Lock Your Doors

This is a fairly elementary lesson. Lock your damn doors: your house doors, your bathroom door and most certainly your car doors.

Last night, I bragged that I never lock my car doors. My drivers' side door handle is woefully broken, therefore leaving me to lean in and unlock it from the back drivers' side door. If I lock all of the doors I have to go around to the passenger door, unlock it and lean across the car. My answer: just leave all of the damn doors unlocked. What can I say? I'm lazy.

Unfortunately today I followed normal protocol. Parked in an alley near my office, left the car doors unlocked, and headed into work. Luckily, I remembered my camera was on my front seat, and returned to my car to get it.

Later in the afternoon, a coworker and I left to run some errands. As he was hopping in, he noticed my knee and elbow pads on the ground. Further inspection uncovered my glove compartment and ashtray open. However - the dollar I dropped on the car seat, my skates, the change in my counsole -- all still there.

Unfortunately, I didn't notice it until just now, but they stole my fucking gym bag (yes, the profanity is necessary at this point). In there was - a fairly new dress, yoga pants, newish Mastodon t-shirt, makeup AND my knee brace. I can do without all of them, except the knee brace.

So yeah - learn my lesson, and lock your doors. Some bum is walking around in women's yoga pants, a knee brace and a pretty damn cool Mastodon t-shirt. My Friday trip to physical therapy is going to be more expensive than usual.

Fuck.

Favorite Silver Jews Song

New Orleans (Starlite Walker, Silver Jews)

I'm scared (I swear) of you.
In the tunnel, in the darkness, the darkest walls of blue,
there's beasts and there's men and there's something on this earth that comes back again:
Alpha...delta....gamma... everybody's smoked
You can't say that my soul has died away (x2)
There's trouble in the hall and trouble up the stairs and trouble in the trouble
that's troubling the air.
Please don't say that my soul has died away.

There is a house in New Orleans,
not the one you've heard about. I'm talking about another house.
They spoke of gold in the cellar that a Spanish gentleman had left.
I broke in one hundred years ago with a dagger tucked in my vest.
Legends of gold I've tried to hold in the grey half-lite of the halway at night
one....two... three, four, five
we're trapped inside the song. We're trapped inside the song
where the nights are so long.
There's traps inside us all
and the nights are so tall.
And the night is so tall.
And the knife is so tall.

Christmas day doesn't seem as appropriate a day as New Years day to christen a new blog, but the mood has struck and I have a few minutes of downtime between phases of The Landrieu Christmas Chaos.

Until my adolecent onset of general strife and malaise (that's normal, right? at least for the oldest child??), I LOVED Christmas and everything that came with it. My family was never well-off, but as kids we couldn't have known. Our Christmases were always filled with warm aromas, new pjs, handmade stockings, Christmas outfits and a tree guarding an abundent pile of gifts. My fifth Christmas, however, the big gift could not fit under the tree. A few days before Christmas, my father began building a structure in our small backyard. It was what we belived to be a small shed. Christmas Eve when we went to sleep, it was nothing but oddly shaped frame in the backyard. In the middle of the night, I woke to sudden construction noises in the back yard. Since it was so late, and I was SURE my parents were sleeping one room over in the very dark house, I hid under the covers and willed myself to sleep. Early the next morning, my mother woke Patrick and I with something along the lines of: "Come see what Santa left in the backyard for you two. And the elves left gifts out there, too!"

We bundled up in our little wool coats over our footed pjs and headed outside where an amazing clubhouse, complete with two floors, a rope ladder, a stationary ladder a bucket on a pully AND a fireman's pole. The second story was as tall as the roof of the house and Patrick and I quickly scampered up to find giant Rudman's bags (the gift shop at which my Aunt Susan worked - we were told the elves made a pit stop at Rudman's before heading to our house to build the club house) filled with all kind of kid junk (peel off fingernail polish, play makeup, rhinestone jewlery, chinese yoyos ... toy cars, water games, bubble bath). The pictures from that day are numerous and they show a very young family.

I like to look at those photos and imagine all that is to come - not just the happy, but also the rough spots. Those two kids, wide-eyed, grinning ear to ear - and my parents, about 26/27 at the time ... we've all learned so much, but we've very much remained the same.

Happy Holiday, friends.