Mind Full

Skylar is really under the weather today. And she's scheduled to have surgery to remove her tonsils tomorrow morning. It has to happen. But we can't go ahead with the procedure unless she's well enough to keep her spirits up. On top of that, I'm getting more and more distressed with each passing news story about the situation in New Orleans. _luaineach and I have been having a productively tough-minded debate in private correspondence about the role of the state in dealing with natural disasters. Having the distraction has been helpful on a day when I would otherwise be treading the same ten centimeters into shiny hardness. Because I'm feeling extremely stressed out and weepy, though, I'm having a hard time sustaining the dispassion necessary to prevent that sort of back-and-forth from deteriorating into statements like "It's hopeless. We will never come to an understanding." Before Kim came home I brought the futon out of the garage for Bean and put on the DVD for Andy Goldsworthy's Rivers and Tides. It lulled her to sleep very quickly and made me feel considerably more relaxed. Now I have to go run an errand for her, however, and then rush down to teach, so my stress level is heading for another peak. It says something about my state of mind that I keep seeing a mirage of rising water everywhere I turn.

The Falcon Needs A Hearing Aid

What eats at me most about the situation in New Orleans is that, like the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, it is playing out like a live performance of a pre-existing movie. Reading stories like this one from The Chicago Tribune, I can't help but think, "That's like that scene in Road Warrior. And this is like that part in 28 Days Later. Oh, and that's lifted straight out of Escape From New York." I mean, I feel bad for having these thoughts, on top of feeling terrible about everything already. But I can't help but wonder whether the stories are being written from a cultural template of which their authors are not conscious, one in which it doesn't take much for mere anarchy to be loosed upon the world, particularly when that world is centered on the Big Easy, which is already notorious for its decadence and lawlessness:

To provide housing for tens of thousands of people for an uncertain period that could last months, officials were considering buying financially troubled hotels and apartment complexes or housing refugees in cruise ships and tent cities.

Just outside New Orleans, officials set up a staging point for the evacuation on the deserted Interstate Highway 10, the major east-west route out of the city. Army and Coast Guard helicopters were landing at a pace of three a minute and hundreds of heavy Army trucks disgorged sick, shocked and desperate victims in an endless procession of misery.

More than 3,000 people were rescued from across the flooded city, plucked by helicopters one by one from rooftops, loaded into boats or jammed into trucks. The Superdome, the sweltering home to an estimated 20,000 storm victims, was being emptied as fast as possible as officials raced against mounting fears of disease.

At the staging point, thousands huddled beneath the Causeway Boulevard overpass in search of shade and relief from the punishing heat while they waited for an intermittent parade of buses to pull up to take them out of their stricken city. They implored rescue workers and police for water and food, which at times during the day were in short supply.

A medical triage area was swamped with scores of sick, frail and elderly patients, many of them hooked to IVs and some still strapped to the doors that had been used as makeshift stretchers to pull them out.

Those of you who thought that Los Angeles or Hong Kong or Moscow would be the model for the cyberpunk dystopian city of the near future need to think again. New Orleans, what my friend chefxh rightly terms an American "Atlantis," is definitely in the running for the prize. After all, how many cities of half a million have been almost entirely evacuated with no prospect of returning to normalcy for months ahead? Not since the plague years in places like London has the character of a metropolitan area in the developed world changed so radically as a result of a natural calamity. Later, after we've recovered from Skylar's surgery tomorrow, I'll try to muster up the energy to ponder the troubling analogies that have been made between Louisiana and Mississippi and "a war zone," right down to the note that Mississippi's Gulf Coast looks, as the state's governor put it, the way Hiroshima did after the atomic bomb. For now, all I can do is hope that the national government starts doing something commensurate with its status as the Law of Our Land.

Live Journal Anniversary

Apparently, it's not only my birthday that has a talent for coming at times of maximum stress, but also my anniversaries. Today is my two-year Live Journal anniversary.

I started reading cpratt's journal late in 2001 and used it to follow him and danlmarmot on the months-long trip they made to Australia in 2002. By then I was also following the non-LJ blog of my friend Steven -- masoo -- which currently features an entry with a long quote from Will Bunch about the role that the war in Iraq may have played in cutting federal funding for flood control in the New Orleans area. And I was also reading around in other blogs, on and off Live Journal.

By the time 2003 came around, I realized that I wanted to write something about the blogging phenomenon. So in the spirit of all those path-breaking participant observers doing ethnography, I decided to experiment with a blog of my own. While I've never given the Live Journal vs. non-LJ divide as much emphasis as some people do, I did think about following Steven's lead. In the end, though, I decided that I liked the commenting feature I'd experienced reading cpratt and danlmarmot's journals too much to go outside the Live Journal fold.

Still, it took me the better part of the year to finally take the plunge. My first entry gives a pretty good sense of what was going on in our lives two years ago. Skylar was already one of the most intense people you'll ever meet. Those of you who now read me regularly might recognize the story I tell in that first entry from a reference I made a few weeks ago in an entry featuring the image of a Zip-Loc baggy with a tiny, green Christmas tree inside it. The differences between the everyday life of the Nicolini-Bertsch household as described in August, 2003 and the one as described in August, 2005 is not as great as one might suppose. Indeed, the biggest change may be that back then I was following the San Francisco Giants in a pennant race and now I can hardly bear to contemplate their horribleness.

Indeed, the biggest change between my life than and my life now is the fact that my partner and I both blog on a regular basis. Part of my motivation for starting De File was too show Kim that it was a cool thing to do. That plan worked, amazingly. She began keeping her own Live Journal in October, 2003. Blogging together has done wonders for our relationship, all in all, even if it has also been the catalyst for pretty significant changed within it.

Here's the tally for my two years on Live Journal:

• This is my 1200th entry
• I've posted 2,436 comments
• I've received 2,702 comments
• The most entries I've posted on a single day was nine, on March 21st, 2004, the first of which features a poem that precedes my "mid-life crisis" poetic flowering of this past spring by a whole year
• The first person I persuaded to start a Live Journal and my first LJ friend was elizabeg, who followed right on my heels from her then new home in the City of Angels
• I didn't tell anyone about my blog at first, but cpratt had found out by the 5th of September and gave me a royal welcome.
• So far I've met four people in the flesh whom I got to know first in the world of Live Journal -- danthered, bitterlawngnome, _luaineach, and derdriu -- and several others whose names I'd seen in comments on my LJ friends entries prior to a face-to-face encounter, not to mention the inimitable Mr. D, who entered our lives as a reader of Kim's journal
• The last day for which I failed to post an entry -- I had to fix the date for one I posted from Washington D.C. in July because the time zone change made it seem like I had missed a day, inspiring mild panic in my family members -- was September 5th, 2004.
• I'm not sure which entry received the most comments, but I know that the total was around 25
• The first day I included a meaningful graphic in De File -- I used a tiny graphic of a soup can in the fall of 2003 for some reason -- was on February 1st, 2004, when I first extended my archival impulse to the realm of family photographs.

Kim is fond of saying that it's hard for her to read her early blog entries because she was so much sloppier and unsure of voice back then than she is now. I see less of a break than she does. And, when it comes to contemplating my own blog, I see almost no break at all. While my life has become more complicated over the past two years, with the exception of the self-conscious experiments I perpetrate from time to time my writing has changed very little since August, 2003. I'm less free now in my criticism. I name fewer names. I conceal my dark moods more artfully. But at the level of the sentence I don't seem to have made much progress. Not that I'm unhappy with that realization: I enjoyed rereading entries from my first year of blogging just now. If you're ever extremely bored, you might even profit from scanning them yourself.

Dystopian Dixie

My entry from earlier this evening on the "cinematic" reporting of the madness in New Orleans bows in admiration to the ones on interdictor's LJ, drawn to my attention by _luaineach, which demonstrates the power of blogging to give a sense of reality that standard journalism only rarely achieves. I suspect that I would disagree with him on almost every point worth arguing, were we to discuss politics in the friction-free environment of some think tank. But I'm awed by his persistence in getting the word out under absurdly trying circumstances and can even live with his less-PC moments because I've never believed that looting constitutes a viable politics of resistance.

Maybe I witnessed one-too-many privileged, white frat boy wander out of the Berkeley Gap with a pile of new chinos during an "anarchist" uprising. Maybe the petty Bürger blood I inherited from my grandfather the camera-store owner still flows too freely inside me. Maybe I'm too much of a fascist law-lover. Whatever the reason, I have a hard time having sympathy for anyone taking advantage of a situation where people are dying in large numbers to raid stores when they could be contributing to the relief effort by simply not looting.

As I've said already in comments, the impoverished neighborhood underneath the Cypress Structure in West Oakland did not take its collapse during the 1989 Loma Prieta quake as a call to loot, but as a call for help. The only looters I know of were the "radical" German Autonomen -- one of whom stole my checkbooks and left scabies on the clothes of mine he'd borrowed without asking -- who, upon seeing the television coverage at Jeremy and David's place, said, "How zou vie get to zies road? Vie can take zair vallets if zay are dead." Pardon me if, even fifteen years later, I still haven't managed to wash the taste of that brand of anarchism out of my mouth.