I like how some of the most important people in my life have taken up online diaries. There’s Melusine and now, with not too much prompting, and about an hour’s worth of design and web work, I help set up my darling, inimitable, soul-glue of a friend Winifred, writing under the moniker Quean Fuchsia.

We’ve been shitty correspondents for a while now, and she lives 2000 miles away (as do all people I care about, in one direction or another). So being able to check up on her via her diary will be very convenient.

I’m actually absurdly excited to see where she goes with this. She’s starting at the point at which we all started — a certain excitement about the concept of writing innermost thoughts online, and a vague uneasiness. What we who have been doing it for a while know, she has this to look forward to — that an online journal is a great disciplinary tool without being browbeating about it — that one’s writing voice is afforded ample room to experiment and expand while both having an audience, and yet a lack of fussy critics — and that there is a very real and diverse and (mostly) fabulous community of diarists out there to get to know.

Please go welcome Quean to the Scene, would you? Go visit, and sign her guestbook. Let her know It’s All Okay. Would you do that for me, darling? Would you do that for her? She’s a worthy addition, je vous promis. Thanks. Here’s a cookie.

Yesterday she and I spent a languid morning gabbing away in my bedroom. Somehow we got onto the subject of punk covers of inappropriate songs. (I think it started with “Muskrat Love” which was apparently covered by some Oi! Oi! band.) So we spent about an hour and a half on Napster, downloading creepy, weird, wonderful punk covers of Partridge Family, “I Think I Love You,” the Mary Tyler Moore theme, Leaving on a Jet Plane, Seasons in the Sun, You’re The One That I Want, Walk Like An Egyptian, Build Me Up Buttercup, etc., etc. (Check today’s “DJ, SAVE my life!” § below.)

I burned CD’s of our efforts for her, her friend in San Francisco, our Masturbatory Euphemism party on Sunday, and one for the juke of the Shim Sham Club.

Using, of course, Kallistí’s old revamping of 50’s clipart that she punkified years ago, but which remain just as godamned precious today as the day she showed them to me.

Went out to the Quarter in the afternoon. Strolled the Aquatic Gardens on Elysian Fields. We planned the garden she would have when she moves here. (Oh please, god, devil, Barbara Streisand, or whoever’s running this show, bring me this jewel and let me keep her here!)

We poked at thin layers of ice in the fountains and giggled as it cracked. Ice? In New Orleans? What the fuck? It’s unseasonably and annoying cold down here this season. Poor Melusine, coming from California, really doesn’t have any proper winter clothes, and I thought I could retire my own northeastern garb with Honourable Discharge. Yet I’ve been trundling about town in my oversized, obnoxiously-insulated P-coat feeling like I was back in Pennsylvania or New York.

Anyway. We went strolling down Royal Street, popping into antiquey shops and galleries when we needed to warm up. Dreaming of furniture and photographs and jewelry that we couldn’t possibly own.

“How much for this tanzanite ring?”

“That? Oh, what is, it, Jean? $15 thousand? Yes, $15 thousand.” Pleasant shop-lady grin.

“Hmm. I’ll think about it. Thanks. Buh-bye.”

Met up with Melusine and gang for Marcy Hours at Shim Sham. Cocktails. Pole dancing. Writing on matchbooks. Grabbing people and running into the ladies’ toilets: “Hey! Look! My hair is bright blue!”

“Thank god, Marquis. You looked like a major dork with badly-bleached blonde hair.”

“Duh, I know. It was a necessary stage to get this beautiful, luminous, smurfy hue.”

To bed earlyish. Damnable colds that everyone has. The Quean woke me up at 6ish this morning to say goodbye and hop a cab to the airport. I stood at the diamond-shaped window of Château Bimbeaux for ten minutes after she left, looking out at the cold, frosty street, sending enormous well-wishing vibes after her, sending aimless gratitude to the universe that I know her, and that we can occasionally see each other, and of course, working all the juju I could muster at that hour that she might continue to think about moving here. San Francisco is dead. And she is anything but.

Visit the Marquis’ Crush o’ the Week. Yah, we’re back to him. And why not.

“DJ, SAVE my life!” Wanna feel like a Marquis? Download the music he’s listening to. But do it quickly. This mp3 will be erased at the next diary entry because we’re stealing bandwidth, here. (If you missed one in the past, email me — we’ll work something out.) TODAY: Less Than Jake, à la Partridge Family, “I Think I Love You” (1.8 MB).