Streetcars!!!

Not quite to our house yet, but running from Napoleon to downtown. :-)

"I don't remember how I felt
I never thought I'd live
To read about myself in my hometown paper
How my brave young life was forever changed
In a misty cloud of pink vapor
Darling, give me your kiss
Only understand
I am the nothing man
Around here, everybody acts the same
Around here, we all act like nothing's changed
Friday night the club meets at Al's Barbecue
The sky is still the same unbelievable blue
You can call me Joe
Buy me a drink and shake my hand
You want courage?
I'll show you courage you can understand"

I am not the same person I was two years ago. Would you be?

The Apocalypse Has Already Happened. We Know. We Were There

Or, the post-Katrina update on what's happening in our fair city.

Lord. Where to start. The first thing you should know about post-Katrina New Orleans is that, while things are vastly better than they were when I moved back a little over a year ago, they aren't as good as the rest of the country assumes they are.

No real, centralized plan has emerged, and now, a year and a half later, it seems unlikely that one will. I think the window for that has passed. People who wanted to come back did, and they're dealing with their shit themselves. There will be no vast restructuring or replanning of the city, which is too bad, because it seems like an opportunity missed. It seems like there could have been a new, exciting initiative, and then the enthusiasm petered out and the moment passed and people were left doing the same thing they were doing all along, which was doing it for themselves. The sad thing is, the demographic most affected by Katrina was the low-income and elderly. I guess they're left to fend for themselves, too. This might explain why so many people elected to just leave it all behind. Can you imagine starting over at the age of eighty, after perhaps saving for sixty years so you could finally pay off your house? And then your insurance company makes up some B.S. excuse to not pay out, and you can't afford to hire an attorney, so you get... nothing. Which is what's left of eighty years of your life. Nothing.

But someone, at some point, is going to realize we can't have blocks upon blocks of blighted, abandoned properties. Maybe then a plan will spring up. Or maybe we'll just be living amongst miles of urban blight for the next twenty years. It's not a very optimistic view, but I haven't seen anything out of the leadership that gives a person reason to hope. For one thing, the federal money? Those billions of dollars? Where the hell is it? Actual people aren't getting that money. From what I've read about the Road Home grant process, it's a joke. You fill out all this crap, only to have a computer spit out a piece of paper informing you that you can have 100 bucks. Whoo. Like that's going to rebuild a house.

Is the city hoarding the money then? Well, judging from the fact that there are car-sized potholes that the city can't afford to fill in and streetlights that have been dead for a year and a half, I'm going to have to conclude that they haven't seen any of that money either. The city can't afford to repair any of their facilities, hire enough police officers, or keep order during a rampant crime wave. Oh, and the pumps. No one seems to care that over half of the pump system is still offline, in a city that lies below sea level. Last month it rained for 24 hours and there was knee-deep water in the streets. Because this has devolved into a pretty negative rant on the State of New Orleans, I will throw out there that the new trash company is awesome. It was the cleanest Mardi Gras I've seen, and they are actually taking our trash consistently on a weekly basis. (For those of you in other cities, this concept is probably like, "So? Of course the trash gets picked up." But things like the trash getting picked up do not happen here post-Katrina. Just a small illustration of the crap that people have learned to put up with here.)

The second thing to be aware of is that we aren't talking about localized destruction here. You can drive through blocks upon blocks of... nothing. I don't mean after the storm you could. I mean today, right now, you could hop in the car and do so. Some of the houses still have the furniture sitting inside, covered in a layer of caked mud and dust. Katrina prompted a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of people, which has not happened in the United States to that large a scale since the Civil War. I can understand why people are angry at the fraud that happened during Katrina... but you have to realize that was FEMA (I think we've all seen exactly how efficient that organization turned out to be), not us. It seems like all the media coverage is negative, and it frustrates me that people read these news stories about a few bad eggs among HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people and say, "Well, don't send any more of my tax dollars to help 'those people.'"

Let me tell you what it was like, because I am not sure people understand what really went down. We had a car and were able to drive out on the last day. We didn't leave until they announced it was a Category 5, so we had very little time to pack our stuff. We were grad students, so we didn't have money saved. It's not hard to imagine that others didn't, either. Now picture being in a hotel (we weren't in a hotel, but many people were), and then the news filtering in that you won't be able to go back into the city-- as in, there are armed military people at checkpoints keeping you out-- for one month. How do you pay? What do you do? If FEMA hadn't acted fast and direct deposited that first $2,000, I certainly wouldn't have been able to make it. And I didn't have a carload of kids, pets, elderly parents, or other dependents relying on me. So the negativity of the coverage grates on me. Yes, money was wasted. But it is a fraction of the amount of money wasted in Iraq. (I would dig up the statistic, but I can't be bothered. So just think about it.) And if I was the leadership of the U.S., I would be embarrassed to have other countries look at us and think in their heads that we're quick to push the ideals of democracy on others, yet we don't seem to care about people within our own borders. New Orleans was left out of the State of the Union address for two years running. That certainly tells me where George W. Bush's priorities are.

To the right is the Ninth Ward, taken from the bridge. You can see here the new levee wall built by the Army Corps of Engineers (click and enlarge). Note that this "new" levee does not actually provide protection beyond the level of the old levee. This means it's just as inadequate, should the same storm hit again. We have all these promises of Category 5 protection, but is anyone making sure it's delivered? We don't get a sense of who's on that. Is anyone on that? Shouldn't they be? The picture to the right was taken in late November. See the field to the right of the levee? That wasn't a field in the summer of 2005. It was a neighborhood, rows of houses. You can drive through and see the paved driveways leading to nothing. In New Orleans, they call it the Federal Flood. Which brings me to the third thing I'm not sure people know-- this field of brown grass where houses used to be, it wasn't caused by an unstoppable force of nature. It was caused by human error. Really, do people know that? Because you read all these editorials where people are like, "See? It snowed/tornadoed/stormed/flooded here and we aren't demanding money!" Yes, Katrina would have caused billions of dollars in wind damage on its own. But the catastrophic flooding that caused the majority of the 1,500 casualties? It was the shoddy construction of the levee built by the Army Corps of Engineers. Of course they aren't liable, because you can't sue the federal government. So really, when people here demand help from the federal government, we aren't being greedy. We just want them to clean up their mess. Because it is their mess.

So, to refresh: This city does not trust the federal government. People don't seem to trust governor Kathleen Blanco either, though most of the ire is directed toward George Bush and Ray Nagin. When someone says they saw Nagin, the mayor, out somewhere, 9 out of 10 times someone will bust out with, "You did? Wait, you saw him? Where?" This is because he's frustrated people with his tendency to lay low and go silent for months on end. It pisses people off, as does the fact that he bought a house in Dallas after the storm. I remain baffled as to who, exactly, re-elected him, because no one seems to want him around. Crime is way up in the city, and population is down. Maybe if there weren't so many abandoned, deserted houses, there wouldn't be such rampant crime. But again, no one has a plan for that land. We're sort of in limbo here. Still, every day a new store opens. Every day a dumpster appears on the street, and a house is gutted, the contents of someone's old life tossed in the bin for the world to see. Every day a house gets torn down, a basement gets sheetrocked. The Hispanic population is booming, and there are taco trucks parked on the corners selling lunch to the workers. Stores are actually open 24 hours again, because there are enough people to work in them. So it goes.

I have opinions on what's going on in the city, but I'm not as up on current events as many New Orleans bloggers. Really, you want to go read Wet Bank Guide for that, because he does a far better job than me. I'm sorry that this turned into more of a rant than an update. The whole Katrina thing tends to bring that out in me. Now I'm off to take a shower and go for Thai. Because the fact that there is Thai food means the city is probably going to make it. Oh! And I nearly forgot my plug: in spite of the eight paragraphs of rant appearing above, I should mention that the French Quarter is fine, as is the Garden District. So basically, everything you would want to see as a tourist is still there, except the streetcars, so you'll probably want to stay downtown rather than on St. Charles. None of the tourist areas were flooded, and the other damage is mostly repaired. If you come today, you will see the same architecturally and culturally unique city you saw before the storm. The city is up and running for tourism, so please tell everyone you know. The city desparately needs the tourist dollars (I know, I know, as a waitress they wouldn't do me any harm either).

Tags: new orleans, katrina, post-katrina, recovery

Dark Days

I don't know if others are in the habit of Googling friends and acquaintances to see what they're up to, but it's something I do when the mood strikes me. In this particular case, it ended badly. This morning, I was looking up some of my co-workers from my old pre-K office, and upon looking up one friend and co-worker, my browser's wheels spun for a moment and then spit her name out in the "is survived by's" of an obituary. "Oh no," I thought. Her boyfriend was killed this summer in an accident. It happened in New Orleans, and I even remember seeing it in the paper and on TV, but I didn't put two and two together. I had met him a bunch of times the summer before Katrina, but I don't recall if I ever knew his last name. Probably if I read the actual paper (the one that's made of paper) instead of nola.com, I would have recognized him in a picture. But I don't.

She had e-mailed me this summer, just to say hi. She moved after Katrina, and got another job. Said she and the on-again-off-again boyfriend realized they were meant to be together after all, and she was expecting a ring. The accident was a week later. I know I should say something, but it feels horribly, horribly belated. And I am all existentially freaked out, because... it's just mind-numbing, how awful it is.

I drove home from work, the rain pelting down on my windshield. The light at Jefferson and Freret, functional for months, was back to blinking red and yellow today. I sighed as everyone lined up in the wet gray afternoon light for the usual four way stop we all have memorized by now.

If I were her, I would never come to New Orleans again. Everything here dies.

Tags: new orleans, post-katrina

Can I Get A Public Service Up In Here?

So Mike went to NYC this week for a conference. And I ordered some stuff from Amazon and some Netflix to keep myself occupied. Fast forward to today. I am going to the airport to pick Mike up at 4:30... and the mail has come ONCE. Naturally, with none of my stuff. I don't think it's on Amazon's end. According to the package tracker thing, my books should be here. So where is the USPS? Between Mike and myself, we get at least three pieces of mail per day. I am putting this information out there, just so you don't say, "Well, Sarah, be reasonable. Maybe you just didn't get any mail." No. I know we are getting mail. The reason I know this is that, conveniently, whenever the mail takes two days off, we get a shitload of mail, all rubber banded together. When it rains, we don't get mail. This is a pattern I have noticed over months of study. THEY DO NOT WANT TO DELIVER THE MAIL ON RAINY DAYS. I do not live in a vastly destroyed area of New Orleans, either. I live in the 70115. I don't mean to accuse the USPS of laziness, but... well, yes I do. This latest non-delivery coincides with the random blocking off of my street by some orange-painted signs and cones. I think they were just like, oops, can't go down there! I mean, I am a person with lots of bills. Sometimes I need to mail my bills. OK, so the mail doesn't come every day. I accept that. But do you think-- thirteen months after Katrina-- the Post Office could put some mailboxes back? I could just walk down to the JCC, where there HAS ALWAYS BEEN A MAILBOX. The Times Picayune put their thing back. Isn't it time we got some mailboxes SOMEWHERE Uptown?

As a matter of fact, why is my street blocked off? Is it because of the huge hole they dug in the street two houses up and haven't come back to fill in? Is it because the Landrieus (Landrieux?) live up the street and god forbid important or wealthy people drive their cars into holes? Really, you might as well just remove the blockade, because we are so used to driving around other neighborhoods' holes by now that there is really no point. And being a veteran observer of the New Orleans Pothole, I can tell you that this pothole is weak. It is only a foot and a half deep, and it is on the side of a one-way street, not the middle. This pothole is maybe a one-cone pothole, not a "block off the street" pothole. Other potholes laugh in the face of this clearly inferior pothole. I'm just saying. Anyway, since the street is perfectly clear, people are just creeping up on the curb to go around the baffling blockade. So-- this just occurred to me-- I almost wonder whether it's there because they forgot to take it with them when they finished digging the hole. It would not surprise me.

Our utilities are controlled by shoddy monopolies. Want to know how much I was charged by Entergy for a month in which the house was unoccupied and the power was TOTALLY OUT? $200! That's more than I paid when I was there! And I know people who were charged upwards of $1,000. Cox(uckers) is no better. I don't know who hires the incompetent fools who work there and try to repeatedly tell us there is no outage and we should buy a new modem from them... when there is no cable! As in, black fuzz on all the channels and no internet connection. Could you please learn how to listen to your customers? We didn't love living in Boston for 4 months, but I cannot tell you how wonderful it was to call for services and actually speak to someone polite and articulate on the phone. Every single time. It has long been the standard in New Orleans that at restaurants and hotels the service is legendary and world-class, while at the Walgreens you have to wait in line for 20 minutes while the cashier talks to her girlfriend on the phone and gives you a nasty look. Come on. This is one of those things that could stand changing Post-K. After all, we are paying employees more now. And one would think there would be more of a "we're all in this together, what can I contribute?" mindset. Let's start over and make this a city that's efficient.

Can we talk about the trash? After living here for nine months Post-K, we have finally determined that it comes on Wednesdays. Except... when it doesn't. This is a step down from our former twice a week service. There is no point whatsoever to using the blue recycling bins, because the recycling doesn't get picked up at all. Our pizza boxes and empty cans just grow bugs until we give up and throw them in the trash. There is no rhyme or reason to whether the trash comes or doesn't come. Or why they are willing to pick up some stuff, while the remains of our hedge sat bagged on the corner for months. I know there is talk about putting a new automated trash pickup system in place, but I don't feel confident about this working. Not here.

Seriously, though, what are we paying taxes for? What, exactly? (OK, this does not quite apply to me because I got all my taxes back last year due to Katrina/grad student exemptions, and I am a renter, but still!) Why do we re-elect the same tired people? Why-- even now!-- do some citizens vote to maintain the status quo? This just would not happen in the rest of the U.S. Because people wouldn't tolerate it.

< /rant>

Whew. I think that covers everything.

Edited 2:28 PM to add: Completely proving everything I said about USPS, eight pieces of mail and a package were just dropped through the slot.

Tags: post-katrina, hurricane katrina, new orleans, nola, public services, usps, rant

Not Living In New Orleans Privilege

You know how they have lists like the Male Privilege Checklist or the White Privilege Checklist? The point of these lists is that they are framed in a way that makes the reader think about what privileged people don't have to deal with on a daily basis. For example, two statements on the Male Privilege Checklist are "I am not taught to fear walking alone after dark in average public spaces," and "If I choose not to have children, my masculinity will not be called into question." If you are among the privileged set, these statements are supposed to make you think critically about what the non-privileged portion of the population has to deal with, and what you can do to stop the perpetuation of privilege. For instance, before I read the White Privilege Checklist, many of the little discriminations non-white people have to deal with had honestly never occurred to me. It's meant to be an eye-opener.

I think someone ought to write a "Not Living In New Orleans Privilege Checklist." Hell, maybe I will. One of the items could be, "Every time I order from Amazon, I am not subjected to this message:"

Your order is being sent to an area recently affected by Hurricane Katrina. We estimate that delivery of your shipment may be delayed up to 10 days or more. Click here for more information.

Because really. This message is starting to irritate me.

Tags: nola, new orleans, katrina, post-katrina, privilege

Survivor: New Orleans

Chris Rose's column from earlier this week about how they should have done Survivor: New Orleans cracked me up. My favorite part:

"They could have one tribe live in a pothole, one in a tent under the interstate, one in a FEMA trailer (it goes without saying that it has no utilities) and one in what remains of Fats Domino's house down in the Lower 9th and let them try to survive the tangle of living options and deprivations that we have come to know as routine.

Or even better yet, one of the tribes could be embedded with Uncle Sal and Aunt Judy in their two-bedroom rambler in River Ridge, along with Sal's two grown sons and Judy's ex, C.J., and his fourth wife Tina and their two kids and four dogs, Sal's nephew Gerald and his family of six and Gerald's son Tony's parrain, Sid, and his boyfriend Jeff and their two cats -- and then they will know what "surviving" means in the post-Katrina landscape."

Chris Rose can always be relied upon to bring us news of the important things in today's Post-K landscape, such as sightings of the Uptown car-eating pothole in its natural habitat (with which I also have a slight morbid fascination). Got to be on the lookout for those car eating potholes. The one in the column is on Calhoun and has an appliance-- either a dishwasher, washer, or dryer-- in the bottom of it. They seem to have filled in our friendly neighborhood pothole on Jefferson. I say friendly because it had a polite hand-painted sign on the neutral ground next to it. It was that kind of pothole.

Tags: Katrina, post-katrina, new orleans, car eating potholes

I Wish

... that I had been the one who yelled out "Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney!" at a press conference. But since I was not, I was fortunately still able to relish the moment while viewing the Spike Lee documentary tonight. In fact, I think it was the highlight.

The rest I don't really want to talk about.

We got slammed today at lunch. I made more money than I made Saturday night, which is impressive. But I didn't see any celebrities, descending upon our fair city to tour the destruction. Oh well. I guess I will just have to settle for plain old local celebrities... city council members, certain people high up in the police who tip substandardly, Mannings, Landrieus. Yawn. ;-)

Really relieved this day is over.

You Can't Stop the Signal

After the previous post, a simple Google search revealed that my experience of being unexpectedly attacked by this song in my car was NOT isolated. Someone else was, too! And they made this video, which I am posting because I think every American should look at these photos, should spend a couple of minutes thinking about this tomorrow. You think you're sick of hearing about it? You think it's not your responsibility as a voting member of a democracy? You will be bombarded. There are many other New Orleans bloggers who do a much better job of this than I do. I feel admittedly guilty about this sometimes, but I'm much better with the levity. Last month I was driving through Plaquemines Parish with another volunteer, someone who's been through an incredibly tough couple of months, and we went by this particular destroyed house. There's nothing there but a foundation with two toilets sitting on it.

I said, "I know it's horrible and wrong, but I kind of smile every time I see those toilets."

He said, "I think sometimes you have to laugh." And we laughed at the toilets.

Anyway, TV bombards you, but most of the time they seem to get the message wrong. The stuff that's out there on the net from local sources, that's the stuff that will blow your mind. I would like to thank them for it today, them and news outlets like the Times Picayune, who have been on the ground in New Orleans since landfall. Have internet connection (well, most of the time, anyway-- thanks a lot, Cox), will write.

You can't stop the signal.

City of Ruins

It seems impossible that there might be people who live in a place, somewhere, where all the houses aren't marked with spray paint, the way I've marked my banner to commemorate the one year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I should probably explain it, though. All the houses in Orleans Parish were searched and marked with this spray painted X. The markings vary somewhat, depending on who made them, but usually the top is the date the house was searched, the left is the state that particular National Guard troop came from or the local agency that searched the house, and the right or the bottom is how many dead. The one on my old apartment said "9-9 LSP 0," for example, indicating that the Louisiana State Police didn't find any bodies. Most of them have a zero. But not all.

So strange, not to have seen one of those marks. I see them everywhere. I feel like I still have the dingy brown waterline stuck to me, in a place no one can see, just like it's stuck on the rows of houses, even though I never touched that water.

This week I have cried in my car numerous times. I am overwhelmed, and I am angry. I am angry at the Army Corps of Engineers for building substandard levees. I am angry whenever someone posts an ignorant rant on Craigslist about "you fucking stupid beggars stop whining i hope you die," because I was hurt by this too, and am not a beggar, nor am I a whiner. We are people, and this is where we live. I am angry because Bush doesn't deserve to show his face here tomorrow and talk about how much improvement has been made. I am angry at my cat's other people, for leaving him behind. Even though I know they couldn't have known, I am still angry. I am angry that we spend billions of dollars bringing the greatness of America to other countries. I am angry because people were left in squalor to die for the crime of being poor or old. I am angry at people who won't do something to help themselves. I am angry at people who won't do, in general.

I see furniture on curbs. I see dusty cars parked under the overpass. I see leaning, collapsed wooden houses. I see spray paint on the porch. I see a skinny puppy nosing the trash by the projects at Freret and Louisiana. I see eerily dark traffic lights. I see a mattress in the branches of a tree. I see a concrete slab where a house used to be. Tomorrow it will be one year, but I still see these things. I see them every day, every week, every drive.

This is not over. This will never be over.

"Without your sweet kiss, my soul's lost, my friend
Tell me how do I begin again
My city's in ruins"

Tags: new orleans, hurricane katrina, katrina anniversary, 8-29-05, nola, katrina

The View From the Other Side of the Levee

The first federal failure: the vanishing wetlands of Plaquemines Parish, New Orleans' natural line of defense.

Tags: new orleans, katrina, hurricane katrina, levees, wetlands, plaquemines parish

Silence Falls On New Orleans

[This is what I posted on another Sunday afternoon at 12:52 PM nearly one year ago today. We evacuated late, having prepared to ride it out. By the time we were on I-10 heading East, it had already begun to rain. We still have the videos we rented in preparation to wait out Katrina, because the store has not reopened today.]

This morning we woke up to sun shining through the slats of the blinds. The palms and magnolias on my street are swaying with the strengthening breeze. The heat bakes the slate roof tiles on the house next door. I look out over roofs that have been there for a hundred years. The cars are parked on the neutral ground. The streets are ominously empty.

We meant to ride it out, but...

Mandatory evacuation of Orleans Parish. It's a Category 5 storm with winds of 175 miles per hour. The officials are saying there's no longer a question that the levees will be overcome by the water. It's so strange, really. It just seems like a pretty Sunday. Last year they said Ivan was going to be The One, and it wasn't. They said the city would full up like a giant fish bowl. They said this was the price of living in the past.


I don't know. I know I don't want to leave, because, no matter how I want to deny it, there is a very real possibility that it won't be here when I get back. I suppose at a moment like this what you feel is admiration and wonder: at the persistence of the people who settled here, who braved malaria and ungodly heat, who watched the river swallow their homes and then improbably built again in a swamp, at the women of two hundred years ago who did it all in floor length skirts. At least that's what I think about. Goodbye to my green streetcars. Goodbye to the sweet still air that smells like flowers. Goodbye to my newly redone little garret upstairs that I was going to write in. Goodbye to the grand old ladies of St. Charles Avenue, with their iron lace and graceful tall shuttered windows and delicate porches, to whom my heart belongs. If this is your end, I am glad I won't see it. Stubborn old city. It's funny, somehow I see it making it... It's very quite outside now. I've taken the pictures down from the walls. We're evacuating north to Nashville.


Goodbye, city. Good luck.

Tags: new orleans, hurricane katrina, katrina anniversary, 8-29-05, nola, katrina

Thirteen Facts About Katrina Cats

1. An estimated 250,000 pets were left behind during Hurricane Katrina.

2. This means that many of the strays running wild and free on the streets of New Orleans today were once someone's pet. I see stray dogs and cats every time I get in my car. It is very sad to imagine that they probably stopped waiting for their people to come back for them a long time ago.

3. There are, or were, over 4,000 food and water stations in the New Orleans metro area and the surrounding parishes. Tomorrow I'll go to the West Bank to cover about 45 of those. I sometimes ponder whether it does any good... but I saw kittens last week. And if they get used to coming where the food is, maybe they can be trapped... and get to go live somewhere safe where a person will pet them and they won't get attacked by feral dogs and their quality of life is better. Not only that, but it kills me to think that a cat who was once loved by someone is now starving to death and wondering what they did to deserve this.

4. TNR stands for Trap Neuter Return. This is a program in which stray and feral cats are systematically trapped, spayed or neutered, and returned to the streets or to colonies where someone makes sure they are fed.

5. Usually the vet will clip the cat's ear so it is easy to tell which ones have already been spayed/neutered. My cat has a tipped ear but as you can see he is still very handsome!

6. An unaltered female cat can produce 420,000 kittens in seven years (well, not personally, but through the generations). Isn't that crazy? So spay your cat!

7. With so many animals left on the streets after Katrina, we are already seeing the second generation of kittens.

8. Spaying and neutering strays cuts down on the amount of noise and nuisance; ie: they are less likely to be fighting and yowling under your window because they will not be mating.

9. Cats can be trapped humanely.

10. Someone I know caught 30 cats last week that had been sighted around various food/water stations. Adult strays can be resocialized and adopted, kittens can be adopted, and ferals can be fixed so they will no longer reproduce.

11. If you live in a disaster-prone area, have an evacuation plan for your pet. (Mine involves having a bunch of food/water, a carrier, a car, and experience sneaking illegal things into hotel rooms disguised as other things.)

12. You can also get your pet microchipped. Once you register the chip online, any vet anywhere can scan your pet's chip and bring up your contact information. The chip goes right between the shoulder blades.

13. Please consider adopting a cat from a shelter! I know I say this all the time, but just look how pretty my shelter cat is! :-) Buying from pet stores and backyard breeders just encourages people to be irresponsible with their pets and not spay or neuter them. 30% of shelter pets are purebred. This means somebody thought it would be "fun" to breed them, and then adopted them to people who they didn't do a background check on and who later dumped the pets in a shelter when they weren't cute babies anymore. This makes Jolee Bindo mad, and you don't want to make him mad, because he bites!

(I guess I've had a glut of cat posts this week... well, before that it was a long dry spell with no cat posts, so we'll just think of it as making up for lost time. I read some article about how to be a popular blogger that said, "DO NOT BLOG ABOUT YOUR CAT." But it contradicted itself elsewhere in the article, so I took it with a grain of salt, because an English major would not do that. And English majors like cats. Because they are writers. And writers are cat people. Hemingway had many-toed cats. And I have a many-toed cat! Alas, that does not make me Hemingway.)

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Tags: thursday thirteen, tnr, cats, pet rescue

"There's Nothing Here"

Yesterday I drove down to the East Bank of Plaquemines Parish to fill the feeding stations there. It was the first time I had ever been there, and the first time I had done food/water stations by myself. You go to the West Bank and take a ferry-- if you have not seen a map of New Orleans, this will sound very confusing, because what I just said, if you were following, was I live on the East Bank but I went to the West Bank to get to the East Bank. But what happens is the Mississippi curves around in a circle at this point, so you have to cross it twice. I am kind of dubious of this ferry business now, because both times I was so far back in line that I had to sit and wait for another one (it's not a very big ferry). I think it probably puts more mileage on the car to drive through Chalmette, but it can't possibly take the hour I waited for the ferry, and anyway, there are only 1100 miles on my car.

The first two things that happened when I got out of my car at the first feeding station: I was swarmed, I mean absolutely swarmed as in they were crawling in my clothes, by mosquitos, and I saw a grasshopper the size of my fist. I thought, shit, it's a good thing they coincidentally found someone who grew up in the country. I think if I hadn't, I would have freaked out right there (as it was, I didn't freak out until later, but I'll get to that).

But as I looked around, I became increasingly confused. All the food and water pans were certainly empty. The volunteers I talked to told me I needed to figure out whether the food was being eaten by raccoons or armadillos. Surely, I thought, it must be wild animals. Why would there be dogs and cats out here? There was nothing here. What was I supposed to be feeding? The few houses I saw were so overgrown, they must have been abandoned for years. I combed my brain, trying to remember what had happened here-- wind or water? I guess what threw me off was that in New Orleans, the areas that got heavy water are quite brown and dead. And there are waterlines on the houses. But there, everything I saw was abundantly green, as far as the eye could see. It seemed odd to imagine that people had ever lived there. The food stations were all inside abandoned houses or sheds. At one station, the landmark was supposed to be the Bethlehem Judea African Baptist Church. But there was no church, just a sign and a concrete lot. And lots of weeds.

Then I looked up into the trees, and saw a mattress and the twisted remains of clothes. No wind had done that. Was it possible that everything was washed away so completely? I parked next to a yellow house that sat about thirty feet from its foundation. I crept through the trees to refill the food and water pans in the basement of a beige house. There were bags of old Mardi Gras beads there, incongrously bright against the rotting browns and grays of the silent house. I felt slightly wrong, being in someone's yard, like someone would pop out and yell at me to get off their property. But all was silence, except for the insect sounds that crowded in from the overgrown brush. (I was glad I didn't read this article, written about the exact town where I was, in which the residents talk about seeing spirits walking until after I'd come home.) There was a sign with weeds growing over it that said "God Bless America." There are no waterlines here, because everything is gone.

But there were signs of people along some stretches. I passed construction being done on a church and a school. I passed a neat grid of FEMA trailers with emergency vehicles parked in the driveways and a large sign labelling it "COP LAND." Mostly, though, it was a desolate strip of land, crowded with encroaching green and not much else. I kept seeing steps going to nowhere. One of the last stations was supposed to be behind a church. I pulled into the dirt road. There were mud-covered chairs and a bouquet of fake flowers lying on the ground in front of the church. Behind the church was a cemetary-- and most of the above-ground tombs were broken, crumbled, some empty because the caskets had floated out.

Childhood fears are strange. You never know when they will come back to bite you. I've been able to walk in graveyards for years, now. Maybe it was because I felt like an intruder; maybe I was feeling some of those spirits. I did feel sorry about it the whole way home, but at that moment I knew I had hit my limit: I could not get out of that car and go into that graveyard. Later, I read in my notes that a resident is feeding the animals there, plus I had left food at a shed nearby, so I felt a little better. But I still feel horrible about it, like I failed somehow. I feel badly because I wish I had talked to people and found out whether they had seen any animals, or whether I was just feeding armadillos and ghosts. I think there weren't people outside because I was there during dinner time. Next week I will do some detective work.

I can't shake the feeling I got when I realized that this place hadn't been deserted for fifty years, that it was Katrina that wiped it out and nature was trying to take it back. In the car, I had been listening to the Bruce Springsteen album "The Rising," which I know he wrote about 9/11, but all the songs seemed to be about what happened here. I just didn't know it would be as haunting as that. At least in New Orleans there is wreckage, debris to show that this wasn't always an open field next to a levee. At least there isn't nothing.

I don't remember how I felt, I never thought I'd live
To read about myself in my hometown paper
How my brave young life was forever changed
In a misty cloud of pink vapor
Around here, everybody acts the same
Around here, we all act like nothing's changed
Friday night, the club meets at Al's Barbecue
The sky is still the same unbelievable blue
Darling, give me your kiss, only understand
I am the nothing man...

Tags: new orleans, nola, katrina, post-katrina, plaquemines parish, animal rescue, volunteer

When the People of Katrina Frustrate You...

Yesterday afternoon and this morning I helped out at Animal Rescue New Orleans. I cleaned out cages, changed food and water dishes, and petted the cats. I may also be learning how to trap cats this week. The people at ARNO are super-nice, and they are doing this for free. I just get fed up sometimes and can't deal with the politics, questions, and red tape of Katrina. I get sick of people in general, and this "gimme" attitude that persists 11 months after the storm. I get angry at myself because my life got derailed too and I should be more understanding. I get angry at the assholes from other cities who come on Craigslist and post about how black people need to die and New Orleans needs to sink into the ocean. I get disgusted at the paper's Corruption-of-the-Day reports. I do not consider myself a helpless person, and I don't want to live in a city that's portrayed that way. In search of a pro-active solution, I wound up at ARNO's warehouse in Jefferson.

These kittens (I found their picture on the internet) are at ARNO. I played with them today, and one of the Siamese-looking ones got away on me. Two of them look like baby Jolees but with light yellow tabby stripes on their faces. They were found in the trash in Lakeview, taped inside a box. Luckily someone found them before they starved to death. They are just about the sweetest kittens ever, and very acrobatic. They can climb all the way up the walls of their cage with their little clinging feet. Which basically means the person who taped them in a box to die is going straight to hell.

I'm going to take a shower now, because I suspect Jolee Bindo can smell cat on me. I don't want him to think I'm cheating on him with other cats.

Tags: new orleans, post-katrina, katrina, pets, animal rescue, ARNO

More Nonsensical FEMA News

According to today's paper, New Orleans residents are in a poor state of mental health. Well, no wonder, when we have to see stuff like this: FEMA wants NOFD to pay, or else they'll take away their helicopters. Pardon me for a second. Didn't we just get that article about the BILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF WASTE FEMA IS COMMITTING AS WE SPEAK? In the midst of those billions of dollars, they want to withdraw their two measly helicopters-- which are desparately needed because of the fires. Every time I drive somewhere I see another building that's burned down. And I mostly just drive through Uptown and Central City. Imagine what the really destroyed areas look like. The other day the water pressure was... let's just say my shower was almost refreshingly rain-like.

It is raining now. Depressingly, since it is the holiday weekend and idiots will be lighting off fireworks, I can only see that as a good thing right now.

Tags: new orleans, nola, post-katrina, hurricane katrina, FEMA, NOFD, news

BEST. POST-KATRINA. HEADLINE. EVER.

The Triangle of Death is nothing compared to this.

Transvestite Crime Gangs Pester Magazine Street Owners.

Tags: new orleans, post-katrina, news, nola

Drivers In the 504 Celebrate the Return of the Erstwhile Stop Sign at Louisiana and Freret

I like to ponder the mysteries of post-K traffic control. The stop sign at Louisiana and Freret reappeared at the end of last week, hopefully putting an end to (I would even settle for reducing slightly) the near-death experiences, with my life flashing before my eyes as vehicles go careening around my little Accent, I have been subjected to on a daily basis.

The story so far: Katrina knocked out the light. There was a stop sign nailed to the telephone pole at the intersection. Then the light came back, as a blinking red. Then it resumed full traffic light functionality (joy! even the blinking turn signal worked!)... only to go blank again last month with the unfortunate burning down of the corner store. They put two of those stop signs on legs in the street, making it once again a four way stop. Then someone stole the stop sign on legs from Louisiana. One might ask, what sort of a person would steal a stop sign on legs from a major intersection with a dead traffic light in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic city? What the hell do you do with a stop sign on legs? Seriously, I used to ask these questions. Then I read in the Times Picayune that people are actually stealing these stop signs to put in their own neighborhoods. Like their little crap dead end street is more important then a major intersection, and they believe they have the right to decide this. Ever since the disappearance of the stop sign, driving to work has been a video-game-like experience.

I mean, if I was going to proceed through an intersection that used to have a light, has always had a light, and clearly has a GIANT DANGLING DEAD LIGHT hanging right over the top of it, I would at least slow down and make a pretense of doing the manuever I like to call the "New Orleans Rolling Stop." I would certainly not plow through at speeds exceeding 30 miles per hour. But I have seen this happen every day since the hijacking of the stop sign.

The best day-- I am not making this up-- was when I drove through on my way to work, and there was a cop car parked on Louisiana Avenue right by the intersection. I thought, "Oh, they must be there so people will quit running that stop sign." No sooner had the thought wafted through the inner coils of my brain than a truck breezed through the intersection at 40 mph, causing me to slam on my brakes. The cop just stared and smoked a cigarette. And it was a real cop, too! Not even one of those empty cars the NOPD has been parking around the city post-K to make it look like there are cops here (I am not making this up either).

Anyway, the stop sign at Louisiana and Freret has returned after several weeks absence. This time they nailed it to the pole. Woe to he who pries it off in the dead of night. Unless his street has a car eating pothole.

Wait! Where's my picture of the car eating pothole? We desperately need a visual! Oh, I found it:

Tags: post-katrina, nola, new orleans

Thirteen Good Things That Happened To Me Because of Hurricane Katrina

In the interest of positive thinking...

1. I moved in with Mike. This was a huge risk, since we had only been dating a little over a month when Katrina hit. Luckily, it worked out. My sweetie is the best. :-)

2. I got out of my dead-end legal secretary job. This was the post-quitting-law-school temp job that lasted a year. You should probably not get a temp job that lasts a year in a field that really bores you. That's some advice. It was sort of liberating to realize I didn't have to go anymore.

3. It got me back in touch with friends and relatives I hadn't talked to in a while.

4. I did National Novel Writing Month. Though I am still polishing the book, with a goal of being finished by August, a huge portion of the work was done during November. It gave me the jump start I needed, and the taste of what a real writing lifestyle could be like.

5. I got to live in Boston for a few months. It's always cool to try out living in a new city.

6. While I was there, I got to hang out with Chrissy and some other people I hadn't seen since I moved to New Orleans.

7. My new car has air conditioning that actually works all the time. And, thanks to my FEMA money, I could even sort of afford it. (Sorry, old car.)

8. Reconfirmed my belief that the girls of the Epsilon Kappa chapter of Chi Omega are the awesomest and most generous people around. Frankly, I think Mike was a little in awe of the way you guys got stuff done for us. I am so, so glad I decided to pledge four years ago. It was absolutely the right decision.

9. If Katrina hadn't happened, I wouldn't have my Jolee. (Despite the fact that we are not speaking due to the swollen black hole in my upper lip, I love the kitty.)

10. I got to see my mom race at Head of the Charles, and RPI beat BU... in the same weekend!

11. I have some crazy stories now. (Such as: leaving at the last minute on Sunday, watching the puddles rise along I-10 as the rain started, and sleeping on the ground at a rest area southwest of Birmingham. Or the guy who pulled us over in Ohio for speeding, saw Mike's ID and all our crap haphazardly piled in the backseat, and said we had enough to worry about.)

12. It has been really interesting to watch the rebuilding effort here. It makes you feel like you are a part of something. I wonder if, in the future, New Orleans citizens will be separated into "People Who Were Here For Katrina" and "People Who Weren't." I will be able to say that I was here.

13. I kind of do love New Orleans. Weird, huh?

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Tags: Thursday Thirteen, Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans

FEMA Cheap Shot of the Day

Me: So I waited on this table full of 6 FEMA workers today. They asked for separate checks. It takes me 20 minutes to do them, and when I get back to the table, they go, "Oh, you can just put these two on this card, and these two on this one." Why the hell don't you tell me that BEFORE I separate your checks? Do you not comprehend the concept of separate checks?
Mike: And you wonder why FEMA can't get their accounting straight.

Because everyone (well, here in NOLA at least) loves a good FEMA joke.

Tags: post-katrina, waitressing