God forgot the ankle twist

2005 was an interesting year, to slightly understate it. I used to believe that I was someone like Hitler in a former life and was paying off sins with bad luck. I now have come to believe that I am more like a cockroach in the eyes of God. A mere annoyance but one that just brings out the worst in the annoyed. In 2005, God apparently finally had enough of me and kept stomping but also kept making that crucial cockroach stomp error of not doing an ankle twist or using a hard shoe. He kept stomping and I kept annoying like the Energizer cockroach.

The events that lead to my intended demise began when in an attempt to save like three dollars per month elected to stripdown my health insurance coverage by having higher copayments and deductibles. Since taking that action less than fourteen months ago, I have sought emergency medicine more times than in my 41 years prior. The odyssey began to come into view on Easter weekend of last year.

On Good Friday, I arrived in the E.R. for the second time in two weeks with recurring severe lower abdominal pain. It was soon discovered that my nuts were in a bind, literally! This condition at best guess was caused by me sitting upon my testes for great lengths and not realizing it. Guys! Wrap your head around that one and Girls do not even bother trying. I cannot ever hope to describe with words the impossibility of getting ones own balls underneath them much less the notion that one may crush his own nuts and not fucking realize it! And to think, I make fun of the Transgendered.

To celebrate tax day I passed a kidney stone. I sucked that one up and let it pass without much dismay. Apparently, at this point, God realized that he was lacking the standard New Orleanian ankle twist but did not fret since he also knew a thing or two about the human genome long before any of us. It seems that just in case he may have to kill me one day, he created me with a condition conducive to blood clotting. To hedge his bet further he gave me a tinge of self-destruction and introduced me to his second and third true wonders of the world, beer and cigarettes. I hear ya! Well, I say fuck that free will shit, if he gets credit for the Great Smoky Mountains, he gets credit for this too. So, realizing his lack of ankle twisting and my shrugging off the kidney stone with much less fanfare and whining than may have been expected in my hypocondriactic existence, he put his little Deep Venous Thrombosis into motion.

Less than a month after the stone, the first of several bloodclots began traveling from my leg to my lungs. Bigger and badder his techniques were becoming but still no twist! I walked out of the hospital with a new lease on life in time for the upcoming summer solstice. I just knew in my heart that the worst of 2005 was behind me and that all would be a cakewalk from here. It was June 15th, the opening day of the Atlantic tropical storm season.

Twisted nuts, kidney stone, DVT, Pulmonary Embolai, the warm-up was over, let the games begin! I awoke on the morning of August 27th vaguely recalling that the night before I had heard that yet another hurricane was hammering Florida. A little early morning channel surfing had me stumble across the local weather guy, Carl Arridondo standing next to the infamous national hurricane center, cone of death with the mouth of the Mississippi River dead center. It was 4a.m. and I was watching a 10:00p.m. rebroadcast. I turned on the Weather Channel and found that Jim "the angel of death" Cantore was stating that he was leaving Mobile and heading for New Orleans............I thought, "we're fucked!"

I was right!

Bigger and badder but no twist! As the world's finest news source reported with their lead headline under which was a picture of the flooded City taken from the Crescent City Connection and viewing down the Pontchartrain Expressway towards the Lake, "God outdoes Terrorists, Yet Again!"

Half a month later, as I began cleaning the remnants of my recently dewatered offices, he gave me another swift kick, Atrial Fibrillation. A little reminder of the emobolai and of his omnipotent wrath. Back to the E.R., I went.

A friend of mine sent me an email that I had sent her from my refugee villa in Baton Rouge shortly after getting out of East Jefferson and hustling a ride out of Katrinaville. Actually I have no recollection of how I got back to B.R. I must have driven to Metairie before being carried to the E.R.

When I first read this draft, I thought it to be more para-psychotic than usual and was not going to post it here much to her dismay. As I have read it a few more times along with a few more trips to the E.R.(God can really be relentless), I have decided to post it not only because it offers a snapshot of my refugee days but because I think it has just a wee bit hint of post traumatic stress going on and I am certain it holds some value in the ultimate acquisition, the Crackrock of Knowledge.

Sunday September 18th;

spent a couple days in the hospital, had some live current run through my heart, I feel fine!

Lotsa military types with IV's laying round East Jefferson General. Apparently, New Orleans in September is actually less bearable than a wartime desert. Who'da thunk it? Me for 1!

Its the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine!

I got a knock at the door this morning which is not uncommon since I have become like the resident assistant for Allied Waste families residing in the Villages of Northgate. At the door were these four dudes on horseback although their horses were more like 8 foot tall demonic wolverines. I invited them in for quesadillas and Lil Debbies. They obliged.

They introduced themselves as Death, Famine, Pestilence and War. Pestilence goes by Plague for short and was a real motor mouth. They were looking for directions to the Quarter apparently Southern Decadence is just their kind of gig. I shut Plague up by breaking out the Zebra Cakes and Fudge Rounds. He made a real glutton of himself. Mr Death explained that much to my surprise that God is a Methodist and is particularly down on fags and savages. War chimed in and said that he is also aggravated by all of the folks who themselves try to act like gods or at least deities. This bunch is a hodgepodge of clergy, soldiers, doctors and cops. Famine brought it all into perspective.

Famine chose to eat nothing and politely sipped on a Dasani that I served. I think it was a She but I cannot be certain since the girl was shriveled and down right homely. She explained that they had been summoned to lay waste to a number of Sodomites in sort of a market correction of mankind sort of way. The onslaught of Katrina was the mere beginning but clearly laid waste to the biggies of misbehavior for the Methodist. Gambling and homosexuality. I questioned if Southern Decadence was in fact the target why did the Quarter seemed to be spared.

This really got Mr Death's panties in a bind. Apparently, this bunch aint use to fielding questions and just like to be heard. But what the fuck? They were after all eating all of MY snack cakes and tortillas! Death explained that a choice had been made to target the most offensive homos. While the Quarter certainly has a concentration of gay men, it is the lesbians that are by far the most offensive so the dike breeding neighborhoods of Arabi, Faubourg St John and Northern East Jefferson were targeted. I had to agree that generally speaking dikes tend to be salty and down right unpleasant kind of like Martha Stewart......wait, same thing!

War was preoccupied with some stuff he was coordinating over in ancient Mesopotamia. Clearly a racist, I was uncomfortable with his constantly using terms like kike and sand nigger. Plague explained further now that Famine and Death had drowned the gamblers and lesbians of the gulf coast that he was stepping up to handle the idolaters and self proclaimed deities. His sword will be TD#18 that by the time it reaches the mouth of the Mississippi will be a Cat1 hurricane and will stall over Lake Borgne for 40 days and nights. The flooding rains will inundate the Ohio and Tennessee river valleys as well as drown every spare cop, fireman, doctor, nurse and preacher in the hemisphere as they are all congregating in a flood zone after brazingly deliberately undermining its flood protection.

The technique was first used by the Trojans but was mastered by the Nazis and the provisional IRA. The idea Plague explained was that when bombing innocence it is best to use multiple timed blasts with the first drawing attention from emergency response types and the second being of an anti-personnel type to lay waste to the egotistical do-gooders. Mr Death had a walking stick or perhaps one might call it a shaft that played Bauhaus. A rather eery device considering the subject matter.

Before leaving they told me that next week Memphis will look like New Orleans last week and that New Orleans will look like ancient Alexandria that is 35 feet under the Dead Sea. They also said that beachfront developments in Cleveland will be all the rave next summer and that if we all do not straighten up and get on the W wagon that the next Cat5 will stall over Lake Michigan.

Upon leaving, Pestilence mentioned that he wants to be a late entry participant on Rockstar INXS, curious, I think!
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A few noteworthy points;

The Villages of Northgate in Baton Rouge is a shithole off campus student housing complex for LSU. It has a high concentration of Indian(like Ghandi, not Geronimo) and Pakistani residents. These kids in my view were amongst the hardest hit by Katrina. Not only had every available unit been rapidly occupied by displaced New Orleans garbage men and their families but for a really sad few they had their own families living with them. What could be scarier than going away to college and having your parents move in with you? Well, being a hard working American citizen and having a group of Indian exchange students pool their beer money to buy you bed linens and your kids toys is pretty fucking scary!

It was Methodists that burned those churchs in Mississippi and Alabama. I guess he don't like Baptists either.

savages: post-Katrina brought out the best in most everyone but when I sit back and look at last year it becomes obvious that most of the time my neighbors particularly in New Orleans itself are absolutely a bunch of fucking savages that do not have the good sense to get out of the rain.

On September 18th, TD #18 was the storm that eventually became Hurricane Rita, a Cat 5 storm with the fourth lowest central pressure on record. I missed the landfall by 200 miles but it respectfully kicked the living shit out of Acadiana and flooded Memphis. I aint Nostrodamus as far as you know but ..................

Undermined flood protection: As I write today, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is rapidly closing the feet of every major outfall canal in Jefferson and Orleans to protect us from the potential storm surge of a 25 year storm hitting us this year after being hit by two last year. Allow me to take a stab at some more Nostrodamus shit. A future press conference by the Corps and local officials apologizing for closing the outfalls with University experts being quoted that nobody ever expected that it might rain a whole fucking lot in a single day in New Orleans.

The Memphis/New Orleans/Alexandria comparison was better stated by my Sister a few weeks ago who said Baton Rouge may become the next New Orleans since New Orleans has become the next Pompei. I was down below the industrial canal a few weeks back and traveled all the way to Toca in lower St Bernard and there is definitely a Pompei quality about the landscape that is primarily gray. Pompei it is!

I rang in the late evening and early morning of the popularly recognized new millenia at Le Bon Tempe on Magazine Street, half heartedly waiting to welcome the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. It was January 1st, 2000. Much debate has come and gone over whether the new millenia actually began on that day or one year later but since the computers had the Y2K issue to overcome and because people generally when left to their own designs are idiots we opted to celebrate the new millenia a year early, or not? I am sure that there is a calendar expert somewhere that can attest that the new millenia actually arrived in Central Daylight Time in the wee hours of August 29th, 2005.

Embrace the Apocalypse for it is upon us. Or maybe, just maybe, it is just God fucking with Hitler incarnate, moi.

I had another embolism hit my lung last week.

Still no ankle twist though!