yIKEs

Oh come on, NOT AGAIN!!!

But listen, seriously: EVACUATE. I know you did last week, and you're broke, and you're pissed, but when you were a little kid, did you ever hear the story about the Boy Who Cried Wolf?

Every year, we play a little game, where the people who evacuate are grumpy as fuck and regretful, and those who stay strut around bragging about how hard-core they are. Well, one day, you're going to get fucked in the ass, and you're not going to feel cool. You understand?

P.S. Y'all heard of this mediocre-ass band Beulah? I'm listening right now cuz I'm exhausted, home on Saturday night, and I needed something mindless...until I hear the goddamn line, "I'm missing you like hurricanes/I give them names but their waves keep rolling/On and On and On..."

Not exactly my sentiment.

Post-Gustav, Making Groceries at Rouses

So, I don't really want to discuss my evacucation--that is, after I got sent home by boyfriend (see my last post). I got in the car with Davy the brother, Angela the sister-in-law, Linda the dog, and Vadeem the piano player and drove to Atlanta. Suffice it to say that we were crammed in an airport-side hotel teeming with Gustav evacuees, who if you tried to bond with them, aka "So you're evacuating too?" would look at you blankly, and say, "You waiting for drugs?"

Now that I'm back home, I feel a lot better, naturally. I have power in my house, and today I went to the store!!! Now I talk a lot of shit about Rouses but I keep shopping there, and I don't think it's just because it's convenient. I think I'm starting to like Rouses; it's still a shit hole, but I believe it's acquiring some of that "charm" that I before had so adamantly declared was missing.

Today, Rouses was packed! We played bumper-carts with each other, but amicably. Lots of "excuse mes," and "I'm sorry, ba-bys," because we all knew we were in this shit-show together. But all the employees were fighting with each other: "Stupid Produce, it's all stupid Produce, what a dysfunctional operation." Help me out, here--when that employee refers to the employees in charge of the produce department as "Produce," is that an example of metonymy or synecdoche?

The cashier checking out at aisle 4 had the name "Chasity" written in Sharpee on a piece of white tape stuck on her shirt. Bored in line, I figured that her parents thought the name "Chastity" was really pretty, but knew if they named their daughter that, she would grow up to be a whore. So they opted for "Chasity" instead, that had the same ring to it, but not the same implications. Similar signifier, different signified. Why did I go to college, seriously.

Ok, but more importantly, Chasity was training! They hadn't even given her a real name-tag yet! That's some bullshit, why train an employee at a time like this? I wanted to talk shit about Chasity, and then noticed that the woman ahead of me was Latina. "No es el dia para entrenar una obrera nueva, sabes?" I asked her. I don't know if that's right or not, but she laughed and said, "Si, con este movimiento..." or something like that. It was fun. When Chasity began checking me out, I was tempted to say some consoling words like "Rough time to have to train, huh?" but was afraid my tone would come off as insincere.

Well, I got my groceries, and for any non-natives who are interested, I'm about to make some cheese grits and collard greens. Oh my God, it's kind of like a Gumbo Party, just like on K-Ville!!!

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.

Sandbags?/C. Ray for President

And the latest technology from the Corps of Engineers is...sandbags. Ill-designed levees, malfunctioning pumps, but heavy, blow-blocking high-quality sandbags. If the levees breach, the Engineers, hovering overhead in helicopters, will drop sandbags, silencing the thrashing, soil-busting storm surge.
Sandbags. I had planned to go to town on this word, punning like crazy, e.g. "The Corps of Engineers really sandbagged us" etc., but I'm really low on momentum.
Quite appropriately, the dictionary.com word of the day is "gubernatorial."

But hey, I am finding motivation in the words of our mayor, C. Ray Nagin. C. Ray is my boy. Calm, collected, loose-jowled and Deputy-Dog-moustached: "You need to be scared and you need to get your butts out of New Orleans right now."

And: "Looting will not be tolerated. Anyone caught looting in New Orleans will go directly to the Big House in the general population. You will go directly to Angola Prison, and God Bless You if you go there."

YEAH, GANGSTA.

Now, I'm pro-Obama and all, but C. Ray, he charms me, he makes me smile. He doesn't bother with any of that "we need a change" rhetoric, and he has his own slow, regionally-attuned way of talking--which usually gets him in trouble. But this time, C. Ray is prepared. Those who normally criticize his free-wheeling, strutting, drawling style, won't be able to say he didn't evacuate the city as professionally as anybody could have.

I'd rather listen to C. Ray any day, over the Weather Channel forecasters who project like sportscasters--seriously, just get a job at ESPN, or direct some of that on-your-toes energy towards a pick-up game of football in your backyard, 'cuz with Gustav there won't be any intercepting, no chasing down winds and last minute save-the-day sacking before he reaches the end-zone; and over the CNN goons with their seriously expert skills at paraphrase and their facebook updates. C. Ray doesn't affect, scramble, or sweat. He just tells it like it is.

Gustav, WTF

Anonymous posted a comment on yesterday's post:

"I think now's the time for blogging on hurricane futures. Where would you go if NOLA flooded again? Would you ever come back? What are you thinking this week as Gustav approaches? How will you prepare? If you could loot one store what would it be?"

Right now, I'm in Boston on vacation, and as my flight back to Nola is scheduled for Sunday morning, I think I'm going to have to work out alternate plans with the airlines. Or else, kick it around here, breathing in the cool, weightless air, marveling at the sightings of slim cops on bicycles--huh?--watching Vicky Christina Barcelona every night using my friend's parents' membership passes to the local non-profit art house in walking distance--what? Maybe I'll fly out to LA, where my brother and my friends from college live; or catch up with my Dad in a hotel room in Houston; or to Phoenix with my mom.

I would never loot a store, ever, I can't even entertain the question. I'm nervous as hell and guilty, because I seem to always avoid the hellish evacuations everybody else has to endure--during Katrina, I was already up at college, beginning a drunken, irresponsible sophomore year, completely clueless as to what the fuck was going on with my city, and when I would see it or my family again.

Well, I'm bout to go by the non-profit movie house, keep up the pretenses of my vacay, although all I want to do is take pain-killers and numb myself with the weather channel's latest updates. Nobody up here will quite understand my obsessiveness, anyway...but stay tuned, because i will be using blogging as an excuse to dwell...