The P is O

It was very weird to sit in my house with all the modern amenities after 10 days without. The power crews got my block up and running last night but forgot to string up the wire from my house to the pole and promised my wife "we'll be back in the morning." She caught up with them down the street, and lo, they came and hooked it back up.

Having no power for 10 days sucked in ways I didn't expect, because the power missing was psychological. These were problems no money, no strength, no connections or influence could remedy, left to be hopefully solved by entities with theoretical plans to which we are not privy. Which is how most people in the world experience life all the time, not just in times of crisis.

I want to sing the praises of my wife who kept her train on the rails during this mess and my daughter who barely let it phase her at all (as demonstrated with her posing next to what my back yard looked like after the tree fell.)

Two small regrets:

• At day 8, the tattoo shop a couple blocks away had a "Fuck Gustav" graffiti mural painted on it and was doing tattoos on generator power. This is precisely why I love this place. I kinda wish I'd gone in and gotten a small Old English capital G on my arm.
• When clearing the brush in the driveway I lost my glasses; they got snagged on a branch as I was throwing debris into the incomprehensible pile lining the front of the yard and I was so sweaty that I didn't even notice they were gone until I was halfway up the driveway. Fortunately I had an old pair with the same prescription in the drawer in the kitchen, though from a style perspective, I went from a little to old to be a record store clerk to possible Civil War reenactor in a matter of seconds.

You wanna trip? I'll break it to ya

On day 9 without power I think. The guy next door had a generator and had been living in his garage with his wife and new baby with just enough juice to power a window unit in there, but he got power yesterday, I guess because the street light is on his corner or something. Anyway, he ran an extension cord over the fence and last night we had a fan, a lamp, TV and DVD player going. We felt positively civilized, and I never thought I would appreciate those old Aqua Teen Hunger Force DVD's as much as I did last night. Things made sense for a minute, and if ATHF is your tether out to logic, you are dangerously adrift.

Since the public schools are all out this week, the daughters of a guy here in the office are running a makeshift daycare in the big conference room, and Maya and her new friends are down there likely forming a new society, crafting hand signals that indicate we slit their throats at dawn. Everything is high tension except for the power lines here. Our neighborhood, Capital Heights, was singled out in a New York Times piece the other day. I wish I could say that I knew the people quoted in the article, but we are more of a wave-on-the-bike-path neighborhood than an up-in-your-business neighborhood. Like, until my neighbor mentioned it right before the storm, I didn't know they'd just had a baby. Tall fences, I guess.

Earnest folks are staging a sit-in at the Entergy office downtown this afternoon

Event: Power to the People
"A sit-in at the Entergy Customer Office to demand our electricity be turned on again!"
What: Protest
Host: Olivia Watkins
Start Time: Today, September 10 at 12:30pm
End Time: Today, September 10 at 7:00pm
Where: Entergy Customer Service Center

I'm tempted to do it just for the AC.

It feels like everyone, including myself, is going just a touch mad in all this heat. The landlady of my co-worker Andrea bought herself a generator and came by Andrea's apartment and took the window unit from her window, citing "Well, you don't even have power so what's the difference?" as her justification. That is what we call fucked-up, and I fear that we all are being slowly acclimated into that kind of fucked-upness. I start seething when I hear friends have power on. Not real seething, but whatever an increment of seething is, I feel that. The heat may be ironically making me a little cold.

Like the other day at Borders, I was charging up my phone reading No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July, a book and author that I don't think I care for, but I feel there is something important going on in it of which I should be aware. The rainbow of plain covers printed in the shades of florescent copier stock, the listless sexual antics of her protagonists, the sheer lack of empathy that coats everything in it, gazing out with the same blank stare the author utilizes in her publicity shots - I was kinda into it. Same with her website - I think I hate it and kinda love it, and that is a hallmark of truly effective art. I was rightly accused by my outsideleft editor for having catholic tastes (he meant the "all-encomapsing" strict definition but I think it's more like the actual Catholics - imperious and long due for a reformation) so when I am strongly on the fence about something, I take notice.

And at the point where I was ready to quit a whole lot of things, some exciting things happened yesterday amid the panic: I was asked to read my Oxford American piece about post-Katrina Baton Rouge and participate in a panel discussion at the Louisiana Book Festival this October, and OA accepted my pitch for the next Southern Music Issue, so out of trauma and night sweats I push my writing endeavors down the road a little further.

So maybe there is a purpose, a continuum. When I walked into the mall the other day, shortly after making the post about the Van Morrison song blaring out of the loudspeakers, Maya and I came upon the carousel on the second floor, bummed that it had not been powered up yet just as The Byrds' "Turn! Turn! Turn!" came on; a perfect summary. I didn't blog it up on the spot because I had a shaky deal that this blog would not become a set of hyperlinked diary pages, but here I am, so here it is. Perhaps no one belongs here more than me right now.

5 Things From The Orange Zone

1. Outlets - My week has been spent in search of outlets and car chargers with adapter plugs and cords and more cords, to charge phones, the computer, PSP, anything to plug into, connection with some system or subsystem that is operational. I believe I can now operate any electrical device, from a defibrillator to a corn dog broiler from the cigarette lighter in my car. It's like I've been in perpetual 2-hour layover mode, in fact, let me plug in my phone right now while I'm thinking about it. OK. Last night I went to get hot wings with a friend of mine and saw that our booth had an outlet next to it and I instinctively pulled the AC adapter out of my cargo shorts and plugged it in. My office is open now and has AC and a computer with a keyboard and I still have a lingering twinge that someone is going to come in and take it all away.
2. Furtive eying of lights - We still don't have power. Our neighborhood is in what is being commonly referred to as an "orange zone" meaning it can take up to 4 weeks to get the power back according to a very vague map Entergy published. I have worked in the customer service sector as an IT person, I know a bloated CYA estimate when I hear one, and know it's an infrastructure -out repair job. I saw lights a block over last night and I'd be lying if I didn't think of at least creeping up to their window and bellowing "I'M COMIN' TO LOOT YOU!" just to hear them scramble inside. But dig this: some white friends-of-friends bought a house behind the bus station in poor, black neighborhood (Baton Rouge's sole gentrificators, I imagine) that is probably a week or two away from getting power, race being only one factor in the delay. By some fluke of wiring, perhaps they are jacked into the bus station grid, they, the one white family in a six-block radius, have lights and rest does not.
   
3. The radio - We have been pretty glued to the local talk station which has consisted of DJ's at the bare thread operational status - I picture them running around naked with warpaint snorting the carpets in cluttered offices with hopes of cocaine residue, toppling the vending machine and engaging in bloodsport over the last bag of Andy Capp's Hot Fries - and it's pretty much an endless line of calls to see when the power is going to come back on in their neighborhood, and "I haven't seen any Entergy trucks on my street and I'm in a white zone" and so on.
   
4. The Republican Party - I'm not sure anyone in Louisiana right now cares remotely about Sarah Palin (I mean, I guess they do, Republicans are team players first) but Gov. Bobby Jindal is poised to be the Rudy Guliani of 2012. He's doing a great job casting the appearance of being on top of things, but one should be reminded that that is what the person in charge is supposed to do. If it is extraordinary that they are doing so, then you have what they call low expectations. Yesterday, though, I saw pasted on stop signs in an affluent neighborhood a bunch of orange stickers that said "NO POWER.... Jindal, this is unacceptable." Evidently someone stockpiling reams of fluorescent sticker paper and running their printer off a generator is no longer a team player when the shit goes down.
5. Getting back to normal - I've been pretty level headed with occasional bouts of panic all week, but emotionally I am a beat dog today. I think its stepping away from it - I had so much leaning up against the wall of Let's-just-get-through - is letting everything tumble off the end of the shelves. Plus I got three separate emails this morning of "so.....where are we on X?" and I'm tempted to say that that a tree fell on X during the storm and your particular need is in the "orange zone" for the time being.
   

[Oxford American] A City Erupts

The New Orleans/Gulf Coast issue of the Oxford American is out now
featuring my piece about the involuntary evolution of Baton Rouge
after Katrina.

I still don't have power after Gustav and am posting from my phone, so
sorry, no excerpts but it's on page 60 of a magazine that deserves
purchasing even witgout my presence in it. The two pieces about Lil
Wayne by Ada Liana Biduic and David Ramsey are really powerful,
really, even if you hate Lil Wayne and see rap as cancer. And the
full story of Dr. Ben Marble, the "Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney" guy,
is truth on the precipice of wild fiction.

I read half of the issue by flashlight trying catch the slightest
breeze while we all half slept on mattresses in the dining room, the
room with the best circulation, and I'm hoping Baton Rouge can keep up
the slow momentum, stay on the right side of the tipping point if I
may get Malcolm Gladwell about it, and not fall into a trap of self
pity and OG Louisiana "well, fuck it then" because CNN left because
there were no starving grandmas on rooftops in New Orleans this time.

I'm proud of my article first because its good and I am a vain writer
who likes seeing his name in his favorite magazine, but also because
I'm proud of my town and my state and even a little proud of our
former exorcist/GOP token governor for keeping our collective shit
together and doing our jobs during THIS hurricane, neither of which
being a Louisiana strong suit.

So go buy the issue. The Oxford American has traditionally had a
Louisiana-esque attitude toward a publishing calendar and this is the
third quarterly to come out on time, so go reward a bunch of us
backwards ass Southerners for keeping it together for most of a year.
Believe me, it doesn't come naturally to us.

http://oxfordamericanmag.com/

I'm in Heaven When You Smile

I mean, generally I am, but right now because I am sitting by the
fountain at the mall charging my phone at a maintenance outlet next to
a loudspeaker blaring the Van Morrison song containing the title of
this post. And because Maya just came running over when The Beatles
"All My Loving" came on and said the singer sounds like
Jason from Home Movies, with the stopped up nose and he totally does.
Heaven and smiling.

No power at home yet but the vague promise of tree trucks and lights
in rhe neighborhood over may yield more smiling.

Some guys are coming to saw up and haul off the Ragnarok in my back
yard, and we are forming plans to get the fuck out of the way should
Ike come in for sloppy seconds, and work starts back up tomorrow and
the bookstore is about to open in a minute and they are playing that
"Open the Door" Paul/Wings song now and its all a littke beautuful.
Not a lot, but a little goes a long way sometimes.

I think its thursday here

in limbo-a timless strech where we shuffle between our frontier house
in midcity and the mall. If only I had piercing skills or could fold
shirts real good, I could find work in this strange new world.

We had a two hour wait for gas and I am very excited at the prospect
of hacksaws at sears and no one has been put out to be eaten by wolves
in the night yet. Schools supposedly open on monday which will be good
for everyones re-routining.

dog + oak tree debris

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