I know. It's been months. I'm sorry. Thank you for all of your warm wishes.

I won't be posting much in the next month or so either. I'm working feverishly on a visual art/poetry project that I hope to have (nearly) finished by May. It's fun but it's impossible too, as all fun projects are I guess.

Yes, S is home and he is all of one piece -- ten toes, ten fingers, two eyes, a full heart. He came back in February and after a week or so in Ft. Hood, a fun few days with me in Austin, he came home with me at the end of the month to spend the next month holed up in our house, us only leaving to get groceries or to see a movie or two. We got to know each other again. And it was good. Here's a picture I took of him in Texas. He doesn't look nearly this tired and run down anymore. And he's growing a beard! He looks absolutely adorable. Plus the beard helps him study for his comps. It's okay if you don't believe me. His tests are the first week in May:



We went to New Orleans a couple of weeks ago to visit friends and work out S's school situation (things have changed, as you'd imagine). It was actually worse than I expected. Many of our friends are getting the hell out. The ones who are staying are those who stayed dry. The "sliver by the river," as the Uptown-Garden District-CBD-Quarter area is affectionately called by its residents, is the "isle of denial" to everyone else. For good reason. Two cities stand where once there was one. The first is functioning nearly as it did the last time I was down there, one week before Katrina. The second looks like this: 


This is the Lower 9th, but it could be Arabi, it could be Lakeview. I didn't go to New Orleans East, but I suspect this picture could be of that neighborhood too. And yes, that's a whole other house crumpled up in front of another.


Again, the Lower Ninth. Our Pompeii. Within hours the community was destroyed. Bodies were found in their cars, driving to a neighbor's or relative's after the storm passed. People who stayed thought they'd been spared. Where houses once were there is now a garden of debris. And this is after seven months.


Another felled tree. Most have been removed and ground into chips, mountains of which stand as earth mound tombs in the center of the neutral grounds. This one was in Gentilly or maybe Lakeview, I don't remember. It could have been anywhere in the 85% of the city that flooded.


This was the neighborhood around UNO where I taught. Once there were apartments next to houses, all behind lush trees that lined both sides of the road. The trees are gone; the structures damaged. The debris has been cleared from the roads, often left in front of the structures like the one in this picture. Broken up, flooded cars sit in front of marked and mold-ridden homes. One couple we know in Uptown is keeping their neon cross, the mark of the search, on the outside of their house as a badge of survival. The friends we have whose house was ruined in Mid City, on the other hand, want to move and never see the mark again.

It's heavy and haunting, the devastation, in large part because it goes on and on and on. One neighborhood melts into the next, shockingly treeless, roads rendered concreteless by layers of mud, sidewalks obscured by piles of debris, houses empty and abandoned, every business boarded up, damaged, and closed. It really is a ghost town.


The inside of the house belonging to our Mid City friends. They lost nearly everything and had the house gutted. For the first few months after the "Thing," they vascillated between wanting to stay and wanting to move. The last several months have decided it for them. They are living on the north shore of the lake and commuting to Tulane and UNO. Every day they drive past and through miles of devastated neighborhoods. It's too much. And, of course, there is no guarantee that it won't happen again. They're selling their house.

Many others have decided to stay. FEMA trailers sit in front of ruined houses in the most improbable places. Surrounded by nothing but debris and closed businesses, lone trailers sit in front of a house, completely gutted, perhaps up on stilts (some are raising their houses eight feet or more). In the ongoing raping of our government by this administration and their corporate interests, acres of trailers sit in parking lots at UNO, empty, awaiting professors and administrators who lost their homes. FEMA set them up last September but won't hook them up to electricity and water services unless the university (which is part of the LSU system) pays $36,000 per trailer. Surprisingly, the university doesn't have the cash to hook them up. Meanwhile, makeshift tent cities pepper City Park. Yes, that's where all of the migrant workers you've read about live. In tents, most made of blue, sub-contracted FEMA tarps. In a flood-damaged park. We saw one man chopping wood to make a fire. And they all pay rent, these workers-cum-campers, just like at regular campgrounds. Welcome to 21st Century America!

I will try to write more often. Perhaps not too much about politics because it doesn't change, it only gets worse. S was bitter then angry and now he's indifferent (though in the negative sense). The military is fucked, but the wars keep going on. It all just keeps going on!