Shifty-Eyed Gustav

Okay, I'm starting to get a little nervous.
I can feel the atmospheric changes getting started.
Temperature's dropped from sweltering to "I need a long-sleeved shirt."
This does not look like it's veering westward.
It's headed right for us, which, for reasons I've stated before,
does not necessarily mean we're in for it.

Me and Otter, I mean.
Here.
In our specific abode.
Surrounded by 200+ year old brick, several feet thick,
here on the second and third storeys, above the carriageway,
with a generator,
propane and charcoal setups for afterstorm cooking,
with two refrigerators worth of food for ourselves +.
With gobs of water and plenty for the kitties.
I'm starting to really worry about everyone else that's still in town for Gustav.
I'm starting to get a little anxious about the aftermath.

Not so worried about the storm, really.

But the aftermath....



...Please don't let there be too many dead people.

Please don't let these beautiful people lose what they have left,
the birthright crafted so perfectly,
so magically,
from their own blood and history.




...please?

Be Safe.

Hurricane Gustav is about 7 hours out from New Orleans. This is what it looks like now.
We took a brief bicycle ride, intending to wind through the Quarter for a few minutes before the winds started gusting. We came around the corner, from Chartres onto Dumaine, looking toward the River, and Lo, the sky hath opened in a deep whale maw! Dark slatey blue, iced with 10 progressively icier.looking layers until the top fastmovers, the fluff before the fissure, moved across space in soft, swift surety. Unstoppable DustBunnies of Doom.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has just issued a dusk to dawn curfew, emphatically reminding anyone considering for a moment looting anything from anywhere that if they are caught with (perceived) covetousness in their eyes, they will be hauled directly to Angola Prison.
Seriously.
Fuckin Angola.
The worst prison in the country.
So, y'know,
you a black man?
Stay the fuck outta the banquettes in the Quarter, darlin,
at least just until these fuckers with the big guns back off.
It's gonna be just as fuckin racist and violent as an episode of COPS.
People gonna end in Angola before they know what happened.

...Betcha theyn't too many white folks get hauled in.
Betcha a dolla.

That soapbox aside (T minus ? until total power loss), the people that are staying, here in the Quarter, folks all kinds of colors and dispositions, are makin eye contact and sayin hello and be safe. It's like we're all kinda takin notes on each other, lookin out for each other. Markin eyes and smiles and generosities. Keepin an eye out for where to pass along a little lagniappe, when the time comes.

I love it here.
I couldn't leave my heart,
now that it's finally found me.

Be safe,
have fun,
relax,
and enjoy the hell out of
Mama's hurricane show,
an event far more grandiose than anything we can imagine.

Under the Gun(s)

Where y'at, darlin?

Yesterday, Otter saw guns changing hands at work, at the oh.so.normal day job.

People got 10 guns at home
+
they wanna make sure their compatriots are protected when the shit goes down
=
"Lemme Loan You a Piece, Podner."

Otter saw or knew of at least 13 fireable weapons changing hands within a matter of hours.
A greyhaired, well educated, shark of a gentleman, who had always impressed Otter as being incredibly levelheaded, offered Otter a .22 pistol.

~Uhm, no, thanks; we'll be alright.
*(cue eyebrow hike) In the Quarter? It's just a little gun; no big deal.
~Nah, man, I got a machete, a 2-foot pipe wrench, and a crazylady at home.
*Too close! Too close! You can't bring a machete to a gunfight! Please take it?
~I don't wantchyer fuckin gun!
...I mean, thanks and everything....~

Then all these kitchen folk started exchanging gunshot scars, talkin "I got shot five times! Once in the leg, three times in the torso, and once in the arm, but I just kept breathin, y'know?" These guys talkin about all the guns they got, how you better be packin if you wanna try and go outside after this weekend.
And maybe they're right.
They'd know better than I would.
Maybe.
However:
instead of buying the (inherentinvisible)propaganda, I've done the research. Gun might protect you when you need it. Way more likely it's gonna hurtchya, though. And, I mean, I used to be a crack shot, used to have deadlyass aim, but I haven't fired a gun in over 10 years, y'know? It'd be pointless for me to have one, unless I were going to use it as a bludgeon. And Otter? Forget it. Ain't no way that mammal needs to be holding an explosive device. No. Way. My territorial aquapod is a menace with a knife, and ninjafuckinfast. Work with whatcha got, baby.
Remember that bad shit sometimes happens to good people, and there maybe ain't a goddamned thing you can do about that. Also remember that the majority of people can still hear their hearts beating in their chests. There are far fewer deadeyes than there are living folks; far more people willing to be kind and helpful than there are people willing to fuckin stab you for your bottle of water.
Of course, there's also an additional 1400 National Guard in town, as well as New Orleans' own overzealous, undereducated, overcorrupted police force, totin automatic weapons in the neighborhood...
It's not the normal people I'm concerned with;
It's these big guns with even bigger egos behind, with godzilla-sized Fear behind that.

Remember, it wasn't, repeat, WAS NOT Hurricane Katrina that fucked over New Orleans last time.
It was the flooding caused by the Army Corps of Engineers.
It was the in.over.their.heads military pointing big fuckin guns at very traumatized, very innocent people.
It was the Federal Government turning its back on the city.
Completely.

Hurricane didn't do more damage than normal.
People of the city didn't go crazy tryin to kill each other so much as tryin to protect each other from the people with the guns, from the results of the Federal Government's laissez-faire policies concerning poor people.

We're gonna be just fine.

Just fine.

Hurricane Hoodoo

New Orleans is gettin busy, y'all.
Holdin its panic in its teeth.
Gustav is on its way, draggin its little sisters and brothers behind.
They've just issued a mandatory evacuation for Lafourche Parish, just downriver from us. St. Charles is up, too. As are Vermilion, Iberia and Saint Mary Parishes. I'm sure Orleans isn't far behind.
The storm's still a ways off, but, y'know, folks are a little paranoid around here.
Justifiably so.
Since we're in a pretty good spot to avoid flooding and the worst of the wind (downtown/riverside of the Vieux Carre), we're planning on staying put. We're gonna go get the generator and the propane setup out of storage for cooking. We're grabbing what we can. We're looking at losing a bunch of stuff that's in storage out in Arabi. Losing our truck if the flooding creeps up past the 400 block of Chartres. All our family, though, seems to be pretty well prepared. As much as we can be.
Otter's brother is an Air Force commander, most closely associated with the Cajun Militia of F-16 pilots, and has already been deployed to a little town just down from Baton Rouge. Ready to go where needed. Knowing how kind and levelheaded Otter's brother is, how empathetic and just, I can only hope he will have a large measure of influence among his troops. People in distress don't need fuckin guns pointed at 'em. Not like last time.
Last night, we weighed and discussed evacuation. Since we're so well located for the moment, we figure we might be pretty well placed to feed people if they need it, to provide extra sleeping room for folks, to do whatever the hell we can to assist those in more dire circumstances than ourselves. We also don't want to risk leaving and then not being able to get back, stuck watching everything unfold on television. Since there's risk involved with both leaving and staying, we'd rather take our chances here and maybe be able to actively participate in ameliorating the aftermath. Lord knows there's never enough people around for that.
We've pretty much got NOAA's hurricane preparedness setup, y'know, set up. Now, I'm listenin to the beautiful Ms. Caux Caux Robicheaux' recommendations for hurricane preventative hoodoo:
Take any water glass,
Fill it with any kind of water,
Place the waterglass in any windowsill,
Place any pair of scissors, open, across the top of the glass.
This cuts the hurricane in half.
Now, as long as the casement windows don't blow violently closed and knock everything off the windowsill, I'll get to see how well this works. I wonder if there are laws of saturation, or some such, concerning hoodoo's efficacy. Like does this work for Caux Caux because she's on a far less populated island? Would it still work if she were the only one among hundreds of thousands, as opposed to just plain ol' thousands? Is it something that works better with a higher ratio of hoodoo workers to people just expecting the storm to come on in and destroy everything?
We're as prepared as we can be.
Now we're just a city full of folks holdin their breath.

Funny how things you've been kinda expecting have such a habit of kinda sneakin up on you.

Gustav's A-Comin

I read this AP article entitled "New Orleans Repeating Deadly Levee Mistakes."

Hey, that's news now? ...Nice of y'all to catch up.

Despite what this article purports, the people of New Orleans have not forgotten the Federal Flood of August 2005. Neither the hurricane that had fallen to a Cat-3 by the time it reached these eroded shores nor the shoddy post-Betsy engineering that caused the worst of the flooding. New Orleans has not forgotten how our hands were tied after Betsy, much as they are now.

There are many in New Orleans who refer not to Hurricane Katrina but to the Federal Flood, and rightfully so. The devastation that gripped New Orleans (not to mention the entire Gulf Coast) in the wake of the 2005 hurricanes was a direct result both of the Army Corps of Engineers' notoriously faulty design and of the avaricious contracts that funneled federal money...where? To whose pockets? Not to needy Gulf Coast folks, that's for sure. Gulf Coast in general, New Orleans in particular, didn't see any government money, any preventative help where we needed it. Not from any U.S. governing body. Certainly not from any of those so-called engineers whose job it is supposed to be to protect this inimitable city.

The Army Corps of Engineers has done more to ensure the absolute destruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast than any other single factor, except maybe their Big Oil Buddies. Between these two plutocratic helpmeets, virtually every scrap of natural storm-protection we possessed has been destroyed. We have lost almost all of our storm-barrier wetlands to oil company interests; we have lost, and continue to lose, the very land beneath us, thanks to the Corps' egotistical attempts to control the Mississippi River's natural ebbs and flows with what amounts to a Geological Straightjacket made of mud and concrete, hillocks and speedbumps.

We also know, from past experience, that our government is truly corrupt, from local to federal levels, and that these same governments are interested only in rewarding their wealthy and/or powerful compatriots with more money and/or power, often in the form of contracts and appointments awarded to the least qualified people for the job.

New Orleans knows what's happening. We know our prospects and odds. We know we're being set up. Again. We know that the rich people, the ruling bodies will be okay, and that the rest of us are just going to have to figure out how to survive. Again. We know that no one in office will listen to us. We know that the Corps is far more invested in salvaging its fragile ego than in being truly effective. And we know that, when it comes down to it, We the People are the ones who will bear the full weight of this staggeringly large burden.

We also know, again from long years' experience, that there's really nothing we can do to lessen these powerful elites' corruption, nor to increase their empathy, increase their devotion to making honorable decisions. We know our hands are tied, just as we know that theirs overflow with ill-gotten gains.

We also know that we are capable of saving ourselves. We gotta be. We would love to be a welcomed part of the USA, but, if the US insists on turning its back on us (indeed, on making things worse for us), then we must become self-sufficient. We must form community bonds amongst ourselves that will get us through the next imminent disaster, ideally without loss of life and with minimal suffering for all our residents. We are doing it now. We have been doing it for some time. You won't see us in the news too much, but we're here. Watchin out for each other. Blessin every other heart around the world that might be watchin out for us. Gustav, that depression baby hurricane, is on its way to meet us.

We'll see y'all on the other side.

*Even though I haven't lived in NOLA nearly long enough to pass myself off as local, I write here in the first person for its strength of perspective, and to remind y'all that these are real real people down here. Really real.

muddy morphology.

Hangin at Schiro's small smoky bar one 8 o'clock evening, makin kissy.eyes at the haggardly dragged.up barkeep, waitin for bright veg curry to accompany my black.bottle voodoo, eavesdropping on the trio next down, who were stuff.fussy peacocked in poly.blend banality: obvious Modern 'Merican Professionals. A ridiculous frilly blouse of anemic salmon, of transparent dacron sashimi, with truly titanic mouth attached somehow above, booming pontificated that,

"As a Degreed Linguist and professor from New York, I declare New Orleans 'Hopeless.' This people's speech is atrocious! Is not even English! Is rife with mismatched modifiers and made-up words; is a rotting melange of slipshod conjunctions and subject.verb deathmatches and wretched, illiterate mispronounciations; it is completely unintelligible, to the point of utter gibberish."

And a number of things raced ears, eyes, nearly mouth in me:

(this:) Hey, I wonder if she can feel the twenty.odd bleary eyes' glaring her stiff spine;

(and:) She sounds kinda uncomfortable, sorta strident.

...Or maybe just pompous, terrified, and out of her depth.

(and, and:) And, really, I'd love to know

how the hell this froofy bitch got a degree in linguistics without

grasping the most basic assumptions and principles of,

y'know,

linguistics?

(and:) That's so funny: she thinks New Orleans is part of the U.S.

Where's she been the last few hundred years?

New Orleans (and southern Louisiana, in general) does have its own languages. Yeah, plural. Languages. In this teeniny little wetland. Its got its own code. Its own Cajun, Napoleonic, Plantation Society French; its Yat; its Louisiana Creole (tongues sticky with rooted Spanish, Native American, West African, and French); its Isleño and Brule Spanish; its urban rich white, poor black and poor white. And more. Oh, more. I cannot think of another place in this country that can boast such a rich tureen of language in which to dip one's linguistic ladle.

A Creole gentleman explained to me, "People come down here and can't understand what we sayin when we talk. Say we don't know English and stuff, you know? We know howta read. We understand how things are sposed to be pronounced. But we got our own waya sayin things, and we don't care what anybody thinks about that. It's our own thing. Nobody in the world talks like folks from New Orleans."

What a beautiful, enviable thing.

Silly bitch got no idea what she's missin.

Baby, Stir That Pot!

Streetcar back to the Quarter from City Park, and I get off a stop too soon,
lured by big brass sounds.
I've been vibrating, craning my ears, for the last two blocks the music's been in earshot.
At Bourbon and Canal, a gathering crowd, and the To Be Continued Brass Band (a sousaphone, 3 trombones, 3 trumpets, 1 tenor sax, two bass toms, and a not-quite-ukelele-small acoustic guitar) makin noise, y'all.
Fuckin noise!
And there are young white girls just outta their day jobs dancin in the street with old black men,
gettin down to the pavement,
leanin in and back and shakin what they got.
I keep waitin for her top and bottom halves to come apart;
didn't think bodies were meant to jive just like that.

Suddenly occurs to me this is what the (puritan-derived) churchies get so upset about.
Like maybe they see this dancin, hear this music, and think,
(1)god didn't mean no body to move like that; it's gotta be the devvil, and
(2)(maybe way back in the backa they heads) if that's what livin really is, if that thing, that alien and unknown and (un)holy, is what god did intend, then i.
then i....

Yeah.
Then you been missin out
and fuckin up
and makin a joke and a travesty outta everything you've been given.
Ain't that a damned shame.

Right behind that sad and tiny epiphany,
I realized that that's what it is with this city,
this place,
this magicallyrealcenter that doesn't have any business existing in stodgy, uptight ol'Merica:

'Merica, specially places like New York and D.C. and other financial/political powercenters, don't seem to ever have much to say about the South that isn't pompous, patronizing:

South is racist
(like the this entire country ain't,
to the grey grey bones),
it's backward,
it's inept,
it's still hanging on solely because their northern brothers stepped in an "saved" em (again again again).
...just like we're all "savin" Iraq.

And then they come down here themselves,
these hegemonic holier-than-thous,
and they see New Orleans.
They see...New Orleans!
Merica's Bottom, baby, and all the Juicy that that implies.
Even if these monocled and moneyed don't make it outside the French Quarter,
they see that this city's a mixup,
that it's an anomaly,
that it's everything everybody ever said the South could not be.
This city that embodies what the powerful been fightin to destroy since the country's inception:
folks workin together across all kinds of manufactured barriers.
This city that just keeps coming back grinnin, sayin,
"That all you got?"

Don't that piss off power like nothin else?
Seriously.
Beat down the disadvantaged and watch em get up again.
Leave em for dead and find em later knockin on the kitchen door,
grinnin,

"That all you got?"

Comin down here and hearin this music?
This joy?
This pain and willful
prosperity in terms much more powerful than money
could ever hope to be?
Like the amber cockroaches that patrol its streets,
this city is undeniable.
It keeps on and keeps on and keeps on keepin on.
New Orleans is everything Pops embodied,
everything he preached,
every grin and growl and grimace and grandiose.
New Orleans' been beat down a thousand times in ways most people can't dream,
and still it's gettin up off the mat,
still ain't layin still.
still grinnin out one side of its head askin,
"That all you got?"

The big guys in D.C. started a false war on terrorism for what happened to a single city block in New York.
Wouldn't it be cool if they started a war on poverty and willfully ignorant, inarguably faulty engineering for what happened to the entire fucking Gulf Coast?
To an entire region of the U.S.,
as opposed to one little block of egregious financial hubris?
Wouldn't that be just?
Or at least pseudofair?
Much as this city's denizens wish the rest of the country would care for em,
would take care of New Orleans the way they did New York,
would see this place as the Heart o'Merica it surely is,
they're not layin down,
not givin up.
They know what they got.
They know what's worth carin for.
What's worth fightin and cryin and lovin for.

New Orleans is evolving, always.
Always reinventin itself along its own peculiar lines.
It is a mystery.
An anomaly.

You still breathin?
Your house and all evidence of your past is gone,
Got dead bodies in your dreams, in what usedt'be your yard, but
you still breathin?
Well, then.

Well well.
.....

New Orleans ain't typical 'Merica, y'all.
New Orleans embodies this country's very sweetest dreams of itself.
New Orleans is better than the rest of the country put together.
Period.
And maybe that's why New Orleans gets shit on and left behind so often:
they remind the rest of us how much we're not livin.
...And lord we are the jealous kind, even if,
especially if
it's our own damned fault.
New Orleans reminds us how, if we'd push aside the thin, weakass broth,
that farce of consumerism marketed as the 'Merican dream,
and get ourselves to the kitchen, where the action is,
we surely could help ourselves to the fine rich thick gumbo that the 'Merican dream maybe started out as.
Hell, New Orleans may well be the only place where the 'Merican dream still lives big and mighty,
always changing,
renewing,
recrudescing.

New Orleans, in all its metaphorical forms, still stirs the soup,
shakin its booty to the music in the kitchen.

payback.

I've been reading up on the Jazz Foundation & their pro bono emergency medical services for musicians, about their provision of elder care in exchange for old jazz artists mentoring young musicians. My heart swells with joy:
finally, FINALLY it looks like people are trying to care for each other, starting to show how much they value what's really important (music+love+food+life).

As I'm reading up on the JF's myriad beautiful services, I'm listening to WWOZ's live broadcast from Satchmo Summerfest, right down the street, and somebody up & starts in with "When It's Sleepytime Down South,"
& my chest is tight
& my limbs go soft
& I cannot believe how much LOVE there is
outside my body,
within my ribs, and I am so grateful.
So goddamned grateful.

This music SAVED me.
Kept razors from my wrists & pills from my mouth & now...
O christ, really? Finally?
Do I get to start repaying this debt?
Do I finally get to really say THANK YOU in some sorta way that's really, truly meaningful?
Do I finally get to love the people who so loved me, whether or not they were aware?

Bless Bless Bless this city.
Bless these musicians.
Bless the Love that makes this & all things possible.

Lo, I am grateful & overwhelmed.