Lookin' Up

The following is a short story I wrote for an English assignment on metafiction. It borrows the style of a piece we read in class, though I'll be damned if I can remember the name of that story now.

Lookin' Up

“I don't know why you even ask me about momma now. Been dead six years. Ain't no use in digging up bones.” Emily sighed and dropped the dishcloth she'd been washing with. “Even if I did pull out my shovel and start, it's not like she ever let me near her long enough to know anyways.”

“C'mon, now, you know she tried. Don't you? She never...” The words were cut short before they had a chance to be aired.

“Yeah, she never. That's just all there was to it. She never tried to have anything to do with me unless it was to get me out of the way.” Bitterness soaked every word.

“She never once kept me home. Always just sent me away til she needed me to do something for her.”

“That wasn't the way of it.”

“Wasn't it though?” Emily turned back to the sink full of dishes and slowly began to run the rough cotton dishcloth over the soiled surfaces under her hands. The distant fog of a forgotten time rolled into her eyes as she stared past the kitchen window. Her voice came floating out soft and low like the rumble of thunder on the horizon as she began to remember.

“You know, I must've been just over the age of remembering, it was so long ago. I can see it – like pictures gone all old and yellow, creased and worn around the edge – just snapshots one or two at a time. All I'd known, all I'd had... when they tell me I have to go home. Just out of no where one day. You're going home. Wasn't nobody listening while I cried. I was home, but they send me away to this woman who says she's my momma.

Three days of dust and dirt on that bus. Young as I was, nothing but the note the ticket man had pinned to my shirt and a grubby paper sack of soggy sandwiches. Finally the driver who'd watched over me came and said it was time to get down. I stepped off into the heat and you know the first thing she said to me? 'Quit walking like a dog been beat too much.' Ain't forgot that my entire life.”

She fell silent a while longer, still swiping at the same dish, oblivious to the fact that it'd been clean since before she started. She seemed to be lost that fog of hers, unable to escape back to this place she'd made for herself. Her next thoughts rushed forth with the sharp crack of lighting in a tree.

“Even when she had me home, she didn't want me around. Sent me off to that school, they called it. Was nothing more than a pen full of dirty kids too poor and too coarse to go to proper care. Might as well just been cattle. I begged her please. Please don't leave me there, let's go anywhere else, but she always sighed and asked me if I thought money grew on a tree in the backyard. Learned fast not to cry after her when she left. That old fat cow that sat watch over the pen would smack you if you went to crying.

When I got too old to stay with the rest of the herd, it was off to the hospital. Horrid green place that always smelled of ether. Don't how they thought they were gonna get us better. Didn't see a kid in there that was sick for anything but love. But they still sent us off to 'treatment' in the ice baths and gave us pills to make us 'calm'. Just another cattle pen as far as I saw. When the baths and drugs didn't keep us in with the others, there was always isolation. Long hours strapped to a white bed in a white room. No one to see or talk to.

Of course, she made a show of it, being there on the 'Parent's Weekends'. She never came up with the regular parents. The ones who genuinely thought their babies where sick. No, she stood underneath the balcony with the ones that pretended that the hospital said they couldn't come. But we knew different when we watched other kids wrapped up in the arms of their sobbing mothers who cried even harder when the orderly came to tell them it was time to go. We knew we only had each other. Had to be careful about keeping each other company though. If the doctor found out he'd strap you to the white bed long enough to move your friends to another part of the hospital where you couldn't see them.” She paused long enough to heave another sigh that had the sound of wind rustling tall grass. She didn't seem to notice that the dish water had long gone cold and sud-less. Softly, the next set of words began to fall from her lips.

“When Susan got old enough to be trouble, she finally sent for me to come home. There'd never be a cattle pen for dear little Susan, I was to be her nanny and servant. Even when it was time for me to go to school, she'd find some reason and I'd stay home, taking care of Susan or the newest baby. Once when I was really sick, I made up a game to play with the boxes of things she'd brought for me to sort and clean in my sickbed. Only time I ever got to play it again was when Susan wanted to play.” Emily rinsed the dish and found a cast iron pan beneath the swirling murk in the fresh white sink. She circled the cloth around it slowly at first, then began a more furious scrubbing, as if to scour away the blackness of it. Suddenly her voice rushed forward in a pounding torrent.

“It was only when the other kids went off to school that she finally let me go back to school proper. Waited for her to call me home when Ronnie was weaned, but I think the teacher visiting scared her. Think she knew then that she couldn't call me back again. Not after I won the show at school. Never even bothered to come to that show. Never said a word about after it was done. Like it'd never happened. Like I'd never done nothing to be proud of in my life. Been one of the others, she'd have been there. So I got on my way out, and wasn't nothing going to stop me. I got out fast as I could after that. Ran off and joined a show. Put food on my table from it. Made my family and never once sent my babies away. I did my life different. Wasn't going to be her, not for nothing. Even in the last years, when she came round begging for me to let her take them to see the ocean on her way to Susan's, I never sent my babies away. Never cared a lick for me. Just stood at that old iron of hers telling me not to be the dress on the board. Not one thought in her head that she'd been ironing me for my whole life. Just a crease to get over.” The pan slipped from her hands and fell into the sink, splashing water everywhere and breaking the plate hiding underneath the brown, greasy surface. She cursed something foul at the pan before carefully fishing for the broken pieces. Her hands stopped for a moment while another thought breezed across her mind.

“Sometimes wonder if I got on the wrong bus that morning. Got on the wrong bus and took the long ride. Wasn't no driver, was the ferry man. Was that old ferry man took my coins and left me on the other bank. Lord knows I never saw a single day of grace in that damn house.” She threw a hot look over her shoulder before collecting the rest of the plate in her worn hands. There was a slight pink tinge to the water that ran down between her fingers and collected in a small pool on the spotless counter top. If she knew her skin had been breached, she gave no sign of it. The fog lifted in an instant, leaving her voice cold and stiff as it came across the kitchen.

“You better get on home before your daddy gets back. He'll be madder than wet cat if he finds you here.” She turned back to the sink, nothing more than a gray silhouette against the bright light streaming through the window. Age and time had made her even thinner than she'd ever been, and creases laid heavily on her face. She looked more than a little like her mother had. No doubt the rigors of life would continue the progression.

“I love you, Em.”

Part One

I had put this post on hold, being unsure that anyone would be interested in anything I had to say, but after the response to the last post, I'm dragging it out and posting it. A good bit of what I have to say has already been said by a number of people in a number of other places, but that's my fault for sitting on the post rather than writing and publishing as soon as the address was made. Enough stalling. I give you: my response to President Obama.

Madame Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, and the First Lady of the United States:

I’ve come here tonight not only to address the distinguished men and women in this great chamber, but to speak frankly and directly to the men and women who sent us here.

Let's be easy on that use of "distinguished" there. If you mean gray hairs and scandals involving sex, then go right ahead and use that word. If you mean made conspicuous by excellence, then go back to your thesaurus.

What is required now is for this country to pull together, confront boldly the challenges we face, and take responsibility for our future once more.

Mr. President, have you actually met the American people? I'm not talking about the plastic, plastered-smile asskissers that attend your fundraisers in an attempt to see and be seen, I mean the American people. The people who, at this moment, are farting into a knock-off Barcalounger, stuffing their faces with greasy fast food offerings, swilling it down with cheap beer and laughing their fat, lard filled asses off at a guy getting kicked in the nuts on MTV.

These people are not watching your speech, these people are grousing that you have interrupted their night of reality programming. They are frighteningly the majority it seems. The only time these people pull together is when you put them all on the same truck at the tractor pull. The only confrontation you'll get from them is when you challenge them to leash their dogs or move their truck. Responsibility? Unknown concept. Personal responsibility? Most of these people can't handle personal hygiene! Don't think they're going away. Don't be fooled into the notion that the more intelligent will prevail, because these dumbasses are out-breeding the intelligent population at a rate that would make rabbits swoon.

Now, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that for too long, we have not always met these responsibilities – as a government or as a people. I say this not to lay blame or look backwards, but because it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament.

Nice way to ay-lay lame-bay while they're not ooking-lay. Seriously? The few people who are watching this are completely aware of what you just did there. Score one for insulting my intelligence.

In other words, we have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election. A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.

Congratulations, you just described the American Way. We are a land of people who do what's easy and fast. If you don't believe me, try this. Take a mental drive from your current location to the nearest public library. How many locations of McDonald's, Burger King, and Starbucks did you pass on that little tour? How many drive-thrus of other services?

And with a plan of this scale comes enormous responsibility to get it right.

That's right, rule three of speech writing: if you feel you may lose the crowd, paraphrase Stan Lee.

And we have created a new website called recovery.gov so that every American can find out how and where their money is being spent.

Because if it's on the internet, IT MUST BE TRUE!!

Second, we have launched a housing plan that will help responsible families facing the threat of foreclosure lower their monthly payments and re-finance their mortgages. It’s a plan that won’t help speculators or that neighbor down the street who bought a house he could never hope to afford, but it will help millions of Americans who are struggling with declining home values – Americans who will now be able to take advantage of the lower interest rates that this plan has already helped bring about. In fact, the average family who re-finances today can save nearly $2000 per year on their mortgage.

Whee! Refinance! You'll save money that way! At least, you will if you can afford to cough up the $6000 - $10,000 USD that will be required for a new appraisal, bank fees and other assorted costs involved in securing a new loan. So... is the Federal government providing the funds for that? I seriously doubt it. Banks don't want to help anyone who pays their bills on time. They don't make the extra money from late fees and penalties that way. If you pay on time, you're a deadbeat as far as the bank is concerned.

This time, CEOs won’t be able to use taxpayer money to pad their paychecks or buy fancy drapes or disappear on a private jet. Those days are over.

Yeah, call me when the First Lady decides to forgo redecorating the living quarters of the White House and when you no longer jet off to Chicago on Air Force One.

But I also know that in a time of crisis, we cannot afford to govern out of anger, or yield to the politics of the moment.

So is that why you singled out CEOs just moments earlier? Or is that why you're standing over the bank bailout money shaking your finger? You keep saying that it's about helping people. Which people? The people who didn't take enough personal responsibility to walk away from a loan they couldn't afford when times where good, much less when things got tough? I'm sure there are people out there who have been fiscally responsible and are still honestly struggling through no fault of there own, but the people I'm actually seeing are the ones who defaulted on their mortgages in Le Triomphe because they just had to have that new home in that fabulous see and be seen community, River Ranch.

Seriously, if you live in this area, take the time to go look up the records on Le Triomphe and River Ranch. A large number of the people you have entrusted with your money, either through election or through hiring them for highly professional services, bought homes they couldn't afford with money they didn't have and couldn't afford to pay back simply because their old half million dollar estate in Le Triomphe was not as "now" as the half million dollar properties in River Ranch. If you don't live here, look around your own municipality, I'm willing to bet it happened there too.

That is our responsibility.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

In the midst of civil war, we laid railroad tracks from one coast to another that spurred commerce and industry.

From Wikipedia: "Every Southern state subsidized railroads, which modernizers felt could haul the South out of isolation and poverty. Millions of dollars in bonds and subsidies were fraudulently pocketed. One ring in North Carolina spent $200,000 in bribing the legislature and obtained millions in state money for its railroads. Instead of building new track, however, it used the funds to speculate in bonds, reward friends with extravagant fees, and enjoy lavish trips to Europe."

From the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution came a system of public high schools that prepared our citizens for a new age.

Other than the public outcry over child labor that removed children from the factory and placed them into the classroom, I do not see the parallel here. Is this one of those "yoga" examples? It seems a little stretched.

In the wake of war and depression, the GI Bill sent a generation to college and created the largest middle-class in history.

Actually, I'm pretty sure it was all of the post-war fucking that created the largest middle-class in history. Soldiers coming home from wet, sloppy, cold holes they had to share with other men to warm, wet, willing holes they could have to themselves. Not to mention the fact that your average GI returning from WWII had nothing to spend his paycheck on the entire time he was deployed, which provided a strong financial base to start a life from and that any business in town was more than happy to hire a fine, respectable, hard-working soldier.

And a twilight struggle for freedom led to a nation of highways, an American on the moon, and an explosion of technology that still shapes our world.

While I'm not sure where he's pulling "twilight" from other than to pick up on a choice, hot word floating around in the popular culture right now, I have to give him this one. Fear of getting our asses nuked built escape routes and fear that those damn Commies would out-do us put American men on the moon. However, he did leave out Roddenberry. Gene Roddenberry is responsible for more of the technology floating around our world than anything NASA ever produced. Your cell phone? Thank Roddenberry. Touch screen kiosk? Thank Roddenberry.

But to truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy. So I ask this Congress to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America. And to support that innovation, we will invest fifteen billion dollars a year to develop technologies like wind power and solar power; advanced biofuels, clean coal, and more fuel-efficient cars and trucks built right here in America.

Oh boy, where do I begin?

Let's start with 1992. In 1992, my mother brought home a brand new, clean, shiny Honda Civic VX. Oh, you've never heard of the VX? I'm surprised. You see, in 1992 this vehicle clocked 40mpg in the city and 70mpg on the highway. What happened to the VX model? We don't know. They were pulled off the market and never seen again. We would not see another 40mpg vehicle until nine years later, with the release of the Toyota Prius in 2001.

Next we have 1996 when General Motors leased the EV1 to a number of individuals in Arizona and California. The leasees loved these vehicles and begged GM to reconsider the "no purchase" clause of the lease. GM refused and pulled the all electric vehicle, citing that it could not sell enough to be profitable. Wall Street deemed the pursuit a failure and the rest of the industry turned their back on the production of electric vehicles. These days, GM is looking at financial failure and pinning all of their hopes on the EV1's successor, the Chevy Volt. Let's see how GM and the President feel when the public becomes aware of "Who Killed the Electric Car?".

Digest what I've given you so far while I clean up the next portion: Health Care reform. Goodnight.

Louisiana Hurricanes (not the football team)

The following passages are re-worked excerpts from personal journal entries. After what I've seen and heard over the last few days, I felt they were warranted.

[Edited for clarification 3:00pm CST, February 26, 2009]

This first entry was written following a breakdown or "freak out", as I like to call it, concerning everything I had witnessed during and after Hurricane Katrina. Being a resident of south Louisiana, I did not watch the events unfold on a television screen far away from the action (the exception being WDSU. Thank $deity for WDSU!). For myself and my loved ones, everything came to pass over frantic telephone calls and various evacuation "shelters".

My best friend, a child of NOLA born and raised, was a nursing student at the time. The call went out for as many capable volunteers as could be found to report to the Cajundome and assist with incoming evacuees from the waters that had engulfed the city we loved. We answered, and on the overnight shift she assisted in the care of the sick and infirm while I was stationed at an "intake" post where all arrivals were "processed".

The events described below are just a small sample of what we dealt with in our many days of volunteering before the Red Cross huffed in and clusterfucked the whole operation.

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Re: Saturday night/Sunday morning's freak out.

It would be easy to shrug it off as being a drunken ass but I can't. I royally freaked out. For crying out loud, I texted [person] in the middle of it, in the middle of the night, just to reach out for someone who might have the slightest clue about the magnitude of what I'd witnessed. That bitch was nearly four years ago. I didn't have that large of a part to play in the events that unfolded, but I'm not over it. I'm not over holding an old man's hand as his life slipped away. I'm not over children who should be laughing and playing clustered together in whispers and haunted looks more befitting a funeral parlor. I'm not over cutting the reeking clothes off a young mother whose eyes don't reflect that she is registering anything around her while her three small, frightened children cling to her body in silent desperation. I am not fucking over it. Who the hell could be?

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This second entry came about following a viewing of the February 25th episode of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart". I suppose I should thank Mr. Stewart for making me want to hit him because he drove home what the rest of the US seems to think of south Louisiana.

• All of Louisiana is New Orleans. Seriously, check the map. There is nothing else here. Absolutely all of Louisiana's population is contained within metropolitan New Orleans.
• No one in Louisiana can get by without sticking their hand out and crying "Katrina!"
• Hurricanes hit Louisiana all the time.
• Louisiana is populated by morons. (I have to give partial credit here since a large portion of the population bears this out on a daily basis.)
• New Orleans was the only location affected by Hurricane Katrina.
  

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I sit here wanting to throw up. After all that has happened, after all that we've been through, Hurricane Katrina is a punchline. I lay blame both on Bobby Jindal for pulling the Katrina card in an attempt to further his own politics and on the tasteless writers across the nation who took the bait. I'm ashamed of Jindal and embarrassed by his actions. I'm wounded by those, who sat watching their television sets far from the scene as it all unfolded, that think they are informed enough to criticize us, the survivors, while saying things to us that they would not dream of uttering to the residents of Greensburg, Kansas.

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There is far more to Louisiana than New Orleans. Katrina's scope was far more than New Orleans. I can't think of many people outside the affected area that can identify Waveland, Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian or Long Beach. Utter those names to most of the nation and the nation is clueless that these are the names of the communities in southern Mississippi where countless lives were lost and vast stretches of land were wiped completely clean by the storm's fury. No one remembers these people and places because they are too busy making fun of New Orleans.

Hurricane Katrina herself did not do insanely large amounts of damage to New Orleans. Residents in the city as the hurricane came through reported dry streets and no more damage than any other hurricane in the first few hours after landfall. The damage done to the city occurred when the levee system failed. That damage was compounded, many believe, when the Army Corp of Engineers called for the pumps that had kept the city dry throughout the storm to be shut down. The pumps themselves were then flooded and rendered inoperable for weeks, long after the levee breeches had been patched.

Evacuations of the city failed due to governmental failure. The Louisiana state government had already issued several unnecessary evacuations earlier in the season for storms that lacked both the strength and the track to pose a true threat to the area. This lead to a "cry wolf" situation where the older residents, who had survived Betsy and Camille, left in the earlier evacuations but found themselves unwilling to believe in danger again. When their elders refused to leave their homes, many stayed against their better judgment, hoping to provide assistance and protection should the need arise.

Evacuations also failed due to their massive impact on family budgets. I have kept track of how much my family of five spends on a single evacuation. The average is $1800USD, more than a third of our family's net monthly income and more than our monthly mortgage payment. That number includes only food and transport, as we are lucky enough to have family outside the "cone of uncertainty" who are willing to house us until we can return home. The cost for other families includes added travel to an available hotel in addition to the cost of the hotel itself. It is not unusual for a single family to spend more than $3000USD on a single evacuation. In the end, each family has to decide for itself when the risk justifies the cost to their household.

Finally, I'd like to ask where the proponents of abandoning coastal Louisiana expect us to live. I'd like to ask them to name me one area of the country that is not at risk due to tornado, blizzard, wildfire, hurricane, volcanic eruption or earthquake. The way I see it, the residents of coastal Louisiana are the smart ones. We've settled in an area where, up to a week beforehand, we are
armed with the information of when to expect our disaster and how extensive the damage may be. We can then decide for ourselves to stay or go. We actually have some experience in this area, and just because one storm caught us by surprise does not make us fools.

There's so much more I want to say, but just can't find the words, so I'll simply provide a link to this rant's required reading 1 Dead in Attic by Chris Rose.