The New Orleans Saints are playing in Super Bowl XLIV this Sunday and it’s officially a thing. I knew it was a thing – officially – when my sister, an ornithologist and the world’s foremost expert on the Swainson’s warbler, a small swampy bird that’s notoriously tough to spot, gave me the run down on Pierre Thomas (#23) one morning when I called to talk to my five-year-old niece. And my mom…I can’t even get into that. She raised me atheist – rational humanist for those with delicate sensibilities – and now she asks me why I’m not Catholic like her; it’s the same with football but with Drew Brees (QB) on the votive.
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These past four months or so I’ve been preparing myself for the novel I promised myself I’d write before my 28th birthday [update: not my first, but the long overdue second attempt]. My problem has never been with words, more with plot and accessibility – that’s where the poetry business comes in – so basically I’ve been building a wire mother I think I’ll be able to love simply and directly and for the long haul. This morning I found out what she sounds like (below).

Not surprisingly, this track is from when I was 21 – from a tape I got through an ex-girlfriend from a prep chef who was friends with the singer. I actually had, I think, a live demo version – which got stuck in the car I ended up leaving with my non-wire mom in New Orleans, so she ended up listening to it for a few months with STOP ANIMAL VIVISECTIONS and KILL YOUR T.V. stickers on the bumper. Now the radio’s broken and instead of fixing it she has a transistor radio you have to hang out the window, which is more rock and roll than the song, really.

Anyway, this is the last you’ll hear from me about it. Just felt like a Christmas Miracle to finally get the sound down.

I knew, as it was happening, that a pre-dawn livery cab ride across state lines was bad news. Those drivers aren’t used to 3 AM straight-aways, they go too fast. Then, approaching Newark Int’l Airport, the whole freighted gestalt of a fluorescent Anheuser-Busch billboard behind an honest-to-god smokestack looking like an industrial fire. And finally, in New Orleans, that disconnect:

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Click for AMR Podcast #22
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