(no subject)
True to my mother's predictions, the storm none of us were even talking about when it first entered the Gulf really did turn out to be the one that hit us hard. It seems like this storm really came out of nowhere, but it will be a while before any of us forget it now. Thanks to a last minute jut to the east, my house and really the rest of my neighborhood survived without much structural damage and pretty much no flooding. But Jesus Christ...poor, poor New Orleans...I can only hope that the charm and character of the city won't have to be bulldozed and replaced with some Houston strip mall archipelago.
In evacuating, we fled to the nearest point we could find that was out of the storm's path. With no family in the area, that place turned out to be the Mississippi Delta. Greenville, Mississippi was a strange but endearing town, all the more so being that it was refuge from a strong hurricane. The first two days were nervy as I worried about the fate of New Orleans, Destrehan and my own neighborhood. I took lots of walks and tried to call friends to no avail. When I found it hard to sleep at night I would just think of the mid-eighties at Anfield Road...Souness to Dalglish...Dalglish to Rush...Rush....
After the storm had passed, we still couldn't go home and found ourselves making the best use of our time that we could. We stumbled around the Delta visiting civil war battlefields and state parks where my father picked up the habit of having long conversations with inmates who were allowed to work during the days on state grounds. I allowed myself the luxury of eating fish and soon became quite enthused over Mississippi's fried catfish, okra and cold iced tea. I made the friendship of a six year old boy from New Orleans at the hotel who would wait for me to come outside and play his Gameboy with him. I passed the slow afternoons downtown at the William Alexander Percy Library on Main Street reading over Walker Percy and Shelbey Foot books, wondering how this small town had somehow produced so many Pulitzer Prize winning authors.
I'm at home now, and thankful to be here. How I'm going to spend the rest of the semester is up in the air right now. A quick transfer to LSU was on the cards originally but got scrapped due to several reasons (Baton Rouge is a zoo, Ryan is a flake, etc...). Hopefully UNO will be functional by the start of the spring semester. I have had some contact with the local Red Cross, and I hope that at some point I may be doing some work with them. Aside from that, I think I'll be doing a good bit of reading, studying, working (? [MAILBAG?]), perhaps some travelling to Canada, and I may even do some writing. Right now, I really don't know.
Oh, and by the way, I hope all of you morons who thought Bush's foreign policy made any sense realize now just where all the money to pay for foreign wars really comes from. If appropriations funds to Louisiana hadn't been consistently cut over the last few years (to pay for Iraq), I'm sure there would have been money available for necessary strengthening of the levee system and we wouldn't be in this mess. That's all.
In evacuating, we fled to the nearest point we could find that was out of the storm's path. With no family in the area, that place turned out to be the Mississippi Delta. Greenville, Mississippi was a strange but endearing town, all the more so being that it was refuge from a strong hurricane. The first two days were nervy as I worried about the fate of New Orleans, Destrehan and my own neighborhood. I took lots of walks and tried to call friends to no avail. When I found it hard to sleep at night I would just think of the mid-eighties at Anfield Road...Souness to Dalglish...Dalglish to Rush...Rush....
After the storm had passed, we still couldn't go home and found ourselves making the best use of our time that we could. We stumbled around the Delta visiting civil war battlefields and state parks where my father picked up the habit of having long conversations with inmates who were allowed to work during the days on state grounds. I allowed myself the luxury of eating fish and soon became quite enthused over Mississippi's fried catfish, okra and cold iced tea. I made the friendship of a six year old boy from New Orleans at the hotel who would wait for me to come outside and play his Gameboy with him. I passed the slow afternoons downtown at the William Alexander Percy Library on Main Street reading over Walker Percy and Shelbey Foot books, wondering how this small town had somehow produced so many Pulitzer Prize winning authors.
I'm at home now, and thankful to be here. How I'm going to spend the rest of the semester is up in the air right now. A quick transfer to LSU was on the cards originally but got scrapped due to several reasons (Baton Rouge is a zoo, Ryan is a flake, etc...). Hopefully UNO will be functional by the start of the spring semester. I have had some contact with the local Red Cross, and I hope that at some point I may be doing some work with them. Aside from that, I think I'll be doing a good bit of reading, studying, working (? [MAILBAG?]), perhaps some travelling to Canada, and I may even do some writing. Right now, I really don't know.
Oh, and by the way, I hope all of you morons who thought Bush's foreign policy made any sense realize now just where all the money to pay for foreign wars really comes from. If appropriations funds to Louisiana hadn't been consistently cut over the last few years (to pay for Iraq), I'm sure there would have been money available for necessary strengthening of the levee system and we wouldn't be in this mess. That's all.