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“What are you in for?”

“I’m a grifter. They caught me grifting.”

“Really.”

“Yep.”

“What is grifting, anyway?”

“What is grifting?”

“Yeah, I’ve always wondered that.”

“Well, it’s when you pull a scam on somebody. Like a guy thinks you paid him forty bucks for a tank of gas, but you didn’t. Like you got the gas, and you paid him the money, but when he goes to tote up the night’s receipts, he’s forty short.”

“That sounds like what I do. Maybe I’m a grifter.”

“What are you in for?”

“I killed a guy for fifteen dollars and a case of beer.”

“Well, did he know you took his fifteen dollars?”

“He sure did. I said ‘give me all your shit and I won’t fuck you up’ before I wasted him.”

“See, that’s not grifting, per se, if the guy knew you were taking his shit. That’s more like robbery.”

“And murder, because I lied when I said I wasn’t gonna kill him.”

“Right. Robbery and murder. That’s probably what they charged you with, right?”

“Right. You got charged with grifting?”

“No, with petty theft.”

“So why are you a grifter? It sounds like you’re a thief.”

“It’s a kind of thievery. Grifting. Did you see the movie? The Grifters? With Olympia Dukakis and Robert Downey, Jr?”

“I thought it was Anjelica Huston and John Cusack in that.”

“Whatever.”

“No.”

“They grifted a lot in that movie. Rent it when you get out, it’s good.”

“Maybe I will,” Frank said. He took another bite of cornbread. “Maybe I’m a kind of murderer. There’s probably different kinds of murderers, right? Did you ever see a movie where they called the murderers something else?”

“You might could be a terrorist. Like in Speed with Keanu Reeves and that girl from the lawyer movie.”

“Sandra Bullock?”

“Right. Did you kill the guy for anything besides the money and the beer?”

“You mean like, was he fucking my woman? No.”

“No, not like that. I mean was he a Jew or a Muslim or something? Did he take your people’s land?”

“My people don’t have any land, they’re from the project on 28th Street. They’re not Jews or Muslims or any shit either, they can eat anything they want.”

Joe thought about it and said “I guess you can’t be a terrorist then.”

Frank looked out the window and said “Maybe I can be any damn thing I want.”

“Maybe,” Joe said, but he secretly doubted it. The cornbread was good. One of them thought the black-eyed peas were dry, but who thought that doesn’t matter.

Funny; one of the things I have to do in order to make Blogger work with my site provider is to publish to Blogspot first, then save the page, strip out all mention of “blogspot.com,” and publish it on mach∏.com via Frontpage. Idiotic, I know.

The last post should have read “Go to mach∏.blogspot.com for future updates,” since it would’ve been a lot quicker. My automated stripper took “blogspot.” out of that, though, rendering the entire post meaningless and absurd.

It doesn’t matter anymore anyway. I’m putting this blog back to bed again because I’m tired of it. I may post new Katrina pics from time to time, and even a message or two, but don’t count on it.

We have a reliable generator now, intermittent phone service, and we may even get real power again next week. We have plumbing; we ate Domino’s pizza about an hour ago. Life’s returning to normal, sort of, except for all the new shit.

Rubble in the streets. A dead coastline. The stink. Helicopters in the air. Moving over so a tank can clatter by. “I shoot looters” signs.

That’s all new shit.

After this for awhile, go to mach∏.blogspot.com for word updates; it’s quicker, and we have to conserve generator gas. Pictures will still go to mach∏.com.

Not much to say; just look at the pictures.

Since we need the generator for the fridge, the next update will be this evening sometime.

The coast to a couple hundred yards inland is absolutely smashed. Who knows how many people are still buried in the rubble. I didn’t think anyone would try to ride it out down there, but judging from my brother’s neighborhood, many people did. Whoever did is buried under garbage.

Pass Christian is smashed even farther inland. We had to pick our way around power lines and houses in the streets to go see how my mom’s and other brother’s places fared. North Street is impassable, although they are starting to clear it. Their subdivision had 20 feet of water, more or less. They won’t be living there for months, if the house and apartment can ever be rehabilitated.

Okay, a quick update: we have a dialtone, but we can’t dial out. DSL is up (amazing). Our neighbor is letting us share his generator (he’s amazing), it usually runs the fridge, but I’m using it now for the computer. It’ll mostly run the fridge.

Long Beach halfway down from the tracks is trashed. Obliterated. We don’t hear anything from the Pass or Bay St Louis or Waveland; just rumors of bodies being taken out. Tony and I went to his house on Ford Street south of the tracks in Gulfport near the Long Beach line; his house is standing, but had 4 feet of water in it during the surge. Inside it looks like somebody put water in it, shook it, and let it settle. Five houses closer to the beach, there’s nothing but rubble, rotting chicken from some ship that got trashed in the Gulfport harbor, and what looks like bags of flour everywhere. Probably not heroin, there’s too much of it. Crowley truck containers are everywhere. Dead cats, dead dogs; we couldn’t make it to the beach, although we tried, but some people did and said there were dead things everywhere. Dead seals and dolphins from Marine Life.

The street parallel to Woodward (a north-south road), a couple hundred yards from Tony’s house, has a 200 yard barge sitting on it and where a house used to be. I didn’t notice it at first, even though I was looking right at it. It’s simply too enormous and out of place to register right away. We talked to an older couple who rode out the storm 2 or 3 houses up from where no houses are anymore; they said they had to retreat to the attic at the height of it. They looked pretty beat up. They plan on staying.

We have a line on water now; the Guard is distributing it at Quarles Elementary. We have plumbing; we lost some trees, a few shingles, and had a little water damage. We were lucky. Half our subdivision was under water on the 28th. We weren’t.

Our dog Buddy died at 10pm on the 28th, after the storm. He was an old dog. He hadn’t drunk any water for 3 days; we had no medicine for him except for some Tylenol we injected with a syringe into his colon. Didn’t do a damn bit of good. He was a good dog.

We’re lucky.

The wind’s whipping outside. We’ve got hours and hours of this stuff to look forward to. It’s still dark; I’ll take a picture or two when it gets a little lighter. Still not much debris in the yard or the street, but the eye wall won’t be near here for another nine hours or so if it keeps its present speed.

I doubt we’ll have power two or three hours from now.

Going to sleep. The storm’s not due here for a few hours. I’ll update in the morning if I can.

Some squall bands, nothing major. It’s gotten dark, so I won’t have any new pics until the morning, provided we still have power. We’re watching WLOX.com; they have a live feed on their site.

The blog was done a few weeks ago, but I’m resurrecting it for the storm. The “before” pictures are here. The “after” pictures might be awhile. This picture is from a friend of mine; it’s the Camille memorial at the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer in Biloxi. Maybe it won’t become necessary to construct a new memorial. We live in a brick house, in Long Beach, on some of the highest land in Harrison County, which isn’t saying much. A little over two miles from the beach. We’ll have some relatives over, and our sheriff neighbor and his family are riding the storm out in the house next to the house next to us. Misery loves company.

This neighborhood (the older part) came through Camille okay, and we’re hoping for more of the same. Best case, the storm becomes somebody else’s problem, and the “after” pictures look the same as the “before” pictures. That wouldn’t hurt my feelings at all.

Regardless, I’ll update this thing intermittently for as long as the power holds out. Our neighborhood’s power lines are underground, but the same can’t be said for the lines that feed into our neighborhood.

Good times, good times.

That’s it, thanks for stopping by.

I like being in a new place that has weird weather. It’s one of the main things I like about new places. And every place besides the place I live in now has weird weather, because I’ve gotten used to weather here. I don’t know when it happened, but it did, like it always does. It’s no longer exotic: hot summer days, humid summer nights, big thunderstorms, and cool late falls. Winters that can get cold, but not that cold. Beautiful springs. That’s now normal.

I’d like to live in several more new places with weird weather before I die. Maybe Montana; I bet they have some really odd weather up there.

I like living in a new place long enough so that the weird weather’s no longer weird.

This entry has been changed since I can’t depersonalize it enough to guarantee maintenance of total anonymity, which is vital since I don’t get paid. So screw it.

It’s the mark of a worker-controlled company if that company will give a worker a leave of absence for the purpose of making him less dependent on the company. An owner-controlled company would have no qualms with denying that leave. Give you more control of your destiny? Be less dependent on the company for a livelihood? That’s absurd.

I’ll find out, maybe, whether Brand X Airlines is a company of the first sort when I apply for a leave of absence four or five years from now to go to nurse anesthetist school. I’ll find out whether Brand X considers me a person or a serf. That’ll be interesting to know.

You’ve gotten tired of coffee tables, they take up too much room. You get rid of the coffee table. You put an old, tattered chest where the coffee table was, thinking it might work, that it just might be different and interesting.

People who come in, everyone, the first thing they say when they see it is “Hey; you want help moving that?”

I guess it’s still Pensacola’s turn. I’m not even going to bother taking any “before” pictures; at this point it looks like we’ll be getting less fallout from the storm than we did with Ivan, which itself wasn’t too bad here.

My mental powers are simply too great for my foes in Pensacola. During the night, while I was sleeping, apparently I subconsciously steered the storm away from us and toward them. Half an hour ago I went outside to laugh at the weather. An extended, exultant, booming laughter.

It’s all me. I’m 2 for 2! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Not my blood! Not my blood! Not my blood!

I’m really not ready for this. I like to read about my tropical storms and hurricanes happening far away, for at least a month or two at the beginning of the season. That has been thwarted this year, first by TS Cindy, and now by this behemoth.Probably nothing will come of it, except for a few downed branches in the yard and a carpet of leaves in the pool. Like Ivan last year. Dennis is supposed to turn toward the Alabama/Florida border sometime tonight, which would once again put us on the good side of the storm. Right now, though, it’s headed directly for my house. That’s pretty sobering.I’m going to take some “before” pictures tomorrow morning, and I hope the “after” pictures don’t look much different.

You know how lakes can be stocked with fish by the government? The only justification for that I’ve ever heard or read is that it’s for fishermen, for fishermen to have good fishing. What the hell is that all about?

If it were just me, and I heard that the government stocked lakes with trout, and didn’t know why, I’d figure that they did it for some scientific or commercial reason. Like the lakes would swell up and explode from a lack of trout. Something like that. I’d never guess it was done because it makes good fishin’.

That’s an odd use of my tax money.

I think it’s fair to say that after one reads his hundredth real book, say around fifth or sixth grade or so, one should know the necessary word is “drivel.” By that time, one should have read enough to avoid unnecessary ironies like this. When making a statement that someone else is saying something stupidly, one shouldn’t say anything stupid. Right?

I’ve come across this foul usage several times lately, in forums and “sound offs” in the newspaper. It’s almost unbelievable that grown adults can make this mistake. I guess I see it more than I used to because I read more words from amateur writers than I used to. Professional writers don’t make this mistake. It goes without saying that the pros have read at least a hundred books before they become pros. But apparently it also goes without saying that there are far too many adults in the world who simply don’t read books, and yet feel compelled to offer opinions in writing.

These people are mistaken when they think their opinions matter. They don’t. It’s not my job to try to figure out what they meant to say when they don’t have a clue themselves. My time is more valuable than that. I urge them to read some books, then get back to me.

Please: if you haven’t found the time to read a hundred real books in your lifetime, keep your god-damn hands off your computer keyboard. Thank you.

Anticipating a tough confirmation battle in the Senate, Bush called for a “dignified” process of considering his nominee.

This is code for “I’m going to nominate who I want and screw my enemies to the wall, there’s not a damn thing you can do about it, so just open wide and take your medicine.”

Through cunning devices and methods, people found out what stars are, and what they’re made of. They found out how big they are and how old they can get.

I think that’s pretty amazing. Good for us!

When I was eleven or twelve or thirteen, my parents were freshly divorced, and my mother was barely scraping by on Markham with four kids. I remember knowing it was (relatively) hard times for us, and knew that some things we had to do without. But I was also a kid, with a kid’s insane view of reality.

I remember seeing a classified ad in some magazine, offering 640 acres of land in Canada for ten dollars. I must have sent off for more information, because I also remember reading a pamphlet that said, yes, the square miles are being sold by the Canadian government for ten bucks, but you the buyer have to agree to produce a specific amount of cordwood from that property yearly for a specific amount of years. I definitely remember my mother refusing to lend me ten bucks or cosign, despite the reasoning I carefully laid out: We could drive there every summer! It’ll be a vacation! We’ll chop down some trees for a week or two, then drive back home! I can hitch-hike! I know this guy! But there was no reasoning with her; she was a mule, unshakeable. I carried a grudge for weeks.

Eleven, twelve, or thirteen year-old kids are insane, and that’s important to remember. They have no real concept of odds, or luck, or even numbers. They don’t have a clue.

Kids grow up eventually. Come age sixteen or seventeen or so, most kids have sussed how the world really works. Because they never won a lottery or a raffle, or got invited to a chocolate ice cream eating contest, sanity arrives. It’s only one in a thousand kids, the lucky kid, that doesn’t get that.

So every once in awhile—in fact, once in every thousand whiles—a kid gets lucky to the extent that several unlikely, pleasant events happen to him as he grows up. He wins a thousand dollars by looking underneath his soda cap. His mother agrees to allow him to purchase a square mile of Canadian wilderness. That sort of thing.

That kid will be unbelievably clueless long after his friends have turned into adults. His understanding of reality will be childish (and therefore insane) much longer than normal. Why should it change? “The universe likes me.” Why make it complicated?

I didn’t win any “scratch n win” contests as a kid, if you don’t count the odd free milkshake or two. I mostly scratched n lost. But that’s the experience of the great majority of people, and it’s only the few away out there under the asymptote of the bell curve that didn’t share it.

I don’t envy them. Good fortune fucked them up at an impressionable (if not critical) age. Can a person recover from that?

That’s all I’m saying.