we live our lives with a strong faith in home, that place where we rest our heads and keep our memories. when my roommate, marlo, was clearing the food out of our kitchen cabinets, we took a moment to pause and breathe in the midst of packing up to evacuate new orleans. she looked around the kitchen and said, ” i finally had given up and started calling this home.” four of us have been living together in this shotgun house since october: marlo, william, me, and the baby, cylis. the house has fostered us, the neighborhood has inspired us. we have become a family.

now, six hundred miles from home, i am struck with the unfathomable dread of losing home. i didn’t think i’d get attached; i’ve always been transient. just the moment you let up your guard, nature threatens to take away your man-made security, striking blows against human civilization. we cannot get attached to the material things in life. and we cannot create systems to wall out nature; it will only be our downfall. the saddest thing about our existence is the suffering that we have created for ourselves.

i am not scared. i am not hopeless. i am just worried about losing our human “stuff”–tools, buildings, jobs. some of the minor things that connect us as humans. i am in awe of nature right now. i have no control. i want others to surrender to this fact so as not to suffer from the losses that may come…

there is a lot of hype on the news as we are just a day away from gustav making landfall. i am trying not to succumb to the whirlwind of worry. but this storm has made a serious threat; i fear, through our own destruction of nature & its safeguards, we may lose the roots of the culture of southern louisiana.

i boarded up the windows today.
moved some things to higher ground (which means little in the path of a hurricane).
met with friends a third or fourth time to go over plans. prepared vehicles for their trips. packed up valuables.

the most striking thing for me was looking at the house all boarded up, wondering what i will return to. of course i hope for nothing…everything will be in it’s place when we get back next week, fingers crossed. all of our stuff packed high on shelves, books moved up to the top shelf, computers backed on top of closets, refrigerator emptied and turned off. but will our house still have a roof when we return? will the boards over the glass have done any good? will our more stubborn neighbors be under piles of rubble or swept out in the current? the hardest part is knowing we all will be coming home soon, next week probably, but what will we come home to? this is all so uncertain.

so it is.

i have not enjoyed myself much or felt very happy since i left home, for happiness depends on contentment, and that has not fell to my lot, and it seems to me never will…merry little birds make one wish he were as happy as all around him; but that cannot be; as this earth is not a heaven for man; for we at the happiest day feel a burden of sorrow which we cannot throw off here.

words by william clarke quantrill.

*
    when my plane landed in new orleans last night at 11:30, i had been wrapped up in conversation with the passenger sitting next to me: a disgruntled cattle farmer from maryland who recently sold all his cattle in protest of a new maryland law requiring livestock farmers with 8 or more animals to pay more fees and have a elaborate farm plan submitted to uncle sam detailing every aspect of the farm operation. his frustration was understandable, but not the irrational blame he kept placing on illegal immigrants in the united states. everything he talked about somehow lead back to how illegal immigrants are to blame. interesting man, but he wore me out.

so anyway, when we landed he pointed at the condensation coating the outside of the little oval airplane windows and asked, “so it’s pretty humid here, huh?”
“oh, you just don’t know, mister. you just don’t know.”
 

* *
    i am back in the south. i wanted to let you all know that i am safe and sound and so grateful for your hospitality and accommodations while i took a month-long vacation this may. the vacation was for my physical & mental health and it worked. i have all you to thank.

when i stepped into my house in new orleans and put my backpack down, the feeling of ‘home’ crept up into my body and filled me up. i hugged my roommates and two best friends in the living room. i looked at the 7 month-old baby sleeping in their room and i paused to take in his presence. he’s so tall now, but still so fat. i laid in my bed and read a letter i had received from an old friend. i sat on the porch while my roommates smoked cigarettes and i took in the neighborhood again.

i’m just writing to let y’all know i miss you and love you. i’ll be seeing some of you again soon. but thanks. it was a great trip.
heart.

i forgot what i was going to write about…
…oh, yeah. impermanence.

i am at my pop’s house tackling the daunting task of transferring my relatively large cd collection (is 200 huge?) into mp3 files. i’ve succumb to the fear that the metal coating on the discs in my 7-15 year-old cd collection is slowly deteriorating and will leave my music to die forever and my wallet to groan at the thought of the money i spent collecting the albums that characterize my adolescence and entry into adulthood (i’m laughing at myself as i write this overly sentimental statement). i remember going through my father’s vinyl when i was a kid, putting some dusty grooves onto the old technics phono and hearing for the first time herbie mann, bob dylan, joni mitchell, chuck mangione, john coltrane. if i were to ever have kids or simply a place where friends could share all the junk i’ve collected over the years–sometimes called a “home”–i’d want my music to be accessible, not obsolete as cds will eventually be. vinyl is supposedly the only media the library of congress uses to archive their music collection. i feel gypped.

i’m not doing much for the cause by purchasing an mp3 player (albeit an open-share piece of equipment that doesn’t require me to use itunes and allows me to share my music with whomever i please. sorry, apple.). a flash memory card probably won’t outlast a plastic cd, but at least it allows me to carry eight boxes of compact discs in my pocket. i feel bad buying another lithium-ion battery, another gadget that will die in a few years time. i’ve been thinking this choice over for many years now, ever since ipods became the as fashionably cliché as converse shoes. a compact ‘walkman’ (sorry, i grew up in the eighties) that can carry over a thousand songs? what a miracle. i grew up using computers, so the technology wasn’t foreign to me. but the dependence on yet another battery-powered circuit board made me hesitate. so i waited. and waited. and kept making mix tapes and lugging my cds around with me wherever i moved.

i am excited though…music is a part of me that my luddite side cannot beat in an arm wrestling contest. the music always wins, and since we don’t all play live music on our back porch (fortunately, there’s often bluegrass musicians on my father’s back porch), we record it on albums and listen to it on speakers. and we share our music and it brings us a certain joy that is hard to get any other way. i love music. it keeps me in rhythm to life.

lately i’ve been watching some of my friends don obama buttons and send out forwards for his campaign, and i see people debating the news of who voted black or who voted female. overall, i do think this is an important election in our country’s history. i also think a lot of people are just burned out on politics and big government, despite the opportunity for a woman or an african american to be in the white house. some people might see past the hype and still feel like neither republicans nor democrats can represent their interests or their ideologies. i’ve heard a fifty year-old, working-class black man living in new orleans tell me he is not going to vote. and i’ve heard a young, professional woman living in new york city tell me she is not going to vote. and i’m sure there’s a million more stories out there…
 
here’s one from howard zinn, although i can’t tell if he’s going to vote this election or not:

Ziga Vodovnik: One personal question. Do you go to the polls? Do you vote?

Howard Zinn: I do. Sometimes, not always. It depends. But I believe that it is preferable sometimes to have one candidate rather another candidate, while you understand that that is not the solution. Sometimes the lesser evil is not so lesser, so you want to ignore that, and you either do not vote or vote for third party as a protest against the party system. Sometimes the difference between two candidates is an important one in the immediate sense, and then I believe trying to get somebody into office, who is a little better, who is less dangerous, is understandable. But never forgetting that no matter who gets into office, the crucial question is not who is in office, but what kind of social movement do you have. Because we have seen historically that if you have a powerful social movement, it doesn’t matter who is in office. Whoever is in office, they could be Republican or Democrat, if you have a powerful social movement, the person in office will have to yield, will have to in some ways respect the power of social movements.

We saw this in the 1960s. Richard Nixon was not the lesser evil, he was the greater evil, but in his administration the war was finally brought to an end, because he had to deal with the power of the anti-war movement as well as the power of the Vietnamese movement. I will vote, but always with a caution that voting is not crucial, and organizing is the important thing.

When some people ask me about voting, they would say will you support this candidate or that candidate? I say: ‘I will support this candidate for one minute that I am in the voting booth. At that moment I will support A versus B, but before I am going to the voting booth, and after I leave the voting booth, I am going to concentrate on organizing people and not organizing electoral campaign.’

dear ——,
i just read your letter and i keep going over words and sentences in my head of what i would write back to you, so i’ll just get it all down now. i think letter writing is the only thing i don’t procrastinate on…

and i’ll write on a computer despite it’s nerdiness and not because i like to write letters on computers–i don’t–but because traveling east has worn me out with the time change and then to spend four days in the city that never sleeps…well, i followed along and didn’t sleep much. i think what wears me out the most is airplanes. when i hitchhike and ride buses or trains, i get don’t seem to get so worn out so quickly. i guess the slow travel lets your body adjust as you move, as opposed to the crash that happens after a six-hour airplane trip.

[regarding violence and bike accidents and deaths happening in new orleans lately:] i heard about l. right before i left town, and the story was super confusing from m., and then s. spent a day at our house to chill out and we talked. but of course the whole incident has been confusing for everyone. the incident makes me angry, but it’s that anger that i can’t aim anywhere and so i just feel upset and confused. sometime a week or so ago i got a call from tony about p. and j.’s bike accident while i was planting lettuce in a garden in portland. it was another pileup on my anger at this…whatever this is that is causing harm to our friends. it is faceless and mysterious, like a spirit of hate and violence or just plain carelessness or recklessness that does so much harm to innocent people. it’s uncontrollable, and so we feel helpless when our friends fall at the hands of it. and even when i am doing something to relax my mind, like planting lettuce, this spirit haunts me and all my friends.
i had not heard about b….and i don’t know if i knew him, or at least i can’t picture his face. did you know him well? i hope you are doing well with all this. i know you have had so much death in your life lately. like so many folks in violet, too…they all say it’s been that way ever since the storm. or maybe it just feels like it. but i don’t know.

i think all this news has been causing me to emphasize the unhealthiness of new orleans in my conversations with outsiders. people usually want to talk about new orleans: oh, how’s it going down there? what do you do? do you think you will stay? i feel obligated to talk about it, mostly just for myself because i think about these questions all the time and i never really have a concrete answer. new orleans is always changing, i never really do the same thing and when i finally decide to stay, i think about leaving…and when finally get away from the city and travel, i get to thinking new orleans is the only place for me. it makes sense because nothing makes sense in new orleans. you know?

i think some of my anxiety and indecisiveness comes from my personality and not just the insanity of that city. i want a steady, stable place to call home, including a house with my tools and music and instruments, but i constantly change my perception of “home” and sometimes think i will only be happy if i surrender myself to the movement of travel. i think i am a nomad, an itinerant. well, no…not an itinerant, because i have many homes in many places. i just can’t ever settle down in one. new orleans suits me well now, and i want to make art, play music, help rebuild houses, and have dance parties in a place i call my home. but inevitably, i realize that new places bring me new inspiration and again, i have homes with other best friends in all the far corners of this country. i’d like to think of my home as between two oceans. think of my home as east and west of the mississippi.

i’m reading into the wild because my sister gave it to me. i have been hesitating reading it because of the fact that the movie made the story very popular in mainstream america and, in my opinion, devaluing the meaning of what it means to detach yourself in wandering. yet despite the cliche nature of the whole thing–the movie, the popularity, etc–i think our culture is ripe to receive some of the messages held in into the wild. the story of alex (the man who the story is about) is helping me understand myself as a restless traveler, not to mention my constant questioning of everything. wayne westerberg, a south dakota friend of alex’s, recalled:

“i think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. somtimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. a couple of times i tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but alex got stuck on things. he always had to know the absolute right answere before he could go on to the next thing.”

still, i am empty handed. there are no answers, but, like some abusive human instinctual response, i keep searching for them.

i am wondering how to get where i am going. i would like to think that something leads to something else.
maybe that’s our folly as humans: we can’t allow ourselves to admit that this is all choas decorated to look like order.

i couldn’t make it all the way to deleware water gap in one day. pulled off the highway at eleven in a small town in the center of pennsylvania. watsontown. in the muted colors of midnight, this assemblage of homes and storefronts looked quaint, a well-kempt village with rolling hills and a main street drag. it was so, so clean. unusual. i slept in the backyard of a church, one with a tall steeple. i awoke at dawn with a start, worried that the friday morning commuters might catch a glimpse of a dirty traveller. would i be seen as an invader? disturbing the cleanliness of this valley town?

i was slow to start out. i only had a couple hours to go till lou’s, but the car was groaning from the weight and cold engine, so i stopped at a twenty-four hour truck stop and talked to a diesel engine repair man to see what he thought. i probably have a thousand pounds of wieght loaded in the truck, so he seemed to think the transmission was the mouth of the groan. i agreed, and moved on to the diner to feed myself some oatmeal and a tall glass of water.

 
chicago
indiana
ohio
pennsylvania
new jersey
new york
connecticut
rhode island
massachusetts
chicago

write me and i’ll visit.
i’m back.