Sergio Leone is alive

and shrimping in Cocodrie.

Mudboat is the new Boatboat!

LUMPCON

It is cold cold cold, although the thermometer would not agree with me on that; the eternal dampness lets the air cut right through you as if you were wearing nothing at all, so 45 feels a hell of a lot colder. Federal Baboon regulations state that when the combined of the air and water temperatures are below 120, a heightened state of alergency is entered, known ominously as "60/60" This means you must open your special secret government happymeal, pull out and don a voluminous orange coat of olympic proportions, and attempt to function as normal. Normal becomes rotating at the waist, and then not rotating at all, it is so exhausting. Should the weather dip down to the fated "50/50" zone, one must open the second secret happymeal, wherein is contained an absolutely ridiculously huge, full body and hood, brilliant orange jumpsuit that looks like it should be for working in the Mars moon-mines. They were all made to fit towering Nigerians, but since their weather is pretty mellow, me and the Korean have to sit on each others shoulders inside one. Of course, once rendered thus warm, you are also rendered absolutely and uselessly caccooned in this monkeybusiness. Needless to say, I wear mine all the time, regardless of the temperature.

I have just been made a captain. They have given me my own boat with a whacking huge engine, so now I can get stuck in the mud all by myself without help. I even have a crew, consisting of a 4'7" korean girl named April, who waves at pelicans and shouts at dolphins. She gave me an apple, in Korean custom, because she felt sorry for me. "Why," I asked? "Because you don't have an apple". We fit right in around here, with the swamp people. Yesterday my giant foolish boat arrived on a trailer, and today I managed to back it into the water. A large crowd gathered and watched as my miniscule mate and I struggled to keep our boat, in which you could very literally smuggle buicks from demolishing all the surrounding craft. One duly impressed local coon ass (this is what they call themselves) exclaimed "you could fit 12, 15 alligators in dat boat, with you and dat little baby chile you got dere..."

The entirety of everything is skewed slightly to the side of normal... I work out of a building called LUMCON (Louisiana Marine Consortium of Nincompoops), which looks like a 1970's set from an underwater space lab show, complete with penile turret and highly official and yet non-functioning appendage/wings jutting out from the center. It is visible from far and wide, and often I navigate back to it from way out in the gulf. Yet it is very hard to get mail here, and if you talk to anyone in the surrounding area, they claim not to know where it is, and ask instead if you live at the Piggly Wiggly. Here, just like in other parts of the world that have not yet discovered credit cards, the Piggly Wiggly is a glum grocery store, and in fact houses frozen chickens and generic cough medicine, not humans. However unlike the rest of the world, this name takes on embarassingly erotic undertones when it is spoken by the locals, often men with no idea how frantically I have to clench to keep from giggling when they say "Ohhhh, you mean dahn by de Peeyaggly Weeyaggly...."

The gulf as an ancient corner of the world's rubik's cube.

Why?

I am up in a tower, exhausted and unable to sleep, and the never-ending salt marsh of Cocodrie takes my face.

Not stay the same

Moments of overwhelming nostalgia often elude any subsequent efforts to connect quality or meaning to them. Like a certain sign on the highway, framed by a dying sun and the cracked rubber of rattling pickup's window seal, or a particularly and locally specific sound heard on the same jukebox 8 years ago, these ghosts bite and then flee. The sign passes, the song ends, but shit, what a taste while it hits.