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Archive for May 16th, 2023

Diary #672

Posted in Biography, Diary, tagged , , on May 16, 2023| 1 Comment »

After I bought my property in Oklahoma, Matt and I returned to New Orleans from 2004-2006 to work.  During that time we lived in Mid-City just a block off Bayou St. John, so we often passed by the massive necropolis at the corner of Canal Street and City Park Avenue which locals simply refer to as “The Cemeteries”.  Early in 2006, I noticed that a statuary adjacent to the cemeteries had a “Going Out of Business” sign, and stopped in to inquire; it turned out that the city had used the recent Hurricane Katrina as a pretext to steal the business’ building and land under eminent domain (with only a few weeks’ notice) to build a new 911 call center which could have been located in any of a number of other places, so the owners were trying to sell off as many statues as they could because their storage facility couldn’t hold them all while the owners figured out what they were going to do.  At the time I had just spent several months as the only escort in town, so I had the cash to buy six marble statues at fire-sale prices.  Some of y’all have probably spotted them in various pictures over the years, but for the first time I’m reaching the point where all of them will be displayed properly.  I’ve decided to place this one in honor of Venus Cloacina, the purifier of waters, in the vicinity of the septic tank; that’s north of the house, in the new paddock extension (if you look closely, you can probably just make out one of the new T-posts for the fence extension at upper right).  As you can see I need to clean her up, and I’ve asked Jae to make a rock garden around her, both for decorative purposes and to dissuade the animals from trying to scratch themselves against her and knocking her over.  And soon, you’ll see another of those statues in the atrium.

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