It happened

That job came through. It's a temporary assignment working with a government agency in the Gulf Coast.

Even if a picture is worth a thousand words, a thousand pictures could not tell the story of the destruction. You drive along I-10 near New Orleans and see mile after mile of water lines left on buildings. You see a Toyota dealership with a lot full of cars, all of them sitting under a blanket of brown. The water has receded but the mud damage remains.

They'll need an army of bulldozers for much of what remains standing in some places. In others they can just let it rot. No one's coming back. In southwesteren Louisiana Hurricane Rita wiped entire towns off the earth. That's not a metaphor. At least one town in Cameron Parish simply disappeared.

In some, if not all, of the southernmost parishes you have to pass roadblocks to get in. We have FEMA badges which should gain us admission.

That's if we ever work around the roadblocks we deal with inside the messed up wad of mud known as our government.

These freaking bureaucrats are trying to drive me crazy and, so far, they're succeeding. It's amazing that there really is a culture in which people don't have to produce results if they produce enough paperwork. They can spend all day in cubicles and conference rooms and think that they've done "work." They care more about scoring political points than accomplishing any real good. Any benefits to actual victims come as an occasional by-product.

It's almost as sad as the destruction. They both can beat down your spirit until it snaps. I'm not there yet but I'm closer than I want to be and I've been here less than a week.

I take it one day at a time. One $400 day at a time. Otherwise I'd flip.

I Mean It This Time

This has happened to you. You make your grand farewell before a room full of people then have to slink back in because you forgot your coat. Don't you hate that?

That's not the situation here but I did say I was leaving until December yet I'm back already. Actually, I haven't left. And you wonder: "How can we miss you if you won't go away?"

We were supposed to leave this morning around 11 a.m. My contact at the production company had said he would call to confirm anything. By 10:45? Still no call. So I made one to him. They haven't found lodging for us yet, he told me, so our departure has been delayed. Oh, and the photographer who was supposed to go with me bailed out this morning so he's scrambling to find a fill-in.

We agree that if we can't leave by 2 p.m. today, we'll wait until tomorrow. One-thirty rolls around with no word yet. I'm not calling this time. Instead I go out to the garage to do lift some weights. At least I'll do something productive today.

I've just finished my warm-up sets when my phone rings. They have a photographer lined up but he doesn't get there until Sunday. How do I feel about driving up myself so that I can get a head start? I feel completely crappy about that, actually.

First of all, if we're doing stories for television, I'm not going to get much of a head start on telling them if I don't have a photographer with me. Secondly, it's been in the back of my mind that this whole thing is not going to come off and I have zero desire to drive ten or eleven hours at my own expense and THEN learn that the project has fallen apart.

How much am I regretting calling that small liberal arts university where I had become a finalist for a PR job and telling them that I would have to decline because this freelance job came through? (I had warned them of the possibility during the interview process.)

Now I'm agitated and frustrated and, on top of that, my muscles have cooled off. Nothing will go right today.

I do a different warm-up set. The phone rings again. The planned location won't work so they'd like to send me somewhere else. That would entail a flight tomorrow morning but a photographer is already there waiting.

I take off at 5:30 a.m. tomorrow. Allegedly. If you don't hear from until December it could be for the reasons I mentioned before. Or it could be that I'm too embarrassed to come back after making yet another goodbye.

Hiatus?

I got a call today from someone about a temporary job that will take me on the road until December. I leave in the morning.

There's a chance I won't have access to the Internet. There's an even better chance that I won't have time to blog even if I can connect to cyberspace.

If you don't hear from me until December, that's why. If the assignment is anything like I imagine, there should be some tales to tell. I hope you'll stay tuned.

Some Bare All

Look at this stuff I'm posting here. Getting a 9-5 job? Lame! Picture of pandas? Tame! Who wants to read that? More important: Why blog anonymously if there's nothing here that could embarrass me anyway?

So changes are coming. First, I created a blog in my real name (not connected to this one so checking my profile won't reveal it) where I'll put the stuff suitable for family viewing -- my family's viewing, at least -- and things that won't betray anyone's confidence.

Second, a lot of the blogs I like to read are the ones on which people share the most intimate things. They talk about their sex lives. They even post pictures. Naked pictures! That's going to be me. I'm going to talk about my sex life.

As soon as I get one. Until I can bare all my sexual exploits I can bare the rest of me. So here goes.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Ready?
.
.
.
.
.
.
(Patience! I'm nervous, OK?)
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.


Ha! Ha! So maybe I'll have to work my way up to the real risque stuff. By the way, as much as I'd like to think I keep my boyish good looks, that is not a recent picture. It is, however, the most recent picture I have of me naked.

Even if I can't offer truly edgy entertainment, I'm serious about not boring you with the mundane here. I hope that by putting all the stuff safe for my mother to read somewhere else, I will feel more free to write honestly in this space.

Vanilla

Time to face it: Freelance work has grown sparse enough that calling myself a freelancer is too generous. The more accurate term is unemployed.

I'm still pursuing freelance gigs -- I just got hired to do voice-overs for a video project Monday, which will feel odd because I'll be working solely as so-called talent. Normally I write and produce things in which my face or voice appears. Fear not, though. At 200 bucks for an hour's work it's not a painful adjustment.

But with jobs like this now too few and far between, I have resorted to applying for regular, full-time work with 8-5 hours, paid vacation and health insurance. That will also feel strange because in TV news, my profession for most of my adult life, I never worked regular hours and rarely spent holidays with family. Jobs that did not entail working either nights or weekends entailed both. I'm not complaining; as someone once said, that's the way it is.

Yesterday I went back for a second interview for a PR job at a small liberal arts university near me. I'd do some media relations and a lot of writing for university publications. Sounds boring, doesn't it? You're probably right but the mundane sounds strangely attractive right now. TV news had its excitement but most of it was the kind that give you ulcers rather than goosebumps. As I told my would-be-boss in the first interview, "I could use some vanilla in my life right now."

But you don't always get to choose your flavors. I sent back the requested "philosophical values" essay and the writing test today. We'll see.

Lawn Mower Therapy

If you can't afford therapy may I suggest the next best thing: mowing the lawn.

I am not kidding. There may be few activities more mentally freeing than mindlessly walking in step, row after row, to the drone of the mower's motor. If I could write while doing it, this space would have a lot more content. Thoughts come in torrents as I push that little machine around the yard.

For someone who enjoys daydreaming as much as I do, it is a wonderful diversion that accomplishes something at the same time. Unfortunately (for me -- you might be happy about it), I never remember more than vague hints of my ethereal escape and, thus, can't share them here.