2005-08-30
High Tide
I've become riveted by the 24 hour coverage of Hurricane Katrina.
I'm pretty sure that Steve Rakers was right - the end really is near.
Think about it: It's 97 degrees and you are standing on your roof. All you can see around your roof is the glare from the sun hitting the standing, grey water that's lapping at the top of your home's front door. Your city's sewer system has flooded, so in addition to the dead vermin, there's literally shit in the standing water that has filled your house.
And I don't mean filled it like, "Oh, honey. The basement flooded."
I mean filled like the flood scene in 'O Brother Where Art Thou?' Your house, were it not bolted to the ground, would float away into the woods.
Mon Dieu.
I can barely imagine. Summers in the town where I grew up were no more pleasant than the humid heat of Monsoon Season here. Summer was wet-hot and it smelled like a combination of animal shit, tar that was used to lay gravel on the roads, and the chemicals that the city sprayed to try to control the mosquitoes. You spent the entire summer itching from chiggers and mosquito bites and poison oak and the rot of being damp ALL THE TIME. Just thinking about it makes me itch on my ankles and my neck.
Now make that summer exponentially more uncomfortable by removing electricity and opening the sewers to flow into the city where sea water and lake water have mixed with river water to make a new body of water that happens to be filled with animal and insect bodies.
It's just misery and destruction and I can not imagine what it must be like to not have been able to get out before it all happened.
Of course the poor people were the ones who couldn't get out of the cities where evacuation was ordered. The people who probably prayed every night that nothing would happen to their uninsured vehicles and their 3 valuables - a photo album, a baby spoon, and a pearl necklace.
The airports in New Orleans are underwater.
THE AIRPORTS.
UNDER WATER.
Think about it.
I remember the flood of 1993 in St. Louis. It was surreal to drive because you'd look out over the fields and see red or green rooftops but nothing else. When you got to the Arch, in downtwon St. Louis, the water from the Mississippi River was touching the feet of the monument. I went to a Steve Miller Band concert at Riverport Amphitheatre in St. Louis, right in the midst of the flood. That night, it started raining while we were at the concert and right around the time we got in the Jeeo to go home, following all of the other cars out of the congested parking lot, we heard on the radio that the second-to-last bridge from Missouri to Illinois closed before we could get across it to get home. My friend Jason and I ended up driving really far North, driving into a night along the Mississippi when all you could see were taillights and the black reflections of taillights in the water.
I think about the flooding down South and I'm sort of blown away by it. The devastation of a flood is kind of forever, you know? You never, ever get to clean up your house when it's been under 20 feet of water for 3 days or a week or whatever. Your car isn't going to be the same after it's carried away by rushing water and gets banked on the roof of a storage facility.
If you're lucky, you are stuck in a hotel in Houston and you're only pretty sure that your house is underwater, as opposed to the unlucky who are wading to the nearest shelter as carefully as possible. The unlucky people are crowded into the roofless Superdome, or too far away from whatever shelters downtown Mobile can provide. They are sitting on their rooftops, hoping they didn't miss the chance to wave at an NBC camera man in a helicopter while they dozed off, surrounded by the stick of rat carcass and raw sewage and being bitten repeatedly by mosquitoes and flies.
I'm obsessed with the weather situation in the South.
I'm pretty sure it's just one more omen regarding the End and it's proximity. I'll never be one of those people who jumps on some prediction of the end of time but I would totally not be surprised if Jesus Himself appeared to someone currently huddled on his or her roof and said, "Sweet Child of Mine, you are my chosen lamb so dive on off your roof and take my hand so I can pull you up into Heaven."
Hell, even I would go to Jesus in those circumstances.
But back on subject? I can buy it. If the scientific end of the planet is near, or the Rapture is actually coming... I wouldn't be surprised.
I'm taken aback on a daily basis and I'm naive, I know that.
And I never travel or anything but the truth is that there's so much out of control, you know? There's all this pressure and it has to give way sometime.
Or dry up and become a callous.
Either way, the blister that I feel like I live in has got to be taken care of. Maybe it'll dry up on its own and maybe there is some gigantic hand in the sky that will peel off the top layer of skin and let all the blister juice spill.... I'm not gonna be surprised when either happens.
I also wouldn't be surprised if nothing happens.
Hell, nothing has been happening for the last several centuries, or at least from the American perspective of ego-centrism, nothing has happened over the last several centuries. Americans like to think that for the last several centuries, we have been the biggest and brightest thing in the Universe and therefore entitled to the biggest tool of transport. This year it's the SUV but in 1705, we had the biggest horse and in 1605, the biggest boat, and in 1505, the biggest serf.
And all of that was right here because America was founded by Columbus in the year 1.
And it will be unfounded by Bush in the year 2005, when natural resources are spent beyond replenishment and when the angry natural disasters that occur with the course of time call on us, we'll have nothing to tape over the next blister that is peeled for us.
God I hate it when bloggers get all political.
Whatevski.
I'm trying to talk by bff into going to Laguna Beach when she comes to visit me in October. It's proabably a 7 hour drive but hi?
It's Laguna� aka Mecca.
I will say this� we ca;t discuss LC v.Kristin anymore because my life is so empty that I take this stuff very, very seriously. I truly feel like Kristin is one of the most interesting and unique ideas on TV and that LC is not. I can't take my bff making fun of my number one source for entertainment and I'm not even kidding.
Sad?
Sure.
But I love that show and I might be Kristin Cavalleri's Number One Fan and all I want it to see her and Stephen on again, as opposed to the current off again. Is that so much to ask? In a time of famine and disease, is that really so much to ask?
arizonasarah at 7:50 a.m.