Christopher Jones' Insatiable Ego-Sphere

Just after Thanksgiving Dinner my uncle Don unwound a spiel that he has apparently been gathering together recently concerning the only hope for our country lying in some "benevolent dictator" taking control and setting things right for us all. Hmmm. Would I be so worried if my uncle hadn't married the daughter of a Pentecostal preacher and didn't regularly attend services in one of those massive, warehouse-like evangelical church-marts out in the suburbs of Des Moines, Iowa? I mean, we all have our benevolent dictator fantasies, don't we? The return of The Father, absorption into and ceding will and control to The Big Other, and all that...right? I guess it just seems like an extra step to be immersed in a political-religious movement dedicated to the living out of those same fantasies, attempting to transform them into the real, or transform the real into them, rather. Yikes, indeed!

More than three months after being swallowed up into the dark, swirling vortex and cacophonic mayhem that was first the death of my friend Jackie and then the hurricane that sank my city New Orleans I have been coughed up in a New Age bookstore in Fairfield, Iowa. People around me are discussing the pre-rational goddess cultures that they believe once dominated the earth and I am wondering where I am, and where I have been, and how the hell I got here. I know that just last night I got to the part in The Sheltering Sky where the author shows off his temerity by killing his protagonist in a typhoid-induced, fevery, existential hallucination in which he is swallowed into the terrifying void of the darkness behind the sky...I feel that I have just been coughed up from that same darkness. Was I just dying of typhoid in the Sahara desert? I wouldn't know to say...but I do remember something about Nashville, and Memphis and some crazy chick that I met on Friendster, and then something about Baton Rouge, and Amarillo, and Santa Fe, and Phoenix, and San Francisco, and Portland, and going back to New Orleans which I thought wasn't supposed to still be there but somehow still was, and a lot of stinky refrigerators painted with clever graffiti, and houses with bathwater rings, and then Portland again where it was raining, raining, raining and so was definitely not the Sahara desert but whose clever citizenry nonetheless continued to deftly deflect my affections, and then St. Paul, Minnesota and a beautiful river named after La Santa Cruz, and then almost out of nowhere I find myself sitting in Faifield, Iowa in a New Age book store filled with Maharishis chattering away about ancient pre-rational goddess cultures. Water flowing under ground. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Did anything happen while I was away? How do I find my way home from Iowa? Where IS home, anymore?

I and my friends now join the hundreds of thousands of displaced New Orleanians searching for hospice across the country. I said goodbye to Judie Maxwell yesterday in Nashville, Tennessee where she will remain with her aunt and uncle, Jane and Bill Tucker. Our other evacuation companion and friend Shana Walton gave me a lift to Memphis before making her way back into Louisiana to retrieve her fifteen year-old daughter from whom she had been separated by the storm. I have remained in Memphis with my friend Alicia Triche and her friend Allison Wannemaker who has so hospitably provided us with refuge as we prepare to return to Alicia's home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Our intention is to first lend what hand we can to others from New Orleans there, who've had a harder escape from disaster than we have. Eventually however, we shall strike west by car planning to arrive in Portland, Oregon sometime in the next month. En route I hope to check in with fellow Anthropology ABDs Stacey Schwartzkopf and Adrienne Tremblay who have relocated to Stacey's hometown of Phoenix, Arizona. Interesting how so many of us "New Orleanians" have hometowns elsewhere in which to refuge ourselves. There was always a tension in the city between the affluent outsiders with options and the "true" New Orleans people who's sole place of lifelong residence was the city itself. This catastrophe has thrown those divisions into sharp and painful relief. Maybe this is an opportunity for us interlopers to give something back to the city and its native people, after all that we've received from them.

Just read a blog from somebody who rode the storm out down on Poydras Street. Apparently, he's eating grilled cheese sandwiches with his honey and watching the storm from his 11th story apartment. He poo-pooed the damage with the comment that, "Doesn't look any worse than the day after Mardi-Gras!" Meanwhile Judie, Shana and I have returned to Murfreesboro, Tennessee after our serendipitous sojourn to the Smokies.

As everyone knows, Thursday night is Zydeco night at the Rock-n'-Bowl on Carrolton Avenue. So when my friend Judie and I went out to kick up our heels last Thursday night we expected to get busy to the sound of the washboard. We expected to get busy to the sound of the accordion. We expected to get busy to the sound of the drums, the bass, and even to a couple of wild folks hootin' and hollerin'. This was to be expected. What we did not expect was to have our booty-shakin' busyness surreptitiously deep-sixed by a spontaneous effusion of irrational jingoism - and by none other than the usually placid proprietor of one of New Orleans' finest establishments. It came in the middle of the set when said proprietor leapt up on stage with the band. At first we admired his aplomb as he boogied frenetically to the beat, and then we could only applaud as he jumped up and came down into the full splits. When he came back up and grabbed the mic however, unfortunate surprises were to follow... First he thanked the band; No surprise there. Then he told everyone how happy he was that his son-in-law was coming back from Iraq in two weeks time. Also neither surprising nor unfortunate, quite a good thing actually - he has survived the violence and chaos which has ensued following our military's unprovoked invasion of that country. Then he pointed out a family, present, who's son had not made it through his tour-of-duty in Iraq. Also not surprising, but sad, unfortunate, distressing - how many more lives will this miserable war take? This being said, he asked everyone present in the dance hall to give a hand to our troops. This was welcome, as they certainly need all the support they can get given that the government and the politicians aren't giving them jack... What was truly surprising was what came out of his mouth next...although perhaps I am a fool to find it so surprising given the banal excess of its repetition throughout the length and breadth of our society. He explained that we should all be applauding and grateful because if those soldiers weren't over there doing what they were doing then we wouldn't be able to be here doing what we were doing - dancing, drinking, and socializing with our friends. He then raised it up a notch by saying that if those soldiers weren't over there doing what they were doing then women in our country wouldn't be able to enjoy the special privileges that they enjoy here and which no other women across the globe are able to enjoy. He next asked all the women in the room to clap their hands if they were grateful for the right to vote. When Judie didn't clap long and loud enough he pointed to her and called out aggressively, "Hey, you there! Clap! I said clap!" Finally, he began pointing around the room at the other women present also commanding them to clap more. After this he said, "Anybody who isn't clapping - I'm kicking out of this place!" And then for punctuation he proceeded to belt out the entire Star-Spangled Banner. No kidding. And when this patriotic feat was accomplished he made a few perfunctory, closing remarks, stepped off the stage, and sauntered back to the bar to join his buddy with whom he laughed and joked around for the remaineder of the evening - thus allowing the slightly befuddled looking band to continue with their music. At the time we were both so flabbergasted that we just stood staring at this man disbelieving the surreality of what was issuing from his lips. Thinking on it in the days since it has alternately made me furious, frustrated, sad, and terrified. Part of me just wants to let loose with a bellowing, "Fuck you!" Another wants to analyze the situation intellectually - an instance of "ideological quilting points" (following Laclau following Lacan following etc., etc.) being knitted together during the course of everyday interactions - nothing surprising or abnormal there. Another part of me wants to do something, to mobilize, organize and get to work quilting a social fabric that doesn't justify unprovoked armed invasion, the stealing of other people's resources, and the slaughter of other human beings - soldiers and civilians - with vapid lies and shallow platitudes that make the seemingly impossible, given the facts (facts? truth? weren't those important once...), but always quite possible within the realm of ideology and fantasy, leap between quotidian social pleasures - the simple, human things we love and that give us joy, like Zydeco dancing - and the necessity of global domination and empire. And part of me just wants to run away and hide...and to pretend that all of this is not really happening, not in my life, not in the places that I love and to people that I care about...

Another heated and humid day of watching my precious life-force drain away in exchange for a greasy buck. The task at hand: rehabilitating the fragile facade of a friend's home in the residential region of poor blacks, gutter punks, and upwardly mobile gay couples from California - the up-and-coming, gentrific-0-rama Bywater barrio. As soon as my erstwhile companion in the manly arts of construction, Mr. Jason Neville, can pull himself once and for all from peaceful slumber to face another day of brutish labor we shall have our start. Working with a friend for a friend: is my labor thereby being alienated from me? I think not, not fully anyhow. Sure, my life-force is draining away and at the end of the day I am given that greasy buck in exchange. But at the same time I am not left with that same soul-sucked-out-of-my-mortal-coil feeling as when, in that past, I have worked for the anonymous business of scale (British Petroleum for instance - for whom I was once a mail-room delivery boy). A little twitter of personal satisfaction accompanies me home each and every day because I have invested my labor not only in the spectral universe of market interactions but also in the face-to-face fleshworld of friendship and human ties that feel meaningful and relevant to who I am and to the path my life has chosen. I had this same mitigation-of-capitalism feeling when I worked painting houses with the nonviolent Catholic-anarchist collective Jonah House up in Baltimore all these many years ago. Curious. Still, doing any sort of manual labor during the sweltering New Orleans summertime inherently involves much suffering and smiling, "pickin' and grinnin' I believe they used to call it, no matter how much one manages to mitigate the alienation of one's nasty and brutish labor. Cheery-oh!

Wrapped in a woolen blanket long ago brought hither from the frigid highlands of Guatemala, Mr. Christopher Jones spent the afternoon awaiting his immanent perishing. Even the heavy-handed humidity of the fetid swamplands could not avail to chase the chill from his shivering flesh. For hours he lay huddled. Fetus-like in his woolen womb he alternately incubated and then assassinated his quite minute, viral companions. Finally, it was nothing less than a can of cold Coca-Cola, faint echo of the Pachamama's mighty mojo, which broke his fever and left him dripping in sweat, elated. Sinchiq munasqaykuna Pachamama, yusulpayki!!!

One day, Nicole and I journeyed back in time to the age of 14.
While the sun was blaring outside on the broken city streets, far too scorching for the delicate alabaster of our pampered flesh, we jacked ourselves into a thrilling new world of virtual adventure and intrigue.
There we sealed our sincere and heartfelt bond of time-traveling, wanderlustful, snake-infested friendship.
Unfortunately my virus-ridden organism posed a dire threat to the future integrity and harmonious integration and equilibrium of Nicole's fragile and endangered ego-sphere.
This, along with my inexcusable yet all too predictable tardiness, served as a bitter drought of injustice to my new found comrade-in-egocentriccity seeing as how she had selflessly extended her precious and jewell-bedecked (but with no diamonds, mind you) ego-sphere to serve, however ephemerally, as my e-muse.

THE END (indeed).