Thursday, September 13, 2012

Sitting On My Porch Part Eighty Four

I am finally feeling like I am back to normal after Isaac. When you have a storm that disrupts things it takes a week or two to get things back in order. Sometimes it takes months or years to get back to normal. Thank goodness I am not in that position this time around but some people are.  Unless something happens and we get more protection I think it’s time for everyone in this part of the world to accept the fact that every hurricane season we can potentially have a city or neighborhood that is devastated by water. We just have to do our best to recover as well as we can and keep going.

On a light note….I learned two things about life during the days when the power was off. The first thing I learned was that as violent as New Orleans can be now it would be even worse if we had to go a month without traffic lights. It wouldn’t be the usual suspects in conflict either.  Four way stop intersections bring the bad side out of people. There would be middle age women in all out brawls on Claiborne Avenue and Martin Luther King Blvd.

The second thing I learned is that I am willing to bet there weren’t a lot of babies born in April before there was air conditioning in South Louisiana. April is nine months after August and if you are in a house with no air in August it is too hot to want to touch anybody. When I was a little kid it seemed like all old people had a mean look on their face. That was leftover misery from sleeping in the heat.

My attempt to live healthier and lose a few pounds is going pretty well. I think I turned the corner when I stopped eating my second dinner plate after 10:00 PM. I don’t know if it is noticeable yet but I can feel it. I have a new incentive to keep going. I have three new Ralph Lauren Polos from Macys in New York. The only problem is that they are a size too small. In the past few years I have donated clothes to charity with the tags still on them because I was never able to lose enough weight to wear them. I like donating things. There are a few shirts and a few pair of pants that I don’t wear that will be donated soon. You must understand that the New Orleans hood kid in me will not allow me to give away those Polos without wearing them. Twenty pounds is going to make them look real nice on me.

I haven’t had much to say about the presidential election yet. I started paying less attention after Herman Cain dropped out of the race. That guy was entertaining. Now things are going like I thought they would between President Obama and Mitt Romney. The president is on cruise control right now. He’s just trying to get through each day without offending anyone or starting any trouble. I’m not sure what Romney is doing. I look at some of the things he’s tried this week dealing with Libya and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s decided he doesn’t want to deal with this mess in America and is making himself fall behind on purpose. If he was I wouldn’t blame him. No one should want the job of president right now.

Maybe the Republicans have figured out that in a lot of states President Obama is the best thing that ever happened to their agenda on the state level and told Mitt to take a dive. The paranoia and hate for the president is so strong in some parts that people will vote against their own interest like the people in Alabama when they voted for that immigration bill and almost killed their farming industry. You have to be really dedicated to the Republican agenda to put your state’s farmers out of business. It’s been a golden time for the conservative agenda on the state level since Obama took office. They should have a secret super pac that runs ads against Romney in swing states. There’s no need to run them in any of these red states like the one I live in. No one is going to change their mind.

Besides the poor and elderly, the people I feel sorry for most of all since President Obama has been in office is all the commandos who went to the mountains and trained for the day Obama came to take their guns and freedom. They could have been at football games and hanging in strip clubs all this time. Instead they have been hiding away fighting wolverines and looking at dudes in camouflage for nothing.

Me and my coworker was at lunch today laughing and reminiscing about old times. I told him that I noticed that the period of life that I seem to speak most fondly about was the time when I didn’t have any responsibility and didn’t grow and expand as a person. When you are younger you have a lot of carefree fun but you can’t do that forever. Then you get older and start trying to create a life for yourself but the weight of trying to move forward can make it seem like the days when you were drinking with your friends at 9:00 AM and hanging out with girls you barely knew was the good old days. That’s not true. It’s the mental and physical fatigue that makes it feel that way. Sometimes when it feels too heavy you need to dig deep and push through it.

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