The WHoReS as we knew it is officially dead.  Still waiting to find out what our insurance company says about that, but she’s a goner.  Yesterday we were finally able to enter our home after a month and a half, and part of me is glad I went and the other part is still sobbing somewhere in the recesses of my mind.  Stuff and I are alive, but our home is dead.

Right now I’m sliding into a hole, a hole full of mold and mildew.  I hope that driving away from this place tomorrow will help to get the smell out of my nostrils so that I can breathe again.  Will help to make me forget the life I had, and make me want to return to the land of the living.  I just want to lay down in a fetal position and not move.  Part of me says “drama queen” and part of me says “damn straight”. 

In short, I am a broken lady.

It’s funny.  It all seemed so permanent.  Driving through Metairie and Kenner, and friends and families neighborhoods that we use to frequent, I realize that we were living a chalkboard life.  Then somebody came and wiped it all away.  It’s strange being in a place I considered home for thirty-five years, and being a stranger.  Everything feels different and alien, and somewhat surreal.  I know that we are some of the fortunate ones, but that doesn’t make this less real.  Now we drive around looking at what use to be, waiting till tomorrow, mostly anxious, to see what was.

I am continually amazed by this town and the cool shit people find to do on an average — oh, I don’t know — Tuesday evening.  We just got back from the Alamo Draft House downtown, and their fairly regularly featured Buffy: Once More With Feeling sing-along.

Those of you who remember, and enjoyed the old Movie Pitchers in NOLA (before if closed down a bunch-a years ago) will really enjoy The Alamo Draft House, because it is what Movie Pitcher was striving to be.  Every row of theater seats has in front of it a bar-like table and you can order tasty food, beer, wine, sodas and desserts and enjoy them all while taking in the flick.  They show old and new favorites and off-kilter cult classics.  They spend the entire month of October celebrating zombie and horror flicks.  They feature Rocky Horror on a regular basis (complete with floor show).  They have The Sinus Show, which is basically a live version of Mystery Science Theater 3000.  I LIKE this place, they’re wacky and irreverent… count me in.

For the Buffy: Once More With Feeling sing-along, they handed out plastic vampire teeth, bottles of bubbles and cheap lighters… you were to try and sing as Spike with the teeth in during "Rest In Peace", the lighters were for when Buffy sings "Walk Through the Fire", and blow bubbles during Tara and Willow’s "Under Your Spell."  Everyone is encouraged to boo and hiss Dawn when she’s being a total twat, dance wacky along with Anya during "I’ll Never Tell", as well as stand, join hands and sway during "Where Do We Go From Here?"  And just to make sure you got your money’s worth, they opened the evening by showing the first season’s Halloween episode.

They are also featuring two showings of their own "The Nightmare Before Christmas" sing-along on October 13th and 16th.  Tee-hee-hee.  It makes me very happy.

All in all, a good night at an excellent venue.  Just enough to help us escape for a little while.

Yuppers, we’re in Austin… all official-like.  The apartment is nice, the city is fantastic and the food is every bit as eclectic as it is (was) in New Orleans.  We’ve met a handful of friendly people and the town is every bit as off-kilter as I had hoped.  Hell, what more can I say about a city who’s motto is "Keep Austin Weird," and no, I’m not joking about that last bit.

Our cellphone numbers are changing in the next day or so, and of course our address has changed.  I’ve sent out a mass e-mail to everyone in my contact list, but I’m afraid it’s not as complete as I should like… I even got some failures and bounce-backs.  I’m going to call as many people as I have in my phone’s directory, but THAT may not be as complete as I’d like, either.  Sooooo, the upshot is this: if you’ve been overlooked, please take no offense and just email me and let me know that I forgot you and I’ll send you the new info.  My email address is over there on the left.  I’m trying to avoid broadcasting my new information to the known free world.

Also, I think I’m going to convert to Pastafarianism.  There might even be a Flying Spaghetti Monster car plaque in my future.

Here the Lady and I sit in Fort Worth, having been run out of Houston by Sister Rita.  We’re high and dry courtesy of Gretchen, and in a meager attempt to repay her kindness and generosity I’ve been doing some odd jobs around the house in preparation for her to sell it.  Of course, my arsenal of tools is still in New Orleans — mostly soggy and ruined — but I’m making due with the materials at hand.  Sadly, I will not be able to construct the new minarets and crenellations I envisioned, but at least I can fix the things that need fixing.

Our apartment in Austin will be ready this weekend, and weather and storm permitting, we ought to be able to move in on Monday afternoon.  I have a job interview on October 4th, and with any luck possibly a job to go with it afterwards.  Otherwise, the hunt continues.  Vincero!

That’s my update and I’m stinking to it.

So, Heather and I were driving back to Austin to look at a few more apartments that our nifty new pal Kevin-The-Apartment-Finder had to show us.  It was our second trip, and everything seemed innocent enough.  We were to meet Kevin at his office and after the 3 hour drive we had just exited I-35 and were making the left turn to enter his parking lot and then it happened.

Blammo.

A larger SUV than mine, a Ford Expedition I think, decided that he wanted through the intersection more than I did and blew through the light and slammed into the front-rightish side of my truck.  I remember seeing him coming and I remember Heather shouting "look out" at the exact same time, the next thing I remember was the world spinning around me, then after that the sight, smell and taste of some nasty chemical filling the truck and consequently our lungs.

In the second after we stopped moving I did a quick systems check — breathing (although choking on fumes) *check*, head mobility *check* arm mobility *check*, leg mobility *check*.  I wasn’t trapped and my side of the passenger compartment wasn’t crushed on top of me.

Me: "Heather, are you ok?"
H: "Stop moving your head, if your neck is hurt you can break it by moving your head."
Me: "Heather, ARE YOU OK!?"
H: "Stop moving around…"
Me: "HEATHER, ARE YOU OK!?"
H: "My back hurts, but I think I’m ok."
Me: "Christ, I can’t breathe and I can’t see shit."
H: "Stop moving…"
Me: "This fucking airbag shit… I can’t breathe."

So I proceed to open my door, and I can but it’s not helping.  I can roll the windows down (to my surprise), and the breeze wafts through and clears all the powder from the airbags out.  Yes, both driver and passenger bags deployed.  Yes, we both were wearing our seatbelts — take a lesson from this kids, always, and I mean ALWAYS wear your seatbelt, that plus the airbags is what saved our lives.

Once I can see Heather, I notice that she’s slouched in the seat a bit, pushed further down than she should have been.  I can’t see past the airbag draped over her lap to see if her side of the vehicle — which is the side that took the impact in the front — is crushing her or pinning her legs.  She’s calm but unwilling to move just in case there is a bigger problem she doesn’t know about (her EMT training coming into play here).  There is a slight trickle of blood coming from her nose and her face is flushed, a side effect of being punched in the face by the airbag.  A guy from the Jiffy Lube is the first on the scene.  He calmly states that he’s a mechanic, and that he was going to roll that airbag on Heather’s lap back up and tuck it away because the crap that was on it, the powder that makes it deploy smoothly and rapidly, would burn her legs if it sat there too long.  He advised that I do the same.

Heather: "Oh, that’s why my legs are burning."
Me: (mumbling to myself) "Yeah, I imagine that must be great for the lungs."

Shortly — VERY shortly — paramedics and cops are on the scene.  My brain has two conflicting thoughts 1) "Welcome to Austin," do I really want to move here and 2) holy crap, that was FAST for the first responders to get here, that makes me feel pretty good.  The paramedics calmly and confidently ask us how we are and where it hurts.  Heather tells them that her back hurts a bit and her neck on the right side does too.  I tell the guy that my right foot hurts a bit, but that I think I may have sprained it jamming the brakes down as hard as I did.  Frankly, I think I pulled a Fred Flintstone braking maneuver, shoving my foot through the floor of the car and onto the concrete below, but there is no evidence to back that up.  How I didn’t shatter an elbow or blow out a pectoral muscle, I have no idea… I was gripping the wheel so tightly, and bracing against it so firmly that I broke the tilt mechanism on the steering wheel and jammed the whole steering column into a vertical position.

The paramedics strap a collar on Heather and start preparing to put her on a spine-board.  I’m talking to the cops and showing all the relevant paperwork, giving my side of the story and basically making sure Heather is OK.  Our apartment guru shows up (me having called him at Heather’s request to say that we were in a wreck just outside of his office) and offers the world to us… transportation, a place to crash for the night, a computer to use, phones, whatever we need.  He’s a pretty decent guy.

I’m starting to notice that my foot is hurting more and more as time goes on.  The lead paramedic shows up and asks if I’m going to the hospital to get checked out, or if I’m just going for the ride.  I tell him that I’d like to get my foot looked at just in case there is something more than a sprain, but that I need to finish up at the scene with the cops.  He says that there isn’t much more to do, and that they’ll find me at the hospital to tell me where my car was towed to and any other relevant info.  I rummage through the car to get anything I or Heather might need… her backpack, all the rest of her shit that spilled out, my car info and anything that the might get stolen by the tow-yard.  I hop in the big white ambulance, and away we go.

Heather is calm and collected, strapped to a board that looks like it’s very uncomfortable.  I’m seat belted into the jump seat and we’re heading to what I am told is a trauma center that ranks pretty high in the country — giving Charity Hospital a run for it’s money in that department — "not because you’re that bad off, it’s just that close."  We show up and Heather is wheeled in one way, and I am led to the ER check-in another way because I am still ambulatory (fancy way to say "still walking around").  I go through the check in, get a preliminary screening and am told that I would be waiting a while because the place is filled up with refugees from NOLA who are staying in the shelter in Austin.

Everyone I have met in Texas has been superbly nice.  I mean shirt-off-their-back kinda’ nice, and the folks working in the ER were no exception.  Hell, while Heather and I were still sitting in the wrecked truck, the cops and paramedics were giving us advice on where to move to in Austin and where to look for jobs.  I had ER nurses nearly in tears when they found out that I not only lost my home in NOLA, but now my only remaining car.  Even the cops, when they came to give me news of the wreck and where my truck was, were remorseful to tell me that they had to issue me a citation for failing to yield.

Yup, that basically means they say I was at fault.  The witness at the scene said I didn’t have the turn arrow, and therefore didn’t have the right of way.  That is bullshit.  First, we had the arrow, and second all but one lane of oncoming traffic was at a dead stop — having the red light — all but the one lane where this guy came zooming through.  I intend to fight it, and I need to contact my insurance company to see what help they can offer.  We’ll see what happens.

Any way, there I sat in the ER waiting to get my foot snooped, wondering how the hell Heather was, trying to calm Lady down over the phone.  She held it together quite well, but was really worried about us, namely Heather since I hadn’t any more news of her.  It took about 2 hours to finally get called in and as I’m hobbling my way back to the tiny examining room, I hear my name called out behind me.  There, sitting in a chair with a blanket on her lap is Heather.  No broken spine and her head was still screwed on tight.  She’s done and was about to come and find me.  Relief and joy.

Now it’s my turn.  I could feel my foot swelling at I sat in the ER.  I can walk on it a bit but put no pressure on the toes.  I’m no fool.  This is more than a sprain, but it didn’t feel like a massive break.  So, I get poked, prodded and sent to have x-rays taken.  The x-rays showed a stress fracture in the bone just below my second toe… the "monkey toe" as I call it.  Apparently my legs are strong enough that I can break a bone in my foot by pressing the brake pedal down hard enough.  Go me.  But it was the speed and force of that braking that made the guy hit us on the front bumper rather than a few feet back on the passenger door.  The hospital gave me a very fashionable shoe that makes me walk like Igor.  I get to wear it for a coupla’ weeks.  Oh, and a scrip for painkillers.  Groovy.

Kevin the Mighty came and picked us up at the hospital.  He ran us to the tow-yard where my truck was so I could sign the release for my insurance company to go and get it.  I went to see if I could retrieve any other valuables and my "DmentD" gator plate from the front bumper and found that the other guy’s license plate was still embedded in the wreckage of my car.  Now THAT’s some funny shit.  I did actually manage to get my gator plate, too.  It’s mangled and a fitting memento to remind me to watch my ass on the road.  The rest of the car is, well, a wreck.  The entire front end is smashed in and down, completely pancaked.  Jebus bless Toyota and their engineering team for making it REAL hard to drive the motor backwards into the passenger compartment.

We then went to look at a coupla’ apartments.  Afterwards we went to a very groovy restaurant that I fell in love with named "Freddie’s" in south/central Austin — actually, that’s the area we’re looking to move to.  There we waited for our rescuers, Fiddy and Raul, to come and scoop us up and bring us back to Houston.  They stuck around and ate with us while we sat there trying to convince Fiddy to move to Austin.  I think we’re wearing him down.

So the upshot is this.  My little 4-Runner played chicken with a Ford Expedition and the passenger compartment was still well intact (the front is fucked pretty good, though).  The worst that has come of this is that both Heather and I will be sore-as-hell for a few days and I get to hobble around like a cripple for about two weeks.  Once again, a disaster hits and people are still alive.  The insurance company will cut me a check next week, and my more-than-car-savvy brother who has escaped to Houston with us is going to help me find a new car — likely another 4-Runner — and talk the salesman into either submission or ritual seppuku (those that know David, know that this is not THAT much of an exaggeration).

I have a coupla’ pics of the car on my phone, but no Bluetooth dongle to get them to my computer.  I’ll post them later.

Things just keep getting better and better.

Well, they say that a picture is worth a thousand words… so here are my thousand:

This picture was taken before the water did it’s cute trick of rising 3′ higher.  I can see the neighbor’s carport roof, which is next to my bedroom, and it looks like it is a few inches under the water itself which means that the water level in the picture is about halfway up the walls in the house… and then rose another 3′.  Kindly notice the avid boater traveling on the street behind mine.

Also, I think that fucking pine tree took a dirt-nap on my garage.  Bitch.

This god damned city is like Rasputin.  It’s been stabbed, poisoned, shot, bound and thrown around but it finally took a drowning to kill it.

So, my house is a submarine parking lot.  My mom, brother and sister-in-law, sister and brother in-law and their kids are whereabouts unknown after staying in Gentilly for the storm.  My home-town, or what’s left of it faces many plagues in the immediate future, and likely a thorough bulldozing before this is all done.

My other brother and his clan survived the storm and managed to make it out of town to retreat to humane and sanitary lodgings.  One of my good friends whom I feared the worst for has managed the same hat-trick.  I am amongst other very good friends in my (and their) homelessness.  My wife, for the moment, is still in possession of a job and is able to collect a paycheck.

The teeter-totter keeps bringing me up and down.  It’s a ride that frankly I’d like to get off of, but that’s not in the cards.

I feel like a whiny bitch for even feeling the need to vocalize what everyone else I know — and countless thousands that I don’t — is going through, and some much worse.

I’m a little homesick, but my home is sick and there is no going back for a long while, and even when I can it’s not really my home any more.  More than the home is a longing to see the entire gang, to witness with my own eyes that they are whole and healthy.  I miss my missing family, and there is a very real chance that there will be no relief for that feeling, ever.

Most of the time I’m fine.  Some of the time I’m not.  Every so often I’m a fucking wreck, like I am now.  Eventually the teeter-totter will swing back up again, but for now, my ass is on the ground in, as you say, the mud.

So, here I sit in a hotel in Houston Teyhas.  Katrina is bearing down on the Gulf Coast — New Orleans almost specifically — like Lena the Hyena in full lust-run after a cock proprietor.  I feel like I’m waiting for some Supreme Being to sneeze and accidentally tip his water glass into the saucer that is our city.

The house is boarded up tighter than a hummingbird’s tweet.  All potential projectiles have been removed from the yard and if whatever’s left can be easily picked up and hurled as a missile by the wind, then there likely won’t be a house left standing to be hit by it.  I have no trees on my property to knock down but there are a plethora of trees all around me, and that makes me a bit nervous… specifically that pine tree with a huge branch precariously dangling right over my garage like the sword of Damocles.  Note to self, if my house and property aren’t destroyed when I get back and if that branch hadn’t already succumbed to gravity, I need to cut that bitch and a number of others back.  You children reading along knew you could do that right… you can trim your neighbor’s trees back up to 6′ beyond your property line without getting in any trouble?  There.  You’ve learned something valuable today.

I’m glad that those of you who Got-The-Fuck-Out™ actually did so.  Those of you who didn’t, and still make it through this rigmarole should be severely thrashed with a Water Noodle and then held tight and reminded that even though you are a king-moron, we still love you, and we will end you with our own hands if you do it again.

I’m quietly concerned about a lot of things right now, but I’m comforted by the thought that whatever may happen to the THINGS I own, I am safe high and dry with the most important person in my life who is also safe, high and dry.  I am being kept company by some very good friends who Got-The-Fuck-Out™ with us.  I am not a religious man, so I am spending millions in karmic currency at this very moment, all that I’ve managed to save up over the years, hoping for the unscathed emergence of those I love who have stayed behind.

Good luck, good speed and the first round of drinks are on me when we get home.  We’re gonna’ need it.

EEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHH!

One quote, that’s all it’ll take to set your frame of mind for this site:

"For the man who goes to the gym, the beach or dancing in a club.  For the man who loves the feel of lycra spandex on his body."

Jebus.  Be sure to check out the Fantasy and Super Hero unitards sections.  "Tards" is a pretty apt description.  I… I don’t know if I should laugh, barf or send in the Feds.  Maybe all three.

Excuse me while I go and scrub my eyes with a little rocksalt and vinegar.