I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in,
And stops my mind from wandering,
Where it will go
I'm filling the cracks that ran though the door,
And kept my mind from wandering, Where it will go
And it really doesn't matter if I'm wrong I'm right,
Where I belong I'm right, where I belong
See the people standing there, who disagree and never win,
And wonder why they don't get in my door
I'm painting my room in a colorful way,
And when my mind is wandering
There I will go -- Lennon & McCartney

NEW ORLEANS, 14 January, 2002 - It will not surprise me if you are reading this on Tuesday, the week being what it was. As I type this, my house is suffering an infestation of the J.C. again. It is a moment of supreme irony, in a way. So much about them remains malignant, yes, even the word evil could be applied if not for the fact that they are so pitiable. After all, they know they have chosen a biological as well as a spiritual way of death. It comes out in their moments of weakness, illness or self-loathing when they step into the Confession Booth. Even though I must suspect that even then they are lying, as their lips move.

But that is beside the point this week. The level of drama at Casa de Caca has gone into such high gear in the last ten days that even Matt, who normally prides himself on being "Switzerland" has been forced, at least momentarily, out of his normal lethargy to try to suss out what is actually going on here and how much his own laissez faire existence has been put int jeopardy. When you read this, we shall all know whether an eviction is in the works because Caio has given all of his money to his "recreational" pursuits. Matt learned when the landlord showed up at the door with a five-day notice. That was the tenth.

To weather this latest bit of chaos in my life, while hustling for more work, I have retreated into fiction. Listen:

But it had all begun -- his transformation from the fun-loving, flirty Alex of before ‚- it had begun so innocently.

He had been very attracted to Bliss from the first. She was a knockout and funny and very smart. Bliss was definitely an alpha female; Alex had known that from the start. She was tall, what people called statuesque. And she was aggressive and competitive in everything that she did. Alex had had no idea how competitive.

When they first met and became intimate, she asked him one evening if she was as good (in bed) as his last girlfriend. "What a silly question! Everyone's different," he said, trying to brush off what he felt was a gauche question.

"No, I'm serious! Am I as good as she was?"

"Bliss, I'm crazy about you."

"That's not an answer."

From then on, Bliss was ferocious. It wasn't a sudden change, though. It was gradual. Until one afternoon he found himself lying on the bed gasping for breath, unable to speak for what seemed like ten minutes.

"Good Lord!" he said. "Something's different."

Bliss looked up at him, still flushed herself, but grinning broadly. "What do you mean?" she asked.

"Down there," he responded. "Something's different down there. It's like I was in vice grips or something."

"That's my exercises," she grinned.

"What? You're telling me they have pussy exercises?"

She told him, still grinning like the cat that swallowed the canary, that she had found them in Cosmopolitan magazine. The article said that if you practiced gripping a pencil or some other thin object every day your man would think of you as the legendary snapper and never want anyone else.

Cosmopolitan? Alex had thought then, I didn't know they ran articles like that!

But now that this tidbit had been given him, Alex looked back to how their lovemaking had progressed up until that fateful Saturday afternoon and knew that the auburn-haired person lying next to him had taken her competitive spirit into their bedroom. At first, she was competing against any memory he had of his last paramour. But also, he sensed it, she was competing with him for control of their liaison. He sensed it, with a chill, but hoped that it was not true.

But it was true, he quickly learned. If he had thought Bliss was ferocious before, he soon had another think coming. There was a new person in bed with Alex now, one whom he found more and more confounding. In their love-play, Bliss even came up with different voices from the one he knew so well. She did things that he knew she couldn't have learned from Cosmo. Until he strictly forbade it, she even attempted the adolescent stunt of marking her territory.

Not that he was a prude or that he expected or wanted a virgin. But just as he had felt it gauche for Bliss to have asked about his last girlfriend's performance, he was uncomfortable about the fact that there was no one he could talk to about her boudoir transformation. It simply wasn't done, as far as Alex was concerned. You don't kiss and tell, even if the "kissing" is troublesome and bewildering and you are dying for advice or counsel.

It was true, though, that Bliss was now competing with Alex himself in the bedroom, he realized, in ways he found frightening and culminating with the day, months later, when she laughingly told him, during their lovemaking, that maybe she was "too much woman" for him.

Alex was shocked. This was the first time he had heard a phrase like that outside of a blues song.

He tried not to let on how much this off-handed jibe of hers, spouted in the midst of their passion, troubled him. But it did trouble and frighten him that Bliss thought along these lines...


"Too much woman." Such an odd phrase. It fed Alex's insecurities whenever he thought of it. Was it that she was not satisfied with his performance now? Was she imagining or seeking some new and wilder territory to explore that he could not provide?

He knew it was silly to think such things, but he could not keep himself from doing so. He was vexed and became more and more suspicious. He watched all of her interactions with other men like a hawk, looking for any tell-tale signs of interest, fantasizing about secret signals between them.

He hated himself for this suspicion and jealousy, but he could not shake it. He would lie awake in bed, after another of their voracious, exhausting sessions, unable to keep his eyelids down. He would stare at the ceiling and wonder if he should find exercises of his own, if he should be more imaginative, or if he should simply do nothing, continue as he had and stop feeding these monstrous dark night agonies.

Bliss, as any intimate would, noticed that there was a change in Alex, but try as she might she could get nothing from him. She had no clue why he had become so somber and moody because he would not divulge his torment.


This change in Alex, along with the natural degradation of any relationship, led to his being able to reflect about it all in the past tense. Bliss and Alex, as an item, as a single designation you use for a couple, are no more.

And Alex worries over the damage to his sexuality that he believes his time with Bliss produced. (Bliss has gone on to be a happy wife and mother living in the suburbs. Her husband, Mike, is an orthodontist. They have two boys who both play rugby.) Alex has moved in and out of other relationships, of course. The early ones he readily compared, physically, to his fantastic time with Bliss. She was the best lover he ever had. But by the third woman the memory even of the acrobatics with Bliss began to fray at the edges.

He could remember Bliss's laughter, but not the exact shading of her skin or much of her smell. He still recalled the day he first saw her, standing in the fog on the corner in her beige trenchcoat, worn over the scarlet dress. In sodden romantic moments he told himself that it was fateful that Bliss should first emerge from an earthbound cloud like some figure of legend. That should have tipped him off about her effect, he told himself.

He would remember other small details,too. The nape of her neck as he put a necklace around it. A couple of her evolving hairstyles during their two years together. But so much else was lost as time sucked away the vitality that had been them.

Still, Alex feels in his heart that he is not the same man before Bliss as after her, and that impacts his relationships even now.

Even as an infant, Rod had trouble
with authority figures for being such
a Wild Child.

The magazine's late because I worked another construction job this weekend, glazing windows on the second story of a building. It was for an restaurant called "Aquarians." If you're coming to New Orleans for Super Bowl or Mardi Gras DO NOT EAT THERE. They were supposed to pay me today, but they didn't. There was disagreement between the boy- and girlfriend who own the place and the guy who had recruited me to do the job. It revolved around money they had given him up-front to do the job and then his raising his bid. But I finished my work, they said they weren't going to pay me, I'd have to get my money from the guy. He said that they need to pay for the extra work that needed to be done -- what he had had me do. Whatever. The upshot is that I worked over the weekend for free. That's the New Orleans Way, too. See why I just love this town?

THINGS ON THE ROD-LIST THIS WEEK

Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was also principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS magazine, which appears both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, reaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.

Rod lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, right now. The new home of the magazine. But he plans to return to Serbia next year.

He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.

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