December 11, 1999
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

This whole place is just emblazoned in my memory the way New York never will be. In New York when a Gap goes out of business it is wiped clean from the slate by the end of the week and replaced by a Starbucks. Around here (and in most places, I would guess) they leave the gutted out buildings in place for a generation before tearing them down.

This year the only new establishment to speak of around the French Quarter is Harrah's Casino on Canal Street. Somehow I was unaware that Louisiana had legalized gambling. For some reason I thought casinos were limited to state lines, Indian reservations, and generally isolated or off-shore areas.

I walked into Harrah's and felt immediate disgust with the buzzers and bells and the apathetic faces gaping into the slot machines. Not enough disgust, however, to prevent me from joining in. I made $42 that night playing just the quarter slots.

A female Harrah's employee wearing bunny ears and whose nearly-bare ass was in my face seconds before offered me a free drink but I refused; I was feeding my head just fine with a bucket of quarters.

The local news is saying that this new Harrah's (which has only been open for a month) is doing very poorly and might close within a few months.

I made about $75 in Las Vegas a few years ago.

Today I wandered all over the French Quarter, over to Louis Armstrong Park, back to Decatur Street by the river and around Jackson Square. It's touristy but so what. I should have rented a car. Maybe next year.

Speaking of next year (if anyone is reading this), remind me to stay at a different hotel in 2000. This hotel is a well-known place, but upon arrival the phone and lamp were unplugged, there was a cigarette in the toilet (it's supposed to be a no-smoking room), and the radio was on. And yesterday someone changed the station on that radio while I was out. I feel like I'm staying at the break room for the hotel staff.

On the plane down here I filled several dozen pages in what is presently my last "blank book." Since high school I have always comforted myself with the thought that I have an abundant supply of blank books to fill with thoughts and drawings and other horse shit until kingdom come. One of those books goes back to the 4th grade, and I know that somewhere in this world exists a piece of paper with something I wrote to myself in the 1st or 2nd grade.

It is tempting to start a new blank book like a novel, and to end each one in the same way.

The same notion applies to individual pages. When the page is nearly done, it is time to finish your sentence, your paragraph, your arbitrarily demarcated chapter or verse. This is where writing by hand and writing into a word processor differ. When writing into a computer there are no limits. No page breaks, no torn sheets, nothing material to subconsciously curtail what you are saying. And if you can type quickly then you can expel more thoughts per second than while writing by hand. I don't know if this is a good thing, but I doubt it. Most thoughts never make it onto the page because they have no business cluttering the head of anyone but the author.

This last blank book was not originally mine. I bought it at a flea market. It contains drawings and receipts formerly owned by a trucker who evidently carried the book with him through California and the western U.S. But most of the book is still blank, and the pages are vast.

I have already begun shopping for a new supply of blank books. They must be unlined, contain hundreds of pages each, the pages should be big, and I should pay for them with some of the money I brought with me from Tampa in October, 1990.

I agree with Franz Schubert, who (I am told) said that nothing is more inspiring than a blank page.

For long periods of time between 1995 and the present I wrote mostly for the stage. I call this "The Stage." This website, other websites, other places. Writing for the stage is as different from writing for yourself as typing into a word processor is different from writing by hand onto paper. This is true in ways I can not explain because no one but I ever laid eyes on my blank book ramblings, and no one ever will. Those books are for me. That is how these websites started out. But like most things I touch it all became very public information, and then came the demands.

It is dead quiet in here. Just me, the air conditioner, and I'm about to open another can of Guinness.