End

I've decided not to reactivate this web journal. I'll be starting another one soon, at that time I'll provide and appropriate link.

My new blog is here.

Roughly rough

Disaster No. 1603

I remember the bar. I was doing my laundry and the place was one of those pubs where you could get pasta or a tofu sandwich and soup for eight dollars, or a pack of American Spirits for five. The convenience wasn’t too dear to be able to drink and do your laundry at the same time. Luckily there weren’t a lot of people out to wash their pants on Wednesday night.

I’d gone up to the bar to buy a pack of cigarettes. It was essentially me, the bartender and two guys at the bar. I ordered a Blue Moon and sat smoking, staring at the lemon floating in my beer. The boy with the curly hair lit his rollie and raked back his curls. He was somehow gray looking, dark looking. It took me a while to realize that a layer of construction dirt had settled on him and colored him completely.

I’m not sure how it began. Aren’t you supposed to remember those first words? I think I’d seen him before. Stanislaus Madrone was a friend of Edwina’s and she’d known him from the gallery. I’d gone to his opening at Barrister’s a month before and felt a little odd, had a the free red wine the gallery passed out, hadn’t really known anyone other than Edwina who’d invited me. She’d introduced me to a few people who I would never see again. I felt a little out of my element at those gatherings.

He made little towers, sort of boxes. They were not like Joseph Cornell’s but they were. They were like a carpenter’s workshop overtaken with antique gears and screws. Pocket knives and superheroes mixed with old photographs and girls. They had some element of Westermann but were more delicate, less bold.

I think he said, don’t you know Edwina von Hildegard? Aren’t you friends with (…)? And I could remember running into him Sundays at the French Market with June and Giovanni after our Sunday brunches-- him, his dogs, and Rosebud who’d play accordion with the band sometimes. His dogs, I guess they were his dogs, though I thought they were her dogs, would jump up and down and would run all over you like mountain goats. They also smelled a bit, and Baby Pearl would always chew on her brother’s head.

So really I had met him before, but mainly when he was being good. To be truthful the first times I saw him he was wearing an old tattered tweed suit, two tone shoes and a rumpled fedora. His hair was in twin braids Wizard of Oz style. I can remember what I thought of his art, or at least that first impression of it: I remember not understanding it. It was like listening to a story where you don’t know all of the characters, don’t quite understand what makes them important, or looking through someone else’s family portraits.

I said yes, that I’d known Edwina and some of the other kids from that café round the corner. He told me that he wasn’t very fond of the owners of that café, for reasons I’d already known having to do with Rosebud’s being sick. He told me the first time that he had seen Edwina’s work he had thought that she was much older.

The bartender gave him a bit of the pizza that she couldn’t finish. I think that she had teased him about eating only beans and rice or some other bizarre eating habit that he had fallen into. Stanislaus was too skinny. He would insist to me later that he only ever ate beans and rice though I had never seen him eat either of those things in front of me.

My laundry had finished. I walked out to my car and told him that we could talk some more outside. It was a bit stuffy and loud inside. It was one of those summer nights in New Orleans where the darkness makes the city a little cooler at night and the heat and humidity haven’t conspired to make it insufferable at all hours of the day. I sat on the curb. The pavement was still as warm as if it were mid-afternoon.

Anyway it was a beautiful clear night. The sky was indigo and deep and dark, not clouded yet. We were on the corner of Touro and Royal streets. He pulled two bottles of Moosehead out of his backpack and offered me one, promptly opening them with his lighter. I took it and drank with him. I’m not sure what I thought then. Perhaps that he was interesting or that I was bored and he seemed friendly. His comments were personal and self-reflective. He said, I don’t think that it’s terrible to have a drink after work. He told me that he dismantled houses all day, every day, and that his work drained every ounce of energy out of him and that by the end of the day he could see what he had done and that was most important, that he had done something every day and that he knew what it was, that he had completed something.

I told him that I was not exactly in that position at all, that perhaps I was in the opposite position of waiting and reading; reading novels and books about architecture and cultural theory, checking books out to patrons, but mainly telling them that the second floor of the library had been closed for renovations. We drank beer and stared at the stars. I told him that I had to go soon, you know, to get to work in the morning and fold my clothes. And he said, yeah, that he had to wake up early too to be at the job site, so he understood. I said that we should perhaps meet again but that if he wanted to and that it was very nice to have spoken with him.

He said, yes Marguerite Clark, you are a very neat girl and I like running around in your brain, and then he kissed my hand and said good night and rode off into the distance on his white bike.

I want to make something very clear. This was all an accident and I really didn’t want this to happen. I wanted to be alone, really, I wanted to work on my drawings, keep my house clean, and spend some more time visiting with friends. I don’t go to bars really. I simply wanted to do the simple and adult things one does alone.

Also

I've been noticing the overall gloominess of my own recent posts and I think that perhaps it would be a good time to inform the three people that are reading this that I'm actually okay, and that is just a rough patch. You know, it happens to everyone and I'm very lucky, actually.

As it is currently I'm still looking for housing in Oakland. Wish me luck. If things don't work out there are certainly other places. I just want somewhere to call home, where I can get a job and get settled, do some volunteer work, go to the Quakers. You know.

Bad times

I've decided not to go back to the library. It's upsetting. Here.

nevermind

I'm sitting in Berkeley. I think it's only 12.30 in the am. I've just finished a performance with the band and I'm going to be very shortly be eating some analog "chicken" nuggets. So anyway, I think that the show went well but that I'd like to get paid and that I miss the rest of our band (banjo, violin, clarinet, string bass). We're usually a seven piece but tonight we were a four piece and it felt a little naked being up there with a violin and string bass to hide behind.

I hate to say it, but it seems like the only people that understand where I'm coming from are other people from New Orleans. It makes for a very anti-social and odd situation. Anyway I was in the Berkeley Good Will and I ran into a friend from the ninth ward whose name is either Low Rent or Laurent depending on who you ask. So he's spent his money on a school bus which he is currently living in and driving around the Bay Area. I've shacked up with my friend Liz (fellow evacuee) & her mom who is infinitely patient, seems to find me mildly amusing and has an incomprehensible patience for rootless cosmopolitan scumbags like me. So Laurent was telling me that he's pretty much given up in his house in nola (he lived in a sort of shack like shelter, I mean really most birdhouses are built better these days...). I've got the same situation. The week of the hurricane my landlord Mr. Edwards was in the hospital and I haven't heard from him since. My apartment building was like some kind of Charles Dickens bullshit, ie. random people sleeping in the hallways, victorian plumbing, leaking roof, and one functional burner on the stove before the hurricane. So I'd be surprised if the roof wasn't collapsed and the windows weren't busted.

The New Orleans Public has been calling me to ask if I'll be coming back and if I need housing, but I don't know what I want. I'd like to run away and bury myself in some other thing completely, perhaps a new life some where else. My impulses tell me escape, escape! and never go back. But part of my will always be in that wreck of a small town city, because it has shaped so much of how I perceive my everyday surroundings. You know, I want to run because there was nothing for me there, even before the disaster. The jobs were horrible, the city government was corrupt, racism, classism, the failure of the public educational system and juvenile crime, all of it. Life was just a sort of violent expendable thing. The city was a disaster before the disaster.

Everyone I know just wants to go back home, but I don't think it will ever be the same. Liz tells me a helicopter crashed in front of her man's house. One of my best friends, her apartment flooded to the ceiling and all of her things are covered with black mold. Halliburton will probably put a no bid contract on rebuilding the city. Meanwhile the City of New Orleans wants me to come back and work part time for the library system when there's no potable/bathable water, the school system's been liquidated, and the tourism industry will be dead for the next year at least.

Hyerborean

I've just returned to Schaumburg, Illinois, my childhood home. My parents have very generously offered to let me stay with them for a little bit until I can find my druthers. For right now I've been constantly in a strange state of mental flux, neither quite ready to accept what is going on down south or properly understanding it.

In Houston we were constantly watching the reports of Katrina on CNN. The hurricane sent sheets of rain down. Reporters seemed to be offering us the usual disaster pornography. At one point I watched a correspondent run into a parking garage, then out into a doorway in the rain, then duck next to a garbage can on Canal Street and throw a piece of metal debris down the street, commenting that yes in deed the rain was very heavy and the wind was very fast.

So as I'm siting here, in my old bedroom, the NPR station is playing brass band music. At the time, well in nola, I'd never liked it. It was sort of on par with Mardi Gras music and "When the Saints Go Marching In." Now I can't get over how lonely and sad it makes me feel. I mean, you're not supposed to feel melancholy listening to Ernie K. Doe or the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, but I can't help wondering if all of my very familiar surroundings, my home up until nine days ago, has become some artifact.

My boss at the library called my cell and left a message. We hadn't technically lost our jobs, but we couldn't work at our branch.

Everyone was talking to me about the looters and I didn't want to talk about it. I mean who gives a fuck! I would be going crazy if I'd been left to die in a city with no aid in sight, I'd be looting too. It's amazing how the mainstream media has the power to disassociate the effects and causes.

In the papers we see photographs of people dying in the street, of the tragedy, but very little was being said about why and how we reached that state. It seems like what I heard being reported was something to the effect of "Look at this tragedy! Look at the sadness, how shocking, how sudden!" Not "Where is the government? Why is this happening to people days after the hurricane? How does this qualify as an immediate response to devastating emergency?"

Michael Moore tracks Bush to San Diego the day after the hurricane. I'm reminded of that scene in Fahrenheit 911 with the president joking in front of a well dressed dinner full of supporters. How different we were. We, being New Orleans. The media coverage exposes so many of the ugliest parts of the American mind-- assumptions about the regional South, and anxieties about race and class parcelled along with that. I defy anyone to tell me that the word "looters" hasn't just become a stand-in term for black youth in American media coverage. Look at the representation in photographs. They're depicting us like we're savages. I mean isn't it the same old colonial mind trick, that we're not civilized that we're lawless, that we're other. And that somehow allows them to justify our mistreatment and neglect.

I am so angry! The only difference between me and the people who didn't evacuate was a car, friends out of town, and a credit card. I wonder about all the people who came into the library, or the bike punks I know. Where are they, did they make it out? Fuck this shit!

Houston and dark water

I am still in Houston deciding what to do. It has taken me a while to fully realise the very long-term consequences of what seemed like just another storm in yet another hurricane season in nola.

I just dropped my friend Austin off at the bus-stop. He has a tech job. It seems like unlike most of the other jobs in the city, he'll be back to working with only a brief lapse in his regular schedule. He'll be living in Austin, things opened up for him pretty quickly there and he'll be in his new apartment by tonight.

I was employed with the city part time, waiting to be moved to full-time LA1 in light of some happy coincidences. I'm not really looking forward to starting it again and scooting back up to where I was before the disaster. I didn't take anything with me, just my cello, my car, some bank paperwork, cash, and some changes of clothes. ...

Hey asshole, why'd ya hafta hit my car?

So dudes, check it out. Some dipshit totally hit my car this morning while I was inside delivering the savory and delicious homemade cream cheeses that I make for my coffeeshop. Oh the folly! Oh the savagery and remorselessness of it all. This is the worst thing that has ever happened in the history of everything ever! WHHHHHhhyyyyy! No one has ever been as sad as I am right now. Look upon me and know that no matter who you are, wherever you are, your life is pretty fuckin sweet compared to mine. No wait, don't look at me, I am too pathetic and pitiable to be looked upon. YYyyarrrrg! Whhhyyy! Sweet oblivian, embrace me...

Okay. My mom said I should put some tape on it or something. I might. Well I probably will.

I had a very strange dream

The other night I had a dream about Chieu Ha Do the other night. It was a very nice dream but very strange. It was like I was in Brooklyn again. I walked into their store, her and her husband's. The mood was restrained, but there were all of these people in the store buying groceries. They had so many things to buy there. The store was bigger. There were lots of wooden crates full of fresh vegetables and other produce, which they never sold at the store in my building. It wasn't a liquor and convenience store but a real grocery. I walked in and was looking at avocadoes, all of them were cut in half and very green. The shelf under it had these small boxes of a strange Vietnamese drink that I'd never had.

I approached the counter to pay for my things and she was there working behind the counter with her husband. I said, you look just like her. I thought you... She smiled and shook her head and said that she was her sister. I apologized and said that the store looked really nice and that it was nice to see it so full and then left.

...

In real life her husband was I think cleaning up the store the other night. One last time. I don't think he'll open the store up again. I wouldn't. It's really terrible to think that his wife died there in my building, in his store while he was working in the kitchen. It's horrible.

I guess I'm feeling like talking about it a little more, since other people have moved into my house. I plan to leave the city before I turn 25 which will be in May 2006. Brooklyn is a really beautiful place. So is Chicago (even though it is cold). I would really love to live in Europe but that connection hasn't made itself clear yet. I'm tired of the violence, conservativism, and poverty. I'm tired of feeling desperate. I've had to scam and be scammed so much. I'm exhausted.

The other day the store was robbed while Drue was working. She can't work nights anymore. Her nerves are shot.

I was changing my flat on Decatur by Canal at 3 am on a Saturday night after the Macrosick show. Some random guy, his name is Geoff and he is actually a very good person, offered to help me change my tire. I was a little nervous because I was wearing something scandalous, but he was telling me about how he was studying a master's in public administration and wanted to join the FBI or work for Homeland Security.

While this is happening a man gets out of his car, runs up Decatur and starts pushing and hitting this lady. She starts screaming and crying for help while he's dragging her toward the car. I tell him to stop it. He doesn't talk to me, but tells Geoff that he should change the fucking tire and mind his fucking business. I look at the tire iron next to me on the ground and think things I shouldn't think. I get up and say that I'm calling the cops. He leaves. I call a cab for her but she wanders off into the night.

Geoff tells me she was pregnant. I say, no way, I thought it was just a little belly. He says she told him 2 months.

It's been a little difficult for me to relate to others.

I suppose I was pretty close to beating a stranger with a tire iron the other night while accompanied by a future federal agent. Swell.