excercise

the hurricane's damage seems to have lost its potency for me.
i find myself becoming numb to it the way the 'refugees' around me seem to be.
so, driving home in my own hometome--the place i've lived in since i was about 6--i decided to try imagine what lafayette would look like after the damage i see in chalmette.

like judge perez, johnston street is the main veign of town, an even mix of chains and local businesses,
branching off into suburban neighborhoods, including my own.

i started at the far end, coming back into town.
driving down a fully alive, nightime street. cars on the road with people running errands for the week ahead.
etc.
normal.

imagined myself then just coming back after the 6 weeks when they wouldn't allow anyone back into their neighborhoods.
when the water had only been down for a very short while.
of course, there'd be no power. no street lights, no glowing signs.
no cars on the roads, except those that had been left or abandoned, swept into the middle of the street or front yards.
roofs and signs and whatnot would be debris all over the road, a common sight after a hurricane.
but the whole city, also, covered in black ooze.
like the ghostbusters had finally won the crusade in a heated interdimensional battle.

i passed a car dealership and imagined the lot full of piles of junkers, still with the new price stickers on the windows.
their ordered parking an unintelligble patternless chaos.
thinking of the value of each car. that someone months before would have spent thousands of dollars on, now worthless.

past the ice cream parlor--baskin robins--where we first explored our independence. walking from my friend's house.
empty and deserted. .. even a year later.

which businesses would come back first?
when maybe 5% of the population returned, which ones could afford to come back?
the office depots and kinkos and corporate names so familiar and 'trusted', that you'd think certainly had enough money.
or the locally owned Don's and leBlanc's autoshop.
i passed the Daiquiri hut and knew (proven in chalmette) that bars are the first businesses to come back.
the Daquiri hut would probably be the first sign lit up again on the street.
and then actually being excited when mcdonald's is the second.

driving through, an awareness of the landscape you never had when you just saw the obstacles to the day's errands.
instead, now, seeing the absence of a certain building, now exposing the field behind or the small dip in the ground becoming a resevoir for debris.

turning into the neighborhood. the busy sub-veign that i've come to expect to be caked in xmas lights during the holidays, dark..completely abandoned.
not a single house showing any signs of life.
windows blown out, some still boarded up, but dark all the way through.
cars at one time familiar, tilted up against the wrong neighbors house or tree.

someon'e showy boat, left proudly under the carport,
now floated who knows how many blocks away.

the trees. our neighborhood is old enough to have grand shady trees--they'd all be leafless and dead looking. covered in a layer of grey muck.
same for people's lawns, that they struggled to manicure so their kids had a soft place to lay and watch the clouds, or the dog to poop or even just the neighbors to envy,
black.

nameless street after nameless street of lightless ghost town.
so familiar yet so completely foreign.
so much like a bradbury story about a parrallell dimension.
expecting the ether to just ripple and show the real neighborhood reflected underneath.

but it doesn't. and you're here, whether its another dimension or not.
where do you start.
how do you even begin to decide what parts of your life to try to piece together.
the school accross the street, the churches, grocery stores- every institution and social center completely incapacitated.
the streets not only littered with debree, but even when that finally gets cleared away, every street being pocked with pot holes.

approaching my own block. imagining coming back to the pool at my mom's old house, lifted entirely out of the ground and drifted to the neighbors yard.
driving up to my dad's house. where i have all my art from my whole life stored,
knowing, when you left, that you'd be back in a couple days just like every other time you had to evacuate.
the things we brought to the second story or attic thinking it'd be safe, even if it did flood, strewn about the floor covered in caked mud. waterlogged if at all recognizable.
trying to think of anything valuable that could possibly have survived...and then combing for it in a foot of mud with rubber gloves. and even when you've found the silver...would you ever really eat with it again?

finally coming to terms with having lost everything you've saved and kept for that day far in the future when you'd appreciate just looking back on it.
accepting that that day is now every day cause its only left in your memory.

and you start by just figuring out today, then this week or month. wehre will you live? where will your kids go back to school.
something to do to occupy them so you can focus on dealing.
then once you have any semblence of routine, do you have a job?
and then finally starting to figure out insurance. what are you worth now. are you gonna get anything back of the investments you had before?

months and months later starting to plan, finally, for the future.
starting to figure out which of your neighbors are gonna do what.
who has enough cash to even start to think about fixing their homes, or eventually, when insurance gets dealt with,
who will try to rebuild or who will just pick up and go somewhewre else.
and when you have to make the decisions yourself, you're really just guessing.
no one is actually doing it, you don't know if they're being optamistic, or in denial.
if they'll ever really come back.
or you know your neighborhood isn't coming abck.
the people who made it your neighborhood, who made life bareable and fun, who took years just to find and then you had kids at the same time and informed each other when you found out they'd done something bad at school,
they're not coming back. they're gonna tear down their house. or try to sell it.
how scary too, if you're trying to sell yours, to see the nicest ones in the neighborhood, the ones that had any structure left at all, selling for shit change.

but still, just the ghosts.
driving through the nieghborhoods, even the ones i never knew as normal, or with life in them,
are so freakin eery, block after block after block after block of empty ghost dark dry dusty deserted damaged wreckage.
shells. like locust trails after they demolish a crop, leaving the most recognizable parts of themselves behind.
and just knowing that this is it-this is how its going to be for months and months, life breathing back in so o o o o o
slowly.
life bursting and overflowing everywhere else. why would you ever try to rebuild this from scratch.



yep.
ok.
i remember how it feels again.

now to try to channel that into something more than just the documentary images i've been making.


and so is my task.
for the next week.
i'll be out of the office for a week probably,
going on a wee trip with my mom.
and when i come abck, it'll be the home stretch.
to really see what it is i'm doing here.