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.