Ike's aftermath.

The city is divided. There are islands of light amid pools of darkness. One can literally drive several city blocks and see places lit up and the home or business next to it or across the street sitting in the dark.  Charlie Brown (Mayor White) and city counsel still have the 12:00am to 6:00 am curfew in effect and the number of gas stations open is increasing.  Yesterday I went to the mall and skated as I do every week to see if I could at least pretend that the the previous week of living like a field Marine never happened. Some of the other skate-trash are still without power. 

        I went to Sullivan's and listened to Robert's Jazz trio playing without him. There was no cover in Ringside and I ran into Morgan Fairchild's doppelganger Kathy who was waiting on some friends to show. The place was dead and aside from flirting with Theresa 6 foot hippy/buxom Korean-American waitress the evening was filled with men and women who were attempting to pretend that we had just been hit by a hurricane and that all was in fact well.

        I found myself at home at 11:00pm and was assembling shelves and reorganizing my books. The storm and subsequent power outage made me realize just how many, books, dvds and tapes I owed and how they could have stood to be a bit more organized. Today saw me going to church and listening to the Catholic Church's equivalent of Ben Stein sucking the life and joy out of the gospel to a packed house.

         Les Girval the Bahn Mi shop that I frequent after mass was open and packed as it always is. I had to search to find a sports bar where there were both lights AND the Texans game and found one with no seats, a bitchy Asian woman with a lap top who assumed she needed an entire booth for herself and her computer, beautiful waitresses and possibly the worst bowl of soup a human being could possibly consume. Had they been giving it away at a soup kitchen it would have still been over priced.  I found an open laundry which was filled with everyone who hadn't washed his/her clothes in the past several weeks. The owner was a woman from Louisiana who had to be a little younger than my mother. She and I discussed the world over a cup of her strong coffee. At the end of my day I went home and ate half of the Bahn Mi which I was fortunate enough to purchase downtown. 

            Don't know if HISD will be open tomorrow but I'm ready to get back to work. The kids most likely will be complaining about how this was the worst thing that's ever happened to them and how it was so terrible living without electricity despite the fact that many of their parents and grandparents grew up in Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and other parts of central America without it. Fat, spoiled, lazy American teenagers in apathetic ingratitude.