford after watching the Rebels lose to Alabama on a last second-and I mean last second-field goal. She was remarkably chipper under the circumstances which led me to conclude that she was pretty much sober.

My brother John called me from a wedding reception in Memphis. I gave him the play by play during the last minute of the Notre Dame game. He would then call out what was going on to, judging from the sound of the voices in the background, what I gathered were most of the
men at the reception. Which undoubtedly amused the womenfolk in attendance to no end seeing as how they were pretty much left to amuse themselves at that point in time.

And all the while, e-mails and IMs are flying across my screen,almost all of them asking, "Can you believe the Notre Dame game?"

This is why we watch. We watch to see if Notre Dame can pull off the upset. We watch to see how Southern Cal can somehow survive. Which they did by the way, in one of the most amazing last minute drives I have ever seen in my life. And I have a loooooonnnnng memory about such things.

We also watch because it is all we have ever known. That night, I watched Georgia dismantle poor old Vanderbilt at the home of my friend J. From all outward appearances J is a pretty quiet, buttoned-down ladylike person much in keeping with her former life as a junior-high principal back in Georgia. Get a couple of beers in her, stick her in front of a Bulldog game and well, suffice it to say, she gets in touch with her inner Jzilla pretty quick.

I remember the first Georgia game I experienced with her. It was over Labor Day and I was sick with a sinus infection. Georgia was clobbering Boise State by 30 or so, which was an insufficient shellacking for Jzilla who at one point screamed at the screen, "Beat their eyes out!"

I thought my fever was causing auditory hallucinations.

" Did you just yell 'Beat their eyes out?' " I asked.

" Well, yes." she shrugged.

I remember reaching over and divesting her of her Corona.

Last night was more of the same. This is also why we watch. Because it is fun. If you can't have fun drinking beer and eating takeout food from Leo's while a good looking crazy person exhorts her Bulldogs to beat the eyes out of the opponent, you need your pulse checked.

But if any of you hear of a bunch of powerfully built young men walking around in West Nashville with white canes and seeing eye dogs, I don't want to know about it.

Because I know who caused it and I can only assume some liability might attach at some point in time.

Island

Mother was having a bad day. Worse than the ones she claims to have on a daily basis even. My brother had brought her to Little Rock early that morning to see a neurologist that had been recommended by her psychiatrist as someone who is good at treating Parkinson's Disease in the elderly. These trips are hard on Mom. As she grows older she is less and less inclined to leave her apartment at the assisted living facility where she lives much less come to Little Rock. In fact, they were about 30 minutes late because my brother found her in bed pretending to be asleep in hopes that she wouldn't have to leave the cocoon she has encapsulated herself in at this stage of her life.

So, imagine my amusement when the lady behind the desk informed me that her appointment was, in reality, the week before and that there was no way that they could work her in to see the doctor despite her having come from 30 miles away. I confess that I went ballistic at this news for no other reason than they had such a lousy attitude of condescension about them as they insisted that they had made no mistake.

" You know, I called yesterday to confirm the appointment and nobody bothered to return my damned call!." I yelled at the wraith whom I gathered was the office manager.

She looked over her half glasses at the computer screen.

" I'm sorry. We have no record that you called." she hissed.

" Then I'm sure that you won't have any record that I called TWICE after my first call wasn't returned!"

She mumbled an insincere apology and asked for my number again to call me with a new appointment. You will be shocked to learn that I have yet to hear from them.

As an aside, although I am not known as a yeller, this was the second time within the span of one week that I had gone off on someone. While both occasions did provide some brief catharsis of sorts, I have to admit that neither episode accomplished much in the way of tangible good. I will try to bear this in mind the next time that I see deep red.

So we got Mom back in time for her lunch. I spent the rest of the afternoon grocery shopping, doing her banking and such in hopes of salvaging a worthless day.

Later that afternoon we sat on the couch in the parlor.

" How is my money holding out?" she asked.

" We are fine. The investments are throwing off good income. We haven't had to invade the assets of the trust to pay for anything and we probably will never have to. Even when you factor in the amount that I am stealing." I replied.

" Boy, you better watch it. God will get you if you steal from your Mama."

I can kid Mom about this. Unlike some elderly people, she is not paranoid about her money. She is not constantly cutting people out of the will or pestering our money guy. We are lucky in this regard.

"Did y'all sell Bill's house?" Bill was her older brother who died last summer.

" I don't know if Janan has sold it yet or not, Mom." I lied. She sold it in September.

" I don't like it here." Mom said. " I would have bought Bill's house. I would have been safe in Benton. It's not dangerous like Little Rock."

" Mom" I said. " You can't live by yourself."

" I could with some help."

" No, Mom. You need help with your meds. You need help with your food. You can't buy a house."

She sat quietly for a moment and then started fidgeting with the throw pillow next to her.

" What, Mom?" I asked.

" It's just that I don't fit in here. I've never fit in anywhere. I just do better by myself. I think I could make it in a little house in Benton."

I took her hand.

"Mom. I'm sorry." I shook my head "no."

Pause. She looked away.

"I'm tired." she said. "I think I'll take my nap."

I really didn't know what to say. It is a hell of a sad thing to be 83 and to have had brought 4 sons into the world and yet to have no sense of place. About all any of us want is to know that there is a somewhere where we belong. I didn't know what to say because some of this she brought on herself by leading a semi-cloistered life in her retirement years. I also didn't know what to say as some of this she didn't bring on herself. It is clear now looking back through the lens of perspective that Mother has suffered from depression and/or mental illness for the past 30 years or so. She now suffers from the ravages of Parkinson's Disease which makes her makes her self conscious about her appearance and movement.

I also didn't know what to say because I, too, occasionally recognize those feelings myself. Maybe that's why I live by myself as well. Maybe I don't fit in either. Hell, I found myself blowing my stack twice in that week alone. That doesn't sound like someone who plays well with others does it?

I turned to take one last look before leaving. There I stood, Mister Well-Adjusted, and watched Mother shuffle after her walker back to her dark apartment where the blinds are drawn tight.

Back to the only place where my mother fits in.

My Sunday Feeling

I was driving back from a party out in West Little Rock when the eye of Rita rolled through Little Rock last night. She had cooled off to a mere severe thunderstorm by the time she crossed the county line. Still, she packed quite a punch at least as far as thunderstorms around here go. The rain was coming in sideways. Water was blowing over the Interstate and the Pathfinder got pushed around pretty good. I thought for a moment about getting off the highway and meandering home on the city streets. Still, I wanted be home in a hurry because, quite frankly, the weird light in the roiling sky made me a little apprehensive. So I barreled on through, one of about 5 other vehicles I saw out last night.

Little Rock really didn't sustain much in the way of damage. There are tree branches and other minor debris scattered about the neighborhood. I did see where an oak tree bent and broke crushing a Geo Metro that was parked beneath it on Valentine Street. But that's about all I saw. As is typically the case with storms like Rita, the reports of property damage and injury will come limping in during the days to come.

But we have no room to complain around here. Rita had taken a chill pill by the time she visited the Natural State having laid it to Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana earlier in the day. I have a lot of friends in Lafayette. I hope they are all right. My friend Jeanette moved to Houston with her husband around three weeks ago. Is that timing or what? She rode it out in a Salvation Army shelter in The Woodlands. She called me yesterday. She and Hot Rod,her goddamn cat, are fine.

I got a call around 10:30 last night from my buddy Chris in Thibodeaux. He said he had turned on the Weather Channel and saw that the eye of Rita was over Little Rock. So he decided to call me to see how I was doing for once. We were both sitting on our respective porches 300 miles apart drinking wine and watching it rain.

We always understood each other Chris and I.

He is fine. He is a Captain of the volunteer fire department down there so he was busy the last 36 hours. But Thibodeaux is none the worse for wear. I have to think that the rates for fire and casualty insurance would have to be pretty high with him being at the helm of the volunteer fire department. But what do I know?

It seems that most of the Rita related damage is limited to the Beaumont, Port Arthur, Lake Charles triangle. ( I am not going to write about the levees breaching again. I'm depressed enough as it is.) I don't know much about any of these places except that they are supposed to be tough old oil and gas towns. Even at that, we must remember that there are people that have homes and lives, such as they are, down there and we must wish the best for them. I do know that Lake Charles is the title of a song by Lucinda Williams and that Port Arthur is the birthplace of Janis Joplin and Jimmy Johnson.

I don't know anything about Beaumont but I do have a funny story that sorta relates to Beaumont.

When I was at Tulane, Tulane Basketball came on right after the Marvin Gorman Crusade show. For those of you that don't remember, Gorman is a New Orleans televangelist who hired a private detective (or his son who was a deputy sheriff in Jefferson Parish depending on who you believe) who got pictures of rival man-of-the-cloth Jimmy Swaggart canoodleing with a hooker in a sleazy hotel room out on Airline Highway. A quick search of the Internet reveals that the old peckerwood's bidness is still extant and you can see for yourself here:http://marvingorman.com

Anyway, my friends and I always enjoyed the altar call that ended each service. The sinners would troop down to the front of the stage where Gorman would lay hands upon them whereupon some of them would immediately hit the deck. Not only was this amusing to behold, but it provided an apt metaphor for what was to generally befall the Green Wave a few minutes hence.

One night, the "Music Minister",a big fat guy who talked like Ashley Wilkes and who generally wore a Bobby Knight-type plaid jacket interrupted the usual laying on of hands and falling out to exclaim in his singsongy voice " Revvun GOH-man, Revvun GOH-man! Please come ovah heah!"

Gorman went over to the Music Minister who was standing in front of a couple of young men.

" Revvun, GOH-man! These are two HOEmohsexyooals from BOOmont!"

I remember popcorn flying in the air. I remember one of my buddies falling out of his chair as if he had been touched by Revvun GOH-man.

These are the memories that will sustain us in our golden years.

And that's all I know about Beaumont. Other than it is supposed to be a pretty tough place and I would imagine that it was short a couple of homosexuals after those two got outed on the Marvin Gorman show.

Like I said, I don't know much about Southeast Texas but I hope everyone is ok. Especially those two guys from Beaumont.

Denial Is Not Just A River in Egypt and Homer Is Not Just The Author of The Iliad.

If ever you thought that Wally Hall was not completely encased in Frank Broyles's sphincter, one has only to read today's Democrat-Gazette to disabuse yourself of that notion. In today's offering in the inappropriately named " Like It Is" column, Wally accused Southern Cal of running up the score against the hapless Arkansas Razorbacks during last Saturday's 70-17 debacle in Los Angeles. Not only that, but he went on to state, in his typically mangled prose:

" It was supposed to be just a game. Instead Carroll (the Trojan's head coach) turned it into a joke, and he made sure everyone knew who was the butt of the laughter, as if anyone needed another example."

Do what? This is all about mean old Pete Carroll turning what was supposed to be "just a game" into a joke? Like the Hog's porous defense had nothing to do with this?

Southern Cal didn't run up the score so much as they just flat out beat the living hell out of the Razorbacks. Running up the score is when one clearly superior team unfairly takes advantage of a lesser opponent as Texas Tech did the other night when it hung 80 on Sam Houston State. This was, on paper at least, an intriguing matchup between teams from powerful conferences. There is no way in hell that a team from the Southeastern Conference should have gotten beaten this badly.

The fact of the matter is that the Razorbacks showed no heart. The fact of the matter is that a team as talented as Arkansas doesn't get beat this badly without considerable help from the sidelines. But you will never hear a word of this out of Homer Hall.

Just because everybody but Tommy the Trojan scored for USC doesn't mean that they unfairly ran up the score. It means that the Razorbacks stunk.

Vanderbilt would have given the Trojans a better game. You won't hear that out of Homer Hall either.

My Sunday Feeling

It is a pleasant Sunday morning here in the People's Republic of Hillcrest. There is a nice breeze coming over from the West. It carries a hint of cool weather that we can expect soon and very soon. Friends are checking in from all over. Sula writes from Florida wanting to know the latest from New Orleans. Marge writes from Jackson with a picture from the Internet. Phil sends a text message reminding me to pick his wife up at the airport tonight. All in all, it is a perfect morning to sit on my porch and ruminate before it gets too warm.

• How 'Bout Them Hawgs?- The Arkansas Razorbacks managed to lose to the Vanderbilt Commodores up in Fayetteville last night. Granted, Vanderbilt is not a bad ball club. They are as good as they are gonna get and nobody in their right mind would look forward to playing them. But you just can't be losing at home to the Vanderbilts of this world. This does not bode well for Houston Nutt. You can already hear the yahoos on the radio call-in shows and the Internet calling for HDN's scalp. And, as sure as the sun comes up in the morning, you can bet that someone will make reference to the fact that UA has no business losing to "an academic school" like Vanderbilt. It will be ugly. If they don't run the table after next week's loss at Southern Cal (who was the genius that scheduled that one anyway?) HDN will be fired. You heard it here first.
• Like It Is- It is always instructive to turn to Wally Hall when a debacle occurs in Razorback sports in order to get a cogent, well-thought out post-mortem. Today's column does not fail to disappoint, containing as it does the following gem : " As for the Razorback's offense, overall, it might as well have been a copy of the New York Times with the lights off." Huh? If anyone can translate that for me, I will kiss your ass on the steps of the State Capitol at noon.
• Small World- A Jewish friend of mine called me last week. He had gotten a call from the synagogue with the news that "four nice Jewish boys from Tulane Law" had washed ashore here in Little Rock. They are first year students and can't enroll anywhere else so my friend asked me if I would help find them jobs. Since last week, two of the guys have headed home but a girlfriend has popped up. It will be easier to find work for two nice Jewish boys than it would be for four. Girlfriend is on her own. Also I got an e-mail from a kid who is staying down the road with a lawyer couple who have taken her in. She has enrolled in law school here. I told her that if she needed anything to holler, as we say here in Little Rock. This is amazing.
• The Response-My church is running a shelter in the gym for people displaced by Katrina. I got an e-mail asking me to pass the word that all Methodist shelters and UMCor (United Methodist committee on Relief) depots have more stuff than they can use. This, too, is amazing. A friend of mine and a bunch of her girlfriends went down to the church to volunteer to work a shift and was told that they are booked up through November. My brother was told by his front office to forget about sales for awhile and to help bring these shelters up to speed on the Internet so the folks there can register with FEMA and the Red Cross. I told him we needed a laptop at the church. He got me a laptop. Somehow we will get through this. People are good. Somehow we will get through this.
• The US Open- Boy, you got to love Andre Agassi. In the quarters against James Blake he faced every problem you can face on a tennis court and still won in 5 sets. Check that. He didn't face every problem as today he plays in the Finals against Roger Federer. My heart goes with Andre but my head says Federer in straight sets. Federer just may be the best to ever play.

As Andre put it, " Federer doesn't have any weaknesses and he has a few great shots. So that equates to a problem." Well said. Again, Federer in straight sets.

Enough of this. It is starting to get hot out here. Time to grab a shower, clean up the kitchen and look for a fully electrified copy of the New York Times.

I Ain't Scared Of No Ghosts

I got a call today from my buddy in the Guard who is down in New Orleans with his unit doing relief work. He reported in today from an industrial canal over on the Jefferson-Orleans Parish line. It is still a mess over there. He says that there are houses that still have water up to the eaves. There is no electricity. He says that it will be really interesting to see this particular area when the water finally gets pulled down.

I know that area well. My buddy Don, the one who foolishly sat for the bar exam in North Carolina last month, used to live in an apartment over there on Monticello Street just over the Jeff Parish line right next to an industrial canal. Probably the same one from which my friend was calling. Anyway, Don's apartment was infested with wharf rats the size of Volkswagens. He named them Trigger, Tank and Silver. I was over there when Trigger bought the farm. Don had bought a rat trap the size of a closet door. When it went off, it sounded like a .38 had gone off in the house. Even at that, it only stunned Trigger who struggled to escape the watery grave Don consigned him to when he flushed him down the toilet. The other two eventually succumbed to poison but not before they had ingested a hell of a lot of it-or so it seemed to me-before it started to disagree with them.

My point is, they had a problem with the rats over there even before Katrina. I shudder to think what it will be like once they get the area drained.

Still, his news today was mostly positive. Or as positive as things can be when there is six feet of standing water. The good news is that they weren't finding as many dead bodies as they were prepared to endure. The total last Tuesday or so, was 6. As of 9 am this morning, the number still stood at 6. No one seriously believes that they won't find more bodies, but the numbers are trending well, as the pollster might say.

I told my friend that they may well find bodies in that canal but that their presence there might not be attributable to Katrina. Perhaps you may not have heard but New Orleans is a hotbed of Organized Crime which is yet another tax-free generator of revenue, along with the churches, in Orleans Parish. It is easy to forget that there is so much organized crime in New Orleans especially in light of the fact that so much of the criminal activity we have been seeing lately from down there is of the disorganized variety.

But New Orleans is mobbed up to its eyeballs. Always has been. And when I was there, they used to dump their stiffs into the industrial canals. The one over by Don was one of their favorite places of casual, if not expedient, interment. My friend has been told this already and they will keep their eyes out for any corpses that are wearing Rolexs and that are sporting a bullethole between the ear.

Katrina can't be blamed for everything, after all. Fair is fair.

The other good news is that Entergy seems to be doing a bangup job of getting power back to the city. The CBD and the French Quarter have lights. The Hilton should have power by this evening. They think that with any luck the Garden District and Tulane should have juice in 10 days or so. My friend described Entergy as an army marching North bringing the lights with them. Which is pretty much the opposite of what happened to them down there during the Great Unpleasantness back in the 1860s but I digress.

My friend says that it appears that Mayor Nagin is going to throw in the towel on forcing the evacuation of the rich white folks over by Tulane in the Garden District. What the hell. They never sustained much water damage. They have water pressure now, so the Fire Department can put out any fires that occur. These guys got food, water and alcohol sufficient to last a month. Some of them have private security guarding their homes and their power will be back on in a week. What the hell. The Mayor has bigger problems than this.

Speaking of housing, the most interesting news my friend related is that some folks have fashioned temporary accommodations in a most unusual place: Mausoleums. I'm not kidding. But first, some histoire.

One of the more interesting aspects of life in Orleans Parish that immediately presented itself to the early French and Spanish settlers was the fact that buried people tended to not stay buried there. At least not for very long. You would think that this phenomenon would have given them some clue as to the larger design difficulties that the sudden reappearance of Uncle Arnaud after his funeral Mass foreshadowed. Indeed, Bienville's engineers thought he was quite nuts to have picked a spit of land 6 feet below sea level upon which to build a city. But there was money to be made and the old town was built there anyway over the reservations of the French Corps des le Ingenieurs.

So they began interring their dead above the ground in mausoleums. The practice continues to this day. And some of them are quite ornate with a square footage that would make them compatible with some outbuildings in Pleasant Valley or Chenal even. Hell, you could fit my little house here in the People's Republic of Hillcrest into some of them.

As a matter of survival tactics, you could choose worse. They are pretty much waterproof which is an attractive feature in a building in Southeast Louisiana nowadays. Many cemeteries are gated communities if security is a concern. As far as aesthetics go, they are well maintained with plush lawns and pleasant gardens. And you are pretty much guaranteed quiet neighbors.

And it beats all hell out of living in the Superdome.

So that's the latest from the Big Easy. Where heavily armed white folks insist upon the right to observe the cocktail hour from their homes on St. Charles Avenue and other people are sleeping with those who have gone on to that great Jazzfest in the sky.

You couldn't make this stuff up. You really couldn't.

The News from Hell's Gate

In lieu of salutation, I heard the following when I answered the phone this morning: " Well, it's a screwed up mess down here, boy. That's for sure."

It was my friend in the Guard. He was calling from New Orleans.

The following is the gist of what he described to me in a 30-40 minute conversation.

They finally got the last of the folks out of the Convention Center. He said that he cannot imagine how some of those folks survived, especially the elderly ones confined to wheelchairs. One man confined to a wheelchair weighed around 500 lbs. The Red Cross commandeered a U-Haul that could lower to the ground. They had to roll him onto the lift and then raise him up. Once inside, about 6 guys got him back up in the chair.

He described the carnage inside the supporting as, well, indescribable. As he said, "You would not recognize the place where you and your buddies used to watch all the ball games." He said that once they get the power and water back up they will have to send in guys with pointy-tipped shovels to scrape and haul stuff out. They turf will have to be pulled up.

The reports of human waste being everywhere is true. There are corpses to be found over by the Superdome. He thinks they need to start gathering the bodies soon as it is a public health issue. The stench, even outdoors, is overpowering in places.

He said that the French Quarter is in pretty good shape. He saw only a couple of collapsed buildings during his patrols. Most everything is structurally intact. The damage caused by the looters seems to be pretty much confined to the point of entry and to the cash registers. They were only interested in stealing stuff and not in wanton destruction. There are abandoned vehicles all in the Quarter. He has been using them to charge his cell phone. The ones that still have batteries in them that is.

He believes that the most critical need is the restoration of power. Once the power is restored, they can put up banks of lights and start hauling debris around the clock. And when the water pressure comes back up, and the sewers are back online, they can commence hosing down the streets and sidewalks to transport the waste. Also, once the power comes back up, and the hotels are able to do some repairs, they hope that rooms will become available for NOPD and the relief workers so they can shower and rest in comfort. Hopefully, the kitchens can be restocked and hot meals can be provided in the hotels for the workers as well.

Power and water are back up in the Riverwalk already. They had to go to each of the restaurants there last night to turn off coffee pots that came back to life. It was obvious that the folks dropped everything and fled as soon as they got the word. Catfish was found in frying baskets in one restaurant. A pizza had just gotten pulled from an oven to be cut up in another. In any event, he said that once they did some glass work and did some cleaning, they could open back up all things being equal. Which is amazing to me.

The water starts about I-10 and gets worse the further you go West. They got some pumps up and running and the water is being drained back into the Lake. He said he has heard that it may take as long as 80 days to draw down the water to where they can start cleaning up out there.

He said the best news is that they have had no trouble out of the bad guys. They are still keeping a wary eye out but so far the people have been orderly and have obeyed the instructions of the police and the military. They are extremely grateful for the porta-potties and the food. He said soldiers bitch about MREs (Meals, Ready-to-Eat, in the flowery language of the Pentagon) all the time. But MREs taste pretty good when you haven't had anything to eat in 4-5 days and so they haven't heard any complaints.

He asked me about the news. He asked me if it was true that a lot of cops had resigned. I told him that as near as I could tell there were some resignations-and I suppose that throwing down your badge constitutes a formal separation in service-but that most of them had returned without repercussion. I told him that two officers had committed suicide. He was genuinely shocked by that report.

He asked me if it was true that the Sheriff over in Plaquemines Parish was running checkpoints to keep evacuees out. I told him that I had not heard that but that it would not surprise me, given the sorry history of Plaquemines in race relations stemming from the days when the place was run by the legendary Leander "Boss" Perez of whom Earl Long once said, " Leander doesn't hate Washington because of integration. Leander hates Washington because they got the bomb and he doesn't." Or something along those lines. Uncle Earl was always saying shit like that. He was a lot funnier than his brother. He was a damn sight crazier too.

I told my friend that the long knives are coming out. That the finger pointing has begun. I told him that people all over the spectrum are united in their dismay and revulsion over how all of this has been handled by government at all levels. I told him that you could almost smell the anger in the wind. But I also told him that hearts everywhere swelled when the military showed up to literally save the day. Just like in the movies. I told him not to doubt for a minute that folks aren't 100% aren't behind what they are doing down there. There may be doubts about the war in Iraq. But there is none about the war in New Orleans.

And with that he took his leave. He said that he and another officer were off to find some IVs for the medic. He says that the medic is worried that guys are working too hard and that dehydration may be an issue and that he wanted to be prepared to rehydrate the ones that needed it. He said that he would be in touch now that cell phones seem to be working as long as he could keep boosting power from the abandoned cars to recharge his battery.

And that is the news tonight from the Vieux Carre. That is the news from Hell's Gate.

Antibiotic Fueled Random Thoughts

The general malaise that lurked inside my head late last week-the one that was physiological in nature that is-ripened into a full-blown sinus infection by last Saturday with fever, chills and a voice which sounded for all the world like I had been doing cocaine all Friday night. Which I deny.

Anyway, I had planned to spend the long weekend playing golf, cooking on my grill and doing stuff around the house. Instead, I have been flopped on the couch drinking water and watching sports. And occasionally feeling sorry for myself.

Until, I look at the footage coming out of Louisiana and Mississippi.

Me? I ain't got no problems. Saturday morning I a) used my telephone to call my doctor who b) called me back on his telephone which he c) later used to phone in a prescription to the d) pharmacy which I picked up later while I was e) driving around running errands. Virtually nobody in Orleans Parish can do what we up here on high ground take so easily for granted. I ain't got no problems.

But I am feeling quite poorly. Perhaps a hatchet job on Wally Hall will make me feel some better.

For some reason Wally couldn't content himself to stick to an account of the Razorback's victory over Missouri State or SW Missouri State or whatever the hell they call themselves. No. He had to lead off by musing about how Houston and Danny had to be pining away for their late father who was not at the opening game for the first time. Or let us quote from the master wordsmith himself:

"It was there.

Not so anyone could see or notice but it was there. A small but very real ache for Houston and Danny Nutt."

Well, if you can't see it or notice it, then you can't know it's there unless someone tells you it is there. And then you quote that person.

But that would be journalism. Wally just makes stuff up. It's easier.

Boy. I feel better already.

It is a pleasant morning here in the People's Republic of Hillcrest. I decided to take a walk just to get some fresh air. As I was walking past the grocery store, I got honked at by one of the hotel courtesy van. The young black fella waved at me. I waved back. He pulled up. The window came down.

" Hey, man! Can I take you somewhere? Can I help you in anyway?"

" No, son. I'm fine. Thanks."

Granted, I don't feel well and so I ain't exactly my usual picture of vigorous good health. But I didn't think that I looked like a shellshocked evacuee. Then I looked down at my shirt to see "Tulane Baseball" emblazoned across my chest. Note to self: The Tulane stuff goes in the closet for the foreseeable future.

Speaking of evacuees, my church is going to take in some folks. And so the call went out for sheets, linens, towels etc. I in turn called many of my little friends and asked them to pitch in. The response has been astounding. They got enough stuff for an army in that gym. People really do respond.

My favorite offer of assistance came from my friend B who called me from up in the Ozarks somewhere.

" As soon as I get back you tell me what y'all need and I'll do whatever."

"OK. Great."

" I was thinking. You know? I would be willing to take in a single mother. I could do that. Only don't tell my mom. She would die and I don't want that on my conscience."

"Neither do I. Your secret is safe with me."

Speaking again of evacuees there was a lady from Gulfport in church Friday night. She was there with her daughter girl who I figured to be around 15 or so. She was staying with her other daughter here in Little Rock. I spoke with her after the service. She had the vacant look in her eyes of someone who has seen hand-to-hand combat.

" We were trapped in the attic. I thought I was gonna die."

She collapsed into my arms weeping. Both her daughters were weeping.

I put my free arm around the kid. I put my right hand above my head.

" Lady, you are in a neighborhood called Hillcrest. You are in Pulaski Heights United Methodist Church. Are you getting the picture?"

She laughed. Thank God.

I put both my hands on her shoulders. "You may freeze to death before you get back to Gulfport but you will not be swept away by water."

She looked at me solemnly.

"I will never complain about the cold again. Never."

I've never had to hole up in an attic while waiting to be rescued.

Me? I ain't got no problems.

Errata

I discovered,much to my horror, that I forgot to run yesterday's post through the spelling checker software. I guess I was in a hurry or something which is unfortunate since I can't spell worth kiss-my-ass anymore.

Anyway, the errors have been corrected. I apologize. Thanks for your patience.

tmfw

Hell to Pay

Today's news from New Orleans is marginally better, "better" being a relative term given the unprecedented devastation that has been occurring in Southeast Louisiana. But I say that things are "better" seeing as how the work on the breached levee seems to be progressing. The tide is pulling the water back into Lake Pontchartrain and the water in affected areas is receding. With any luck the Corps of Engineers will have effectuated the plug before the next round of rain that will surely come soon. The National Guard has finally-finally!-arrived with men and materiel. The long overdue evacuation of Charity Hospital is finally underway now that the civilian helicopters are supported by fully armed Chinook helicopters sent up in order to dissuade sniper fire from the damned fools that have been inexplicably shooting at rescue workers as they attempted to extract folks. More on this later.

I don't know what it takes to qualify for a Congressional Medal of Honor or a similar award around here. But the next time they start to think about handing some out, I have a suggestion: How about the staffs of Tulane and Charity hospitals? Talk about holding down the goddamn fort! Tulane got its people out a couple of days ago but as of yesterday, the skeleton crew at Charity was working with no food, no water and very little electricity. They were ventilating people by hand. All of this while armed looters were thought be on the bottom floors of the vast building. God almighty. What devotion to duty. What bravery.

By contrast, let us now consider the human scum that has been busy stealing, causing even more property damage and shooting the place up. The story coming out now is that the authorities were surprised by the extent of this violence.

Please. Let me explain something.

In the first place, in Louisiana your homestead is exempt from property tax. In the second place, I would imagine that fully 45 percent of the buildings in Orleans Parish are owned by church or church related entities. So all of the owners of all those stately homes in the Garden District (for example) and all of those beautiful structures owned by the Roman Catholic Church (for another example)do not pay one nickel of property tax. And yet, they expect municipal services such as fire and police protection as if they did. They just expect it on somebody else's dime.

So this requires the Parish and City governments to fund municipal services out of general revenues for the most part. Which doesn't leave much for social services and public education. Which is too bad because, as the world is now seeing, New Orleans for all of it's old world charm and ambiance has one hell of a lot of poor people.

The public school system there is a joke. Nobody goes to public school except black kids on the lowest end of the strata. Public housing is horrific. The response of the City is to warehouse folks in the schools and in hellholes like the Desire Housing Project ( which was mercifully razed some time ago) and the St. Thomas Housing Project and just hope they cause the bare minimum of trouble during their sojourn through this vale of tears. And so you have a permanent population of an insufficiently civilized underclass that passes its collective sociopathy from generation to generation. Some of these people are exceptionally dangerous and live within easy proximity of Tulane and Charity and the French Quarter.

And they say they are surprised? Bullshit. They dealt with this problem much the way that they dealt with the issue of the potential arrival of a Category 4 hurricane. They just turned a blind eye and hoped for the best.

I do not say this to explain away the behavior of these punks or to assign blame to society. There is no time for such hand-wringing. Their shocking behavior is inimical to good order and public safety and must be stopped pretty much by any means. And so, there will be war in the streets tonight. There will be hell to pay for what they have done whether they did it for money, for thrills or for street cred. And much of the hell that will be visited upon these desperately stupid young men will be visited upon them by the 39th Infantry Brigade from here in Arkansas working alongside the local authorities. As we know, the 39th just got back from Iraq where they spent a year or so doing urban warfare at night. These thugs don't have a chance. Peace, even if it is an uneasy peace, will be restored.

There will be hell to pay at the polls as well. It will be interesting to see who the electorate blames for this debacle. The Feds? The State? Local government? It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

But there will be time enough for that. The time for tears has past. The earth can accept no more water. It is time to go to work. But first, pray that peace is restored so that search and rescue teams can work without bullets flying overhead. Pray that they get the water out sooner than later. And pray that, for future reference, somebody in the government remembers the old saying that "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

It applies to emergency readiness. It applies as well to social engineering.

Trouble

We have had much activity of late in my little corner of the People's Republic of Hillcrest. The college boys that lived in the rent house two doors down from me have moved out. They were replaced by female counterparts of about the same age. I suspected that young women would be moving in as soon as the guys left. For about a week prior to the day I actually saw U-Hauls in the yard, I saw women who appeared to be about my age carrying in loads of stuff on almost a nightly basis. My suspicions were confirmed one day when I went around back to take out the trash and saw a tits high pile of boxes from stores like Tuesday Morning and Pier One stacked up behind the house.

Girls. No doubt.

Men and women move stuff differently. I didn't know that the guys were moving until about 10 of 'em showed up one Sunday afternoon armed with trucks, SUVs and coolers full of beer. The biggest item of furniture I saw hauled out was a big- screen plasma television.

Guys move stuff in. They move stuff out. They don't spend the week before hanging drapes, shooting measurements or comparing fabric swatches to the colors in the room. We move stuff in. We move stuff out. Point me to where the refrigerator will be.

One of my friends allowed as how I thrilled I must be to have a couple of cute girls living just a chip shot away from me. I pretty much am predisposed to view this as trouble. But not of the sexual foolishness variety. Even I am incapable of that level of hubris.

I tried to explain it once before to my friend J. I accompanied J to a wedding earlier this summer. After 20 years of dedicated service to the noble and useful profession of teaching, she decided to chuck it all to go to law school. As you might suspect, her classmates are all in their twenties. Anyway, at the reception, J introduced me to the bride and groom. The bride, as radiant a girl as I have ever seen, held my hand the whole time I stood there congratulating them and wishing them luck and all of that.

In the car afterwards J was smitten with the sentimental emotions that overcome women from time to time at these events.

"You could tell Mary-or whatever the hell her name was-really liked you." she said.

"How you figure?"

" You could tell by the way she held your hand the whole time she spoke to you. That was so sweet."

" Look" I said. " She could give a rip about me. She likes you. I have just reached a stage in my life where young women consider me to be completely harmless."

Here's another example. A couple of years ago I became friends with a young woman with whom I ran on a relay team for the first Little Rock Marathon. She was a second year med student at the time. She is a beautiful girl and an accomplished marathoner. However, like many highly intelligent people, she occasionally can not be trusted with a wet match, so absent-minded is she.

She called me late one night to tell me that she had locked herself out of her apartment. She asked me if I would come over and help her climb into the second floor window which was unlocked. This is how I would up with a 26 year old girl in a blue jean skirt hiked up to her hips with her piston-like legs wrapped around the back of my neck some 30 minutes later.

At this point, let me say that this wasn't nearly as much fun as one might think. Given the kind of luck I usually possess in all things, I just knew that the cops were going to show up at any time during this refenestration. That would have been some picture. Me with a girl on my shoulders and a beer on the hood of my car trying to bust into a private residence in the middle of the night. Bearing this in mind, it was with all due haste that I pushed her ass up through the window and threw her goddamn flip flops after her.

Clutching her flip flops to her breast she beamed down at me Juliet-like from her window.

" Thank yooooooou." she said. " I knew I could count on yooooou. You are so sweeeeet. " she cooooooooed.

Nah. Mainly I'm harmless. And she knew it.

Besides, I'm a guy. We move stuff in. We move stuff out. Plasma teevees, budding pediatricians, whatever. It's just stuff that's gotta be moved.

And so, these new neighbors will need something moved eventually or they will need someone tall to reach something high up ( I am exceedingly popular at Christmastime for this reason). And they will come to me.

They can't go to the grumpy gay couple to the North of them. Those guys don't talk to anybody. They can't go to the neighbor to the South of them because, even though she has a boyfriend that stays with her a lot of the time that might be of some use, he's a strange ranger. On the weekends, he occasionally wears leather pants and a cotton peasant blouse. It's like living next door to Mick Fleetwood.

But then again, who am I to talk? I just realized that I used the words "grumpy" and "gay" in the same sentence to describe someone. Maybe living next door to me is like living next door to Wally Hall.

My friend M lives in Jackson, Mississippi. She understands these things. And while I don't mean to suggest that I hear Edith Piaf in the background anytime she calls or sends e-mails, she has a certain world weary view of relations between men and women that informs her judgment in this regard.

" Oh yeah." she said the other day. " They will come. First you will be moving furniture. Then you will be hearing about their problems with their boyfriends. Trust me. Just make them produce a driver's license before you give them any alcohol." In that regard, I guess I had better brush up on my froofy drink recipes. From the looks of those two, I bet I won't serve 'em many boilermakers.

Like I said. Trouble. Just not the kind my buddy who obviously has spent way too much time watching porno on the Internet was contemplating.

They will come because at this stage of my life, young women find me to be completely harmless. That's kind of depressing. But it is what it is.

Found Objects

You can get reacquainted with surprising things whenever you clean house. I remember the last time I cleaned out the closets. I managed to unearth numerous items of memorabilia. Here they are in no particular order: Different items of women's underwear, a 12 gauge shotgun, a guitar case, a pair of espadrilles (Which strongly implies that someone actually left without her shoes. Why don't I remember that?), a baseball bat, a woman's bathing suit, 2 tennis rackets (one of them being an old Jack Kramer woodie), a highly illegal Blue Dot softball that I attempted to smuggle into a softball game once, shotgun shells for the weaponry mentioned earlier on, a robe and surplice, and last but not least, a bottle of moonshine made by-no lie-an itinerant Baptist preacher in the Ozarks.

Who says I have lived a wasted life?

I cleaned out my old desk the other day. I bought the old rolltop about 20 years ago from Hambuchen Home Furnishings in Conway, Arkansas. I paid 400 bucks for it, which was a lot of money at the time. And while the process failed to produce anything so interesting as a jar of white lightning that was distilled by the clergy, there were some interesting relics.

I found tons of useless financial relics. Cancelled checks and the like. I lingered over those old checks, an ordinate number of them written mostly to various area liquor stores , and I marveled at how much my handwriting has changed. I used to have pretty good handwriting for a guy. This was the result of my engineer father's insistence that anything important must be printed. Now I am told by the people who are forced to decipher same that my writing is illegible. My signature nowadays could be the scrawl of an orangutan or a lunatic.

Speaking of writing, I found various items of correspondence. I found a letter from my mother asking me to confront my youngest brother about some "older woman" who Mother believed was leading John down the path to certain destruction. Being raised a Baptist, she felt comfortable viewing matters involving her sons in such starkly apocalyptic terms. And John being John, he was enjoying the trip down the path as I recall. In any event, the letter goes on to state that the reason that I was the best candidate to counsel Junior in these delicate matters was " because you are a mature man that knows how to handle women."

I had to pick myself up off the floor again just as I did when I read Mother's letter 15 years ago. I ought to frame it.

I found letters from my buddy Don, who was working on a tugboat for a ruffian named Captain Billy while studying for the Louisiana bar exam. I came across a series of letters written by an old girlfriend who was studying architecture in Italy. I found a copy of a letter that I had written to a woman who was concerned for my soul after reading a piece I had written for the old Arkansas Gazette. I wrote to decline her invitation to attend her church. She belonged to one of those huge non-denominational churches out in West Little Rock that subscribed then and now to a sort of "Brand X" theology. She thought that I would profit mostly from the Sunday night service where I could show up comfortably attired in mere "khakis and a short sleeve shirt."

I think it was the part about the short sleeve shirt that I found most offensive. Listen buddy, you might find a couple Lily of France bras in my closet. But you won't find any short sleeve dress shirts.

I found an old Agfa 35mm camera. The only thing I can figure is that it must have been given to me by my poor old crazy Aunt IdaBeth who watched "Hogan's Heroes" religiously and actually talked back to the television while doing so. She had lived in Germany with her equally crazy husband Donald who was stationed in the Air Force there. Agfa is a German camera. I would guess that they bought it at the PX. I made a mental note to see what I can get for it on e-Bay just in case there were still any lingering crazy vibes yet infused in it. I am not a particularly superstitious person but I believe craziness, like radioactivity, can be stored in objects. In any event, one can't be too sure about these things.

I found all sorts of pictures. I saw a picture of me from the Arkansas Gazette back when I was the student body president at Mabelvale Junior High. I was wearing my letter jacket. Which I also found in my closet earlier on. Finally, I ran across a picture of me with my old girlfriend LS. We are apparently at a dinner party. I deduce this from the fact that I am holding a plate and am captured in the moment of placing a fork thereto. LS has her hand on my forearm, as if to call my attention away from the grub. Her face is turning toward the camera. She is wearing a summerry cocktail dress that is cinched behind her neck beneath her long curly brown hair.

She looks so happy. She is so pretty.

In the picture, my hair, beard, eyelashes and eyebrows are bleached out from playing tennis on hardcourts in the blazing sun 3 to 4 times a week. I no longer play tennis other than fooling around with friends. My beard is gray and I have a lot less hair.

I ran into LS the other day. She pretty much looks the same, which is to say pretty great. In fact, I don't know what to attribute this to, but it seems that the women I have loved in this life haven't changed much over time. I know this cannot possibly be true and I also know that most of them, LS included, would guffaw at this notion. And she would give you chapter and verse of every line, every ding, and/or scar she has added to her chassis in the last 15 years.

But then again, it is only the good looking ones that keep an inventory.

The day after I cleaned out the desk I took the financial documents to the shredder service. The world has changed 360 degrees since I bought that old desk. I write very few checks any more. Most of my transactions are done on the Internet. I no longer get cancelled checks. The shredding service is over by the golf club to which I belong. I didn't play golf 20 years ago. Everything is changed.

All but one thing. Like I said, thanks to the lens of sentiment, to this day all of the women I have ever loved remain beautiful and resolutely changeless to me.

Who says I have lived a wasted life?

You call this a Warpath?

The National Collegiate Athletic Association recently announced the ban, effective immediately, from the use by its "member institutions" of American Indian images deemed "hostile or abusive" from hosting post-season events or displaying such iconography during championship competition. It has identified 18 schools that allegedly use such derogatory imagery and it includes six Division I schools including a couple of biggies in Florida State and Illinois.

I was immediately reminded of the late Frank Zappa who once observed ( and when was the last time you saw Frank Zappa invoked in a piece about sports?) that they would never start World War III in Los Angeles because there's just too much real estate involved.

Let me state at the outset that I am a white male. As far as I can recall, I have had the privilege of knowing only one person of Native American descent. I know nothing about how the majority of Native Americans feels about the use of Native American iconography by sports and corporations. I believe that diversity is a good thing and that any practice that perpetuates hurtful stereotypes or causes needless offense is probably something that should be closely examined to see if the continued perpetuation of that practice causes more harm than good.

Having said that, the latest edict from the NCAA is nothing more than a cynical attempt to placate those advocacy groups that have called for the elimination of "ethnic identifiers" in sports iconography without actually doing anything about it. And if I were a Native American with an interest in the issue, I would be offended. Here's why.

The ban only applies to post-season tournaments. That way, Division I men's sports are pretty much off the hook. D-I football utilizes that marvel of fairness and reliability known as the Bowl Championship Series to decide its national championship. And of the 18 schools listed, Illinois and Utah are the only schools that have traditionally made repeat appearances in the NCAA basketball tournament. And since the revenue ( much of which is derived from the advertisement and sale of merchandise, some of it now bearing derogatory imagery) from D-I football and men's basketball is what feeds the bulldog over at the NCAA, I can see where the ivory tower types over at headquarters in Indianapolis must feel as if they have arrived at a particularly elegant resolution of this problem. As I said, D-I is off the hook. The new policy mainly comes down hard on little bitty schools that don't produce much revenue. World War III does not start in Los Angeles.

And here's where I might have my nose out of joint if I were a Native American. If the use of derogatory ethnic imagery is wrong why not ban it outright? Period. Across the board. Notre Dame's "Fighting Irish" on the one hand connotes spirit and scrappiness. On the other hand it perpetuates a stereotype of Irish people being argumentative and violent. Is this really an appreciably better image than the one used by SE Oklahoma State whose teams are the "Savages?"

OK. Bad example. "Savages" is a really terrible nickname.

But you get my larger point. If it's wrong it's wrong. And it is just as wrong for the Seminoles of Florida State (probably soon to be known as the "High-Pissed Seminoles") as it is for the "Flying Dutchmen" of D-III Hope College in Michigan.

But the NCAA would rather kick the hell out of the Chowhan Colleges in its ranks than take on
Notre Dame and Illinois in any fight that might appreciably hit those schools, the ones that feed the bulldog, in the wallet.

Evidently the use of "hostile and abusive" imagery is not sufficiently bad to warrant starting World War III in Los Angeles. Or South Bend either.

And if I were a Native American, it would offend me that the NCAA evidently thinks I'm too stupid to figure this out.

Goodbye to All That

Boy, Major League Baseball can't get it right. If baseball were an automobile, it would be a Chrysler product. If it were a corporation (which it sort of is) it would be MCI-Worldcom. If it were a religion (which it also sorta is) it would be Scientology. When it comes to shooting itself in the foot, baseball is Audie Murphy.

Just looking at the sports page, you would think that baseball is a hell of a product. As of this writing, you have 2 heart-stopping pennant races going on over in the American League. In Chicago, both the White Sox and the Cubs are going good which, if we remember the sorry history of these two inept franchises, pretty much occurs with the frequency of Hailey's Comet. Speaking of the Cubs, not only is Derek Lee still flirting with the Triple Crown, he might win it while hitting .400. And for those of you that enjoy watching car wrecks on the interstate, I give you the National League West. Without a single team over .500, it just might be the worst division in the history of the game. One could go a lifetime and not see such hide-your-eyes collective incompetence again.

But do you hear about any of this stuff when you turn on ESPN or listen to talk radio? No. All you hear about is-once again-about how somebody got caught with steroids in his system. Once again, as is always the case with baseball, the sidebar stuff is bigger than the sport. To paraphrase Emily Litella, with baseball it's always something. It's labor trouble. It's owners highjacking cities for new stadiums ( I know that it is stadia. But this is a sport's piece after all.). More recently, it was all the high drama over drug testing. Would the union agree to it? Would there be a lockout? Will Barry get indicted?

And now, now that we have caught our collective breath real good, Rafael Palmiero tests positive for steroids. This is the same Rafael Palmiero who back in March waggled his left index finger at a camera and denied that he had ever used steroids, much like another rather prominent citizen in the DC area waggled his left index finger while lying through his teeth. Unfortunately for Palmiero, he was under oath at the time. Which creates its own certain set of difficulties.

What a month. On June 15, he gets his 3000th hit. On June 17th, the President-a man who, say what you will about W, has no use for steroids-congratulates him. On August 1, baseball announces that Palmiero was suspended for testing positive for steroids. The New York Times runs with a story that says he tested positive for stanozolol, a known wrecker of livers and shrinker of testicles. Which may or may not explain why Palmiero had such an interest in hawking Viagra.

How does the New York Times know this? "Unnamed Sources." And get this. The Baltimore Sun published a story (citing guess what?) that Raffy flunked his test in May. May. Which means that baseball (and presumably the Player's Union) knew that he was hot and waited until after he hit number 3000 to bust him.

After all, business is business.

This whole mess stinks to high heaven. One of baseball's poster boys pops up dirty. Stories are leaked to the media, presumably by higher-ups in baseball, which is what the Union always feared would happen. And now we know that "zero-tolerance" doesn't really apply if you are about to set a record.

Now you hear the old debates start all over. Should Palmiero be inducted into the Hall of Fame along with the other drunks, womanizers, cheaters, bigots and Bible-bangers that currently are enshrined there? Should Sammy? Should Mark? I don't care anymore. If I hear the names Gaylord Perry or Pete Rose invoked again this week I will put a gun to my head. Put 'em in. Leave 'em out. I don't care anymore.

This was not the easiest Spring for me for any of a number of reasons. So when my friend asked me to join he and his brother in coaching a Boy's Club team, I took him up on it. God knows that I preferred having a bat in my hands than time on them in those days. The highlight of many a day back then was the certain knowledge that I would soon be out on the field with friends who thought enough of me to ask me to help them and with little boys who loved to play baseball. Sadness was was only the special province of he that struck out. The only guys that hurt were guys who got hit in the head. Anger occasionally reared its ugly head. But it was only directed at the drag-ass college kid umpires who were too busy checking out the chicks in the stands to pay attention to the actual games. It was just what I needed.

Such are the simple joys inherent in this peculiar beautiful game. And only an outfit as completely dysfunctional as Major League Baseball could fuck it up so completely.

But I don't care anymore. Because with baseball, it's always something.

Random Thoughts

The following are some random thoughts that have come to me while getting over a stomach bug, proving once again that an idle mind is the devil's workshop:

TERRELL OWENS- It is indeed hard for the average person to pony up the first ounce of pity for the plight of the professional athlete in a team sport who demands that his contract be renegotiated. It is particularly difficult when the athlete in question is as narcissistic and has as few roots in reality as Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Terrell Owens, who was quoted last week in the Miami Herald as saying:

" At the end of the day, I don't have to worry about what people think of me, whether they hate me or not. People hated on Jesus. They threw stones at him and tried to kill him, so can I complain or worry about what people think?"

I am no scholar, but try as I might, I don't recall a biblical account of the stoning of Jesus. And the historical record is clear in that the Romans did actually succeed in killing Jesus, albeit only temporarily, depending on your religious persuasion. But let us forget for the moment our inability to comprehend someone being unhappy with a contract that pays him 49 million dollars over 7 years. And let us try to overlook the hubris of a man who, intentionally or not, equates his business dispute with the agony of Christ.

The fact is, Owens has every right to take this action and to hold out of training camp if he feels so led. People often confuse business relations with moral obligations. And while there is certainly a moral element to the concept of living up to one's agreements, of equal dignity is the concept that implicit in every contract is the right to breach. This is Contracts 101.

Unlike Major League Baseball, the NFL has revenue sharing. This ensures that every team is awash with money from television and radio as well as from merchandising. This means that every NFL team is turning a healthy profit no matter how incompetently it is run ( read Phoenix Cardinals). Secondly, unlike the NBA, the NFL's owners are not madmen. Accordingly, there are no guaranteed contracts in the NFL. Or there are none that I know of. This means that teams can get rid of guys who underperform or get dinged up without having to eat their salary in perpetuity (read New York Knicks and Portland Trailblazers).

Both Owens and his agent, the equally reptilian Drew Rosenhaus know that he is an injury away from getting cut. And so, they are threatening to breach by "holding out." The Eagles, for their part, are threatening to sue to get the signing bonus back. These are all big boys here. And it says here at TMFW that Owens will go back as they are taking quite the PR hit. I mean, Rosenhaus is so obnoxious that he managed to save a little boy from drowning last week and still come across as a jerk.

Owens has every right to do what he is doing, even if you and I cannot comprehend it. I am not one to invoke pop theology, but since TO has brought it up: What would Jesus do?

I have no idea. But I would like to think that He would have a greater sense of perspective and that He would comport Himself with a lot more dignity than Owen and Rosenhaus have displayed thus far.

PROFESSIONAL TENNIS IS SUCH BULLSHIT- The US Open, will crank up here in about a month. I don't know if you have seen it yet, but the USTA has given nicknames to some of the players in its advertising. Really. Roger Federer is called "The Boss." Justine Henin-Hardenne they refer to as "The Comeback Kid." Andy Roddick is "The Rocket" and Venus Williams is "The Goddess." You can see for yourself at http://usopenseries/news/fullstory.sps?inewsid=194928 .

Why would the USTA adopt the subtle elegance of Pro Wrestling to hype its product?

Because nobody watches tennis anymore. At least not the men. The women are more interesting. They are , for the most part, easy on the eyes. Which I know should be an irrelevant consideration, but hey, I'm a guy. And the women all hate each other. This adds an aura of bitchiness that you just don't get with the guys.

Besides, the men are just boring. They, for the most part, rarely stray too far from the baseline. Assuming that the point gets past the first serve that is. The only serve and volleyers left are Great Britain's Tim Henman and USA's Taylor Dent whose main claim to fame is getting his ass kicked by Andre's 4 year old in that commercial. The rest of them approach the net as if it is radioactive. Where's the excitement in that?

I mean, I will watch the US Open because I used to be a player and I know how hard it is to play tennis at a certain level. That, and I know for a fact that Roger Federer may be the best player ever even if he is allergic to play at the net. And so, I will watch.

But there is no reason to make a BFD out of changing the color of the courts from green to blue. There's no reason to give the players these stupid nicknames (and by the way, there is only one Rocket and his last name is Laver) and there is no reason in this day and age why the women don't play 3 out of 5 just like the men.

No reason other than the fact that tennis is just bullshit. And that nobody much watches anymore.

HOCKEY IS BACK!-Who cares?

BERNARD HOPKINS-Just shut the hell up. What is it about you guys from Philly anyway?

And this are my random thoughts delivered while my stomach sounds for all the world like a flooded out Evinrude.

Dispatches from the Field

My friend Steve asked me to pick up his mail last week while he took the wife and kids to St. Louis for the family vacation. While I certainly don't pry, it is always interesting to see what other folks get in their mail. I'm sure that when Steve gets my mail for me, he can't help but see all of the returned checks, threatening letters from attorneys as well as the various items of correspondence from various state and local taxing authorities.

I am quite often badly misunderstood. It is an awesome responsibility being me.

Similarly speaking, I couldn't help but notice the stuff Steve gets. Indeed, I found the experience so fascinating I could not resist "text-messaging" him about it.

"You get more bills than even I do." I wrote.

A few minutes later came the reply across the ether, all the way from Six Flags over St. Louis or some place equally dreadful.

"I have four more kids than you do. Please don't bother me again unless the house is on fire."

He also gets one more copy of the "Arkansas Catholic" than I do, so I took the liberty of reading last week's edition. Evidently, there wasn't much of any import going on in the One True Church. At least not here in the Diocese of Little Rock. There was a nice article from Catholic News Service about how the new Pope is cooling his jets at the Papal villa in the Swiss Alps. The reporter quoted someone as saying that he was heard playing Mozart on the piano. Some guys really know how to let their hair down when they are off the clock. There was a weird little piece about the need to maintain reverence during Epiclesis.

For you Protestants out there, this is the moment in the Mass wherein the priest asks God to sanctify the gifts of bread and wine by sending down the Holy Spirit. I'm willing to bet that if you typed the word "Epiclesis" into a search engine, you would find all kinds of crazy articles and websites devoted to the subject. This is one of the reasons I love Catholicism. Five tool crackpot stuff like this abounds among the faithful. Finally, there was a thoroughly pleasant essay by the Bishop upon his memories of summer as a kid growing up in Memphis.

I confess that I was somewhat disappointed to see no red hot flaming letters to the Editor about gay marriages or the ordination of gays to the ministry in the Arkansas Catholic. To read the Arkansas Methodist you would think that this is about all us Methodists have on the brain anymore. What the hell kind of church newspaper wastes newsprint on the doctrine of Epiclesis when there are larger issues like eliminating social concerns and the "homosexual agenda" to obsess about?

I felt the phone buzz again while I was still yet engrossed in my ecumenical pursuits. It was my buddy D checking in from North Carolina.

" My first ex-wife just called and said she's leaving town Wednesday, so I just got in touch with my second ex-wife and arranged for her to take care of my youngest daughter until I can get back in town next week. " he wrote.

And what is he doing in North Carolina that is keeping him so damn busy that he is required to put in a call to the former spouse bullpen in order to relieve the starter, as it were? He is preparing to take the bar exam there. And why would an otherwise sensible man in a responsible position in a prestigious law firm in California and already armed already with three law licenses be sitting for the North Carolina bar?

To ask the question is to answer it. He is in love. To make a long story short, he saw C again for the first time in years at their college reunion. Zing went the strings of their hearts. And thus began their bi-coastal relationship. She has a young son in the home and cannot move. D's youngest is headed off to college in the fall. Hence, the plan to head east to the land of pine trees and big time college basketball.

I think this is utter madness and have made my position abundantly clear. I see no need for this foolishness especially when it ain't like there is a shortage of available women in Southern California. Besides, Me, I wouldn't take another bar exam for Sela Ward. This consideration has become even more acute since I am recent friends with a woman who is, even as I type this, slaving away at the law school preparing to sit for the Arkansas bar exam next week. And to think JL forsook the honorable and useful teaching profession for the wholesale agony of the bar exam. An involuntary shudder crawls up my spine anytime I look at her bar review books. It is indeed testimony to what a great gal she is as being around her is bringing back perfectly horrible memories.

Similarly speaking, honesty compels me to admit that C must be one hell of a gal to inspire such misery. I look forward to meeting her. And I hope she doesn't have any eligible sisters that are as obviously spellbinding as is she as I am not a particularly strong man nowadays.

And so, my sensible advice about all of this remains completely disregarded. They are a couple of crazy goddamn kids in love. There is nothing more that I can do.

Except to write back, " I'm certain that your future ex-wife would help if she could."


Steve came safely back last night and came by to get his stuff. I recognized on him the same poleaxed expression that my father used to wear after a week in the car with his four kids. JL is grimly beavering away at her notes and index cards. D is trying to remember what the hell arcane phrases like "the expectation is subsumed in the reliance" and other stuff equally not germane to an environmental defense practice actually means. Still, I have all the faith in the world that they will do just fine next week.

And that they too, like my buddy Steve, will all come safely back.

After Steve left, I got a reply from D to my earlier missive. It was succinct but it was not fit to relate in this space, devoted as it is to a general audience, as they say in the movie business.

I am quite often badly misunderstood. It is an awesome responsibility being me.

Sula vs. THE HURRICANE

I suppose that every now and again it does a person a bit of good to survive an act of craziness. As for me it has been a long time since I did anything crazy. And most of my brushes with bad craziness generally involved people wearing short skirts and high heels. But I'm not talking about that. And I'm not talking about other examples of forms of bad craziness such as reposing trust in e-mails from ersatz Ethiopian bankers asking for your bank account information or joining the Scientologists (or the Christian Scientists for that matter). No.

I'm talking about willingly doing something that could stand you a reasonable chance of getting yourself killed. Or worse. Like pumping gas while smoking a cigarette. Going up on the roof to mess with the satellite dish during an electrical storm. Standing between David Wells and an umpire. Stuff like that.

My friend Sula is an unlikely candidate for "Crazy Person of the Year" award. Sula on the one hand is the very model of the buttoned down kind of person that gravitates toward the practice of real estate law whose idea of an interesting day is to form condo associations and/or rifling through musty records in county courthouses. All the while racking up big honking fees for the title company where she works in Destin.

So you can understand my concern when Sula called to tell me that she was going to ride out the arrival of Hurricane Dennis instead of getting the hell out of Dodge, a course of action that I gently suggested a more prudent person might well be advised to take. Nope. She was bound and determined and could not be otherwise persuaded. After all, as she wrote in the blog (http://gulfbreezecourt.blogspot.com )that she maintained while the electricity stayed on during this adventure, "I'm...fairly adventurous, and am an able handy person who will take risks."

Well...just so long as she didn't have a stupid reason for taking on 150 mph winds.

But you know? If you think about it, this is not of unheard of down here in the South. History's immortal scroll is replete with instances where Southern women took on equally daunting tasks against insurmountable odds and prevailed. A couple of quick ones come to mind. It took fully six weeks of siege from his gunboats in the Mississippi before Ulysses S. Grant forced Vicksburg to surrender. This is in no small part due to the indomitable will of the women of Vicksburg who never gave in despite some of them being reduced to in caves and dugouts during the worst of it. Another example is the women of Little Rock during the integration crisis of the fifties who decided that keeping the public schools open was simply too important to be left up to the men. It is no exaggeration to say that probably 40%, if not more, of the social progress that has been achieved in these parts probably had its origins in the parlors of halfway dotty Episcopalian or Presbyterian broads who,when confronted with overwhelming crises, simply folded their hands in their laps and said, "Now this just won't do."

And perhaps the issue was similarly no more complicated for my dear Sula who, maybe looked around at her home and her stuff and said, "Now this just won't do."

Maybe Sula isn't crazy. She is, after all, an able handy Southern woman.

In retrospect, Dennis never had half a chance.

The Human Torch

I was driving through Hattiesburg the other day when I remembered a girl from Mississippi. Once upon a time, years and years ago, I was once crazy in love with a girl that was born in Hattiesburg. Now, it struck me as passing strange that I would think of her at that particular moment. After all, I was staying in Jackson where she has lived for 30 years and which is where we met. And yet, I didn't give her the first passing thought until I got out on Highway 49.

It's funny how we remember old flames. There is just no telling.

When I think of her, I remember her red hair, her green eyes and a deep voice, deeper than mine, that came from somewhere in her long, skinny body. She used to tell me that she yearned for me when we were apart. Really she did. Only it sounded like "yunned"when she said it.

I can safely say without hesitation or fear of contradiction that no woman has "yunned" for me before or since.

Of course, this reverie on Highway 49 did not pass by the many detours and obstacles along the way. There is no good way to get to Jackson from here. And despite her being as fit as a horse, she managed to rupture a disk in her back while mopping the kitchen floor, which made riding in a car uncomfortable. She had two young daughters, a deadbeat ex whom she was constantly haling into court and she wanted to go to graduate school.

That's a lot to unpack from 256 miles away. The timing could not have been worse. It could not work.

But I chose not to dwell on any of that. I vastly preferred remembering that a beautiful woman from Mississippi once yearned for me.

Werner Heisenberg would understand this completely. Surely you remember Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle which posits that the findings of the experimenter cannot be completely accurate for the reason that by virtue of conducting the experiment, the observer becomes part of the observed system. In other words, participating in a system necessarily colors one's perspective. Insert the word "relationship"for the word "system" and Werner Heisenberg prefigures Dr. Laura in history.

I once took a deposition in a sexual harassment case. The plaintiff worked with a man with whom she fell in love. They got engaged. It didn't work out and she broke it off. The ex still carried a torch for her and made numerous overtures to her in an attempt to win her back. She admitted that she went back with him but stated that she broke it off again after a couple of months.

The problem with carrying a torch is that sometimes you have to play with fire in the process.

She claims that he persisted in trying to hug her and kiss her after she broke it off for good. She claims that he called her house and that he pestered her in the halls. She is lovely, intelligent, articulate and believable. My client's guy, the ex, swears up and down that he left her alone after the second breakup. He is handsome, intelligent, articulate and believable. There are no witnesses to the acts complained of, which is not unusual in these matters.

So who is telling the truth and who is lying? Or are they both telling "truths" as whispered to them by their memories? Memories that are necessarily colored by their prior relationship if not their current relationships as well? Think of other "women scorned" of recent notoriety. Think of Anita Hill. Think of Paula Jones, if you must. Who was telling the truth? Who was lying?

The old country lawyer says, "Everybody lies a little bit." The problem is, everybody also tells the truth a little bit.

None of which would trouble Dr. Heisenberg in the least. What's good for describing quantum physics is equally good for describing failed relationships. The observer becomes part of the system.

Which is why I prefer to let my mind linger over the memory of a certain girl from Hattiesburg instead of remembering what a goddamned fool idea it was in the first place.

It is funny how we remember old flames. There is just no telling.

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