Flea Holocaust, Day 5

I vacuumed. I did lots of laundry. I sprayed the hell out of everything (well, I hope everything) with pesticide. I applied flea killing stuff to Sam and Max. I vacuumed again. All of this while my apartment is about 200 degrees because my AC unit blew up. And while there are a lot fewer fleas around than there were on Thursday night, when the little bastards were running the place, I'm still finding some on the cats. And the cats, of course, continue to wander around everywhere, so I have to hope I got the pesticide everywhere too so it can kill any eggs that fall out of the cats' fur.

Yep, fleas suck.

Important Update

I'm going to start a new band called "Pavlovian Stoplight."

Also, I watched the movie Cursed last night and it renewed my woodrow for Christina Ricci.

Seriously Bad News

I discovered, around 9:30 tonight, that my cats have fleas. I'd been suspicious when I saw them scratching themselves a hell of a lot more than normal. Then I confirmed the problem when I felt little stinging sensations on my ankles and looked down and saw the little bastards crawling on me. Since I discovered the problem, the cats have done their best to run around every corner of the apartment, scratching and shaking themselves and making sure to get fleas, flea eggs, and flea shit absolutely every-fucking-where. Wonderful. I washed my bedding but I'm sure I'll be the main course at the flea banquet while I sleep tonight. Poor Max in particular is going out of his mind, but I can't do anything for him now, at 1am. Obviously, it's off to the vet first thing in the morning.

Your City Lies in Dust

Pictures from my vacation in New Orleans. Note: They are in reverse chronological order, so they proceed from me wandering around town randomly to the reception to the wedding ceremony to stuff that happened before the wedding ceremony. Enjoy.

Playing the Post-Vacation Catch-Up Game

Well, I managed to finally make it back from New Orleans late Monday night... and proceeded straight to the bar before going home. The cats were quite obviously overjoyed to see me when I stumbled in around 1:30.

It's going to continue being busy around S&S headquarters. I have a massive freelance project to work on through the end of the month, and I'm already behind. In fact, I just had to turn down another good freelance opportunity due to lack of time.

This week is the anticipated/dreaded Art Fair here in Ann Arbor, and of course this weekend is the Summer Beer Festival, which I'm volunteering at Friday night (pouring for The Livery, stop by and say hi) and attending as a regular drunkard on Saturday.

All of this is to say it will probably take me a little while longer to write more about my trip and post pics from it.

In the meantime, here are some stupid links:

• A "music" video of David Hasselhoff somehow sucking even more than he did in the "Hooked on a Feeling" video. Simply... amazing. (Thanks DataWhat.)
  
  
• I nearly pissed my pants laughing at this re-dub of Star Wars, where Darth Vader's voice has been replaced with James Earl Jones talking in other movies including Field of Dreams and what sounds like some funky blaxploitation flick. "Yo mama is going on a date!" (Thanks Steve.)
  
  
• This might be the only time you'll ever see me write the words "too bad I'm not in Los Angeles." It's Tiki Luau Night at LA's Egyptian Theatre! I guess I'll have to content myself with wearing tiki attire at the beer festival this weekend. (Via Boing Boing.)

Partying Geeks

Maitri has written a nice post (well, except for that shit about Wisconsin) on Alan's geek party and also put up a Flickr photoset, which includes a couple dreadful shots of me. (The dreadfulness is due to something other than Maitri's awesome photography skills.)

I can't post my pics until I get home, so stay tuned...

Apres Le Deluge

I missed my flight* and had to re-book for tomorrow, so I'm spending another night in New Orleans. Tonight I'm keeping it low-key, hanging out at Alan's while he spends the night over at Becky's. I don't think I even have the energy to go out again.

This trip has had everything: drugs, alcohol, skinny dipping, a wedding, parties, an insane unintelligible black dude who insisted that the eye on the pyramid on the one-dollar bill is really a spaceship, cowboy guys, and more. In fact, I'd say in the few days I've been here, I've made more friends than I have in the past six months at home. I haven't even had time to call back some of the cool people I've met, like Sarah and Jen and Steve, who is a brewer and fellow appreciator of beer. (I still have your phone number -- maybe next time I'm in town we can do the pub crawl?)

But more on all of that later. What I wanted to write about now was the other end of the city. Thanks to Becky, this evening I got a quick tour of the Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish, some of the hardest hit areas. They are, in a word, completely fucked up. If I weren't from Detroit, I'd say I've never seen anything like it. Street after street of empty, silent houses, tons of wreckage and debris, and the occasional white FEMA trailer. It's hard to imagine how these neighborhoods will ever recover.

I'm happy to report, however, that the spirit of New Orleans is alive and well. In characteristic fashion, the souvenir places are even selling t-shirts with Katrina-related jokes like "FEMA = Fix Everything My Ass" and "NOPD = Not Our Problem, Dude." It's a small thing, but it speaks volumes about the way people are down here and why I love them and their city so much. Even with all of the devastation, on top of all of the city's regular perennial problems, nothing this visit has changed my belief that New Orleans is the coolest place ever.

And now that I know people here, it will make it that much easier when, on one of my visits, I miss my flight... and don't bother to re-book it.

* I managed to sleep in so late I didn't wake up until about an hour before the plane took off. The plane took off at approximately 5pm. Yeah, I had quite a night.

Drinking 'Til Dawn

Got to bed around 7 this morning, after ending up where I started the day, at the Erin Rose (formerly Monaghan's Erin Rose). That bar has a strong gravitational pull. Time to go in search of some food to absorb my hangover... and start it all over again.

It seems I had the day of the geek party mixed up, too. That is tonight at 7.

New Orleans: Post-Katrina Visit #2

The feeling of being home, of not wanting to turn around and leave in four days, or ever, enveloped me at the same time the moist, muggy air settled around me like a wet blanket.

I made it to Alan's apartment on Esplanade; while Alan is out of town, his friend Becky met me and gave me a set of keys. It is, how to say it, a modest sort of hovel -- as Alan warned me -- with two electrical outlets in the whole place, one of which isn't grounded, ergo useless for plugging in my laptop. There is a nice pool in the ramshackle courtyard, and a window-unit air conditioner kept things this side of tolerable while I slept.

After dropping my stuff off here, I went over to the Lions Inn in the Marigny, where my fellow travelers Jeff and Mari are staying. The bride- and groom-to-be were throwing a pool party there, complete with a crab and shrimp boil. It is the first time in my life I ever walked away from a table of shrimp before the shrimp ran out. I actually got full first. Drank three kinds of Abita (wheat, golden, and the ubiquitous amber) as well as some Flying Dog Pale. (Sidenote: The mosquitoes here, contrary to what you might think, are actually smaller and they fly faster. You can barely see them as they attack your ankles. But they love them some Dave blood as much as the ones back home. Consequently, I have about 4000 new bites already.)

Everyone sort of conked out by midnight, so I strolled over to the Spotted Cat, a little joint on Frenchmen, where a jazz quartet were playing, and had a few more beers. An old dude danced vigorously with a young chick he grabbed from the bar. She had extreme difficulty keeping up. When the band quit, I went across the street to dba and had a Chimay Trippel and chatted up some chick named Kelly, who was also in town for a wedding and originally from Metairie.

Then I stumbled home and wrote the previous blog entry.

I should say that on previous trips I would have probably been afraid to walk the six or so blocks from the Lions' Inn to Alan's place, alone, late at night. But this time, it didn't seem scary at all. Maybe because half of the population of the city is gone and there just aren't as many folks hanging around, I don't know.

Tonight it seems I have a decision to make... there is a bachelor party for the groom, and Alan is throwing what he's calling a "geek party." I'm a bachelor and not a geek, so the former sounds fine to me. But I'd also like to see Alan and meet his friends too. Maybe I can manage to attend both.

Well, time to shower up and go in search of some more delicious food. Maybe it's time to hit up Central Grocery for a real muffuletta, not the funky imitations they serve in places like the Quarter Bistro!

New Orleans: Post-Katrina Visit #1

The first thing you notice is the blue tarps. Maybe not so many, near the airport, not the worst-hit area, but enough to catch your attention, to let you know it isn't exactly the same as you left it. Then you look a little closer, squinting out of the airplane window, and you see other things: missing shingles, timbers sunk down and in, debris in yards.

It's almost a year later, and everything that was familiar still is -- but something seems slightly amiss.

In a lot of ways, however, it is peculiarly hard to tell. New Orleans is a rundown, sketchy-looking place by its nature. And yet the ride from the airport to the Vieux Carre still reveals places and buildings that seem quite a lot more weathered than you remembered. Then you remind yourself: This isn't the area that suffered the full brunt of Her. Those areas, you need to make an effort to see. Those areas, tourists don't ever go.

I talked to an elderly woman on the plane ride over, a native of the city. She told me a thing or two. She lived here through Betsy and Camille, Katrina's evil sisters. She's been afraid of storms ever since she was 12 and needed to evacuate her home. She was the last one out, and the storm bore down so rapidly it shook the entire house as she exited. She never forgot. Maybe this residual fear saved her when she fled Katrina. Or Betsy, or Camille. But still this is her home.

Familiar landmarks exist and continue to operate: dba, Port of Call, the Funky Butt, Snug Harbor. In some ways, life seems as it always was here, before the fanciful and fancified CNN reports about murder, rape, cannibalism, and savagery absolutely unknown to these shores. Will we ever know the exact truth of those days? I bet you a beer no, we won't.

I haven't yet traipsed around the French Quarter, but I will more than likely do some of that tomorrow, as the two friends I'm traveling with need to see the area.

I'm writing this from what can almost be described as a ruin on Esplanade Ave. But this is New Orleans, and I can state unequivocally to you, dear readers, that it is a beautiful ruin. For those who have been here before, you know what I mean. For those who haven't, I invite you to come down and find out what it is to live, even in the midst of what might be called, in any other city, "blight." I call it charm, perseverance, strength, continuity. Convince me I'm wrong. You won't.

Vacation, Have to Get Away

Yeah, I think it's technically "had to get away," but whatever, the Go-Gos suck.

Anyway, work's been kicking my ass for the past few weeks and I need some damn time off. A bit of serendipity may allow me to meet up with this guy while I'm in New Orleans. A columnist for the Times-Picayune who also wrote the book on barbecue? I'm thinking he's probably someone I want to know.

On Saturday, Verd asked if I was going to blog while I was down there. I don't know if I'll have the chance since -- I'll be honest -- it sounds like my schedule is essentially a nonstop party. But I think I will take my laptop just in case. I'll certainly have my digital camera with me. So if nothing else maybe I can throw up some pictures of random drunken louts on Flickr.

One Week Until NOLA

My trip to New Orleans is coming up next week, and from the sound of it, I should expect the French Quarter and the more touristy areas to be relatively normal. But outlying areas are apparently still devastated. I won't have a way of getting around, so I probably won't get a chance to tour the rest of the city unless one of my local friends has a car and offers.

But apparently the French Quarter and the Lower Garden District are not completely without problems. I'll need to be wary of coked-up black transvestite thieves. Truly, an "only in New Orleans" phenomenon.

In belated and unrelated news, Germans are seriously peeved at having to drink Budweiser -- which they call "an insult to all true beer lovers, taste-buds, and football-fans" -- at World Cup games. Some Krauts have even set up a web site to protest. Go, Germany!

Speaking of patriotism, happy Independence Day and stuff.

(Thanks Verd.)

Stop! It's Ypsi Time!

Just a reminder that next weekend, July 7-8, is the Michigan Elvisfest in Riverside Park, Ypsilanti. Dust off your blue suede shoes and go listen to Elvis impersonators as well as tribute artists for Cher, Tom Jones, Ray Charles, and who-the-hell-knows-who-else. Or just have a beer with me at Aubree's or the Sidetrack or the Corner Brewery or wherever I end up going.

The following weekend I'll be in New Orleans attending a rather Bohemian wedding, but I encourage folks so inclined to head to the Corner Brewery in Ypsi on July 15 for the first-ever Shadow Art Fair, co-organized and sponsored by S&S friends Mark Maynard and Matt and Rene Greff. Hats off and beer mugs raised to these quality folk for their local community-mindedness.

The weekend after that, of course, is the long-awaited Michigan Brewers Guild Summer Beer Festival, July 21-22, also at Riverside Park. Only a total loser would miss it.

A Message from Mayor Tommy Shanks

I know it looks like I've abandoned my blog, but I haven't. Work's been kicking my ass into the evenings, and I've been out every night after that for the past week, maybe more. I can't remember the last time I did anything more at home than feed the cats, shower, and sleep.

It's hard out here for a pimp. Or whatever.

Right now I was supposed to be going to Kuhnhenn Brewery with some friends, but I guess maybe they are too hungover. So I thought, hey, now's a great time to reconnect with my rapidly dwindling audience.

So, how are you guys?

Are you enjoying your summer?

I am. But it's really hot today. I was forced to turn on the AC.

Well, I guess that's it for now. Good talking with you.

Now, where'd I put my Milkbones?