bashful, maybe.

So, we're still alive.
New Orleans made it past another hurricane with little else but wind damage and mild flooding. Not so the parishes west of here. Not so the fishing communities, populations whose primary means of transportation is boating the waters in which they dwell.

Now the city is opened,
but our people are scattered all over the place,
many unable to get home.
People in faraway shelters,
shipped out of hurricane's path on school and touring buses,
unaware they can return,
at the mercy of state transportation.
Losin money so far away from their jobs,
hopin they still have jobs when they get home.
Without their own means, they are
waiting for the city to bus em back.
Wonderin why this reopened metro has not yet given them a turn to return.
Wonderin, sometimes, if they're gonna get a real turn.
Ever.
People in Mississippi, Texas, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, Delaware, and on.
We've got a friend staying in Alabama, holed up in a hotel room with 12 other people.
Twelve.
People.
In one hotel room,
for several days.
He's desperate to get the hell outta that situation, but unwilling to come back until he's got electricity for his family's home. Understandably.

People left outta here knowin that, if Hurricane Gustav hit those shoddyass levees, they were gonna lose everything anyway, from food to furniture.
That in mind,
they don't have gennys full of petrol waitin at home;
they don't have emergency food supplies to last until the grocery stores open;
they don't have water stockpiled with which to bathe and hydrate;
and they certainly don't have any goddamned air conditioning to battle the brutally humid, inescapably torrid New Orleans September.

All they've got is a fridge full of noxious stank and, with these weather conditions, likely some sort of insect or vermin outbreak.
Fleas. Roaches. Rats. Y'know:
the regular denizens of the world's waterfronts and subtropic climes.

Fuck. That.

While it was nice to have the town to ourselves for a few days (skatin that longboard down Decatur, dodgin trees and wavin to folks), New Orleans is not itself without its autochthonic denizens. Ain't the same without its heart and breath, without its sacred and profane, its far out ends and its everything but the very middle.

Come home soon, y'all, and stop by my place for a bite to eat if yr hungry.



...Just come home.