An Excerpt from Chapter Eight: A Lonestar Education

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My biggest male-stress was our house and coordinating with our realtor and contractors to try get the house on market and sold.  Selling the house represented the pass-card to progression.  The sale had to occur before the rental house and our old mortgage’s grip could thrust that Atlas-weight back into the ocean from which Katrina came.   

Our realtor had an abundance of homes to sell.  Most of which were customers much closer to the city than we were.  Despite the apparent dearth of housing in the city, getting that house sold was like trying to sell water to a blind Romanian gypsy lost in the desert.  You know she probably needed the drink, but nothing was normal or trustworthy about the situation.  

I remember going to work in Dallas on Mardi Gras Day, like it was just a Tuesday.  It was the first time in my life I was not off from school or work.  Nobody else in the office even noticed.  The storm mocked in subtle kidnappings.   

It was like the storm transplanted our whole life into this flotsam wreckage jettisoned to a transient wayside to rot in a mire of a minority-percentage choice.  The choice had to be owned as an anchor to the landscape of redefined daily tasks.  The people we spoke with, the food purveyors, the refueling stations were now by-default alterations.  No Tastee Kastleburgers!  No Manda andouille for gumbo!  No Danny & Clydes Leidenheimer bread Chisesi Ham po-boy!  No Hubig’s pies!  No Bud’s Broiler number four with the sauce and no god-dam mother-fucking Haydel’s King Cake!   

In the macro-level devastation, the remaining local survivors huddled down in NOLA had to relinquish the entitlement of complaint.  In every urge to extol a release of tension to a sympathetic ear, all anyone could find were qualifying empathetic ones.  Any who could listen were also corrupted by the stale wrath of nature and man.   

Was our humanity corroded and purged by the flood?  External smiles showed luminous.  Jovial retorts aired, but inside home was gone or at minimum disfigured like acid sprayed on exposed flesh.  History was mutated in the dichotomy of war with a life we compressed the gall to declare we deserved in private conversations with the Lord.   

We were alive in this flooded wasteland.  Every joy was precious.  Our challenge in the driftwood strand was to let these doppelganger former selves that we could have been, keep washing by.  “Do not grasp their hands.  Their fingers are dark leaches draining any future with tainted hopes no longer feasible in this altered beyond-Thunderdome future that demands our attention.  Let them drown, so we can filter the oxygen through these fetid breaths.”  New Orleanians could only hold what could fit in our hands as we scavenged in the debris; so we grabbed our culture tight.

I started to realize more of the unsalvageable possessions.  Mr. Roberts’ Mont Blanc pen was missing.  Pre-digital family photos were gone including this book from our wedding that got smeared in the water. 

Ashley changed jobs after her daddy-figure boss was too big a failure.  Ashley got a job doing tax work for a wealth management company that handled individuals with over twenty-five million dollars.  Translated that is, she worked as part of a team of professionals to reduce the taxes of the moderately-mega wealthy as much as possible.  Some rich guy saw he needed a crew just to handle how much money he had, (accountants, lawyers, financial analysts, and bankers), so the guy made more money by starting a company with his team to help other rich people like him keep the government away from their money.   

(This is how the spectrum of disparity of wealth is maintained.  Such machines perpetuate the perception of living individuals requiring respiration, the consumption of water and food, fecal excretion and a domicile to avoid the savages of nature to imprint upon their own self-view an enhanced upward mobility that is not only capable of being obtained, but an achievement of past fact.  For the very concept of the threshold of monetary wealth required to foster prosperity in one bucket is a pittance compared to the threshold to constitute moderate wealth in another.   

The great magic act is beguiling a man to misunderstand the comparative size of his own bucket, while adding a lesser measure to his own than he does to another; in the sense that the ounce he adds to his own is below the threshold of necessity for daily repetition of respiration, the consumption of water and food, fecal excretion and a domicile to avoid the savages of nature, while the measure he adds to the other is above similar thresholds.  One is obtaining necessity, the other excess. 

These twenty-five million dollar buckets contrast with a Texas school teacher, an Indonesian miner, a New Jersey bus driver, a Parisian nurse, or the geographically independent chief executive officer of Pfizer.  Imagine the volume of contents like water spilling upon a floor the size of Tanzania, prompting the burgeoning of life like a Serengeti flood.  If the smaller buckets spill, a few weeds or bushes may sprout.  If the largest buckets spill; a great deluge will ensue, drowning animals and grasslands in a chaotic melee.  The entire system will die in excess.  So it is we must balance the supply exiting. 

This water is not like water on earth; energetic wealth is not finite, the quantity is not a zero sum.  The amount can be nothing or a raging fire depending on the choice of individuals.  However when the largest buckets, release such a minimal liquidity in comparison to the consolidated abundance, the concept of a moderate bucket becomes skewed.  What is the top two percent of wealth and what is the bottom two percent of humans separate in such a variance that these statistical strata become alien species, of perceived divergent needs, despite completing the daily repetition of respiration, the consumption of water and food, fecal excretion and a domicile to avoid the savages of nature. 

These traits: the acts of breathing, eating, shitting, drinking, and sleeping, become so distant in one and all the more intimate in the other.  The priority system of processes leaves us focused on our disconnection as if one is climbing a great building admiring the view; the other is drowning in a great ocean.  Each is blinded by the sun, shinning above both by an immaterial difference in the universal scheme.  One sees the rays reflected off the water incapable of seeing any floating bodies.  One sees the rays cascading into his direct vision causing any attempt to see a building to produce black flecks upon his retina or the haze of clouds wafting kilometers below where Jack’s beanstalk reaches its canopy.   

So you see, it is what we so often can not see; that is the perception of who we are in comparison and in common that blinds us.  This is how it is that once one is on the thirteenth floor of the building; it is all the more easy to get to the thirtieth; and so on the five-hundredth to get to the thousandth.  So once one begins in the basement, how is one to see the street, to knock on the door?  The difficulty exponentially increases lower to the planet; it mirrors gravity in this way.  However we must see an inverse gravity operating in a duality; for gravity functions based on mass, not a planetary core.  One mass is human bodies; one is a cluster of bank vaults; clouds and roots; each tearing away at a middle. 

For surely some measure of men must occupy each floor, each purpose, supplying the work to achieve such climbs.  We can not have nations of flatness in a squalor of industry devoid of standing structures.  It is in this balance we find our societal conundrum; it is in this balance that we eternally vibrate, primarily stationary, yet constantly pulled by the gravity of either end of the spectrum.) 

So it was, each my wife and I found ourselves employed; doing work adding to buckets.  God bless America.  Life was more sanitary, but everyday was a synthetic step.