How to get me to read the classics.

As we equally enjoy a good story and good shvitz, G and I frequently combine the two--taking turns reading aloud to the other while they bathe. Such was the case two nights ago; me in the tub, he positioned on the posh dais that is the toilet with the lid closed.

We had trouble scaring up something bath-length to read. All our lit magazines were old, tired. News related periodicals were nixed since the whole point of a nice relaxing soak is to temporarily divorce yourself from the horrors of the world. And we'd worked our way through all of our short story collections during baths past, with the exception of one--The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain--which is how it came to be our selection for the evening.

I was disappointed. Not that I dislike Twain. Can you dislike Twain? Not your bag, okay, but...I guess that's my point. Twain just doesn't do it for me. I don't know if it's the trauma I suffered because of him in high school*, or that I have an aversion to folksy American yarn-spinning in general. The former I guess, considering the hours I've clocked listening to A Prairie Home Companion.

Anyway, the prospect of Twain left me sulking in my bubbles; pissed that we so carelessly whipped through all our other bath-time short-story favorites (and didn't acquire new ones). Oh for a little David Sedaris or Cintra Wilson or Lethem; the good old fashioned bath-time fun... shit, don't we have some old New Yorker's laying around at least?

G opened the book and read the titles for me to choose from. I suggested he should pick.

"Okay, let's read this one." he said, and added casually "...it's the story that made my father lose his faith."

Wha?!!

I was blown away. You have to understand the weight of those words. G's dad was no ordinary believer, he was a missionary the first half of his life, dedicated to spreading the word of God in foreign lands. An uber Christian, who, legend has it, mysteriously lost his faith and left the ministry shortly before G's conception. It took him over twenty years to reconcile with God--G's entire child and young adulthood--which is how G came to be a minister's son who has never spent a day of his life in church.

A twenty year separation from God because of a short story? Needless to say, my interest was pretty flipping piqued. I had no idea Twain was so dangerous. So punk rock. I would have paid attention had I known he was a holy muckraker! Hell yeah we're going to read that one.

We poured through the story. And although it was out of the realm of possibility for it to cause non-Christians to lose their faith, we could see how it might cause one who is grappling with their faith to question it. I'm going to send a copy to a nameless friend's mother. And every single member of the Christian Coalition. Just in case.

*trauma = having to read Huckleberry Finn aloud in a predominately African-American 10th grade English class, and having the word 'nigger' feature prominently, without fail if I recall--as if a diabolically designed sociological experiment--in whatever chapter *I* was asked to read.

safe. please.

President Bush headed for his home state as the storm closed in.

"We're now facing another big storm," he said... He added: "There will be no risk of me getting in the way. What I will do is observe."

Lookout Wurtzel...I'm on to your method.

From Zeebah (via, via)...fun with random sentences:

1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

Unrelated, I know, I just got to thinking about how multi-talented and totally amazing my grandma was.

[For extra added fun, I posted my sentence after Zeebah's in my comments to start a bloggy exquisite corpse. Join in! And then we can publish it. Yeah! I know...put something girly and pink on the cover. A lipstick. A feather boa. Because nothing screams "well wrought quality fiction" more than that!]

If it's too loud, you're too old.

My brothah from anothah mutha Mr. Xavier has got this brand spankity new music blog: duchess. It’s like if you took all the wordy stuff that rattles around in your head, and blogged it as sounds. And he lets you listen! For free!

You go now!

If someone asks this is where I'll be...

I love living in New York City. I do. For all the reasons too numerous to list which make this group of islands, quite deservedly, the center of the known universe. The city so nice they named it twice. I can't image life anywhere else.

However when you seriously begin to look into home ownership in this city, it gets a little easier to imagine life elsewhere. For example, this:

is what $350,000 will get you here. And no, it's not a picture of one of the rooms, that's the whole enchilada. Behind the wall in the right of the picture is a galley kitchen no normal sized human being could cook in, across from it a postage stamp bathroom with a toilet and a shower stall. A whopping 250 square feet. A third of a million dollars of which you must put AT LEAST 20% down. Plus, for you non NYC residents, a little som'pin som'pin called "maintenance" which is another few hundred to a few thousand ON TOP of your mortgage. A month. Yes, a month.

This, on the other hand:

is what $350,000 gets you in Monk's hometown. 4,492 square feet, not including the thousand square foot rental apartment in the attic. Five bedrooms, four bathrooms, three half baths, four working fireplaces and a wood stove, completely restored, landmark certified, on just under an acre.

Yeah, I know all the downsides. But still.

I know it's been awhile, near six years, and time can cause our memories to grow hazy; particularly while having to endure such a long, relentless period of shock...so it's understandable that you may have forgotten completely. If that is in fact the case, may I present you with a gentle reminder:

THIS

is what a president looks like.

Silly idealists, you.

According to this snazzy interactive chart-thing at MSNBC, America has set a historical precedent for sucking at natural disaster relief. So stop having all those ridiculous expectations and being so darned critical, already.

Bare witness

Linked from Dana's place, one of the most compelling, appalling, illustrative--there aren't enough words--first hand accounts of the Katrina disaster I have read.

Gotta warn you, it's long. Necessarily, and thankfully so. I printed it out and read it on the train, and was so engrossed I didn't notice someone had peed on my shoe until I got home. Also a true, first-hand account, but less infuriating.

Truthfully I'm just afraid I'm going to stumble upon some fucking 'we are all New Orleanians now' crap, and explode.

Something has switched my default setting from ‘can’t look away’ to ‘I just can’t look anymore’. Going out of my way to ignore the news makes me feel like a monster. Although I have to admit, a much saner, more rational monster.

TMFTML linked to the most wonderful post. Please go read it, while I adjust to my new monsterdom.

My "How will Bush (et al) spin and/or capitalize on the hurricane disaster?" pool.

I'm putting my money on:

A) He will point out how the Department of Homeland Security was completely unprepared to deal with the disaster, but instead of dismantling the program, use that fact as justification for pouring billions more into the agency and give it broader power.

B) Hire Haliburton to provide the...wait...I don't know if I can technically win the pool on this one, since they'd hired them before I'd finished typing the sentence.

C) Advise the use of local churches as temporary school houses for children displaced from their homes. Enforce a no math, no science, no biology, or other Godless manmade hooey taught in a "House of God" clause; thus ensuring an already impoverished, homeless underclass of African Americans stay that way in perpetuity.

D) Appoint John Roberts as chief justice of the Supreme Court...aw, crap. Beat me to the punch again. Boy, that Bush is really freaking quick to move when it's important to him, eh?

E) Scotty McClellen and crew will not answer any of the criticism of the Administration's handling of the disaster and choose instead to focus attention on his whimsical "The President went on vacation, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" t-shirt. Bush, when asked to speak on the topic, will keep saying "hard work" over and over with the by-wrote earnestness of of a toddler's "thank you"--because hey, it doesn't matter if you know what it means, as long as it keeps those presents coming.

Getting less speechless

I know many people feel like it’s a bad comparison, apples/oranges situation (or that it’s just plain poor taste) to bring up 9/11 in relation to the debacle in New Orleans. But I can’t stop focusing on one particular point my brain will not let go of. Indulge me.

At a quarter to nine in the morning on 9/11, I was in my apartment in the Lower East Side two blocks from the Williamsburg Bridge, and was eyewitness to each tower hit and both collapses, and everything that unfolded from those moments on. Ten minutes after the second tower was hit the airports were shut down. Five minutes later, all subway and bus routes heading downtown, eliminating every mass-transit option for the eleven o’clock call for a full evacuation of lower Manhattan. By eleven thirty Triage units had been erected on the West Side highway, supplies were arriving, the police mobilized, the National Guard in tanks rolling down Canal Street. By noon the evacuation of lower Manhattan was nearly complete, and the area surrounding the Trade Center had been cleared—to the very best of their ability--of everyone but emergency workers. I watched the exodus of the evacuees at the base of the bridge. Police were on hand to give directions, instructions, answer questions, and quell fear. The Red Cross handed out bottled water to the tens of thousands of people who were making their way across the bridges on foot. Since nearly everyone had lost service on their cell phone, officials were allowing people who worked in or near the towers to use their satellite phones to call loved ones and let them know they were alive.

…”according to the Coast Guard, perhaps up to 500,000 persons were moved. Later estimates have sometimes reduced the figure to around 300,000. Both seem reasonable given that one ferry company alone did count transporting 158,502 evacuees.”

In three hours. It took three hours to get upwards of a half a million survivors and residents in danger off of an island--BY BOAT AND ON FOOT! After a SURPRISE attack!

And these fuckers have the nerve to blame shift and evade their responsibilities and continue to sit back and do nothing after having had at least a MINIMUM of a week to prepare for the Katrina’s potential touch-down (in a city well-documented as being unable to survive such) and days and days and days to do SOMETHING, ANYTHING AT ALL, after it actually happened.

Sure, some argue that you can’t compare the two. We hadn’t had 9/11 yet, we weren’t at war yet, and our preparedness and relief programs had not yet been stretched as thin. To which I say…EXACTLY, you stu-pid fuck-ing mor-ron. Bush had only been president for ¾ of a year, he hadn’t had time to rape and destroy the programs and institutions created by and supported by previous administrations. We still had a strong National Guard and Army Reserves. We still had FEMA and the Red Cross and a hundred other emergency/disaster organizations operating at their full potential. We still had money in the bank, because we hadn’t given it all away in tax incentives for the rich.

Which is how Georgy could show up at ground zero fucking three days later talking bullshit about bravery and heroes and justice, and pretend like he had a single goddamn thing under control, and claim to have had fuck-all to do with any rescue attempts, relief efforts, and a very successful evacuation of the area…oh, he was able to look like a real winner all right. First rate presidential material. Thanks to the leaders who had already taken care to prepare for such things all those years George was a godless drunk snorting coke off the lids of daddy’s oil barrels.

So what now, Mr. Bush? Will you take credit now? Because six years later there are no coattails left to ride on, and no one to blame but yourself.

How long, to sing this song.

There are times, like now, where I become so sad and outraged, where I feel so helpless, I lose the ability to make any kind of rational sense of things. Sometimes, even to speak. Hence all the quiet around here lately.

G--familiar with my current mental state--calls me at work a few times a day to check in. Thankfully (in my opinion) he's too busy at his work to dedicate himself to full-time monitoring of the unfolding horror in the South, like I do/have/am. "How's it goin', babe?" he asks; first a request for the latest news, second to soothe what he knows will be my reaction to it. Sometimes I can get out a relatively complex sentence like, "It's...it's...it's so bad." The rest of the time all I can muster is a light moan/exhale he knows translates to ‘don’t ask’.

I didn't think it possible, but my hatred for George Bush has reached a new high. Inappropriate, misdirected anger one might say, but it makes sense in my non-verbal lizard brain state. Now obviously the man is not responsible for a hurricane. (Well, not that we can prove.) But he is responsible for so many enormous policy fuck-ups, so many unheeded warnings, so much mind-numbingly bad governing in general, that this, his latest episode of business as usual in the face of disaster--his being at a golf resort to try and talk little old ladies out of their Medicaid while the storm was beating the coastline, and at a "Yea! War!" rally while people in New Orleans were clinging to the last three inches of air in their attics, having it be BIG NEWS instead of a given that he’d have to cut his vacation short and head back to Washington--well, that pushed me over an edge I didn't know was there.

I guess people in the hurricane path were supposed to rest easy knowing FEMA was at the ready. Oh, oops… It’s been dismantled by the Department of Homeland Security. Right. Well the National Guard was on hand, full force, ready to manage the disaster. What's that? They're all where? Iraq? Oh. Right. But thank goodness they completed all those levee repairs in 2002. Huh? Oh they cut the project in 2002. Gee, I guess they’ll have to rely on the other existing disaster preparedness agencies. NO shit, them too?…

...and my hatred grows and grows.

This guy in the next office over, a relative stranger, said the most absurd, evil thing to me today. He was moaning in the lobby about the stifling humidity we've been suffering here in New York. I wiped the sweat off my forehead and agreed it has been unbearable, then mentioned the hurricane and how, you know, in perspective, we have little if nothing to complain about.

"Why, you got family in New Orleans?" he asked.

"No.” I answered.

“Ever been there?”

“No, I never have.”

"Then why do you care?" he said.

Wow. Just…wow. There you have it, my brain said, this is how a George Bush thinks. How the empathy-free, sympathy-free, compassionless assholes who don't give a rat’s ass about anything but their own narrow lives and agendas, think. This is who votes for a George Bush. This is how illegal wars gain support. This is how genocide and rape rooms and famine and preventable disease can exist, and are ignored. Why do I care? With a straight face, totally bewildered by my sadness he asked, Why do I care?

And we wonder why the evacuees have gone mad, shooting at helicopters, looting, rioting. It seems to me you wouldn’t have to sit on a roof watching bodies float by for too long before you’d realize all of the inaction, budget cuts, and lack of preparedness meant frankly? protecting that area from disaster was never really that big of a priority. Given the choice of how and when and where to spend money, other stuff was just a wee more important. Your life doesn’t matter. That’s a frightening realization to have to face in the aftermath of Armageddon: Nobody cared before, and they can’t help you now. You are totally on your own.

Goddamn right I’d pick up a gun.