The End of It.

Well that's it, I'm done. With jury duty. I was planning on doing a long post of Saints fever in the jury pool the day after the Super Bowl (which was indeed off the hook) and maybe finishing up with a character study of my last judge, Julius Parker, a pie-faced, built-like-a-fireplug Irish Channel Yat who looks exactly like my conception of James Lee Burke's literary creation Clete Purcel from his Dave Robicheaux detective novels. But I don't have it in me. I'm sick (some kind of flu) and tired. There's a whole bunch of stuff I thought I was handling, but it turns out it's handling me. I've been thrashing about, driven by urges I don't understand and can't control. After Katrina, I was filled with purpose. We did better than most people, no water in the house and nobody drowned (although the landlord's house in front of us burned to the ground in February 2006, necessitating our move here to the 6th ward). Sometimes I wonder though, what a thing like that does to your head. More specifically, my head. It'll mess with your sense of security, that's for sure. The phrase "safe as houses" doesn't mean shit to anybody here. And now and probably for the rest of my life, I can't walk down the streets of any modern city without an acute sense of how illusory the whole thing is,how once the lights are off and the shit hits the fan, things can get all 16th century on your ass real quick. Modernity and civilization are facades, we are all skating on very thin ice and when we break through we fall and fall. Don't think it can't happen to you because it can. Lately some dark thoughts have taken up residence in my head and I'm working real hard to get them out of there. I'm going to stand up and walk away from this mess, just wait and see. Cause this shit is not me. Not at all. Right now I've got a fever of 100.8 and a cough that's keeping me up all night. It feels like my lungs are coming up in chunks. But tomorrow's a new day, and spring is coming.