Gustav: "New Orleans's Shit Sandwiches" Reprise

Last August, 2007, while I was home for the summer before my final year of college, I wrote for the now defunct New Orleans blog "At the Parade" (R.I.P.).
My first entry defined and explored New Orleans's signature "shit sandwiches," a reoccuring phenomenon, or rather, predicament, in which one finds oneself entrenched in the muck, preferring neither here, nor there, stuck between "mold and a wet place," so to speak. Soggy bread, wilted greens above; rotten tomatoes and spoiled meat below. When you're inside the shit sandwich, you can't see outside, where there may be a better alternative; everywhere you look, it's all mush.

And I thought last August was piled high with shit sandwiches, from below sea-level to stormy-ass sky? I think I wrote about being broke and falling off my bike.

Let me tell you about this year.

To begin with, it goes without saying that August is a shit hole. If you don't know what I mean, check out my post about it. However, some Augusts are worse than other Augusts. Sometimes the weather is hotter; the hurricane season more tempestuous; one's personal life, a little rockier. So, I was having a normally shitty August--scorching hot weather, soaring high Entergy bills, poor, poor tips in the service industry, frustration misdirected into self-destructive behavior--when two situations coincided to create a very special shit sandwich for me:

Shit Sandwich: I fled New Orleans the last week of August for Brookline, Massachusetts to visit my boyfriend (that character I called my "friend" a few posts ago, back when my blog-ethos was still strongly founded on the principle of discretion). After all, I have never wanted to be like one of those Julia Allisons or Emily Goulds, who inevitably come to a very sticky end. Fleeing the city for August's deadly last week is usually a good idea, though anxiety-producing, and I wrote about my fears that my city would evacuate while I watched the weather channel, guilty and unmoored up north. Well, Gustav started churning, and I carried on with my vacay, trying to limit my hours in front of the t.v. I was anxious about flying home that Sunday (which turned out to be the day of NOLA's mandatory evacuation) to an empty, stormy city. But my boyfriend solved that problem for me; on Thursday he bought me a plane ticket home early, for Friday morning, to the tune of "I don't love you anymore; goodbye." Now, somebody has to really not like you to send you into the path of (what was then) a potentially-category 5 hurricane.

The rest of that Thursday, Mr. and Mrs. Gourmet Magazine-Subscribing, Non-Profit-Movie-Art-House-Donating, Barack Obama-Voting Liberal New Englander and their son graciously set me up in their guest room, and welcomed me to their kitchen whenever I wanted before sending me away, out of their sight the next morning. What does that translate into? Brookline Hypocritical Liberal Trust-Fund Bullshit. Too bad that's not an acronymn. So, if you didn't put it together, the shit-sandwich consists of the two halves/options: go home to New Orleans into a hellish emergency evacuation situation, or stay up north with some hoity-toity motherfuckers, including a boyfriend who is tired of looking at you.

Now, everybody has his story of "evacuee victimization." But that's because it really does happen! When I was at Oberlin the spring after Katrina, I made the mistake of asking some acquaintances if I could ride to New Orleans with them for Spring Break, as they were bringing a car down of relief-workers/habitat rebuilders. They responded that they wanted to keep the seats available for relief-workers. What I wanted to respond was, "You fucking assholes, I lost my entire house, and you are so clueless that you're going down to my city to help out Katrina victims, but you won't help out one who is looking at you, right now, asking you a simple favor?" but the girl had that spaced-out, inocuous look on her face, seen on many a young, eager activist at my school, and I didn't want to disturb her vision of herself as an important, wordly do-gooder.

My family evacuated from Katrina to D.C. to stay with my brother Chris. In the lobby of his apartment building was a clothes donation pile for Katrina evacuees; yet, my evacuating brother Davy and my sister-in-law Angela were turned away because dogs weren't allowed in the building. It was Jim Tozzi, an acquaintance of Chris and a Washington lobbyist for Big Tobacco, who bought Davy a $500 suit, out of his pocket and the kindness of his heart, so that he could compete in the national Thelonious Monk Competition for guitar (in which he placed 3rd).

I had to grow up a little before I could realize that liberal does not always equal good, conservative not always bad. What you learn is that an asshole is just an asshole, no matter what ideology to which he or she subscribes.