What a very sad day

11:04:08 AM September 2, 2005

I've been fighting the mild depression these long, silent periods seem to bring me. That brief conversation with S on Saturday morning was not enough. He left his old base nearly three weeks ago now, and since then I've talked to him twice via sat phone ("the phone that talks to the moon," as the Afghans call it) and both conversations were not much more than short reportage: "I'm just calling to tell you I'm okay" and "I don't know when I'll be able to call you again," the mantras of separation.

I did get a wonderful surprise call today, though. One of my New Orleans neighbors, Eric Julien, called me this afternoon from the steps of the Shedd Aquarium down on the edge of Lake Michigan here in Chicago. He and his wife Molly Day and their darling son Etienne (pronounced the Haitian creole way, "Eh-shawn") moved to Chicago a little over a week ago. Since Katrina they have been nomads, floating across the country from relative's house to relative's house, friend's to friend's. Though our area of New Orleans didn't flood much, their house, the famous ghost house of Carondelet and Washington, was badly damaged by the winds. The roof blew completely off (did the ghosts finally escape?), and now the house is uninhabitable, though Eric said a couple of their neighbors are living there anyway, "basically camping out." Since he and Molly have a baby son, "camping out" was not an option, especially since no one knows when, or if, the city will resurrect.

Imagine having your entire life jumbled and tossed about, thrown out like dice on a craps table. And then think the same thing happened to 500,000 other people who used to be your neighbors. It's hard to comprehend the vastness of it all. New Orleans has become Pompeii; her people roaming, homeless nomads and my neighbors are nearly my neighbors again, but now in this shockingly different place. Here it is winter already. Even when it's bright, it's bitter. Tonight the temperature is supposed to drop even further, and tomorrow evening there may be snow. And it's only going to get colder in the months to come.

How sad Eric sounded. They lost about 50% of their things, if you don't count their way of life, their community, their home town. And their jobs. Both of them are now looking for something to tide them over while they squeak out a living as all of us restless artists are condemned to do. We're going to talk again tomorrow. Hopefully I'll be able to see them soon. They're living down in Hyde Park, though I don't know exactly where. I want to take them around and introduce them to everyone I know so they won't be alone. I want to help them get started here if I can.

This is a city of rough edges. I hope Chicago is kind to Eric and Molly and baby Etienne.

Apparently some families have found better places for their kids since fleeing Katrina and being washed out of New Orleans. The schools cheated them there. I know this because I met so many incredibly bright freshmen who had graduated unprepared for even basic introductory classes. They had been abandoned by a system that seemed designed to keep the basic social and political structures of the city in place, to keep it "authentic." I remember the first time I was told "this is all you can expect from these kids."It was my first semester teaching at Delgado Community College and I was in the copy room where I spent most of the first month of class xeroxing my own thrown together text book. (I couldn't bear the thought of teaching from our uninspired text book, so I put together my own with some of my favorite essays and poems I'd collected over the years. The beauty of no-code copy machines!) The teacher who said it was one of the full-timers, a tenured professor who the next semester would be my 'mentor.' I had to give her a stack of graded papers so she could review them and tell me whether or not I was grading correctly, even though I'd had to do the same thing my first semester there, and even though I had been awarded because so few of my students failed. I had one student my second semester, an artist with a mop of black hair and horn-rimmed glasses, who turned every essay into a short story. His essays were so smart, so funny, each punctuated with little snips of dialogue. Of course my "mentor" said his As were Fs and that the kid would fail the exit exam if she had anything to do with it. Well, he passed. She was wrong about a lot of things.

I only bought one piece of art down in New Orleans and that was one of Eric's Haiti photographs. His photographs are visions, not mere documents. My photo, "Temps," floats next to our bed and dances on our fuschia-red wall. It's beautiful. I remember Molly told me that to get pregnant she had kept a special sugar bowl next to her bed so the spirits would get enough sweetness and wouldn't want to taste hers. I always meant to ask her what kind of sugar, what kind of bowl. Now I'll be able to, though I wish I could ask her over a glass of wine in our leaky apartment on Washington Avenue instead of over coffee, perhaps, in this city of rough edges. I wish they hadn't had to go through these piled-on weeks of hardship, that everything was still as it was. But it's not. The roof's been blown off, and here they are in my blustery, brumal city.

Ray is in New Orleans and the devastation has left him without words. Imagine. It is so bad a writer can't write about it, photos can't show it.

We are a nation in love with forgetting. Given the opportunity to push what's ugly, what's difficult into the netherworld of distant memory, we do. It's curious, really, this infatuation with forgetfulness. Tonight I glanced a show about Katrina and Rita and Wilma on discovery channel or maybe travel, and the hurricanes were spoken of as history, as if the effects of these storms weren't still being felt across the gulf.

Well they are. Hundreds of thousands are still homeless, are still without adequate shelter. Many are being evicted from apartments because FEMA's vouchers don't begin to cover rents in most American cities. Most of New Orleans is still uninhabitable. None of my friends have been able to return to their city though more than two months have passed. One friend, a poet from our workshop, lost nearly everything. She estimates 95% of her belongings melted away in the standing floodwaters that took over her Mid-City apartment for weeks and weeks. And this loss followed the horrific trip out of town, a journey punctuated by lack of drinking water, gas, and a sleepless night on the side of the road.

In today's Times-Picayune, the editors wonder whether or not the nation has completely forgotten their city, and whether or not that includes Congress. Across the city, they say, are signs of nascient life, that even as the roads continue to be littered with unusable refrigerators, residents continue to filter back in to rebuild their lives:


Yes, when the cameras are on, when the images are flooding our living rooms and kitchens with helplessness and despair, we respond. We care. But as soon as those images are catalogued in the underground vaults of distant memory, we forget about the need.

This isn't just about New Orleans, of course. While running at the gym tonight, I saw a 60 Minutes segment about a group of New York City doctors who went to Pakistan on their own to help victims of the earthquake. What they found were vast areas of the country that had not been visited by a single relief worker or government official. They worked in a forgotten valley, treating infections and lifethreatening disease, and since they are from New York, the news started to cover them and soon relief organizations came to the valley. When they did, the doctors packed up their mules (that's the only way to travel through the devastated borderlands) and headed to the next forgotten valley to treat more forgotten people.

Perhaps it is because there is too much to worry about, too much flooding of information for us to deal with it all. Perhaps that is why we push it into the depths.

We need to remember. We need to remind ourselves and our leadership. And we need to demand more from our government, because a handful of New Yorkers, a handful of North Carolinans or Chicagoans or Texans can't do it all.

Coyolxauhqui, daughter of Coatlicue, as a broken woman at the base of Templo Mayor.


Las Lloronas/The Crying Women

As she cried,
she drowned her children,
wrung them breath-
dry in the river
after he left.

He left with cudgels, rifles, and short knives,
perhaps with another woman's
                                                wet
on his lips, she tells me.

I know about crying.
I tell her my words left
under river stones and broken-
down bridges failed
to come up that day.
I found only an inadequate list:
weep, wail, bawl, keen,
a collection of girl-words
soaked in absurdity.

Yes, I killed them, she tells me,
like a man, then I wept
like a woman.

We part at the end of the river
where the water turns
                                  brackish.

Her laments follow me
home, entangle in my damp
hair, sway me to sleep.

I wake when the night
                                   dawns
with a splatter of stars across the ink-blood sky.
Outside, the mourning
                                   doves speak little cries,
feed the young and feather-
cover their eyes. Tear-
stripped naked, I swim
in the river next to her, run
my fingers in the hair
of her first-born son
as he descends.

c Kate Ingold, November 2004, New Orleans


S and I spent the summer of 2003 in Oaxaca City, a colonial town of 75% indigenous population in the thick of the largest state in Mexico, the state Cortes described to the Spanish crown by crumpling up a piece of paper and throwing it on a table. To walk through the mountains of Oaxaca, he said, was to walk through that crumpled parchment.

That summer I studied Spanish and S worked at an archaeological site on the road to Mitla about 35 miles outside of the city. The site was an ordinary household in a Zapotec suburb of 1,000 years ago, a collection of patios surrounded by rectangular structures each with the family's dead entombed beneath the patio and in front of an altar. Many of the men S worked with were from a nearby Zapotec village, Maquilxochitl, which means "Five Flower" in Nahuatl. Some day in the future, after he's done with this war, S will do his doctoral research in Maquilxochitl, where families live in the same patio-structure compounds their relatives did those years ago and where the tlyudas are made on adobe stoves fired by craggled mesquite.

I was flooded with the stories of the women I met there, particularly the women of Maquilxochitl who fed us stewed squash with onions, chile, and Oaxacan string cheese, and those miraculous tlyudas made from corn they'd ground themselves on volcanic metates. So many of the stories were about goodbyes. Women had said goodbye to their children years ago before the children went north to cross the border, and some hadn't seen them since. Others had said goodbye to their chidren before they had left to cross the border themselves, returning years later when their children were no longer children. One woman had four daughters and only one was still in Oaxaca. The other daughters were scattered from San Jose, California down to Baja and Mexico City, where one daughter worked in a plastics factory. This woman had crossed the border herself several times, outwitted coyotes and was beaten by one, but ended up coming back to Oaxaca for good and married one of S's good friends, Procopio. Her cousin crossed fifteen years ago and she never heard from him again. He was presumed to be dead.

How many have died in the river of two names, Rio Grande, Rio Bravo, or in the dusty, waterless desert? Can you imagine how many?

I had been reading about Mexico for a few years before that summer we spent in Oaxaca, including books about Mexico's rich religious and cultural heritage. The country is crawling with stories. legends, myths. When I got home, I started a series of poems about women facing what we face at this beginning of the third millennium, and how these stories relate to the histories of our anscestors and my own life. Las Lloronas is one of these poems.

I wrote this poem the day after S was "called up," one week and two days before Thanksgiving last year. They really did call. Early, before 7. We were both still in bed in our leaky New Orleans apartment because it was a Tuesday and neither of us had class. They called on the cell phone we shared and they told him he was to report to his base in Indiana the following Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving. We were supposed to leave that day for New Jersey to spend Thanksgiving with S's family, but suddenly everything was uncertain, unknown. S was in his final semester of classes in his PhD program. In just a few months he was to take his comprehensive exams then his orals, and then the following autumn (right now in fact) we were to go back to Oaxaca where S was to begin a dig at the temples ringing the small chapel on top of Cerro Danush, the symmetrical mountain that sits prominently inside the village of Maquilxochitl, a mountain that the entire village ascends on May 3rd to celebrate the Festival of the Cross. Now we weren't even sure he'd be able to finish his semester. I was a full-time instructor at University of New Orleans and I knew I had to make some decisions too. Should I stay in New Orleans or go back to Chicago to be near my mother? This all happened in an instant, and as a stark reminder that nothing is constant, all is change, our lives were changed instantly.

Yes, you'd think that there would have been a little more consideration for national guard soldiers, an understanding that they would have to "tie up loose ends" and make arrangements at work, school, home. But no. There was none of that until S and the other four men who were called (the unit had been split up and splintered the previous August, with some of the group sent to Afghanistan and others ordered to stay home to help train new members) complained so bitterly they were given a reprieve. But this happened a few days later, just before we were to leave for New Jersey, and just after we called the airline to see if we could change our tickets (the answer was no, by the way). It was the first of several mid-play changes, some good, some not, that would define our next several months and demonstrate how absolutely incompetent and confused the military brass were.

After that call I yelled at S, told him he clearly didn't love me since he had put our relationship and our future in jeopardy for the army (why he was still in is for another day). I cried and yelled, then cried again. He said that of course he loved me and that he regretted this as much as I did. I had to get away from him. I was too angry, too upset. I went into our roommate Rebecca's room. She was awake and had her coffee, which was curious. Usually she woke much later, but she was studying for her comps too and at the side of her bed was a mountain of books she was studying from. Her days were beginning early and ending late as she filled out note cards and typed out synopses of anthropology and archaeology texts. I went into her room and she took me in her arms and said "What's wrong, honey?" and I told her and she cried with me.

That day S and I talked a lot. We talked about what would happen. We talked about how much we loved each other and how surprised S was because he was certain, dead certain, that Kerry would win and he wouldn't get called up. He apologized and apologized again, and then I forgave him.

The call had come after weeks of disappointment. The three of us were still in mourning over Kerry's loss, still stunned and stressed and dreading another four years with Bush in office. Election night we had sat together in the living room batting away brown june bugs and the occasional flying cockroach that had moved in through the open windows, and watched the results come in. When it started to look bad, Rebecca and I ran around the house and found things that represented the contested states: a Pretenders disc for Ohio; a chunk of cheese for Wisconsin; a book of poems by Florida poet David Kirby. Rebecca had spent eight years in West Africa working with Doctors Without Borders, so she gathered up her super-fine African juju sculptures like the two figures with nails and shanks sticking out of their bodies, and I gathered my Zuni fetishes (buffalo, toad, bear, Corn Mother). We placed it all on the table in the living room then rang the booty with La Virgen candles, curios, small bowls of our just-finished dinner, and several shots of tequila. Rebecca got sage out of the refrigerator and burned it, blew the smoke across the table and at the windows, and we both begged the spirits to help John Kerry win, to help all of us escape the Bush-born madness. As the night wore on and things got even more dire, we knocked on the door of our neighbor George, a voodoo practitioner who had helped Rebecca rid the apartment of evil spirits when she'd first moved in two years before. George wasn't home, which we should have taken as an omen, I guess. When we knew it was over, Rebecca went to her room and we crawled into our bed for a sleep deep enough, we'd hoped, to erase the night and start us over again.

Well, obviously it didn't work. S knew it wouldn't, but then he's much more practical than me. It was that morning after when I started to worry. I knew it would take more good juju than we had in our leaky apartment to prevent S from being called up. Three weeks later I was proven right.

The story of the La Llorona, the Crying Woman, comes from Mexico and it varies from the scorned harlot who kills her children out of revenge, to a scorned woman who kills her children to protect them from poverty, to a woman whose children are murdered by their father, to a woman who has a vision of her children being wisked away by floodwaters, only to wake up and find her nightmare had come true. In every version La Llorona dies, usually from her own hand, on the banks of the river that also took her children. For her crime she is condemned to die and to walk the banks as a ghost. In most versions of the story she feels regret and remorse for her rashness, and cries in longing for the children she will never see again. In the version of the story told around fires and at bedside by malicious babysitters, she roams the banks looking for children to snatch and take as her own.

When S was called up, I became a crying woman myself. The original version of the poem had allusions to the fact that we hadn't gotten pregnant yet (and that I therefore had no children to drown), but the wise ladies in my poetry workshop urged me to take that stuff out, and as usual they were right. But when I let loose the river inside of me and mourned for the forced separation that was to come, I felt an affecton for las lloronas who had come before me, and the thousands who are struggling with difficult goodbyes right now.

(I wonder, even, if Cindy Sheehan feels like la llorona too. She is trying to 'right' the wrong of her son's death, a death she feels all of us, including herself, are responsible for because we allowed Bush to be elected. She is wailing for her dead son on the banks of concrete rivers across the country.)

The photograph above is of Coyolxauhqui, the daughter and murderer of Coatlicue. She is part of the web of legends and myths that La Llorona is a part of. In this picture of the stone at the base of Templo Mayor in Mexico City, she is a broken woman, beheaded and shattered to pieces, the work of her just-born brother. Wikipedia has decent versions of the stories of Coyolxauhqui, Coatlicue, and La llorona.

I decided to post this poem and this story today after reading two excellent posts yesterday about Lashaun Harris, a severely mentally ill woman who drowned her children and who faces execution for her crime. Dr. Omed's wife Elsbeth has a powerful personal essay about living with a manic-depressive, knowing a man who'd "sacrificed his arms to a train," and the possibility for mercy. And Phila at Bouphonia talks about Harris and the question of hearing voices. Of course Lashaun is a version of la llorona and Coyolxauhqui (she is certainly a broken woman), and sadly, her fate may be the same as the women of those legends. She may not die by her own hand, but rather by the groping hands of the state.

Tonight I sit on my couch with a half-flamed fire in the fireplace, alone. I've just finished a thrown-together dinner -- simple sauteed pork chop, leftover black beans, sauteed white onions with tomatoes -- made from a handful of groceries I picked up just an hour ago at the Whole Foods on Ashland Avenue. I spent the day with my mom. Lunch at Flo, a little shopping at the shoe store next door, a trip up Milwaukee Avenue to Max Gerber to check out affordable kitchen sinks. Afterwards we went back to her place and made a couple of decaf cappuccinos before heading out to the Boyd Gallery on Wells for the opening of their newest show, a collection of square canvases by an Italian abstract painter. Painted on the canvases were different shades of the same color, like white and white and white or black and black and black or blue and blue and blue. All of the colors were in squares or rectangles and were differentiated by texture, not just tone, like rough and smooth and some with brush strokes and some with none. At the gallery I talked to several people about how much better free internet phoning is than any phoning that's not free and how hard it is to paint black oil enamel over kitchen cabinets and how, miraculously, one writer's house across the road from Delgado Community College got only an inch or two of water and no real damage at all. I don't know this writer. My writer friend whose house is close to Delgado got several feet of water, I found out today, which meant the loss of over 350 books. It was like losing 350 family photographs because each book had a story and a place and a time it was associated with, though most (not all) can be replaced, unlike photographs. He and his wife are in Santa Fe because they still can't live in their water-logged house, their house without those 350 books.

My mom and I were to meet her boyfriend Howard at the gallery then go to dinner. But when he got there, after I'd talked with those several people for an hour, maybe more, and when we left the gallery and were walking toward the car, I had this overwhelming desire to leave and get home to be alone. The last thing on earth I wanted to do, suddenly, was go out to dinner with the two of them.

So now here I am: alone on the couch with my half-flamed fire and my thrown-together dinner cooked from a handful of groceries I picked up at the Whole Foods on Ashland. It's one of the saddest ironies that depression brought upon by loneliness makes you want to be alone.

It's not that I didn't see my abrupt departure coming. All day I was grumpy. I was quick to tear up. Over lunch, I found myself weepy over our uncertain financial future, over the house, and mostly over the fact that I feel like my writing is going nowhere and even the blog I find no purpose in at all most days.

I am, again, completely irrational, and I know it. That should make me feel better, in theory, but instead it makes me feel worse. I ought to be able to do something about it if I can see it for what it is. This irrationality is cyclical, but it's not connected to the cycles of the moon or of the waves or even of the sun. It's not even connected to when I speak to S (though it most certainly is connected to the fact that he's in Afghanistan and not here next to me in front of this half-flamed fire). I talked to him this morning via Skype for fifteen minutes, maybe more, about the beastiality some of his ANA troops participated in this past week (and no, I'm not joking), about how he blinked and blinked while boxing a guy on base (it's been a few years since he last sparred), and how today was "Fuck Off Friday," the Afghan equivalent of our Sunday, a day of rest and of doing-whatever-you-damn-well-please. I talked to him this morning and still I spent the day feeling out of control and irrational. It's the cycles within my heart that move from deep in the crater and out again, over and over without end.

The insecurity over my writing came up when my mother told me she showed the post I wrote about nanotechnology and Carmen and green building and passion to Howard and how Howard had forwarded it to Chuck. Suddenly I felt a twinge of panic. Did I write something offensive? What the hell is wrong with me writing about people I know and posting it to a public blog? Even conversations? And, worse, why did I feel so betrayed when she told me this?

I've had a hard time being around my mom and Howard these past few weeks and I've tried to figure out why. I've wondered if I'm jealous or if I miss having my mother to myself. I've wondered if it is that when I'm with them, a couple, and without S, I'm therefore not a couple. I've wondered if it is that I'm sick of being around my mom's friends because I have no friends of my own here in Chicago after being gone so long, except for a couple who I hardly ever see and none of them are writers. In New Orleans I had friends, a lot of friends, and I had S. I had the poetry group and I had our roommate Rebecca, and I had S. Now New Orleans is a flooded wreck of what it was. The poetry group is scattered and I haven't even talked to any of them in weeks, and Rebecca is in Nigeria, and I haven't talked to her in weeks either. And, of course, S is still in Afghanistan, still away from me, and I know I feel his absence more acutely now because we spent those two weeks together and they were such good weeks. We're still not pregnant and we're still not parents. It's only the last two days that I haven't felt completely exhausted.

On my drive to my mom's place this afternoon I passed two trees on Lake Shore Drive that looked to have been dipped in red candy, the kind candied apples are dipped in. Just the leaves at the tops of the trees were red while the rest were still green. I didn't think there would be much fall color this year because our summer was so dry and so hot, but I was wrong. The city is goldenrod and ochre now with hints of chartreuse and crimson, though that is most rare. So many of the old trees have died the past decade -- oaks, elms, maples, hickories -- from foreign bugs and diseases, and they've been replaced with these thin-trunked Kentucky Coffees and others similar that have groups of petite, diamond-shaped leaves rather than the hand-sized, star-shaped leaves of the maples or the Dadaesque leaves of the elms. These new trees turn yellow and nothing else.

It is, I know, impossible to lessen this loneliness through activity because though I miss my friends and even that crawling, stinky city, I really only miss S. It's his absence that I feel most, and it's his absence that I can do absolutely nothing about. Which is why this loneliness is so irrational.

I'm writing every day. I'm applying for work. I'm getting the house together. I'm not exercising or meditating or doing yoga or any of the other things I know I should, but I am reading and I'm reading good books. I'm eating right and I'm trying to dress appropriately so I can avoid getting that deep chill I had last spring when I first came back from New Orleans, when I felt cold even if the temperature outside was in the upper 60s. I'm leading a workshop for NWA at a library in Uptown (it's all mine starting next week) and I'm writing, every day, even if I think it's all a bunch of crap. None of it seems to matter.

By the sliding glass doors at the Whole Foods on Ashland was a pink paper flyer: "Why Astrology Works Better Than Therapy." I'm not the only lonely heart in town, I guess. But tonight in front of this half-flamed fire that doesn't matter either.

I think I'm finally getting a handle on my house situation, this place that has left me tired and obsessed for weeks. Today a contractor who worked for my mom and her neighbor came by and he can do both of my projects, hopefully for a reasonable price. What a relief. I can't wait. Meanwhile, I talked to my neighbor last night and she made an effort this morning to shuffle instead of stomp, to turn the television down to a low murmur instead of the usual carry-through-the-house volume. I still woke up when she did, but I was able to fall asleep for stretches which helped a lot. I'm really tired of being tired. It's hard to write when my mind is soggy with sleep.

Since it is Thursday, there are outrages and outrages though they could have come yesterday and more could come tomorrow since that is the state of things right now. Crooks and Liars has video from Keith Olbermann/NBC about a FEMA whistleblower who was inside the Superdome during the Katrina debacle. He blackberried our despot Mike Brown about the growing desperation of the situation only to receive a brief email from Brown's press secretary saying how important it was for Brown to get a good dinner and how the restaurants in Baton Rouge were packed with all the New Orleanians swirling about. So why exactly hasn't he been criminally charged and why hasn't Chertoff been fired? And why oh why hasn't Bush been impeached? I know. Stupid, living-in-a-dreamworld questions.

On Bill Maher's show last night Larry Miller (who was hilarious) wondered why anyone has been surprised by the corruption in New Orleans that Katrina exposed because "the concept of corruption is part of the fabric of the city." He said visitors weren't offered keys to the city because "it's always open," and so it is. Now we know it's not just New Orleans that is open to thieves and plunderers, but the federal government as well. Even open to horse and pony show operators aching for a pot of gumbo and a whiskey-sauced bread pudding for dessert on a steamy August evening in Baton Rouge.

Last night I watched Voices in Wartime, a documentary about poetry of war and the Poets Against the War movement prompted by an invitation Sam Hamill received from Laura Bush. I wonder if Laura knows how much she's helped the world of poetry in the United States by being such a dolt. She asked poets to join her for a symposium about Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Langston Hughes on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. What the hell did she expect? Apparently she hadn't actually read any of their work. If she had, she'd have noticed that they were rather progressively political poets, even Emily, and that if they were alive today they would have refused her invitation too.

The documentary isn't the best, but it is something. Later this month Occupation: Dreamland is playing at Facets Media Center. It sounds similar to Gunner Palace, though perhaps with more insight. The New York Times said it is"a compelling study of composure and decency in the midst of overwhelming pointlessness," which could describe so much of the absurdity this administration has produced as good-hearted, everyday Americans try to make sense out of senselessness in our wars abroad and here at home. Clif Hicks, Op Truth's newest Vet of the Week, tells his story of absurdity, and is it ever absurd:

Well, during this time we were supposed to go around interviewing imams at all the local mosques. An 'imam' being the muslim equivalent of a christian preacher. The first imam we spoke to was murdered the next day. There had been a large crowd watching the whole thing as we did not enter the mosque for the interview. Well we went out the next day and interviewed two more imams in the same manner. They too were murdered the next day. I realized what was happening and told everyone what I thought. These men were being murdered by the insurgents for collaborating. I couldn't realize why, none of them were particularly cooperative, they were blatantly not happy about us being around their mosques, but they were killed just for speaking to us. We went out again several times that week with same results. Finally my lieutenant (a fresh fish butter bar just out of OBC) decided to tell our CO about this and these missions were put to a stop. The fifth imam was murdered that night.

His story is a litany of pointless actions and an indictment of incompetence and foolish military hierarchy. He and his unit weren't allowed to eat in the KBR compound and were threatened with article 15s if they did, among other insanities. It is a really, really long list.

On a completely random note, Paula Zahn and CNN have just now discovered "cage fighting," the promoters' newest name for Mixed Martial Arts. When I first started kickboxing in the early 90s, an even younger kid at my gym who rode his skateboard everywhere and listened to Pink Floyd before every fight built an octagon in his mom's basement to grapple with friends. They used to compete in these "cage" matches held in bars and Catholic school gymnasiums. So Paula, "cage fighting" is nothing new.

How about war with Syria? Anyone? Anyone?

It seems we're already "engaged" on the Iraq/Syrian border:


And you thought I was joking.

I know, I know. You're saying to yourself that we already have a shortage of troops in the overstretched military, that we're already spending billions that we don't have (and that we're borrowing from China) to sustain our ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and the corporate pillaging in the Gulf Coast, and you're wondering how we can afford, in the fullest sense of that word, yet another war. And I say to you, have faith! Faith in our president and his leadership!! With God telling him what to do he will not lead us astray.

Is it just me or is it becoming increasingly difficult to write about politics? I feel like I write the same argument over and over again in response to the same outrageous actions by the administration, and nothing ever changes. It's as if we are on a carousel in the middle of the drowned Ninth Ward, fighting the waters slapping all around us just as the mad carnival operator operates the machine with a remote control high up in his Blackhawk enjoying every minute of our suffering. I read a comment today on another blog about how evil homosexuality is but how it's okay if the army turns their blind eyes from gay soldiers who have been activated for Iraq, even if those soldiers have been open about their homosexuality and therefore have violated the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Several commenters even said that gay soldiers fighting in a war zone are "patriotic" but that when they get back from their war service they should be "prosecuted" and given a dishonorable discharge because "their lifestyle is evil." There are still neanderthals out there that think this way.

And then there was the comment on Op Truth from a soldier who participated in Bush's Q&A the other day that was "outed" by the AP as being staged. The soldier said that he and the others weren't prodded at all, that they are firm supporters of the war in Iraq, and that they are "preserving YOUR freedom of speech." I have no doubt that this soldier, and probably the other nine who were handpicked by the military to talk to the president, is behind the war. And I have no doubt, too, that the vast majority of soldiers who are serving in Iraq are "for the war" when their superiors are standing next to them or behind the cameraman facing them, and that many remain supportive even when they get home and get the hell out of the military. This doesn't mean that tens of thousands of soldiers aren't against the war, but who can deny that many are for it? When they are trained to fight in wars and, especially the younger ones, are eager to 'test' their training in the field, it's not exactly a surprise. I also have no doubt that not a single soldier fighting in Iraq, not a single soldier who has died in Iraq or lost a limb in Iraq or lost his or her mind in Iraq, is or was "preserving" my freedom of speech.

The carousel spins and spins, waterlogged and rotten.

And speaking of the Ninth Ward and Lakeview and New Orleans East, apparently animal rescue workers are finding more dead than alive, except for the feral dogs roaming the streets and no doubt feasting on the corpses of their dead cousins and neighbors. I wonder how many of these wild dogs became wild the past month and a half and how many were already wild, members of the roving bands we'd encounter walking our dog down Carondelet and driving down Louisiana Avenue or even Napoleon. Sometimes the dogs still had their leashes attached. Many had remnants of collars, but many more had no leash, no collar. They were pure-bread dogs and mongrels, the females with fat nipples hanging down toward the ground, the males free to piss on every patch of "who" grass along the crackled sidewalks. They were sometimes intimidating, their free-spirit struts and power in numbers, and our dog Casey would breathe heavy until they passed or we made it home. The first pack of wild dogs we saw on our trip to New Orleans before deciding to move there, the same trip we heard from the real estate agent (who was, in theory, trying to sell us a house) that any house would "get flooded and get termites," and probably have to be shorred up, and the same trip where we saw then-mayor Marc Morial on our B+B room television set standing before a green-screened animated computer graphic of the city filling with water like a baby's bath tub under the spout, and telling us that the levees along the lake were certain to be breached and overflowed from even a category 4 hurricane. I remember S turned to me when we saw the dogs and said, "I feel like I'm in Mexico," and after Mayor Morial's half hour plea to get the hell out of the city if he tells you to, "We are definitely not buying a house down here."

One Saturday when we lived on Magazine Street near the "dog park" levee at the turn of the river, we encountered a yellow/brown dog hanging out at the gravel parking lot next to an abandoned, condemned shop. The dog was clearly abandoned too, and was making a home for himself in the upturned insides of the building that just a few days before had been torn apart by a drunk driving a pick-up (the driver had plowed into the building, scraping two cars parked there and barely missing ours, and then abandoned his car and fled. Since it was New Orleans, it took about two weeks for the truck to be removed and the wall to be patched up with plywood.) The dog wasn't quite feral yet when we first saw him. He accepted food and water from us and didn't growl. We called the humane society (the police didn't have a K-9 or animal control unit. At least that's what they said when I called.) and were told that it would take at least two weeks for someone to come for the dog because there were so many reports, always, of near-feral dogs and they were horribly understaffed. The man on the phone told me we had two options: feed the dog and hope for the best, that the dog could survive the two plus weeks it would take for a professional to collect him, or take the dog in. We couldn't do the latter -- our leaky apartment was already too small for my husband and I and our dog -- so we kept feeding the animal, but within a week he was gone, and I'm quite certain he wasn't picked up by SPCA. He just joined the others, leashed or not, to hunt for rats in the bushes and undergrowth of New Orleans, or take a spin on that waterlogged carousel.

So my cousin Bobby couldn't come up this weekend after all. He was offered a job he couldn't refuse. I'm completey excited for him and I don't mind waiting until S comes home to install our new kitchen. Bobby and his wife have started their own housebuilding business and they break ground on their first spec-house in just two weeks. They both have to keep their regular jobs -- with four kids between them they really have no choice -- and any extra income from overtime weekend jobs helps a lot. Oh well! I know "we can do that," and I don't much mind waiting. I've lived with this kitchen for six years, so what's a few more months?

This means that I can enjoy this beautiful fall day, though I'm not sure how I'll do that. S is stuck in Kabul for another couple of days, away from his cold-weather clothes and he's already sick. I'm sure the depression he's dealt with ever since landing back at Bagram doesn't help. He knows it's only a handful of months, but every day feels long and those months seem impossibly so. Hopefully he'll be able to call again today. For that reason I selfishly wish he could stay in Kabul, even if he was stuck for the next few months with the "mofrakies" he's dealing with there (or the "PX soldiers" as my cousin Bobby, a former Blackhawk pilot, calls them). It's so wonderful to hear his voice, even if it is crackled with static and delayed from its long travel up to space and back down again.

Bob Herbert, whose column is only available on-line through Time Select, nails it today by taking to task the "liberals" who are "no longer hopeful" that Bush will address poverty and race when dealing with the Katrina disaster. He questions how anyone could have believed a word Bush said in front of the cathedral at Jackson Square those weeks ago:


As usual, Bob Herbert is right.

As I've said before, I think of the Bush administration's privatization schemes as a gangster-style money laundering system: take money from the people, filter it through government, then hand it out to corporations, all the time wearing the pastor's cloak to lend "legitimacy" to your actions. They are pillaging our country in the same fashion the PRI pillaged Mexico (and as it continues to today). Last week I heard on Chicago NPR's WorldView (an outstanding show, btw) that the US now ranks third in economic disparity and corruption, under Mexico (#1) and Russia. We are going through a dramatic "Mexicanization," which certainly doesn't bode well for our future seeing that Mexico is going through a transformation too, what Margarita calls "Colombiazacion," as the government is being taken over by drug cartels. Frankly, I don't see us too far away from that, it's just that our drug cartels don't peddle in heroin and cocaine but oil and other natural resources, including human beings.

The Chicago Tribune ran a series last week, "Pipeline to Peril," about KBR's subcontracting for third world labor in Iraq. The series focused on twelve Nepalese workers who were kidnapped and executed by insurgents on the road to Baghdad from Jordan. Most had been promised high-paying jobs in luxury Jordanian hotels by labor brokers who took $3,000+ brokerage fees from each of the men in exchange for the "opportunity." The average annual salary in Nepal is about $270, so the families of these men had to borrow a decade's worth of salaries (some at 36% interest) to pay the fee, only to have the men end up in Jordan and told there was no work there after all. It's a horrendous story and not so different from what is happening now in New Orleans, except the Ecuadorian men my friend Lisa met are still alive. Apparently, though, slavery (or at least indentured survitude) is making a come back wherever we're "rebuilding".

Like Herbert, I am shocked when anyone trusts anything Bush says. And frankly I'm insulted when a liberal claims to. When have Bush's words jived with his actions?  Not once! Instead, it is nationalistic rhetoric laced with religiosity delivered on a patriotic, well-lit set, bleeding the language of all meaning through his repetitive use of a handful of words and phrases. Herbert calls the Bush cabal a "regime," which is more appropriate than "administration." Our one-party rule is becoming increasingly similar to those of other totalitarian regimes, which seems to suit the ruling party just fine. They see no disconnect between "democracy" and one-party rule. If Stalin had "state-capitalism," what do we have when the state funnels money from the people to well-connected corporations? Has such a monster been named yet?

I lost hope years ago that Bush et al would suddenly reform and see the light on any issue, let alone the important ones. He "took responsibility" for the government's negligent response to Katrina by acccepting Brownie's resignation then quickly turning a blind eye to Chertoff's hiring of Brownie as a consultant. Apparently Bush knows we are fools. A few mentions in a column or two, and then we're on to the next photo-op. He can do this without worry of ramifications because we are living in a state not so different from other totalitarian regimes where there are no real checks and balances. Last night MSNBC was back on Aruba. You'd have thought we'd left Iraq months ago and all was peaceful around the world, not that there had been more killed in Iraq and Afghanistan yesterday, or that tens of thousands had been killed in an earthquake in Pakistan.

I'll say I was suckered the past couple of weeks into thinking our national attention had changed, that maybe, just maybe, enough people had woken up to the truth to force our news agencies and politicians to start talking about what's important. But perhaps optimism is an American trait, something given to me simply by this accident of birth. Clearly it is irrational in the face of this one-party rule.

I'm in the middle of kitchen redo preparations, which has left me with less time to write. I''ve posted an ad for the cabinets and I've cleaned out half of them. Today I clean out the rest. My cousin Bobby and his wife are coming up tomorrow evening and we get to work on Saturday. I'll post before and after pictures. We don't have all of the wall cabinets in yet (two are missing -- good for me, one of them wasn't in our plan, and since it was the designer's oversight, we don't have to pay for it!), but we have all of the floor cabinets, so I ought to have a working kitchen within a week or so. What an adventure.

I've already got another home improvement project in my sights. I have a new neighbor upstairs and she has no carpets. She gets up about 6 every morning, so now I do too. The sound is unbelievable. I hear the clickety-clack of her heels, of course, but also the opening and closing of drawers, the hyper patter of her yellow lab, the low murmur of her morning television fix. This place has very thin ceilings. I don't know how I'm going to fix it (or how we're going to afford it), but I'm going to start asking around seriously and see if I can get some material prices. Perhaps S and I can do it together next year when he's home. Right now he's at Camp Julien in Kabul which is being torn down now that the Canadians are moving out. He's living in a deconstructed base just as I'm living with a deconstructed kitchen! Soon he'll be returning to his fire base near the border and then it will be time to worry again...

The earth opened up in Pakistan and 20,000 or more are dead. First we offered $100,000 in aid, then we were shamed into giving $50 million, a substantial sum though only one-third of the $148 million we gave in military aid this year. (There is always money for guns and bullets, only less for bottled water and medical supplies). Right now hundreds of thousands of people are sleeping without shelter in a mountainous place that nurtures chilly winds this time of year. Doctors Without Borders has sent teams and supplies and they need our help.

Across the border in Afghanistan, five suicide bombers have blown themselves up in two weeks, a chinook has crashed, and another US soldier has been killed along the eastern border. Iraq is, perennially, Iraq, where every day brings more despair, more tragedy. Most Americans are against that war, but does it matter? The violence continues, more and more people die, more families are torn apart by the deaths of those they love and our president continues to offer empty platitudes, desperate calls for patriotism. He is trying to convince himself, no doubt, just as he is trying to convince us. Doesn't he know we already know the truth?

In Guatemala, the clouds erupted in a flood of tears, leaving hundreds buried in rivers of mud. This time last year the story was drought, showing that April does not own the market on cruelty.

Many of our water-soaked neighbors in Louisiana and Mississippi are still suffering on this Columbus Day, or Indigenous Peoples Day, including the United Houma Nation. Katrina and Rita left nearly 5,000 of their tribal members homeless and many others unable to inhabit their homes. Organizations like Veterans for Peace have been helping them, but not the Red Cross or FEMA, who has only worked with a handful of families so far. You can help them directly here.

On Democracy Now today, the United Houma Nation's Principal Chief, Brenda Dardar-Robichaux, talked about the troubles her tribe has faced these past five weeks and why Christopher Columbus, the Italian adventurer working for the Spanish crown who never set foot on the land that would become the US, should not be honored with a national holiday. "Let's face it," she said, "Columbus was a slave trader and an Indian killer...This shouldn't be a day of celebration, this should be a day of mourning."

And so it is.

I've realized that I'm becoming angry again. I'm not surprised; I'm missing S badly and it seems when I do I lash out at those around me, even those I don't actually know. I've gotten snippy in comments on other blogs (not here, because my snippy comment to one wingnut was appropriate, thank you very much!), and that's not good. I need to find myself again. This afternoon I'm meeting with my former co-workers at the Neighborhood Writing Alliance. We're hoping to find a new location for a workshop that I'll facilitate. Their workshops are brilliant, really. They are free and open to all adults in the city. They're held in neighborhood locations that don't require much travel for the writers. They're based on the idea that "every person is a philosopher" and all work is valid. As a facilitator, I won't "teach" but rather make a safe place for everyone to share their poetry, prose, rants, snippets without fear of ridicule. Later, work by every writer who participates will be published in NWA's quarterly magazine, the Journal of Ordinary Thought, should they want to be published. This little magazine has won two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards (one when I was ED), going against well-known journals like Another Chicago Magazine and Rhino. And in support of this magazine and the workshop, our group will host readings that are free and open to the public, where writers can meet one another, exchange ideas, and share their work with family, friends, and strangers. Cool, huh?

As usual, there's some fine writing floating through cyberspace:

Sam at Feral on loss and laundry (beautiful);

Clayton at Operation Eden on Charity Hospital, New Orleans, and the "Third World version" of America;

Rob at Realtique on cleaning house, rescuing pets, and being harassed by NOPD;

Harry Connick, Jr. at Habitat for Humanity on humanely rebuilding New Orleans;

Yan at Glutter on dissent and censorship, American-style;

Joe the Heretik on the "Tragedy of the Real" in Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan;

and a shout-out to Daniel at All the Kings Horses, whose name and writing I came across at n+1.

Last night I saw Bill Maher's Real Time and Salman Rushdie asked what the difference was between yellow and orange fear, the daily alerts put out by what Rushdie calls Bush's "Ministry of False Alarms." I was shocked to find myself agreeing with nearly everything Andrew "Sully" Sullivan said. Ann Coulter was on too, but really, is there anything to say about her that hasn't already been said? The fact that she's still invited to be on television shows all that's wrong with our country.

I need to erase her face from my memory if I'm ever to get past this angry phase. Temper that heart, girl!

Last night I went to see Luna Negra Dance Theater's performance at Millennium Park featuring my friend Luis' backdrop for the world premiere of Quinceañera, a dance piece about the latin american coming-of-age party for girls on their fifteenth birthdays. The backdrop was beauitful: a lush sunshine dress with a fully opened rose around the waist, the folds and shadows reminding me of the pedals of Georgia O'Keeffe's desert flowers. Luis also created three stand-alone dresses that the dancers slinked up from behind at the beginning of the performance. Along with the Quinceañera piece, there were several others including one about Don Quixote that was commissioned by the Ravinia Festival last year and a fabulous piece called Flabbergast, where couples dressed in mid-century housedresses and ties with trousers moved among bead curtains carrying brightly-colored suitcases. Sometimes the suitcases overwhelmed the dancers, a clear visual metaphor for the difficulties of taking your life with you when you're forced for political or economic reasons to leave your home for a new place.

Just minutes before the show began my friend Lisa called from her home on Napoleon Avenue near Fountainbleu in Mid-City, New Orleans. This afternoon we finally got a chance to talk while she was taking a break from cleaning out her basement. Luckily the floodwaters missed the living area by inches, elevated as it is about eight feet above ground, but the basement was wrecked with debris smashed against the walls and mold crawling through the insulation. She and her roommate are staying with her sister in Metairie (which along with Kenner is coming back again) and driving into town to clean and assess every day. Before the storm, Lisa parked her truck in the neutral ground, the New Orleans name for the parkway separating the north-bound traffic from the south-, hoping that it would be spared. Normally it would have been. During Isidore and Ivan, the neutral grounds of many Uptown boulevards were safe because the waters only rose a feet or so. Of course this storm was different, and the water line on her truck comes just below the top of the vehicle. When she called her insurance company, they settled the claim over the phone based solely on her address. Knowing how much the neighborhood flooded was enough.

Lisa told me that today was a beautiful day in New Orleans, the temperature perfect and the full light of the sun shone down on them while they worked. In all directions, she told me, were piles of debris pushed in front of houses by the waters or stacked there this past week, waiting to be cleared. She drove around the city a little, where she was allowed, and said the place is essentially a ghost town. Most residents still haven't come back in, and it seemed the guard troops were driving out as Lisa was driving in, though she has seen a couple of humvees cruising down Claiborne Avenue.

Lisa's family is originally from Mexico. They moved to Texas several generations ago and then settled in New Orleans during the middle of the last century. Her father speaks Spanish though Lisa does not. This past week her dad met three men from Equador who had been brought over the Mexican/US border by coyotes trafficking in laborers to work in New Orleans. They were hired by a local meat shop owner who wanted them to clean out the coolers sick with rotten steak and chicken breasts, and repair the outside of the building. He told them to cook up some meat and take a couple of drinks from the shop when they asked for food and water, and they were locked in the shop to sleep. After several days of hard labor, the owner refused to pay them, telling them he would call immigration if they didn't work for free. That night after they'd labored for hours the men sneaked out and escaped and found themselves at a latin american market. Lisa's dad met them later and hired them to help them clean out his family's home.

During the eighteenth century New Orleans played a major part in the slave trade. Men and women stolen from their west African homelands were taken to the Caribbean, through the Gulf of Mexico to Veracruz, and then to New Orleans, where they were sold by the French then the Spanish then the French again (and then Americans) to wealthy landowners and homesteaders. New Orleans, "the city that care forgot," became one of the major slave trade ports just as it was home to the most free African-Americans in the country, who helped create a culture world-renowned for America's indigenous music, jazz, and our most distinctive indigenous cuisine. One of the neighborhoods badly flooded by Katrina was Faubourg Tremé, the birthplace of Louis Armstrong and home to the notorious Storyville. It is the oldest, continuous black neighborhood in the United States.

Lisa and I talked about how this one disaster has caused the displacement of so many New Orleanians, scattered as they are across the country (even in rural Arkansas), and how it has simultaneously brought displaced persons like these three men from Ecuador to New Orleans. How will New Orleans change in the coming months, years? When so many of its residents, new and old, are here and there?

I talked to S this morning and he was in somewhat better spirits. He had felt some of the earthquake that struck the Pakistan/India border yesterday, but he had no idea how tragic or devastating it was until I told him. Our conversation was typically short. Perhaps we'll be able to talk longer tomorrow.