A pleasant Saturday afternoon and evening found us at an Austin tavern eating and drinking.  With the exception of going to see an aerial ballet performed on the site of a building under construction (all five floors being utilized), we pretty much spent most of the day at Opal Divine’s.

As the evening progressed I started taking pictures using only the ambient light on the patio, which was extensively lit with red and green floodlights.  I also took quite a number of pics of traffic passing in front of the bar, being a sucker for the look of headlight streaks on a still background.  Here are a few of my favorites from the evening.

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Now, somewhere in the black mountain hills of Dakota there lived a young boy named Rocky Raccoon, and one day his woman ran off with another guy… hit young Rocky in the eye.  Rocky didn’t like that.  He said "I’m gonna’ get that boy."

So, one day he walked into town, booked himself a room in the local saloon.  Rocky Raccoon checked into his room only to find Gideon’s bible.  Rocky had come equipped with a gun, to shoot off the legs of his rival.  His rival it seems had broken his dreams… by stealing the girl of his fancy.

Her name was McGill and she called herself "Lil"… but everyone knew her as "Nancy".  Now she and her man who called himself "Dan" were in the next room at the hoedown.  Rocky burst in, and grinning a grin he said "Danny boy, this is a showdown."  But Daniel was hot — he drew fast and shot — and Rocky collapsed in the corner.

Now, the doctor came in stinking of gin and proceeded to lie on the table.  He said "Rocky you met your match."

And Rocky said "Doc it’s only a scratch, and I’ll be better — I’ll be better Doc as soon as I am able."

Now Rocky Raccoon, he fell back in his room only to find Gideon’s bible.  Gideon checked out — and he left it no doubt — to help with good Rocky’s revival.

So, those of you that know me know that I express a preference for colorful language.  And when I say colorful, I mean shit brown, piss yellow, and Linda Blair puke green.

Hello, my name is DmentD, and I like to curse.  Now go fuck yourself silly.

I don’t always use the foul vernacular; it can be a lazy way to get your point across.  One must first know how to speak well and communicate clearly before one can effectively use four-letter words with the proper impact. 

(Side note: how did the term ‘four-letter word’ come about as a generic and pasteurized way to describe profane language… especially when there are such tasty words like asshole, motherfucker, jackoff, snatch, cumdumpster and mooseknuckle, none of which are four letters long?  This is, by the way, is purely rhetorical.  I know the answer, and just felt like working "mooseknuckle" into this post ’cause it cracks me up.  There, I did it twice.)

My finest moments occur while I’m driving.  Again, if you’ve ridden with me you know all too well that I vent at the other drivers on the road, none of whom come close to my world class, platinum perfect vehicular handling skills.  I comment, I quip, I holler and I curse.  Now, if you were interpreting this as road rage you’d be dead wrong.  Road rage would be if I took action on the other drivers, which I don’t.  This is a pure 100% letting off of steam, an acknowledgement to myself that they pissed me off, getting it off my chest and moving on.  This incident and any anger or aggravation is forgotten almost as soon as the words leave my mouth.

However…

It does make for some fine, extemporaneous swearing.  It’s like being a free-form jazz musician.  I’m Miles Davis mixed with Lenny Bruce, with just a dash of that retarded kid that lives down the block from you (you know, the one that wears the Hello Kitty bike helmet (helmet size ‘extra pre-pubescent’, head size ’15lb H2O’) and the "Honk if you’re a honkey!" t-shirt — answers to the names Carl and "get off my lawn").

I also have many opportunities to laugh at my own ridiculousness.  For example, I was driving down the road, all the windows down (sunroof and rear hatch windows open too) and enjoying the sunny weather, singing along with the Beatles, which I had cranked up on the ol’ Victrola.  I was in a spectacularly good mood.  The particular street I was on has a center turn lane that allows folks making a left turn to get the hell out of everyone else’s way and not bind up traffic.  The considerate fellow in front of me starts braking ever so slowly, forcing me to decelerate to a near stop, before he eventually gets into that center turn lane to make the left.  Of course, I can’t let this go without comment.  Here is what the casual pedestrian on the sidewalk would have heard:

"Love, love me do jumping jesus christ on a pogo stick!"
"You know I love you oh come the fuck on!"
"I’ll always be true that’s why there’s a motherfucking turn lane!"
"So please, love me do so motherfuckers like you can turn!"
"Oh, love me do well it’s about time, douchebag!"

I wish I had a recording of that… I’d play it at parties.

I am a profane lexicon.  I am a sponge and an originator.  I am an idiot savant (ok, just an idiot).  I am Jack’s ruptured bowel duct.

I agree with Louis Black when he says: "I realize I use the word ‘fuck’ a lot, and I’d apologize, but, well, I don’t give a shit.  I’ve lived in New York City for so long that ‘fuck’ isn’t even a word… it’s a comma.”  Except that I don’t live in New York and… well, you get my point.

Here’s a homework assignment.  Try reading, to yourself, down this list in a crowded room, preferably at work, without snorting out loud because you were trying not to laugh yourself into an embarrassing explanation.  You are disqualified if you read it in the privacy of your own home or other quiet location.  Bonus points if you can keep your shit together when you read the definition of dirty sanchez.

Updates to the Cake Gallery.

So, you may have noticed the cute little icons now positioned squarely above my ranting space here.  They are there to keep score of the number of rats that have been dispatched in my apartment.  More specifically, my pantry.  On the third shelf up.

We’ve enjoyed a quiet, yet slightly strained peace with the varmint that had apparently made a home somewhere in the great mysterious places that they do such things.  We were content to completely ignore him as long as he left our food and such alone, and he seemed content to remind us that we should never, ever leave a bag of garbage on the floor — we, being too lazy to bring it out to the dumpster after yanking it from the can and putting a fresh bag in it’s place — by eating a hole in the side and dragging a few pieces of said trash out to nibble on.

When it first happened, I made a complaint to the apartment powers that be.  In their infinite, unquestionable wisdom, they rapidly dispatched a crack squad of Death Mexicans to promptly squirt liquid foam in a few of the holes they half-heartedly looked for.  And when I say that they looked for them, I mean they really got busy opening the two doors under the sink and calling it a day.  I slept better that night, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that our apartment was now locked up tighter than a hummingbird’s tweet… a real Fort Knox constructed entirely of Jell-O, proof against even the mightiest of rodents.  If it was really, really tired.  Or dead.  Maybe.

So, we turned a blind eye and hoped for the best, even seeing our little houseguest as a cute little feller that would scurry under the dishwasher when we wandered into the kitchen.  Until, that is, we found that several baggies and boxes of food in the pantry had been chewed into and panty-raided in the night by that furry rapscallion.  This, as they say in the industry, was war.

I went out and bought a trap… but not just any trap mind you.  I’m a technical boy living in a digital world, and frankly I love gadgets.  I stood there in the Isle Of Doom at the local Home Depot, staring at all the medieval devices used to dispatch creatures great and small (where was all this when I was bitching about my neighbor playing his stereo too loud while I was trying to sleep?).  I was wondering if I could deal with the nastiness of a spring trap that may not kill the thing outright — or worse snap a piece of it off, making a hell of a mess.  How about the squeal of a rodent caught in a glue trap, slowing starving to death.  Poisons aren’t really all that effective in the strength you can buy from home improvement stores (oh, how I miss Barber Labs in NOLA!), and if they do work, you end up with a dead rat in the walls making a stink.

Then I saw it, and I swear there was a shaft of light shining down upon what I had been searching for without even knowing it.  The Victor Electronic Rat Trap.  Now, I wasn’t sure at this point if we had a rat or a mouse, but my roomies had described it as being about three-ish inches long.  Big enough for this baby.  It was a bit pricy at $39, but what the hell, I had to have it.  No sir, no analog traps for me.

Now this trap is, for all practical purposes, a taser in a rat-sized housing.  When you turn it on there is about a five second hum… that would be the capacitors charging up from the four C batteries it uses.  There are three metal plates in the floor of it, and when the critter stands on two of them he becomes the last part of the circuit and ZAP! he gets the full charge and his heart and brain stop working so well.  He is instantly killed, in what is billed as the most humane method on the market today.  No slow death from poison or a poorly snapped trap and no tortuous starvation in a glue trap.  No muss, no fuss, and the trap is infinitely reusable.  My only concern was if I was going to be able to convince a rat to climb in this sucker, regardless of the bait I used.

The bait of recommended choice from Victor is peanut butter.  A small dab of it in the back of the trap should be enough.  We also found that the varmints are crazy-go-nuts for sunflower seeds — removed from the shell, of course — owing to the fact that the bag in the pantry was chewed into, and there were remnants of the seeds everywhere.  I had initially placed the trap on the floor along the baseboard leading to the panty, but GonzO had the genius to put it on the shelf in the pantry, at the scene of the crime.  I added a couple of seeds just outside the trap opening, a couple of seeds in the peanut butter, and a seed or two in the middle of the trap.

This my friends was the magic combination, and we had our first victim that night as we slept.  Deader than Jimmy Hoffa, we found a rat (not a cute little mouse, oh no) in our contraption… clean and exterminated.  We re-set the bait and trap thinking that maybe, just maybe, there may be another one creeping about — an accomplice as GonzO put it.  We were not disappointed.  Not one, but two rats died at our hands the next night; GonzO happened into the kitchen on the way outside for one final smoke and noticed the corpse in the trap, cleaned it and re-set the trap, and another had bit the dust by the time we woke the next morning.

Let me tell you, this was the best forty bones I’ve ever spent on pest control.  I heartily recommend it to all you faithful readers out there.  It’s the best entertainment money can buy.

So, now I need to go and file another complaint with the apartment folks.  This time, however, I’m going armed with (as of this writing) two dead rats in zip-loc baggies.  I decided that after the second rat, any more that I collected would be disposed of in the manager’s office.  If I was going to be disgusted by this, they were going to feel my pain and at least be disgusted by it too.  I have been discouraged by my loverly wife against walking into the office and tossing the baggies onto the manager’s desk from a distance of a few feet, making a satisfying thud.  She says I should save the real drama for later, if need be.  I am also inclined (but will not… rest easy my dear) to ask for a refund on my rent to the tune of the cost of having an exterminator come out, since I’m doing that job already, and more effeciently at that.

If my camera was with me, I’d catalogue the kills as I go — alas, it is not.  Maybe I can convince GonzO to take pictures of them as they make it to the morgue.  At any rate, keep an eye on the Rat-O-Meter up top as I keep score.

Sleep well, gentle readers.  Try to ignore that little pitter-patter in the night… if it’s not followed up by an electrical snap, it’s no fun at all.

Wow, I’m disappointed that this guy has to resort to using his hands.  Some people can do that with a single solitary muscle… to the amazement of others.  What a fucking amateur.

Yo — pretty ladies around the world, got a weird thing to show you… so tell all the boys and girls.  Tell your brother, your sister and mama too, cause they’re about to go down and you’ll know just what to do.

Wave your hands in the air like you don’t care.  Glide by the people as they start to look and stare.  Do your dance… do your dance quick mama.  Come on baby; tell me what’s the word.  Ah — word up everybody, say when you hear the call you got to get it underway.  Word up — it’s the code word — no matter where you say it, you’ll know that you’ll be heard.

Now, all you sucker DJ’s who think you’re fly, there’s got to be a reason… and we know the reason why.  You try to put on those airs and act real cool, but you got to realize that you’re acting like fools.  If there’s music we can use it — we need to dance.  We don’t have that time for psychological romance.  No romance.  No romance… no romance for me mama, come on baby tell me what’s the word.  Ah — word up everybody.  Say when you hear the call; you got to get it underway.

Dial “L” for love; come on, all you people say word up.

Word up.

Here’s some quick and dirty:

I’m employed… finally.  Been working for about three weeks now.  The job is good and keeps me on my toes, figuratively and literally.  It’s nice to have some income again, and frankly it’s a relief to have something to do during the day that doesn’t involve some clever new way of cleaning the lint from my bellybutton (that only happens on the weekends now).

I’m hopelessly obsessed with Cheapass Games.  Thanks Andy, I’ve managed to unconsciously put this off for two years and now you’ve gone and raped my willpower… you fucked it dry and made it bleed.  Now, OCD-Boy has been unleashed — be ascared, be very ascared.

I have had the opportunity to hang out a bunch with half of the crew who are now living their lives here in A-Town and that makes me very, very happy.  I have also not been hanging out with the other half very much, and that makes me a sad panda.

My 4-Runner was hit from behind and damaged a bit, but since it wasn’t my fault I didn’t have to pay a penny for repairs (oh, and nobody was hurt).  I also was not in the truck at the time and never saw the damage done to it… and frankly my brain has almost managed to erase the whole event because of that.  Weird.

Battlestar Galactica — the new series.  Well done and hurry up with that third fucking season already!

I love Kurt Vonnegut.  Here’s what he has to say about freedom of speech:

"… and ten or more years ago now, when students and some authors were insisting on the right to use any damn words they pleased, this was perceived by many easily frightened people as a form of assault.  They were right.  The primary wish of many free-speech fanatics was, I am certain, to bop prudes around.  That’s always fun.  But something beautiful came out of the legalization of all the funny, endearing, ugly little words.  We were not only free to mention any part of our bodies we damn pleased, thus improving our mental health and our understanding of ourselves to the extent that we are machines.  We were free to discuss anything!  When I learned politeness at my mother’s knee — God rest her soul, God rest her knee — I learned not to offend anyone by discussing excretion, reproduction, religion, or a person’s sources of wealth.  We are free to discuss all those things now.  Our minds aren’t crippled anymore by good taste.  And I can see now all the other more sinister taboos which mingled with sexuality and excretion, such as religious hypocrisy and ill-gotten wealth.  If we are to discuss truthfully what America is and what it can become, our discussion must be in absolutely rotten taste, or we won’t be discussing it at all."

Kurt is a Humanist.  Go figure.

And that’s all I have for the moment.  There may be static on this station for the most part, but every so often a program comes in clear.

I cannot believe how extremely happy I am with a recent decision I made.

About five months ago, Heather and I were at lunch just talking.  One of the subjects that came up was that of tattoos.  Many of our friends have tattoos, and most have gotten them to celebrate or remember some particular event that has happened to them.  I was saying that I thought the concept was a cool one, but that I just didn’t personally have anything that I felt was momentous enough that I would want to have a permanent symbol of on my body.  I had no idea that an event of epic proportions was only about a week away. That’s when Katrina hit.

No need to go into all of that again, as all of the gang from NOLA suffered losses of one proportion or another.

So, Stuff and I are currently visiting friends and family and enjoying Mardi Gras.  A lot of the people that had relocated to Austin had discussed getting tattoos, and I had already decided that I was going to get one.  A small group of us got the idea that we should go get tattoos while we were in.  We knew of two reputable tattoo shops in town where friends had already had work done, and of the two I found an artist whose work I liked.

Low and behold today I got my first tattoo.  It took about two hours, and wasn’t as painful as I thought it was going to be just a bit uncomfortable to have to straddle a semi padded board for such a long period of time (there are just certain body parts that are quite disconcerting to have fall asleep).  While he worked on the outline it wasn’t too bad.  Just a few spots that were more sensitive.  The fill was more intensive and there were moments when I squeezed my hands together a little tighter and tried to concentrate more on the beat of the music playing and less on the needles digging into my back.  I was thinking that there was about another half hour to go when the tattoo artist said he was done.

I’m really quite pleased with the results and cannot quit smiling about it, or stop talking about it.  I’m glad that I had it done in NOLA too.  The only worry now is, where will I put the next one? 🙂

Happy Mardi Gras everyone!

Well, we still don’t have jobs yet, but my life is slowly but surely starting to feel like mine again.

We just spent the last three weeks putting together costumes and make-up for "Carnaval".  This was the 29th year of the event, which is held for one night from 9pm till 2am and consists of "Brazilian music played on Brazilian instruments and sung entirely in Portuguese", and throngs of people in outrageous costumes dancing and having a great time.

I have to thank Shortbus for that, because had she not found a great fansite about Carnaval we might never have known that such an awesome event was being held just a couple of blocks from our apartment.

Shortbus, Gonzo, Doug, Stuff and me all decided to give it a whirl.

I have to say that for the first time, in a very very long time, I felt like myself.  The high that I experienced was not unlike any one of the parties we had at the wHoReS except that there were a lot more people and most strangers.  For a change, I wasn’t worried about not having a job, or having lost our home or anything else.  I just enjoyed the music and the people.

I could have been anywhere just celebrating, but I was in Austin, TX.  How lucky am I that I had to leave one great city like New Orleans, but be able to discover a city that seems to be just as groovy.

For now, I’m still on an emotionally charged high from all the people, and what can only be called rejoicing.  I still miss our friends and family and the life that we had, but I’m glad to start to see that life appears to be going on.  So, "Vivo!" my friends, which the English to Portugeuse dictionary tells me means "Live!".