Written on a Post-it, signifying nothing

Year's List of Good and Great:

Rory O'Shea Was Here - finding my tattered old fleece in the closet - Thai omelette with scallions and Eric Lane - A History of Violence - the dreams I started remembering again after not remembering any for a year when I sleep in on days off - Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild - The 40-Year-Old Virgin - shrimp boil on restaurant porch in New Iberia, LA - the narcissus and paperwhites I bought at Target that grow right now, mitotically as I type - Batman Begins - learning how to calculate catecholamine and opiate intravenous drips - Walk the Line - hiking in Runyon Canyon and Griffith Park when it's fall and the light gets golden - Millions - wet burritos - discovery of great bras after many years of searching - U2 and dinner in April with Bonnie and Karen - Mysterious Skin - pulling up shrimp traps with Da off West Vancouver in November - Sinead O'Connor's reggae album - Junebug - kale with andouille in my kitchen - Ryan Adams x 2 - breakfast with Mom when it's grey outside - Breakfast on Pluto - Trader Joe's Hot and Sour Soup in glass jar - Everything is Illuminated - hearing a legally blind 70-year-old tell me how she helped steal a public bus to evacute her neighborhood in the Lower Ninth Ward - Brokeback Mountain - Sufjan Stevens' Illinois - Google maps - My Summer of Love - Russell Stover's sugar-free chocolate-covered toffee - The Constant Gardener - watching cooking shows ad nauseam with my sister - Grizzly Man - marcona almonds with rosemary and sea salt from Trader Joe's - Antony and the Johnsons I'm A Bird Now - retractable Sharpie markers - the Weatherman - the treadmill at steep incline for 20 minutes - No Direction Home - first time being a camp nurse - Thumbsucker - a striped scarf when the time is right - Beck's Que Onda Guero and Go It Alone - King Kong - the quad press at 130 lbs - exiting the Arclight, returning in the dark to your car parked on the roof, it's foggy and cold and to the north are at least 12 beams of light from Hollywood Blvd. roving back and forth across the fog - Cat Power and Handsome Boy Modeling School, I've Been Thinking - the Marcel Dzama drawings on the wall at 826LA and the sad ghost Dzama salt and pepper shakers I got at home - The Squid and the Whale - my Christmas tree and its ornaments - Smog, A River Ain't Too Much to Love - Halloween despite having to work the next day - Gustavo Santaolalla who did the music for North Country and Brokeback Mountain and the Motorcycle Diaries - walking to work when it's cold - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: Lyre of Orpheus and Abbatoir Blues - camping with cousins and their cousins in Santa Barbara - Spoon, Gimme Fiction - Libby's Sense of Style - dinner club sundays - X & Y - Ron being pouty, Harry sitting out the dance, in Goblet of Fire - my neighborsm who carve pumpkins and have dinner with me, just whenever - my Nana, independent film lover, aged 90 - BJ Schwartz and Eric Lane when they are stand-upping it during Trivial Pursuit - the patient in the PICU who has been there for a year, making witches brew with dry ice on Halloween and having frozen grapes and pasta for the nurses and doctors to feel with their eyes closed - my sweet family in general, my sweet friends in general.


Bad and Awful:

Beta blockers - Elizabethtown - my car being dirty most of the time - hypertension - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Southern storms- Lord of War - empty half-a-bed-syndrome - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - writing personal statements for graduate school applications - skin hunger - wearing gowns at work when your patient is in isolation for infectious disease or immunosuppresive protocol and you take the gown off (there is much static) on your way out of the room and are given really bad shocks by cribs, door handles, water from the faucet and you can see the electric arc - missing family but not being able to tolerate The Vancouver Grey efficiently, therefore leaving one unable to find a compromise between Here and There - the part at the end of Crash where Ludicris chuckles to himself after letting free the Asian slaves and it starts to snow; oh, what a world indeed -the morgue sign-in book - myocardial infarctions - My Humps.

Got My Kong On, Jack Nasty

I wear a scarf and hat inside my bungalow while sitting here with you, dear reader(s).
What a lovely contrast to the many months of sitting in this very chair, sweating from the face without exerting any energy whatsoever, due to the combo of summer, inadequate air circulation and a general lack of fan(s).
This evening finds me sipping a chemical concoction - decaf, fat and sugar free instant Chai - with my first Personal Christmas (TM) tree ever in the background, a three foot noble fir sitting in sugar water, it's ankle draped with a paisleyed tablecloth, and the shittiest array of tree lighting this side of the Rio Grande. I neglected to purchase those delicate white mini lights, so I've substituted red and blue until such time as I aquire them.
Soundtrack for decorating:
Sam Roberts: Brother Down
Nick Cave: Carry Me
Some new Strokes song
Madonna: X-Static Process
T. Rex: Monolith
Johnny Cash: When the Man Comes Around
Spoon: all of Gimme Fiction
Ted Leo: Me and Mia
The Undertones: Teenage Kicks
(In truth I think the actual decorating only took the length of Van Morrison's Cleaning Windows)

My First Personal Christmas (TM) Glass Ornaments: a pomegranate, a pickle, a frog, a robin, a hen, an owl, a hedgehog, a fish of unknown genus and species, a salmon, a barracuda, a squirrel, a very wee bunny and three Chinese firelantern flowers. Apparently in Germany on Christmas morning families play "hide the pickle" which is akin to hide the matzoh only not Jewish and with a greater propensity to be misread as incestual impropriety. You find the pickle and "win" Christmas or something. Do you think IV catheters would make interesting ornaments? They come in different colors of plastic hub depending on size of needle. I could hang them like those glass icicle ornaments. I would take out the needle first of course. For two Christmases in a row, my mother has made a tree out of pussywillow twigs in a bottle like an empty Hornitos bottle. Five twigs or so, with some orange, white and blue lights adorning them. Classy. We're like that.

This is pretty silly. I'll be working both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, but as it will be a coal-in-my-stocking, lonelyheart time of year, gimme pine needles.

Three people Who Made Me Emote to the Point of Tears This Week While Sitting in the Dark, by Sarah:
1) Ennis Del Mar/Heath Ledger. Waiting in lineup for a matinee of Brokeback Mountain yesterday, watched a parade of ancient gay couples flow out of the Grove theater, holding canes and hands and having red-rimmed eyes. Cardigan-sweater old. Goddamn to you, Loneliness - you make good art.

I now have three favorite man performances of the year: Cillian Murphy, Joaquin Phoenix and Heath. Heath is probably the best of those, ya?

2) Kong/Andy Serkis and Ann Darrow/ Naomi Watts. Now. Well. I went with Eric and Will-Jordan to see Kong at midnight last night in the Cineramadome. We were treated to the trailer for Miami Vice. Someone in our vicinity kept letting off air biscuits, barking spiders, what-have-you. Despite this, and the rising temperature of a sold out cineramadome, the spectacle of Kong was stellar. Yes, too long. Yes, OTT in all respects. Campy, corny a bit. However, um, beautiful? Yes. Yes Petey's a genius, but without Fran Walsh and Phillippa Boyens he would be maybe not so much.. In the OG Kong, Ann is passive, shrieking, and there are those rapey overtones, those Large Evil Black Man/Victimized Virginal White Woman issues. All of course alongside the nasty colonial/savage stuff. In this Kong, Ann is active and she is as much a victim of Carl Denham et al as she plausibly is of Kong (which she isnt anyway, but that's how the film crew sees it). It seems that the business of moviemaking is even worse. Look what happens White Man when you go where you should not. Heart of Darkness...the way Our Lovable Nerds comment on the racist platform of the first movie is brilliant but I'm not telling you how they do it. A lot of it felt like a silent movie, or rather, the most important parts did, aided immensely by the score (written in six weeks!)...but it's wierd to think there is an entirely different one sitting in Howard Shore's computer somewhere. And that face. That sweet sad face.
Jack Black is fucking great.
I cried, yes I did. I cried today even while hearing Ebert's review on podcast. Jordan made fun of me, but that is because he has a pingpong ball for a heart and mine is like a big wet sponge and it leaks sometimes, so what?


.

Welcome to the Hole!

Part I: Meaningless drivel (movies)
A) Oh Harry Potter the Fourth, you have finally come to be a real movie. How many double entendres did you count? How many Frodo-faces? He made a couple, or rather, the camera did.
And to my dissapointment, the kids don't make face with each other. Sigh.
The people next to me at the Vista wanted to share their popcorn, and so I felt like an orphan taken in from the alleyways of London. The row of gay men in front of me did a synchronized "hand dance" along with the "Enjoy a refreshing cola!" ad before the trailers. People always clap when the ad is over, whoop and holler. It makes me laugh when they do that. People do funny things at the Vista.
B) Joaquin and his not-a-cleft-palate, got-it-in-a-fight-with-my-brother-that-I-refuse-to-talk-about scar. I liked the nuzzling, the scene at the lunch counter, the peanuts, Reese WItherspoon's freckles, and absolutely everything else. Jerry Lee Lewis had some nasty lyrics.
C) I finally got around to seeing Monster too this weekend (and I started Into Thin Air as well, having finished book one of the naval novels). Not a new revelation, but man is Christina Ricci sucky. Fortunately, things tend to work themselves out and henceforth even though I had a hypothesis that maybe Charlize was being overpraised, I was wrong. I would also recommend the HBO documentary.
I am now about to try to watch The Notebook, but I don't think I'll be able to make it through.


Part II: Small, potentially meaningful story from my daily life:
Today was my first day semi-quasi-hemi-solo in the PICU. I had two patients on my own, in the Hole. The Hole is one of our two quad rooms, e.g. there are 4 patients in a room. You might barely leave the Hole for all your 12 hours, except to go for breaks. Sometimes the Holes are vacant and quiet, half-full, and you go about your business. Sometimes you're alone in your hole with an unconscious/sedated patient, so every now and then a heard of medical residents, fellows and attending will meander into the Hole during rounds or someone outside the Hole will pop their head in and say "Come on out of the Hole for a sec". Today there were no vacancies. Four patients, three RNs and two nurse residents, plus assorted family members. Over in one corner was one of my patients, a 14 year old who had taken to yelling "Sarah can you please get my flema?" (phlegm in Spanish, quite endearing). He'd chase this ten minutes later with an expressive sentence en Espanol involving the word 'puta' or 'hija de puta', e.g., some take on "whore". He'd often include his dear mother in the insult. He can't help it. Yesterday he told me to - and I quote -"take it in the ass" when I asked if he wanted pain medicine. We use a universal pain scale with numbers and faces on it to help kids tell us how bad their pain is...I asked him to rate his pain and he said "What the FUCK is wrong with you goddamn people?". He says it with a slur to his speech of course.
I couldnt help but empathize in a way. If I was a teenager and I had a tube coming, say, straight out of the center of my brain and someone asked me to point at a face or a number to describe my pain - no matter how mindful the inquisitor was of not sounding patronizing - I might turn inside out like a sea cucumber after holding up my middle finger to delineate where I fit on the scale.

I was there when some good news about his prognosis came down the line, and there were tears and hugs, so it was a good day.

Using a laser at your place of work: A Primer

Today was neurology review day for my critical care orientation.
I like neurology.
I've decided.
Here's what we reviewed:
1) neuromuscular blocking agents (paralytics)
2) intracranial pressure monitoring and assessment
and then we were regaled with a bunch of horrific but notable stories involving children and their heads by our beloved mentor Fran, and so we will never forget some very important things.

In the PICU, I am becoming adept at manipulating cockstops (not cockblocks, though maybe that too?).
Would you like me to explain the physics of the pleural cavity? No problem! Whenever you're ready.
We use lasers and levels at the bedside. The laser is used to make sure that the drains we use to drain fluid from the brain are aligned against the proper anatomical reference point. If the drain is lower than the patient's head, too much fluid will drain off, equalling *collapse*. If it's too high, no fluid will drain and the pressure in the brain will increase, equalling *squish*.

After brain class, I went to the laundrymat, folded my clothes, read a chapter of my naval novel, then ate a frozen yogurt with my neighbor.

Yesterday I was at Trader Joe's and next to me in line was the guy who played the character/rugby player "Roy" in "Alive". You'll remember him as the freckled, whinging, anxious, consistently annoying survivor.

I don't know if I told you - and forgive me if I didnt - but I saw Keanu in the parking lot of Home Depot last week. He had just purchased a hot dog from the hot dog cart outside near the garden center.

I lost 3 hours of my life to Netflix last night what with its convoluted yet decidedly wonderful site compiling a massive queue filled with PBS documentaries, Return to Oz and Murderball.

Beat to Quarters!

Today my special nautical/historical/flauna-flora glossary arrived from Amazon. It is called "A Sea of Words" and it has been described [per back cover of said book] as "A godsend" by the Irish Times. This is because if you attempt to read what I have started reading without it, the harpies will descend to pluck at your eyelashes. Only a nautical savant could understand Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels (aka Master and Commander) unaided. And only a savant of a totally different variety would even pick such a book up, in this case a filmic-nursing-marine-oriented savant.

In essence:
I don't have to worry anymore - because now I know what a "cunt-splice" is! No more harried nights!

It's a "type of splice formed when two ropes are overlapped and joined in such a way as to form an EYE" (emphasis belonging to the text)
My friend said to me today: I didnt know you were into boats..
Hey, now! That's because I aren't.

In other news, my Saturday matinee of Jarhead was interrupted by the guy to my left who kept readjusting his package every time...well, every time you saw desert in a frame. Today I learned from NPR that Walter Murch doesnt like attending sets of the films he cuts, so if he has to go on set, he looks at the floor until he sees the director's shoes and then looks up to talk to director and then back to floor and he leaves. he doesnt want to see anything that the audience wont be seeing. How does he know a director by his shoes?

I would recommend Jarhead but only in a dispassionate way. Jake G doesnt make that developmentally delayed voice in this movie, in fact he's pretty good aside from the lobotomized way you feel for his character and everyone around him.

That Bob Dylan PBS thing is amazing. I only just saw it. I like it when he says things like: "It was rightly cold."

More importantly, I would like to recommend Danny Boyle's follow-up to 28 Days Later, which would be Millions, available on DVD.
It is amazing!

I had babka tonight
Exclamation point

This loser took the longest

Napoleon
Originally uploaded by Sarah Lebo.

Mephisto

Mephisto
Originally uploaded by Sarah Lebo.

Danielle in her wisdom chose to carve Mephisto last night, which isn't really Mephisto of the shoe company or the German film, but the Bono version of Mephisto circa 1993 when he would dress up like so and phone frmr. President HW Bush from a concert and leave strange messages on the machine.

Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit?

Frank
Originally uploaded by Sarah Lebo.

Why are you wearing that stupid man suit...

row o' gourd

The Pumpkin People
Originally uploaded by Sarah Lebo.

Oh look at the little lighted items in our courtyard. It really lit up our little Gateway Ave kibbutz.

The Pumpkin People

Dracula Mr Burns
Originally uploaded by Sarah Lebo.

The annual tendinitis-inducing gourd-scoop out came and went.
They make an electric saw for carving pumpkins and I got one.
My neighbors and I carved through the night and some drank egg nog with rum and others ate mediocre chinese food and we had a few little Darth Vaders, an Obi Wan, two red Power Rangers and baby skunk (trick or treating in a stroller) and a boy dressed as a girl. Way to push cultural boundaries (machismo), brother.
So here we have Mr. Burns, a labor of love carved by Shelly.

"In the Christmas pageant, I was a ham."

Token objet d'inanimate, avec class
Originally uploaded by Sarah Lebo.

My experiences of Halloween as inanimate objects have been as:
1) a trash can
2) an Aquafresh toothpaste pump
3) a McDonald's milkshake.

Innes VII was a polaroid who did vodka shots, thereby truly blending the inanimate and the animate.
I am a lucky girl to have been in the company of so many great people for a night.

The 10

The 10
Originally uploaded by Sarah Lebo.

So then Robyn had to come and show us all up by being the 10! Being the Dreadfulest Freeway in Los Angeles, The 10 runs east-west from Pomona through Compton to Venice and Santa Monica. If you are driving back from Venice towards the Eastside at about 5 PM, you begin to stare at the veins in your wrist, contemplating an existentially realized death, wondering what your serum carbon monoxide levels are at this point in time. The 405 competes with the 10 for most hideously trafficky LA freeway.

Those four people as that digital clock: 10:34!

Those four people as that digital clock
Originally uploaded by Sarah Lebo.

Were they brothers and sister? Were they a big giant "couple"? I forgot to ask. they were the best digital clock I've ever seen, and they had the best footwear (not pictured).

The Greatest Shame

The Greatest Shame
Originally uploaded by Sarah Lebo.

I had many favorite costumes on Saturday evening, however when Mo Twine showed up dressed like Santa, complete with gators (were they for snow or soot or hauling lobster traps?) on, I was sold. Then I looked to my left and saw a small man with a Mexican wrestler's mask on, wearing this World's Greatest Grandma sweatshirt. He was accompanied by a mule/donkey/mouse with a hat that looked to be bought in Cabo San Lucas at Papas & Beer, bearing gigantic balls, supposedly the result of elephantiasis. I am trying to remember the actual animal this man was supposed to be..it had a ridiculously cute name like the pica, but not the pica...if anyone remembers, lemme know. They sat on Mo's lap for a time as you can see here.

Now to cleanse the palate...

KatAlex
Originally uploaded by Sarah Lebo.

I give you - don't look! - a sexy pink elephant and her polyester, straight-out-of-a-bag prisoner-costumed gigolo, complete with glass of Bordeaux, Classy Hong Kong 1920's Moustache and Yalie eyewear!

The Valve

The Valve
Originally uploaded by Sarah Lebo.

I want you to know that I have 23 photographs of my pal Eric galavanting as Ignatius J. Reilly and that they will soon be available as a tastefully mounted montage of flannel and hotdogs. I arrived early and therefore began to drink early. I came from work in my scrubs, which made me feel very inadequate as Halloween is my most favorite thing and I had to work this weekend prior. Manta Ray! made no appearance, but she will return once again, headlights a'blazin at a 'ween of the future.
To Eric, I lift my glass.

Quick Film Club Retort Over Eggs and Chinese Broccoli

my miniature brother
Originally uploaded by Sarah Lebo.

Alex: I hated Everything is Illuminated.

Sarah: I thought it was great.

Alex: It was the worst movie of the year. It was so boring. You only like it because of Frodo. That character was so passive.

Sarah: Yes he was passive, and might I add that your Baggins suggestion is off base.. Eugene Hutz is what is amazing about this movie. The Odessian character arcs are great. Hutz is like one giant Kindersurprise within the milky-chocolatey happy-sad shell of this movie. I also found myself strangely attracted to him. I feel vulnerable now about my movie opinions and am now hesitant to tell you what I really thought about Thumbsucker. God, what a breakfast Alex, thanks.

Alex: (punitively) Lebo, finish the bread and cheese. Eat all your lox! Don't drop any more of that triple cream brie onto the carpet. We just got rid of an infestation.

The Sportsman and the Lone Star and me

I am sorry to be so full of shit. I'm afraid your kindly offers of laxative tea won't help. I am FOS (which is a real clinical term, by the way, meaning Full of Stool) because I have been lax to regale you with tales of Louisiana and Texas. Maybe this hasnt even crossed your mind and you don't want to hear my stories.
I shall now attempt to do tell you -*despite that* - in point form in order to bring us up to current events.

BEGIN POINT FORM
- Houston is humid which was news to me, and I have a firm belief that it was designed by the same evil genius who engineered Calgary's grid-system-sprawl-hell. Requisite oppositional statement and truth: the people of course, were geniuinely awesome.

- The government put us up at a Ramada in the very south of Houston, almost in Sugarland. When I arrived at the airport, I had been given no info on where to go, who to call, who was meeting me etc..it was Comical!! I thought per chance that someone would be there to greet me, but alas, through some gutsy phone calling to Admirals and Captains, I got the name of the Ramada and sped there taxi-like lickety split.

- The Ramada had poor air circulation yet was conveniently located next to an Indian vegetarian restaurant serving delicacies in the Gujarati style, a Target and the MHMRA, also known in no uncertain terms as The MENTAL HEALTH and MENTAL RETARDATION AUTHORITY of Harris County.

- In Houston, and I'm assuming all of Texas, a sickeningly wealthy family of Greek immigrants, the Pappas, have birthed a series of hangar-type eating establishments. There is Pappas Seafood [300-seater designed to look like an old shrimp shack and/or Floridian highway seafood restaurant], Pappas Smokehouse BBQ [designed to look like an old BBQ hut with Big Jim out back, a'stirrin the sawse], Pappadeux [no identifiable Louisianan motif in the architecture, intense use of seasoned salt on its cajuny items, fried alligator], Papasito's Cantina, Pappas Burgers, Pappas Pizza and Pappas Brothers Steakhouse. I believe we went to 2/7 of their chains.

- I was sworn in by the oath of office by a commander from the US Deparment of Public Health. He was bedecked in the ubiquitous uni-beige uniform, complete with folded naval cap in belt. His name was Gene. I swore my oath and was nervous doing it. Thereafter I was a federalized, unpaid employee of the US Gov't. They never gave us any documentation, no badge announcing our titles, authority etc. In retrospect...WTF?

- I went to the G.R. Brown Convention Center in Houston on my first day. I did triage for the mindblowing medical unit that was set up there by the U of Texas and Scripps of San Diego. They had x-ray and lab capabilities (faster than most hospitals), two mental health trailers with big plastic signs on them that read MENTAL HEALTH (empty folding chairs in the waiting area), two Walgreens pharmacy trailers for filling the one-month free prescriptions that Katrina victims were entitled to.

- At the Brown Convention center, there were thousands of faith-based volunteers wearing bright yellow shirts that said Operation Compassion. If you were an evacuee (or not), you could ask them for directions, they could sit with you and hear your stories. They could sit with you and just hold your hand. The Brown center was brightly lit. There were three long tables lined with many bright red phones like the kind the president has, so that people could call anyone across country to locate lost relatives or arrange travel or just talk. There was an area designated to helping people find housing. There was an area for employment help, with lots of computers and pencils and pads of paper. Somewhere in the fold FEMA was registering people, but I didnt see them. Upstairs was a cafeteria run by volunteers. The sleeping area was the size of a high school football field dotted with neat rows of aerobeds. Volunteers were tucking in sheets and folding newly donated clothing. It was my fellow traveler Mr. Dr. Bill King of Tracy, California who pointed out the unique (and glaring) disparity between the Brown Convention center and the picture we saw in Louisiana. In Houston there was a dignity to that shelter...the spic and span-ness, the visible community of volunteers.

- The one comparable shelter in Louisiana we came across was the Cajundome in Lafayette, but we were denied entrance to it when we asked if we could take a look around to make an assessment of potential healthcare needs. The woman at the gateway wore a sad Red Cross vest, like the kind the Cards wear over the shoulder in Alice in Wonderland. She was a public health nurse from Orange County and she was more than ready to go home. She said she was doing "prison nursing with some mental health on the side". She was a long way from Newport. On the doors to the Cajundome were "no cameras, no photograph" signs. They had metal detectors and police dogs. Diabetics were not allowed to carry their own insulin needles but had to check them in with the Red Cross as if they were children or potential junkies. We saw a good number of military police outside of the Cajundome as well as a hefty Dept of Homeland Security trailer, antennae and satellite dishes pronging out into the night. There were barricades out in front, trash on the ground. There was a curfew. Orange sodium lights made everything that was slightly invisible seem suddenly dodgy, and the police presence didnt contradict such a feeling.

Next time on "Point Form"......The preacher's wife gets into a scrap!

intake and output

Originally uploaded by Sarah Lebo.

My dad and I had a conversation about marine species this evening.

It is starting to rain.

Today was day two for me in the PICU. It is a different place from where I've been. Today my baby patient breathed helium and oxygen inside a plastic dome that looked like something belonging to a fancy person who happens to live in the Crab Nebula.
When he cried, everyone said it sounded like a person crying from five rooms away.
But no, there he would be, his head under the bell jar, right next to you.

The banana tree outside my bungalow sounds like a man in the bushes.

Don't worry, it really is a tree.

I'm not done telling you about Tx-La but I need to sleep.

Around the week of August 30, 2005

It feels somewhat deflating to write about this so late, but as I was in Texas and Louisiana last month, I'll tell you about it.

At the start of it all, many of my colleagues and I signed up to be volunteer medical assists with FEMA when the levees broke. They actually called our hospital to make such a list. However, we didn’t hear anything more.
That was the week we all saw the baby held by its mama on CNN, the baby with the floppy arms and pale hands and sunken raccoon eyes held in a chubby embrace outside the Superdome. Perhaps that was the day we saw that man softly place a patchwork blanket over somebody’s grandma who died sitting up in her patchwork wheelchair (duct tape around the armrests, cardboard wrapped around several spokes in the wheels), the man trying not to let out tears as he calmly yet angrily protested such a way to die, to absolutely no one. Everything was like a one-way valve that week. The people of New Orleans emoted outwardly towards us all through the glass of our TV screens, looking up from tar-papered garage roofs, pleading through the lenses of network cameras that were steamed up at the edges from the humidity (those cameras of course imbued with magic powers enabling them to make an appearance where our government could not), teenagers eloquently expounding the disgrace of Iraq in light of their current needs...Their holler was clear but our response was stifled and retarded in the true definition of such a word; our reactions flew back, hit the impermeable surface of the TV screen and rolled right on back into our laps wherein their extreme helplessness became ours (though ours was much less important because it was softened of course, privileged and air conditioned and hydrated with Vitamin Water and adorned with diplomas and iPods and toilets that flushed and lights that clicked on when requested). And so all Our Brilliant Solutions (so passionately discussed over so many lunch hours) and emphatic I-hear-yous and all that Red Cross money at this point was in a sense without horsepower. It’s like that mechanism inside of engines that transfers chemical energy into power and then into movement, it was stuck or malrotated or simply was never there to begin with. I think the people in the Ninth Ward came to know this was true before the floods. For some of them maybe it was an appalling reminder of something familiar they already understood; for us it was simply an apalling revelation.

I wrote an angry letter that night to Bush and to Cheney, that no one will ever read.

I wanted to tell them that my colleagues and I were willing to jump from copters, each bearing 50 liters of IV fluids on our backs, because it was something that would very cheaply and easily arm people against death. Why the fuck weren’t they using us?
I wanted someone to kick and punch.
Later that week Anderson Cooper cried on television twice, one time during a split-screen interview with Governor Blanco wherein he fiestily noted that rats were consuming a corpse to his left and that her thanksgiving to other politicians was an inhumane response to the situation. (Blanco, white.)
So Blanco prayed to lord baby Jesus, suggesting the state of Louisiana do the same and asked for nonspecific help from the federal government. Mayor Nagin decided to enact a mandatory evacuation 2 days late. Heckuva-job-Brownie told Paula Zahn that people at the Convention Center in N.O. were receiving two meals-ready-to-eat per day, and when our anchor denied his data and asked about the situation at the Superdome Mr. Brown, well, Heckuva-job- Brownie says he only that morning knew that those people didn’t have food or water. Our anchor rhetorically spanked him as best she could, which was still feeble but better than nothing (a theme for this whole scenario –some anchor on Fox news even lost his shit) - by asking if that meant the public had better intelligence than the federal government?
Then this past week I read that Brownie, under questioning, stated said the media had been creating “hype” and “fabricating stories of rape and violence” and generally presenting the situation incorrectly. Gee, Brownie, the stories I was told by both 8-year old girls and 82-year old men, I mean, talk about overly vivid and painful imaginative capabilities! And those grandmas – especially the legally blind ones with the acute senses of hearing – well they’re spinning some yarns, I suppose, Sir.
But then they’re like, well…yarns so dark they couldn’t possibly be yarns, y’know?
[I didn’t want to resort to angry sarcasm, but there it goes.]

In response to those emails I sent to Bush and Cheney, I received a rote email requesting patience from the citizenry and reassurance that all arms of government had been activated in response to this national disaster.

I thought of Doc Octagon, because that sentence made me think of “arms”. I thought of how the ground shook in response when he thonked all around Peter Parker’s city, how the bricks sounded when he scrounched down on them. An active sound.