Just got in from the Avenue, where I saw the second half of Thoth and the first half of Mid-City. I felt absurdly irresponsible when I heard Okeanos rolling at 11:00 this morning and wasn't out there to see them -- since we're living so close to the parade route this year, I feel as if it's my duty to see every single parade -- but my friend Bobby from Athens is in town, and he's coming Uptown this evening to watch Bacchus and Endymion with me and then eat at Chris' restaurant, and I've just got to conserve a little energy. Had I remembered sooner that Thoth was an ibis, though, I'd have been out there for the whole parade.

I was partly good last night. I stayed in and wrote, but what I wrote turned out to be by far the most explicit sex scene I've ever written about Rickey and G-man. I feel ambiguous about this for a couple of reasons. First, readers have been encouraging me -- sometimes not very politely -- to resume writing "erotica," and I don't like seeming as if I'm doing anything to order, so to speak. Second, Rickey and G-man have traditionally been very reticent about having their sex life splashed all over the page for my own titillation or that of readers -- there's a fairly raw scene in "Bayou de la Mère," some in The Value of X,, and, aside from a couple of soft-focus fadeouts in the Liquor novels, that's about it. However, last night's scene (in Waiting For Bobby Hebert) seemed as if it needed to be there, and I don't have a sense of the guys tapping their fingers and scowling at me, so I suppose it will be all right. My standards of "explicitness," though, have changed over the years. The days of eighteen-page sex scenes are long gone.

There has been a pair of Carolina Chickadees at our feeders off and on all day. Hardly an unusual bird for the area, but I've never had any personal visits from them before.