A World Without New Orleans

Great tragedies befall every generation. The devestation of Hurricane Katrina along the Gulf Coast is one of personal impact on me because my brother (until very recently) lived in New Orleans with his cat Tazmanian Devil, or Taz for short. My brother was forced to leave behind Taz, a black cat, half something, half Bobcat on the second floor of his apartment home. Sadly, I doubt his chances at this point. Though I still hold out hope that he escaped somehow before the flooding reaching my brothers house, it is a grim situation. It is with Taz in mind that I post the following memorial poem. He was a good cat. He deserves it.

Tazmanian Devil stands up to Hurricane Katrina

I’d like to think that at least
you died in your element,
the fury of Katrina’s whirling turbine,
fangs bared, fur raised at the maelstrom
wrenched shingles, fractured beams,
Spanish moss and Mardi gras beads.
Threw vehement hisses into shrieking gusts,
swiped claws at the visibly invisible.

I doubt that this was the case.
Had you stood up to the monster,
you would have been swept helpless
through a shattered window,
lacerated by swirling shards,
spinning towards an oblivion
that you are programmed
to frenzy against with every fiber.

I too am helpless. When the worst past
you probably crawled out from under the bed,
lapped the pooled water from the slats
and listened as the rains abated
while you waited for my brother to come home.
Had the news come, pumps failed, levee gave,
you wouldn’t understand that the water
wouldn’t stop rising. I really don’t either.

*** Please note - although the contrary can be read into the poem, my brother is in fact alive and well and participating in the evacuation of the superdome (he is an emergancy room physician with a minor specialty in helicopter rescue).

And it could happen to you...

There are some things in life that we spend our whole lives looking for, except we never know that we are looking for it until we find it. Today, I have made one of those miraculous discoveries: BEHOLD! The picture on the right is a picture of an authentic retrieval portal. I say again, I have found the retrieval portal in a small coffee shop in Knoxville, TN. Thousands, I'm sure, throughout history have died in search of just such a retrieval portal. So far I have managed to unlock the secret of retrieving concentrated chai tea from this particular retrieval portal, but I know that it is only a matter of time before I uncover the greater secrets in the darkness of the carton's cardboard belly. Will I find the answers to the great mysteries of the universe; God, life, a unified field theory? Will a voice within whisper to me undiscovered excerpts of the Canterbury Tales or perhaps a sequel to Beowulf? Does this portal lead to the body of Jimmy Hoffa and does Jimmy Hoffa's body contain the cure for cancer when it is found through The Portal of Chai? Perhaps I will find tea leaves or perhaps the doorway into some sort of tea based dimension where physics are based on the caffeine principle, people read wine dregs to tell the future, and the rivers flow with warm honey. The possibilities are limitless, the universe beyond infinite. More on this in years to come as we all ascend to greatness.

Technical difficulties

It would seem that a cat is attempting to adopt me as its owner. It showed up on the deck last monday, and has not since departed despite numerous attempts to shoo, scoot, scare, chase, or otherwise dislodge said cat from the deck planks.

So, if any of said cat's friends or relatives are viewing this page, it would be much appreciated if the said cat in question could be removed. I realized the unlikelyhood of this page being viewed by any of the majestic feline species, and if so viewed, it is furter unlikely that it would be understood, and if understood, the odds are absolutely remote that they would be acted on, acted on successfully, or if acted on successfully, leading to optimal results.

That being said, I feel there is little else that lies within my power to remove said cat from my property outside of violence or meanness, violence and meanness being two things with which I am incapable of treating a cat - unless the cat in question be proven to be an evil cat, such as Zervok the Furricane of Death, the cat who led the other cats in the Great Rat Extermination of 1903.

This is why, despite the unlikelihood of cat action in response to this message, I offer a reward of ten cans of unpoisoned tuna to any cat who aids in the removal of the current cat fixture off my rear porch. I feel bad for that cat because I'm not even sure what it's eating and it's been raining a lot, but I simply can't A) afford a cat or B) deal with cat allergies, or C) cast a voodoo spell that will simply cause the obstacular cat to be sucked into some sort of magical vortex.

So I say unto ye, sweet cats, oh great felines of the world wide web, Call to your stubborn brother, make him see the light reflecting from the eyes of mice on the other side of my fence. Let him chase the mockingbirds into the trees of neighboring yards, and let him bury his feces by someone else's trashcans.

Fly well and deliver him.

Voosh.

Here is a picture I took of a plate of eggshells on the stove top. It is important to bear in mind that this photo was not arranged. The plate of eggshells just happened to be sitting on the stove (it is usually in the microwave - long story), and I thought the effect of the stove top light would look really neat in black and white. If you don't like it, then go to hell.

A Fire Hydrant named Bill

Bill was a fire hydrant, a red fire hydrant, the reddest fire hydrant in the universe, so he believed. Whenever there was a fire on his block, the red fire trucks would screech to a stop in front of him on the gray asphalt, black tires leaving smoldering black streaks. The firemen in the yellow boots and hats would leap from the sides of the truck, shouting to one another as they uncoiled their hoses, and one would always take the giant red wrench and undo one of Bill's pentagonal nuts to plug the hose to his raging water supply.

Bill loved to feel the water surging through him into the rubber house, loved knowing that somewhere the power that rushed through him jetted forth to extinguish the hottest of flames. It made Bill feel important, purposeful.

When Bill wasn't attached to the hose, when there wasn't a building engulfed in flames, restlessness twisted through his metal housing, a geyser supressed, and he found himself frustrated with his inability to wrench himself free from the concrete and venture boldly towards a place where he would be needed immediately. Sometimes he wondered what it would feel like just to open himself up and pour into the street to watch his precious poor vanish into the storm drains.

On quite sunny days, he tried to will his pentagonal valve nut to unscrew, if just for a moment to release the pressure that sometimes seemed to threaten to launch him into the sky from below, to erupt in a glistening torrent. Whenever a woman carrying a little leather hand bag and a pooper scooper stopped her dog at the end of its leash, Bill found himself envying the dog's ability to release the fluids welling inside with a simple lift of the leg. The envy grew so great that he no longer disdained being urinated on by canines and wished that he was a canine himself.

One fall morning, as the golden leaves tumbled from the branches of the sparse trees that decorated the street, as the amber light of the late afternoon sun refracted off the broken glass in the gutter by the curb, two teenage boys walked up to Bill in tattered jeans and frayed sneakers. One carried a monkey wrench, the other the hammer, and they proceeded to bang and twist on Bill's pentagonal valve nut.

A strange feeling came over Bill as the threads gave first just a touch and then in swift twists as the teeth of the monkey wrench found their purchase on the ill-fitted angles. The feeling was that Bill didn't want to let loose his flow of water into the streets. There was no fire, not even anything to cool because the summer heats had passed. Helplessness coursed through Bill's metal as the pressure grew more urgent as if sensing its imminent release.

Metal cried Bill's despair as the nut wrenched further down its threads until suddenly bursting off in an eruption of water and sadness. It was a violation, a forced opening without purpose. It wasn't that Bill hadn't sometimes wished the pressure would just release, but that it was the fulfillment of a fantasy he'd never expected to come true. He never imagined he could be left so vulnerable by his dreaming, that their fulfillment could be so empty.

The boys didn't even have the decency to play in the water they set free, but instead they lit cigarettes above the very force meant to extinguish all flames. The boy with the hammer whacked Bill across the top with the blunt end. Bill's tears trickled unobservable into the greater stream, and a great regret filled the hollow where the pressure had been. So much potential given over to so little reason.

It was that night, after the firemen in their yellow boots and hats had wrestled the valve shut again, that Bill first noticed spots of rust on his red paint, but when he cried over it, the tears stayed in the tumolt of swirling force just inside the valve just as invisible as before, just as useless.

The birds sung from the trees. A gentle rain began to fall. A slight gap where the pentagonal valve had not been screwed as tightly as possible because the firemen where irritated to inattention by having their time wasted allowed just a little bit of water in. The threads began to rust, and Bill knew that it was only a matter of time that he would either rust shut forever or become so brittle that he broke open. Either way, his pressure would either be forever or nothing.

That night Bill didn't cry anymore. He didn't cry again. Sadness and tears are irrelevant in a world where the fulfillment of dreams and the empowerment of the self amount to little more than futile expression that is lost because it is delivered too far from where it is needed.

The News in Briefs I

1. New Blog site up open for Croatian pictures at Eatculturebaby.blogspot.com. It will be mildly amusing, to be sure.
2. Michael Allen and his wife Maggie are town. For more information on Michael and Maggie as well as a plethora of musical fun, visit Texas Embrace.
3. My house is nearly painted. Finally. The Kiltz patches no longer reign supreme.
4. The garden beds will lose the battle on Monday. They have fought well and fought hard, but soon they will be put to rest.
5. I have done nothing on my book since I got back from Croatia. I have been severely jet lagged and sleeping twelve hours a day when I 'm not fixing my house or lying next to the pool. For more information about sleep, go to bed, turn out the lights, and close your eyes. For more information on pools, well, if you don't know what a pool is, you're either a fish or just plain helpless.
6. I start teaching my own classes in just over two weeks. Creepy. I will mold people's minds. Mold. Heh. For more information on my classes, well, I guess check back here or take them. I dunno what to tell you on this one.
7. My chainsaw broke. It was a sad thing. The rip cord tore straight out of the housing. Damn piece of junk. Oh well. Damnit. Piece of junk. Damn junk. For more information on this chainsaw and other chainsaws see thingsthatiknow.blogspot.com, concerning: Chainsaws.

The journey is now complete.

Behold! This picture is an authentic picture of a Croatian slug. This particular Croatian slug was photographed on the stone steps leading up to a cathedral that I discovered while walking with my mother in downtown Zagreb. Although I cannot confirm any personal information about the slug, I believe that this slug may have been some sort of slug priest either travelling to or from its congregation given the fact that I observed this slug on a Sunday night. Also, be sure to not the divine 'v' of it antennae.

I travelled 4,000 miles bring back this (and other) information.

A little about the trip itinerary- we departed from Knoxville to Detroit Sunday the 18th, then Detroit to Amsterdam. International flight technology has grown more than I imagined, and I was able to pick the movies I watched and play games such as solitaire, reversi, and taipai on a little screen in the back of the chair in front of me. I would have taken a picture but cell phones were not allowed on the plane. Alas.

Though our 4 hour layover in Amsterdam was insufficient for us to venture forth from the airport and sample of the fruits of Amsterdam social life, we enjoyed our stay in the airport immensely through the consumption of much beer and the smoking of some excellent cigarettes. As a curious note, I discovered that not only did they still have cigarette vending machines in Amsterdam, but that smoking is allowed for the ages of 16+ as you can see on this picture.

The final leg of the flight was from Amsterdam to Zagreb. It was amazing. The armrests still had ashtrays built into them. They didn't have ice for the Cokes. The pilot spoke in another language BEFORE he spoke in English I knew I had arrived in a foriegn land. When we passed through Croatian customs, our journey through the beauty of Croatia (note - no sarcasm here) had finally begun.

So- over the next few weeks I will be putting up photo posts talking about my trip to Croatia. However all further posts will appear on a new blog page that I will start shortly. The link will be up when the page is. This page will be dedicated to the trip, and when stuff about the trip is done with, it will be dedicated to something else. I am taking this course of action in order to prevent substantial disruption in the usual idiocy, blathering, and tom foolery usually illustrated by this page.

I will close today's entry with a photo of a praying mantis I met on the Isle of Ist. Though I did not have any actual conversation with this mantis, I like to call her Father Head Eater. I know that there are no female priests in the Catholic church and that she would techinically be "Mother Head Eater", I figure that things might work a little different for praying mantises since the male's inevitably get their head eaten. Furthermore, I have no proof of the Catholic inclinations of this mantis, the number of Catholic shrines on Ist island suggests a predominantly Catholic insect congragation. This is a tribute to you, Father Head Eater, keep your congregation straight and true, and eat the heads off those who stray so that they may no longer see the way and thus be more easily be led back to Mantis righteousness.