bark, bugs, leaves, & lizards

Bulleted List To The Head

• Snail mail–from your browser.  It’s more expensive, but no licking.  (h/t Lifehacker)
• I’ve often thought the city of New Orleans should promote urban falconry as a means to limit the rat population (though some urban hawks have been known to freak out children and kill sparrows, and I like to think I’m opposed to that), or at least lift the city’s spirits via the very public slaughtering of a few representative rats.  But.  Think.  Imagine.  Believe: Rat eating plants.
• Incidentally, I know it’s possibly wrong to flippantly pun about ‘bullet to the head,’ especially living in Central City (weeding our driveway Saturday I found an old bullet casing, not sure the caliber–not much for gunplay, unless I’m losing my ever loving mind at a presidential event)  so I like to think I’m not being flippant but instead simply processing my anxieties, stacking them in the processor, flicking the switch and walking away.  Sorry if the noise sucks.
• I admit it, lock me up and throw away the key, I didn’t read C Murder’s book.  I got a free copy at a reading, I’ve flipped through it, read a paragraph here and there … Still, he seemed pretty earnest about his interest in writing and now that it seems he’ll … let’s just say I see a lot more writing and reading in his future, and if he’s going to be serious, he needs to read something better than what he’s been reading.  So, for starters,

1. If He Hollers Let Him Go, Chester Himes
2. Erasure, Percival Everett
3. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
4. The Decameron, Giovonni Boccaccio

• Or there’s prison memoir:

The segregation cell was in the building parallel to my cell. And lucky for Roger, he’d been put in a cell roughly across from mine. Anybody locked up for more than a few months on the Farm knew how to fish. This is when you made a line from the sheets you slept on and added some sort of hook. The hook could be a shampoo bottle full of water, a boot or a fingernail clipper. It depended on where you were sending your line. If it was going inside the building it would be a fingernail clipper or a bar of soap, but if it was going to another building it would be something heavier. Fishing was how we got stuff to each other when we were locked in the cell. At night, you could see lines drifting from the top tiers to cells on the bottom and then you’d see a laundry bag containing Black and Milds, soups or whatever the fisherman was angling for. Sometimes the bag just held a note.

• Maybe I liked those Hughes movies more than I realized:

Eclectic Method – A John Hughes Production from Eclectic Method on Vimeo.

Bulleted List To The Head: Voting & Eating

• I have a good friend–I’ll call him t3–who is about 15 years younger than me.  We became friends 9 years ago when he was still an undergraduate and we took a few art classes together.  Our sensibilities are pretty similar, which accounts for our friendship, but our age difference is kind of always a subtext.  Let’s just say I’ve been a civilizing influence.
• I’m not the only civilizing influence of course.  G Bitch has been as well, which makes perfect sense since she’s been such a civilizing influence on me these past 17 years.
• t3′s fiance–A1–is the other civilizing influence.
• They bought a house in Broadmoor a couple years ago.  It’s a double and they rent out the upstairs apartment.  They’re very responsible.  He has a good tech job and is pursuing an advanced degree at UNO.  She’s teaching in a Jeff Parish public high school.
• G and I dogged t3 for a year or so about registering to vote.  It’s true–he was approaching 30 and had never voted.  I know, appalling.  I like to think we harangued him with logic and charm.  For xmas one year we gave them him a Voting is Sexy t-shirt.  Then we ridiculed him, for months, until he finally filled out the voter registration card in my presence.
• A1 saw how we did t3 and took appropriate measures: she registered to vote with little pressure applied.
• Now it’s food.  Except in this case there’s been no haranguing.  t3 and A1 have sought our insight into a meat-free diet.
• As in, if we don’t eat meat, what do we eat?
• The other night I was at their house and they revealed they’d recently used a Weight Watchers cookbook.  Just the day before someone had told me about some lousy Weight Watcher brownies she’d made–one of the ingredients was black beans.
• Oh, do we have cookbooks.  Many, many vegetarian and vegan cookbooks.
• We lent t3 and A1 a clutch of cookbooks yesterday and tempted them with another we wouldn’t lend them: Vegan Soul Kitchen by Bryant Terry.
• They stopped at Borders on the way home and bought a copy.
• A year or so ago I was visiting with t3 while he was playing a first person shooter video game.  He was playing online with some friends in California.  He wore a headset so he could communicate with his teammates.  At one point the phone rang and he had to step away from the game.  But first he told his teammates: “I’m going to be AFK.”
• I asked him what AFK meant.
• Away From Keyboard.

Bulleted List To The Head: Wal-Mart Parenting Edition

• I went to Wal-Mart this morning.
• Mother #1
• Turning down an aisle I’m immediately blocked by a woman on the right looking at produts on the shelf and on my left by her shopping cart with her daughter, probably 8 or so, at the handle.  The girl doesn’t notice me at first and I just wait, trying to be patient.  When the girl and I make eye contact she begins to push the cart out of my way so I can pass.  The mother turns and sees what’s happening and says,”What you doing?” and, reaching her hand at least as high as her head, slaps the girl’s forearm hard.  I say, “She was only trying to move out of my way.”  The mother has nothing to say to me.
• Mother #2
• I pay and make my way towards the exit.  In front of me is a woman with a young toddler who is sitting in a big plastic wagon with a canvas cover–bags engulf the child and even fill the canvas top.  Then I notice the kid is putting something in his mouth.  I look more closely and see it’s the receipt.  By this time we’re turning to leave the building and the greeter yells to the mother, “He’s chewing on the receipt.”  The mother  smiles back.  I say, “He’s eating the receipt.”  He is, and it’s a long receipt.  The mother waves us off.  “Oh, he chews on paper all the time.”
• For anyone keeping track at home, the first mother is black and the second white.
• Cat #3
• Our youngest cat jumps on the chair next to our front door when she wants to go outside.  We also pile our to-be-recycled Times-Pics on that chair (thus the degree of difficulty increases over time as the stack grows both higher and more unstable).  Sometimes the cat jumps on the chair and nobody notices and she grows frustrated.  We know she’s frustrated because she bites at the paper and rips it by jerking her head, similar to the kill-shake a cat may use on prey.
• We’ve trained the cat to jump on the chair to go outside.
• The cat has trained us to let her out by tearing newspaper on the chair.
• The cat is a tabby.