Jules & a prayer for New Orleans

Julian Stock, 2003

I'm worried for my buddy Julian Stock down in New Orleans. He's a tough nut, but nobody should have to cope with the kind of shit coming down on New Orleans for the second time in three years. And if I know, Jules, he may opt to stick it out this time. He may choose not to abandon his post which, in its abandonment for Katrina, likely feels now all the more important to stand firm and protect rather than watch helplessly from afar as it molders to ruin.

Jules is an artist, builds Mardi Gras floats for Royal Artists in a warehouse near Napoleon and Magazine. Chaos and Hermes are two parades for which Royal builds floats. I had the honor and pleasure of working alongside Jules in the months leading up to the 2002 Mardi Gras season. Those were a couple of the most brilliantly colorful months of my life (click HERE for fun photos posted back then - hint: flip the coins), and I have missed New Orleans ever since. I had a bad premonition of disaster in NOLA (New Orleans, LA) during the final weeks of my Appalachian Trail thruhike in 2004. It took a year for that premonition to catch up. And when it did, I wanted to be there in some way for the friends I'd made there. But I never got there. Like all the aid we as a nation have promised NOLA since leaving them high & damp in 2005, I never got there.

It's hard to give one easy answer to why I didn't return. I don't really know. Life. Other life got in the way. Publishing and promoting Dead Men Hike No Trails. Getting through another suicide in my close circle of friends. Paddling the Mississippi River in my unrequited Dream Catcher Expedition. Losing a best friend to cancer a year later. Obliterating sensation for much of last year to cope with all the loss. Then came a detox to cope with life again.

Now as Hurricane Gustav looms in the Gulf of Mexico, I wish I were there with Jules.


Watch this New Orleans tribute video posted 3 hours ago.

I wish to hell I'd headed down there right after Katrina or anytime since to lend some kind of aid if only in moral support, and if only to Jules in his campaign to survive and rebuild where many didn't or couldn't. Then I would be there now. We could ride it out together.

If I thought they'd let me in down there, if I could get past the National Guard troops, if I had press credentials, hell yeah I'd go. It's just my kind of gig, just the sort of thing for which I trained at the Gonzo School of Hard Knocks. See chaos? Run headlong into it with Crackberry in one hand, bilge pump in the other.

Instead, I can't even reach Jules. Lost track of him during the past year. I hope he makes it through this in one piece.

My heart goes out to Julian and everyone in NOLA, especially those who made my experience there so singularly unique and memorable. To Jules' brother Chris, who was displaced after Katrina destroyed his home, I send out a big hug and well wishes. I miss you both, sons of Robert. (click HERE for my ode to the Stock brothers & their family back in 2002)

I'll be here, on the water across the bay from your birthplace, Jules, holding vigil via the Internet, following events via YouTube and individual blogs like those on Metblog New Orleans. And, as I was during Mardi Gras six months ago and am most every day I'm online at home, I'll be tuned in to the live web stream on WWOZ.

God Bless you, brother.

- RSM

ps: Duke sends his love, too!

Delays, delays & the death of James

This wonderfully demented Sebastian Kruger rendering of "Naked Lunch" author William Burroughs is/was for sale on eBay today. The going bid at 3 pm PST was $41. My friend Hunter Mann turned me on to it, and I responded to him saying that if my friend James hadn't run off and joined the choir invisible back in May, were he thus still alive this Christmas, I would have out bid anyone to make him a gift of it. Alas, he is gone, and I'm drawing a blank as to who else might like it in my several circles of friends (probably most any of them, the bloody freaks!). And I live on a sailboat. Not much room for a 2x3 foot leering portrait of a dog-icidle queer junkie genius.

Anyway, back to the new book. Although it hardly feels new anymore, interrupted in over two years of random scribbling by not one but TWO serious episodes of post-humous grief over loved ones lost, the death of four other art car friends, a string of tail-chasing publicity events for "Dead Men," the death and long-delayed replacement of two laptops, the purchase and resurrection of two neglected sailboats for the dual purposes of living aboard and moving toward the 36- 40 footer more suitable to open ocean sailing (read: escape out the Gate, or, I think it was Cypress Hill that said, "When the shit goes down, you better be ready."). Oh and moving from the asylum safe surrounds of small town Arizona to the big loud loco San Fran bay area, and just to really throw some terror in the mix: quitting anti-depressents after a decade on the shit. That's about it, I guess.

Yeah. So, back to the new book, which shall as-yet remain unnamed. For those of you who liked "Dead Men," which judging by every review and email I've seen is ALL OF YOU, you're gonna loooooooove this one. Speaking of Burroughs, I'll challenge any of you to find a linear story line in this one. It's working up to be a kind of Naked Lunch On the Road with Fear & Loathing and Civil Disobedience for All.

Make your holiday shopping easy! Buy everyone you love a copy of "Dead Men Hike No Trails," the life-affirming survival memoir that touches everyone and that no one can read just once. Grab 'em now at Booklocker.com!

Or Amazon.com, or Barnesandnoble.com, or Borders.com, you get the picture, although I highlight Booklocker because they're my publisher, a small press outa Maine. And not only is it good to support the little guy, but you double your good kharma by not buying from the big shits, who in all their giant corporate graciousness, pay authors less than a dollar a book.

God Bless America and bring the boys back home. - RSM

I Got's DIY in my DNA

I finally tired of my techno-impotence the other day. I yanked out my 6-month dead Mac laptop, the one on which I edited "Dead Men" (thus dearly hated to part with), and pulled off a massive DIY (do it yourself) coup involving about a hundred micro-screws and snap-plug connectors so small an infants' finger would be hard-pressed to manipulate them. Of all the laptops ever made by Mac, this one, I was told, was the one not even Mac geeks liked to touch, its innards all foil-wrapped and densely packed, a virtual impossibility for the novice.

I'd already paid one such geek $100 to go in and pry into my private files and suck what he could out of a synapticly-mangled hard drive and onto a backup DVD before the thing totally died. Had I waited any longer, I was sure the 20 gig HD, no bigger than 1/4 of a deck of playing cards, would have imploded in upon itself like a white dwarf star, then back out again, blowing up me, my boat, San Francisco Bay and leaving a hole in the western hemisphere large enough to park the moon, as white dwarfs are known to do.

Anyway, said geek wasn't the first to tell me how hard it was to do surgery on a G3 iBook, but he was the first to give me a glimmer of hope that I, Rick McKinney, recipient of the Half Off For Jesus Lifetime Unemployability Grant Award, could possibly perform said surgery MYSELF.

He didn't say it in those terms. What he did say was, "Yeah, the screens on those will sometimes short out, and to go in and find the short you gotta take apart everything to get to this tiny bundle of wires and unwrap the foil and tape, and ugh!" To which I said, "Oh, yeah, I had that problem once. I fixed that." At this point he looked at me like I had three heads and exclaimed, "You did what?"

So I took a crack at it. I dissected more of the computer than necessary (what did I know?) when I thought, "Hmm, I wonder?" and went online and sure enough there was this site iFixit.com that laid it all out for you. With ease, I found hard drive removal directions for my exact model, paged through 1, 2, 3.. over twenty pages of instructions and said, "Hot damn! I did all right!" I was so impressed and grateful for their step-by-step instructions that I ordered the part from them, right then and there, badda-bing badda-bang! And for half the cost of the recovery DVD I'd paid the geek to make me.

That was three days ago. I got the new hard drive in the mail today. I'd like to say I got it reinstalled successfully, but it's still sitting here wrapped in bubble wrap on the galley table of my floating home awaiting my attention. And as it's currently 4:45 a.m. and this vampire's insomnia is giving way to the greater threat of dawn, I'm going to leave you with this thought: it WILL be successfully reinstalled.

And if Sir Bats-in-the-Belfry ducky slippers and a beach bucket on his head (picture above) can do that, JUST IMAGINE what great things you NORMAL PEOPLE are capable of!

- RSM