This summer has drained & tore, fascinated & freaked....
posted by jeremy on December 16, 2006
Or possibly the impossible debacle of three Chihuahuas fighting over the ragged corpse of a hamster some style-monster apparently dyed hot pink on some unimaginable whim....
Or even, O true story, the riddle of seeing a 400lb. man wrapped in a parachute-sized moo-moo splotched on a bench in Jackson Square belting out such classics as Footloose or American Pie to the instrumental accompaniment of a beat boombox.... The riddle being: Does one laugh or does one just cry?
Some goddam days, this strange bent city is a psychic gorgon glancing flesh to stone, dust, rot.... (The shards of hearts we've had to step over, baby, just to move on.) Carnage isn't just a word, I've found. It has a face, claws, teeth, a shape, many shapes.... It shifts, resonates, penetrates. It has eyes that have no choice but to see what lies before..... and these eyes are your very own, as you stand there before the remnants.... the vaguely house-shaped graves.... of the Lower Ninth Ward seeing, seeing, slowly comprehending what 9ft of rushing debris-ridden water can do....
Exactly. In excruciating detail. The awesome malleability of all varieties of matter.
The surprising shapes that light post, 14in in diameter, can assume.
A car crushed flat with nothing nearby to explain how or why.
A hundred cement stairways leading up to empty air, vacant, no, sheared lots.
How a two-story house can split, almost surgically in its own way, right down the god-fucking center... & how the side with the kitchen floated west....
and how the other side took out the bright green double shotgun 4 houses down on the opposite side of the street.....
and the orange blazes tell you 3 people died there, absorbed into the word: Carnage.
& yet Katrina fades... Each day thru this last winter, spring, summer & fall giving us a lead on what she took, what happened, what failed, who failed, who fell, who slipped away & are still missed by friends, compatriots still.
& each night putting distance between yourself & the images that, at one point, constantly superimposed themselves over how you see this place....
To look up Esplanade Avenue on a cold bright beautiful morning in December of 2006 & not have flashes of the unimaginable tangle that was August 29 2005...
To cruise up Elysian Fields & not even think of where the flood muck began...
To not think of tired aging mothers, too scared to send black sons into a shotgun bray of hair-trigger police, gang-bangers with wide-open permit for vendetta... Mamas wading thru that filth looking for food drops, potable water, rumors of dignified exit...
To not think of the weight of all that those women carried.
To walk Canal & never even consider it as once being the Beach...
To cruise the Ruins, to see how the wild creeps, the swamp flowers gorgeously alien in their neon oddity, creatures resuming the old old schedule of life-without-man, the lush easy spring-back of nature left alone....
& to find a certain & definite beauty in that... A consolation in our demise.
& finally, we're getting there, one by one by two by three, we're leaving the Bitch behind...
& tho the scars will always be there & will ache & burn in the ugly bleak of 3AM...
& tho many many will not yet survive the fallout of all this... Will still be eaten by suicide, murder, insanity, the pure fuckery of blind circumstance, vagaries of race, economy, disaster...
To simply exist in the now... To see the state of things as they are...
Slashed, bent, molded, folded, repaired, desolate, blazed, spared, fine, fucked or no, whatever...
Finally finally finally, to just see what this is: The medium that you must work with, the raw materials that will eventually assume whatever shape you hammer out...
Whatever pattern, song, whatever goddam life you can pull from the chaos.
Whatever it will be, I tell you, it's time to find out... This is my final blog on those days, I almost promise you. From here on out, it's all about now. All about now & now & now.
