Jim Varagona

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There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening
with an insurance salesman?

—-Woody Allen

Is it wrong to joke after a death? To me, it is the only way to stay sane. I can only imagine how my mother feels. Yesterday, September 18th, was her 53rd birthday. Fifteen minutes into the day, at 12:15 AM, her father, my granddad, Jim Gifford, died. He was 84 years old and had dealt with several strokes recently. We were told a few days ago that things weren’t good, but the doctors gave him 3 months. So much for that. I think she takes it personally, because they say we can control when we die to an extent. I don’t know what to think.

I just dropped my parents off at the airport for a trip to Italy to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary. They’ve been planning it for years. I hope they have a swell time, because I won’t. I do have a funeral to go to, but it has more to do with the accompanying family drama. My mother was written out of the will along with one out of two uncles. Apparently they didn’t visit enough at the hospital. As people are ill, life goes on, and so do jobs and families. Either Granddaddy didn’t understand that, or his wife (Grandma passed away 15 years ago) helped him to not understand that. And I am left to deal with this psychodramatic bullshit. I don’t blame my parents…they invested a lot into their trip. I still do not comprehend why families like my mother’s feel the need to bicker over petty crap when they are a family. They came from the same blood.

I am going to the visitation and the funeral. I owe it to my Granddad and my mother. That doesn’t mean I am not completely uncomfortable. It’s a shame.

Aside from the crap pertaining to his second marriage, Jim was good to have around. He watched and played more golf than anyone I’ve ever met. He even taught me and my late brother how to drive balls at the range, which I still do to this day on occasion (it is great for aggression). As a child, I fished with him at his lake house and learned a thing or two from that. Thanks Granddad, so long. And Happy Birthday Mom.

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As Mississppi deals with the loss associated with Hurricane Katrina, they lost one of their greats on September 1, 2005. R.L. Burnside, one of the great Mississippi delta blues singers and musicians, passed away after declining health following heart surgery in 1999.

I was first introduced to his music by a friend in 1999. I honestly did not like the blues much at the time, but could appreciate it. Burnside’s music was different though. Just as Johnny Cash‘s music was reinvented and introduced to my generation, Burnside enjoyed a similar resurgence. His blues was remixed for a new generation. He signed to Fat Possum Records in the early 1990s, which was created for aging bluesmen Junior Kimbrough and himself. He recorded A Ass Pocket of Whiskey in 1996 for indie music label Matador Records with The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, who modernized blues themselves by infusing it with flavors of rock and hip hop.

The first season of The Sopranos featured the Burnside tune “It’s Bad You Know,” which also made it onto the HBO series’s first soundtrack. I prefer “Shock Dub,” which made it onto the second Sopranos soundtrack, “Pepper & Eggs.” It is hypnotic, like much of Burnside’s stuff, and it puts a lot of the crap kids listen to today to shame.

In 2004, he released “A Bothered Mind,” which Rolling Stone gave a not-too-shabby three stars. Kid Rock and rapper Lyrics Born help out on the album, but reviewer Tom Moon wishes they didn’t. It is a fine line when you take something as classic and raw as the blues and try to modernize it. For the most part, I think it works with Burnside. If you want the pure blues that he is rooted in, check out “Burnside On Burnside,” a live album from 2001, which showcases just that.

Either way, the man was genius. He is a good introduction to the blues for my generation. As he wished on his album title for 2000’s “Wish I Was In Heaven Sitting Down,” I only hope he’s doing just that. Rest on old man.

Check out R.L. Burnside through these free downloads at Amazon.com.

>I never thought I’d hear of it. Dubya took the blame for something. He admitted fault. Someone in the press should take advantage of this and question him further on Iraq and the WMDs now.

I like the tension between the press corps and the President’s Press Secretary. Finally, the press is showing some testicles in all of this and not accepting whatever the government feeds them. David Gregory of NBC is especially entertaining from what I’ve seen. He fights back with the attitude that most of the crap coming out of Scott McClellan’s mouth is ridiculous. I also caught Gregory anchoring the Today Show for the first time a couple of weeks ago. He was giddy like a school girl, cracking jokes and acting like he was made for that job. I prefer he stay with the White House press corps and stick it to the man though.

And a joke of the weak (sent to me by former World Wide Magazine cameraman, Mike Perez):

Q: What’s George Bush’s position on Roe v. Wade?
A: He really doesn’t care how people get out of New Orleans.

>Over the weekend, I got my boy, Dan, a gig playing music at my sis’s hubby’s birthday party, which was held in Soulard at the Juniper Grill. It was real swell.

Mmm…rum and Diet Coke…hey, I do have diabetes.

I will post pics and maybe a vid soon.

I also hope to get Dan on CD soon, so that the world may hear his mad skills on the guitar…playing originals and covers of Dylan, the Dead, Phish, the Stones, and more.

>Finally, news I like to hear. A day after I blog about him leaving the devastation in New Orleans for Washington, FEMA chief Mike Brown, went ahead and stepped down today…like a good boy…putting himself in the corner. I only hope his replacement has more experience dealing with people, and people in emergency situations especially. Although, maybe it would be cool to have someone like Jack Hanna as director of FEMA. He can deal with all kinds of animals that he brings on Good Morning America and The Late Show with David Letterman, so I guess he could deal with a catastrophe the size of say, Hurricane Katrina. His experience with wild orangutans, reptiles, and birds is close enough to that of a category five hurricane, that I think he would be a fine choice. So Jack Hanna, you have my vote to lead our federal emergency management into the future.

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>Farewell, Mike Brown, head of FEMA. Two days ago, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff relieved you of your duties with the Hurricane Katrina debacle. Good riddance.

Did he pad his resume to get the job, or did the White House simply get it wrong in his bio that he had emergency services oversight through a job as assistant city manager in Edmond,OK? Apparently he was simply an assistant to the city manager, which TIME magazine quoted someone from Edmond’s government saying the position was “more like an intern.”

Apparently he had no emergency management experience before coming to FEMA. Before joining FEMA in 2001 as a general counsel, he was a lawyer, also serving as a commisioner of the International Arabian Horse Association. Did he get this job because he was the college roomie of the former head of FEMA?

And Bush says, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” And that’s why he’s no longer doing that job, correct?

Even if some of this information is not accurate, as Brown has stated, isn’t it a tad disconcerting that the man in charge of emergency management for the country doesn’t have much of an extensive background with the field?!

I could understand if the citizens of this country were horses, then he would be great, but the media knew more about the suffering people down there than this man. Shame on him.

4 years since 9/11, and look at how this country has imroved its emergency management skills. Keep pumping money into the military and cutting funds and programs from these poor people. It seems to be doing wonders. Let those stars and stripes fly high.

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I discovered a disturbing article on the cover of yesterday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Metro section. “Church posts bond for convicted priest” read the headline, which is enough to piss me off, but I read on.

Using ten checks with values ranging from $10000 to $350000, church officials posted bond for the Rev. Thomas Graham on the same afternoon that jurors recommended that Graham spend 20 years in prison for performing oral sex on the boy in the late 1970s, court records show.

The Archdiocese defends the move with excuses of exhausting all appeal opportunities. I really wish I could have a job that supports me after I am convicted of a crime, not even taking in to account the horrible nature of this crime. And he did it on company time.

The Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests criticized the move by the church. That makes perfect sense. The SNAP victim outreach coordinator, Barbara Dorris, pretty much said the money is going straight from the collection plate to defending these nut job priests (pun intended). I don’t know that for sure, but you wonder where all of the defense money comes from and the payoff money to victims. For a job that pays little, these guys have a lot of money to toss around.

Is this why my Catholic grade school didn’t have air conditioning? Was the money that they were even collecting from the grade school children’s small envelopes being put into legal defense funds, just in case the altar boys started coming out of the woodwork???! And the Catholic Church is always asking for money. They got their Bingo, Arts and Crafts Fairs, School Picnics, Homecomings, Flea Markets…you name it. Where does the money go? They should really share that with their congregation. Meanwhile I am going to go rob an old lady. It’s nowhere near molesting a little kid, and I am pretty sure my job will cover my legal fees.

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>I have been watching the Hurrican Katrina coverage as much as possible. It’s a bad addiction, but I don’t have much of a job, so I watch. It is a surreal feeling to see a place that I just saw in perfect shape not too long ago. I haven’t been incredibly emotional about the whole situation, besides the occasional bouts of incredible anger that our government would allow such a thing to get to such a chaotic point.

This morning on the Today show on NBC, though, I saw Harry Connick Jr. go back to his father’s house, which was in a flooded area. Normally, I would think sending a celebrity in to cover a major news story would be silly, but this was different. His emotions were raw and very real. Imagine how it would feel to take a boat through your old neighborhood. Luckily, his father’s home was spared, compared to the devastation we have witnessed from afar on our television sets. As they left the neighborhood, one of the people in the crew spotted a resident who did not look too good. He looked like someone straight out of a third world country, except in our land of freedom and liberty. How messed up is that?!

(the above from the AP and Houston Chronicle is of Connick Jr. as he says a prayer at a body he came upon in New Orleans)

Harry and his crew carried the man back to the boat, where they took him to receive medical care. It was the first time the news of Katrina brought a tear to my eye. Everyone is doing their part I guess. It is a shame that Connick Jr. was at the Convention Center before the head of FEMA, Michael Brown, even realized there were people there.

Something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is…do you, Mr. Brown?

The New Orleans Times Picayune wrote an open letter to President Bush asking for Brown’s head to roll along with the rest of FEMA. I realize that the levees were only built to withstand a category 3 hurricane, and we are dealing with a strong category 4 here, but that gives no excuse for people to suffer for three to five days, living in piss, shit, gas, oil, and amongst the dead scattered around them.

On today’s Oprah, I witnessed the kind of coverage that the news was not even showing. Usually you think of going to the BBC or NPR for that meaty type of information. She went insidethe Superdome after the mayor and the military tried to talk her out of it. She described walking through human waste and the horrible smell that the building emitted. She heard stories of children being raped there in the bathrooms and people having to walk over bodies to use the facilities. I hadn’t heard this on the news.

The police chief told her of two of his officers that commited suicide. One went back to his home and assumed that his family was dead. Abandoning all hope, he took his life. They turned out to be alive. He had seen some horrible crap though, so how do we know how we would react in such a scenario?

Oprah’s resident doctor, Dr. Oz, went to Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans, where a makeshift hospital was treating the suffering. Many people who could not be saved were moved to the morgue to die in peace. This is very fucked up, and it is happening in our own country.

The doctor then walked through the streets, where he found a shooting victim in the middle of a street. He moved chairs around him and put a blanket over the man to keep people from disturbing the body. He found a woman on the side of the freeway dead. She was white and fairly young, it appeared, which is unusual compared to the face people are painting this with. (And why is it that the national news nevers shows people dead in our own country, but they have no problem with showing bodies in overseas countries. Oprah doesn’t mind showing it.) Every type of person in every class was affected. The poor were just more affected, because they didn’t have the resources to be as prepared.

NBC Nightly News did a piece tonight on the residents who refuse to leave. They are in denial over the awesomeness of this event. Even as rescue workers come to save them from this wretched hell that has become of their once beautiful city, they refuse to leave. Don Teague, who reported for NBC, ended the piece with a poignant statement, “Residents here pledge to stay come hell or high water. Tonight, they are living in both.”

It is a time for our country to come together or fail miserably. By the look of the government, it isn’t looking so good. We need to focus on the terror here that Katrina caused, and not that supposed terror overseas (not to say that it does not exist, but I believe this takes priority over an endless war).

To those living in that wasteland down there, I don’t know what it is like to be homeless, but I don’t know what it is like to live in hell either. I do know which I’d rather have though. We can at least make a home out of helpful people around us and being surrounded by some kind of caring environment.

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>Last night, my fiance and I decided to take the dog for a walk. It was just a normal jaunt around the neighborhood…not really. We were about a block and a half from our place, when I looked over at an apartment complex that we were walking adjacent to. The door to a unit was open and right there in plain view was a man, at least in his 60s, standing stark naked in front of his television. I said aloud, “He’s fucking naked!” My lady looked over at him and his almost invisible twig and berries, and we all made eye contact. As we stood amazed, he looked fairly calm. He simply walked away slowly like he intended this all to happen. We stared a bit longer, astonished. It is not everyday that something like this occurs, and while I do not get off looking at naked old men, I had to take in one of the most odd and random occurences to happen to me as of late.

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> It was only 3 months ago that my fiance, Shannon, and I decided last minute to go to New Orleans to celebrate our 4 year anniversary and my graduation from college. It was a great experience, and now considering the events that are transpiring there due to Hurricane Katrina, we will cherish that trip even more.

Instantly I compared New Orleans to my hometown of St. Louis, MO. They have more of a reverence for historical landmarks and buildings there. The blocks are covered in old buildings, especially in the French Quarter. Their river walk is amazing, covered with things to do and things to see, like sculptures and other various works of art, not to mention the Audubon Acquarium.

St. Louis doesn’t have an acquarium or a river walk.

The French Quarter itself contains more to do than the entire downtown area of St. Louis, with its eclectic mixture of restaurants, shops, countless bars, and voodoo related spots (apparently New Orleans is the voodoo capital of the U.S., if not the world). Bourbon Street is only a small part of the quarter, and I found it actually kind of annoying, because all it is is bars and strip clubs, with balconies overhead filled with horny middle aged men hoping that one female will show her breasts to them. Such a sad world we live in.

That however, was one of a few drawbacks of this beautiful place. The streets are inhabited by more homeless people than any other city I have visited. Most keep to themselves, which I appreciate as sad as it sounds. I tend to give money to the ones that don’t beg. I wonder how many of them survived this disaster.

There already was a horrible stench to the area, reeking of trash, which is left curbside for pickup because of no alleys, and of sewage. Add several feet of water to that and god only knows what the smell is like.

They are saying that 80% of New Orleans is flooded now, with at least several feet of water. What we saw only a few months ago may never exist again.

One creepy aspect of the whole situation is the dead. The city has numerous historical cemeteries with people buried above ground in various types of vaults, sometimes very simple, sometimes very elaborate with statues and columns. There has been speculation that the remains from these cemeteries may get lose in the flood water along with the gas and oil that already contaminates it. An AP photo showed a body of someone that died in the storm surge floating in the water. Imagine remains of the already dead mixed with that already disturbing image. Those people were buried above ground because of fears that underground burials would not be secure due to the city being below sea level. It’s ironic that all of that may have been done for nothing if the cemeteries like St. Louis #2 is laid to waste.

New Orleans…I may have only got to know thee in a few short days, but I feel for you and your people.

I only hope the casualties were kept to a minimum, and this great city can recover from this mess.

For photos of the Hurricane’s effects in N.O., go to NOLA.com.

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