20150824

The anniversary of Katrina has been stalking. The clutching penchant to write how the wolf feels staring from outside the porch window come round again a decade later is a lick of sublimation. I don’t like the bitch. I don’t want to remember her and frankly every recycle of this time of year there is an acorn of stress that falls from every oak from St. Charles to City Park to the East to St. Bernard that concusses the skull of most residents: refugee or denizen that the Gulf will just unearth another Kraken. The pith of the plant roots into ventricles like yank-kudzu tugging at memories of the uncontrollable wrath swashing homes, photo albums, and bodies like a titan-hand slapping landfall.

Fuck it, I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to remember any of it. The newscast and blog blurbs can vomit in the marketing parking lots and chew it up on the brush of George W and Clinton through town. The nerve of Georgie boy to show his face, fuck, dude shouldn’t get to come until after his vacation is over. Storm hit Sunday August 28, levees broke Monday, Bush Jackson Square September 15th. Show him at a country club giving a speech like he was doing on Tuesday August 30, 2005.

I want to see you show up for the anniversary a week late, by yourself no secret service and a big sorry sign or the one Bruce Willis wore in Die Hard 3 which is probably more accurate if you prefer. You have the balls to walk through the streets of New Orleans and do that on camera shaking hands, bring CNN, I don’t wish you to get hurt, just be human, apologize, make a point that you fucked up handling what was a difficult situation and you made it worse. Some number of humans died because federal help: water, evacuation, food, etc. were too slow. Go explain to a kid his auntie died because you were lagging cerebellum while hers was melting in a microwave. Just say why you didn't move faster, we all know. Do right you born on third base schmuck.

Everything changed. There are moments speckled in mold dots like a Rorschach ceiling test of the parallel life one might have lived if the storm had not been. There is a bitter appreciation for the help, some of the love that came back to aid problems that existed before and beyond the hurricane, systematic corruption, poverty, housing, mental healthcare, schools, social services, blight, racism, jobs, and crime are all mixed in a bucket of black smudge and a lake of bleach. Some shit is better; some is a mutated federal experiment of gentrification and northwestern blue in red state south using art as a respirator plugged into the Bamboula rhythms marching out of A.L. Davis Park as Jindal rim-job’s Grover Norquist behind the bleachers. Culinary migration and class diaspora milking tribes to Texas and Georgia like a bizarre yat-creole trail of tears. It ain’t der no more to beleaguered squadron of souls tattooed with a waterline.

Steve Gleason, my god that man almost makes me believe in god. Such a good dude, there are so many good women and men who have rattled the carcass of humanity to be as he put it, “a city of steadfast maniacal idealists.” I didn’t make it back to New Orleans until 2013. Since then I have met so many poets, artists, musicians, dancers, and paragons of the bigger on the inside daring to choose love over fear. Ideals, money, results, foundational weaknesses where wishing it so ain’t the same as making it so, but sometimes spiritual viscera can summon an antamantine skeleton out of a blue tarp.

The beat of drums founded this old slavery river town caulking its past with the limbs of brown bodies toiling, escaping to hide with indigenous outside the ramparts generations left floating with shoestrings tied to stop signs to stem the drift. Levee wall outside swank Lakeview along the 17th street canal, office high rise Heritage plaza 17th floor was perched on the Jefferson side to outlook the electric lights to the left and the brown lawn pitch black Pelican shit-pot of no power after sunset to the right cloaking east. Gazed Lake Pontchartrain after men in yellow Hazmat suites culled the building’s mold.

The garbage mountain of West End sat like an eponymous elephant hill bulging ass cheeks for god to kiss our soaked mattresses, excrement shingles, and pissed sheetrock. Nuclear water bombs caked mud and splayed lumber bones. The heat, the no gasoline, the helicopters, the ghost town interstate sneak past the federal guards house inspection. I don’t really want to remember…

I’m finally in my eleventh place to live since the storm. I have been trying to finish another book and a hundred page letter by the date as if the day has meaning. Like a turning of a page to put old thoughts down for new ones in, so that is good. I do not really want to look her in the face as I do, but sometimes it is better, that slight finger wave in the distance not completely stopping the car as you drive by, but just that small acknowledgement that, “Yeah, the man I use to be used to live there. I am me now and maybe that is for the best.”