Strong Work

The night the Saints won their football game, I had maybe 6 drinks and assortment of beans and cakes and went to bed early with a protesting stomach and the remains of black eyeliner smeared across my cheeks.

But I was genuinely excited over a football -- heck, a team-sport victory of any kind -- for the first time in my life.

Excited but also sort of weirded out. Does this mean I'll start taking study breaks for Sunday football games like my colleagues in law school?

I got my answer this evening from my maniacal little Torts professor. He opened the class by declaring:

"The Saints worked hard training all year round for prolonged and deserved gratification. People are saying their victory will revitalize the city -- if revitalize means getting drunk and missing work."

This professor, I learned, is a Cajun who lives on a farm and plays in a Zydeco band, so I know he doesn't hate fun -- but he sort of reminded me of why I usually don't like following sports.

As far as the Saints go, I toasted them wholeheartedly and copiously, but I'd rather go out there now and steal their strategy.

Put Your Lighters Up

Gross Negligence

The area surrounding the Orleans Parish Prison courthouse is a gritty sprawl of petty criminals and bail bonds "offices," some more legitimate than the rest. As soon as my Buick flies over the overpass and touches down on Tulane Ave., I feel people looking at me through my windsheild in anticipation, invisible questions on their minds:

"How much power do you have?"

"Are you going to help me, or help keep my son in jail?"

The sun is always blinding there, even when it's overcast, and the first thing I see is the grey marble of the courthouse rising up out of the hovel of Quickie marts and swaying houses, trying its best to look just. I faintly remember two gigantic sculptures of eagles.

Having only been in magistrate court, I don't really know what to make of the whole thing.

All I know is that, if nobody cares enough about you to pay a $50 bond, you can sit in jail for over 60 days on a possession of marijuana charge. Also, police have trouble spelling, and, sometimes, not embellishing on their arrest reports. They also enjoy flinging "probable cause" around.

A curfew on a person subject to house arrest is later if he has a BA in something vs if he's only got a high-school education: profiling barely pretending not to be.

But por favor, don't scoff me off as a gushing liberal. The man is there regulating for a reason (wife-beaters and 17-year-old double murderers for example) he's just not quite man enough for the airs his courthouse puts on.

The Beginning of the Decade

A newly turned 27-yr old has a retrospective moment:

I'm 20 and home from college for the summer. I'm feeling angsty after having read "Please Kill Me," a sort-of illustrated history of Punk Rock. So angsty in fact that I feel like I have to rail against something somehow or be sucked into suburban normalcy before I return to school and be embarrassed under the scrutiny of my misguided-musician crush -- who, I would later discover to be an ego-maniacal ass, but who I saw at the time as the cool guy with 45's and the fatalistic attitude.

So I did what any budding punk rocker would have done -- I threw out all my makeup from the year before: when I had gone trawling to college parties with the rest of em, "shades of seduction" eyeshadow in tow -- before my life was saved by rock n' roll.

Next step: bleach hair to a crisp underneath a shopping bag, buy some t-shirts with favorite band names on them, rip holes in all my jeans (if I can't accomplish it by falling off my skateboard), and spend lots of time in my basement with my $10 record player, ignoring the suburban hell outside.

Though it has been, and continues to be at times, misguided, here's to many more years of railing against shit.

Malls Don't Stay the Same

They expanded the Freehold Raceway Mall. The carousel is still there, thank God, but the sea green paint is now a sensible eggshell, a Borders bulges out of one side, and a Dick's stands as a sort of satellite in the middle of the parking lot.