Boogie avec le Marquis le Marquis’ Intimate Diary

“Guess What!” FRIDAY, 5 JANUARY, 2001, NEW ORLEANS
Guess what I’m doing!

No, you filthy monkey, not that.

I’m expanding my stomach!

Yes I am!

It’s chilly out; it’s time to put on that winter coat. Hey, it works for sea lions.

Gah. This is why I prefer the inhumanly hot and cruel Louisiana summers to these mildly annoying, occasional-freeze NOLA winters. Because when it’s 110°F with 97% humidity, you’re living in a state of shock that prohibits eating, because eating gets blood moving and blood moving causes friction and friction causes heat and there’s already enough of that in the summers, ergo, Marquis stays sexy-slim.

But what to do when it’s freezing out?

Why, you stay home and make large amounts of food, of course. If things don’t warm up soon, I’m going to lose that girlish figure that’s the talk of the town. I’m going to have to cancel that Playgirl photoshoot. My dreams and aspirations of becoming a high-class male prostitute will be dashed to shards.

I blame Melusine, really.

I mean, she’s the one who turns down my offers for food. “Hey ‘Zeen,” (I might say) “I’m going to make a delicious-tasting pot of Zatarain’s long grain wild rice using chicken broth instead of water. What say we split some?”

“Oh, Marquis, I have something else entirely going on. I’m whipping up a quick pâté de foie gras, followed by a very complicated stuffed manicotti recipe that requires split-second reflexes in that crucial over-to-counter stage, followed by a three-tiered somethin’-or-other flambé, the recipe of which was handed down to me from my great-grandmother who in turn got it from her great-grandmother who in turn got it from Mary Queen of Scots herself…”

“Oh. Okay then. I guess I’ll just eat all this delicious-tasting, straight-from-the-box, ready-in-20-minutes-or-your-money-back Zatarain’s delicious-tasting long grain wild rice with chicken broth instead of water all by my lonesome.”

Because, I mean, c’mon, leftovers? Nothing tastes good the second time around.

(I’m gonna let you run with that one all by yourself. Spare me your conclusions.)

But now that I think about it, maybe she turns down my delicious-tasting, fresh-from-the-box, home-cooked meals because she knows that I put enough hot spices into everything that would rival the dishes of a Pakistani with tongue cancer.

Hey! Guess what I did today!

(Besides that, you depraved orphan-boy.)

I learned something! That silver is a very good conductor of heat!

Our dining implements in the Château Bimbeaux consist primarily of old family silver — beautiful, shiny, Victorian filigree designs winding about the family initial. C’est très, très. It brings a touch of class to eating a bowl of delicious-tasting Zatarain’s long grain wild rice fresh from the box (using chicken broth instead of water, of course).

But here’s a Helpful Household Hint. If you put a silver spoon into a bowl of hot rice, carry it upstairs for thirty seconds, then grab the spoon and lift, you will have a reverse family initial burned into the webbing between index and thumb.

Neat, huh!

Learning sure can be fun!

Hey! Guess what I did today!

Well, no, I mean after that. (blush, blush)

I turned down a job!

Tee hee! What a clever boy am I!

What a broke, sad, impoverished, sad, destitute, sad, sad, sad, clever little boy am I.

So there’s this professor at Tulane who needs help with a web page that is instrumental in conducting research for his dissertation, and he contacted my agency and my recruiter sent me out to him, and I went up to his attic, wading through children’s toys and such, looking at the children hiding behind the furniture, pointing to the tall man with blueberry-hued hair, and talked to the professor for a while about what he wanted, then came to this conclusion:

“Hey! Guess what! I am so not the person you want for this job! (big grin). I’m the sensitive artist type n’ all. I design. I put the ‘lust’ in ‘fabulous.’ I take the ‘dull’ out of ‘delicious.’ I’m West Hollywood. I’m East Village. I’m fuckin’ SoHo ovah heeah, New York, and London. I’m above Magazine and below St. Charles. I am the ‘it’ in ‘glitter.’ What you need is someone half as fabulous as I, but twice as nerdy. Cos when it comes to database creation and manipulation on the fly using user input, forms, uploaded jpegs that need to be resized and cropped automatically and a whole mess o’ other stuff about which I haven’t a clue — well just watch me do the six-minute-mile in the opposite direction. Mea culpa, my friend. Best of luck to ye.”

(I paraphrase.)

So there go a few hundred bucks which I not only could have used, but that I really could have used, too!

So clever!

Hey! Guess what I’m doing tonight!

I can’t tell you. Because it’s dirty. It’s my dirty little secret. Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

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: One of my favourite old-Cure B-sides, “Harold & Joe” (4.6 MB).