We miss the Boye

We miss the farm

Stream at Livingston Orchards
Originally uploaded by cansel.

Donna is getting used to city living again. Of course, there are things she didn't miss, or had forgotten about. The daily unpleasantries. But we do have wonderful luck in our new place: a yard, roof access, and we're across the street from a lovely community garden and a green embankment that was just saved from development by COMMUNITY ACTION! That is the most exciting thing about moving to Jersey for me: people are actually actively involved in their community, and the arts community is very communicative and open.

But yes, it's true, today I miss this, my favorite view of the farm. It's hard to beat 100 acres. Nothing in any urban area, so full of noise and psychic pollution, can beat it. Thank you, Josh Harris.

Me and Donna on the roof

thejerz
Originally uploaded by cansel.

We just moved to Jersey City, and I think our faces tell how happy we are. I'm about to make a home with my girlfriend. I'd love to be more poetic now, but I'm content just to be happy and smiling.

Update

Well, people are settling into where they're settling for now. What I'm hearing from most people now is that when they get back to things, the easiest aid will be in the form of gift cards from national chains for daily items like dishes, clothes, food, toiletries.

More when there's more to report.

Hope for Rebuilding

The Wall St. Journal says if other devastated cities' histories are any indication, NOLA will be all right.

Check out the article here.

New Orleans Aid: Grassroots

I'm going to begin to use this blog as a diving board into pools where there is need. I know a lot of us are wondering if we can trust where our money and aid are going, so I think for me the best thing to do is to post here how you can help real individuals. Of course here I'm only thinking of my friends and family/families of friends--in other words my extended circle. So any concrete way I know that I can help or you can help, I will post here.

So far, my friend Tanner has his two dogs with him in a motel in Houston and he's running out of cash. Tanner volunteered with the Red Cross for a few weeks after September 11 here in New York. I think he's got some karma coming. I don't know what else he needs just yet, but I've donated some money to his PayPal account, which is an extremely easy process: You just enter the recipient's email if you already have a PayPal account. If you want to help Tanner and his dogs, here's his info:

Go to: www.paypal.com
Make a payment to: tannerno@aol.com


My friend Nina is looking for a job in San Diego. Do you have any info or any leads? She can do just about anything: service: coffee/restaurant/bar, administrative, archiving--you name it! Resourceful and bubbly and looking for employment in her new place of residence. She and her boyfriend Evan just discovered that they've lost everything; their home was flooded. So anything you can think of for setting up life/house. Post here and I'll forward to her.

My friend Melissa is in Florida with her family. Baby James, husband Patrick, mom, dad, sister and her family. They've rented a condo for a month until things get figured out. I'm not fully updated on everything going on, but as soon as I figure out what they need, I'll post. If you have any ideas, please post.

So far, that's it, but if you have any info you'd like disseminated, let me know and I'll post. Also if you know of any volunteer opportunities for rebuilding our great city, let me/us know.

Yours in eternal love for New Orleans,
Candy Sue

One year and I'm dripping in cloying honey, and I like it

You know what's weird about this romantic relationship of mine? Today celebrates a year (which I haven't had the experience of celebrating in more than seven) and I'm pretty free of anxiety. Me, who is anxious about whether I can pay my bills, whether my fish will still be alive when I get home from work, whether I will die penniless and alone having never accomplished any of my goals. I'm not anxious about D.Rae or how she feels about me. I just hate that I don't see her every day. I don't know if I've ever been in a situation that improves the more I see someone. I'm a big fan of space. And today I feel pretty comfortable slipping into the soft, snug-fitting clothes of someone who doesn't mind being disgustingly in love, who doesn't mind public displays of affection, or sticky-sweet declarations of everlasting carnal admiration and reciprocation. It's obnoxious, sure. But today I don't care. With her I don't care.

It's a nice thing to look in the mirror and like who you see a little more every day, feel a little more comfortable anywhere you walk. I think that's what makes a really satisfying relationship. When you really like who you are in it. And when you can start to think for once (if you're like me) that someone else's happiness can make you happy.

Golden Skeletons

OK. We already know that corporations are ethically bankrupt, for the most part, and that it's the perfect structure to adopt if one never wants to be held accountable for "indiscretions." Here I'm thinking, Standard of living, health and welfare, compensation for work--all of which are heinous things to take advantage of and play with in a human being's life--but Holy Pope on the Cross, here we go with the life itself. I mean, the content isn't as surprising as the fact that no one feels the need to keep these sentiments in the closet. Parade those golden skeletons, boys. I guess closets are only for homos.

This horrific parody of ethical standards is really from Dow's website. Read it and weep.

http://www.dowethics.com/risk/

ADDENDUM: OK, this isn't really from Dow's website, I discovered. It's just a fucking awesome watchdog group that ripped off all their logos to make it look legit. I'm happy to be duped.

Horror can be funny

If you read Mr. Fish. Holy shit. These cartoons pull no punches--or lynchings, for that matter--tell the brutal truth by kicking your teeth in as they make you laugh literally until you cry. Wow.

http://harpers.org/Cartoon.html

Rock and Roll Music, Volume Me

This is the true story of how I became a fan of the Beatles:

I was in junior high, 7th grade, trying my hardest to be cool and fit in. Well, I was living in rural Louisiana at the time, in a place that wasn't even a town. I thought of it as a speck of cartographic dust located down the (Mississippi) River Road from a suburb of a suburb of New Orleans, an "accidental township." It was called NORCO, an acronym which stood for New Orleans Refinery Company. You may have heard of it. The Shell plant that sustained the town exploded and made national news in the late '80s, which began a litigious boom and gave many of the un- and underemployed of the township a purpose in life again. And a little acting experience. Playing the whiplash victim requires a costume and an acute awareness of how one acts when in actual pain.

Call my prepubescent years a cultural experience.

Needless to say, most of the people there were affected by the chemicals that bathed the atmosphere day and night. On some evenings, a horrible rotten-egg smell would go prowling and infect the entire populace. Those same streets were warmed by the midnight sun of the refinery flame, which had an eerily appealing glow. I would pretend it was Tuscany at sunset or the cabaret lights of Paris.

So, while trying not to stand out as much as I knew I already did, I was psyched to inherit some metal and hard rock tapes from my uncles in Sioux City, Iowa. Hell, yeah! Now I could add to my burgeoning repertoire of hot Dokken licks and creepy Iron Maiden lyrics. I was particularly excited about the obscure On Through the Night Def Leppard tape. "Man, how cool will I be? This record came before 'Photograph,' dude!" I thought. Imagine my chagrin when the tape in the case was actually the Beatles' Rock and Roll Music Vol. 1. "This is old-fashioned faggy music. This sucks." But my curiosity nagged at me to listen.

It was so catchy, so delicious, I wanted to jump out of my skin with joy and relief. I felt like I'd just raided the Halloween trash and devoured all of the grape Pixie Stix that the other kids had thrown away in disgust. I had a sugar high. I was jonesing for more. And I was so ashamed and embarrassed.

I kept my Beatles love in the closet, listened only with headphones, while I blasted more appropriate tunes like Motley Crue, Billy Squier, and Led Zeppelin. That is not to say that I turn my back on my actual love for this other music. Rat and Poison (my first official concert) and the others gave me a language in which to speak to the other kids in the trailer park and on the bus. And there is a satisfaction I will get from listening to it to this day.

But it can't compare to the secret, deep, private affair I began with those catchy Beatles melodies. An affair that I'm proud to say has become a live-in situation, an engagement, a commitment, if not its own sort of marriage. I thought it was sticky-sweet dreck that I had to hide at the time--like my femininity, like my sensitivity, my attraction to other girls, my drawings and my poetry. It was like admitting I was in love, that I even had the capacity for love. Sure to elicit sarcastic "Awwww, isn't that sweet!" taunts (and then possible violence), I hid it--all of it--until I could let it loose openly, freely, without judgement, without hatred and taunts. And scream like all those girls in the '60s did. Scream with abandon that I was saved by this music, that I was set free to feel pleasure and joy. That I could feel at all.

Now that's rock and roll, mother fuckers.

New Look, New Content

It has been ages since I've paid any attention to this blog. My attentiveness reveals a lot about my personality. Maybe I'll use this as my "I need to write something every day, or at least a few times a week" outlet. My practice. And maybe tell people I'm writing in it again. I've mostly used it for links, which I love putting out there.

I'm reading Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, at the suggestion of my friend Kate Simpkins (http://www.katesimpkins.com). I love the way Winterson makes her main character, the lover, of indeterminate gender. And always is this character having an affair with a married woman. The same was true in The Passion, which is another book of hers I adore. Set in a surreal Venice. Characters who deal in human hearts as if they were black market firearms. It's lovely. My favorite part is where the lover steals into her old flame's house to steal her heart back, stuffed into a box and shoved in with all of the other bric-a-brac.

Speaking of hearts, mine has been under pleasant siege. My lovely D.Rae surprises me with each passing day and night. It has almost been a year. Her eyes house the sun. Her heart has a door for mine.