Caterwauling

So this is my first bona fide post back at Caterwauling — and my first WordPress entry.

It’s like moving back into an apartment that you left or getting back together with someone you’ve been missing, and you get that sort of cognitive dissonance — like, can you really start over again? I have no intention of picking up where I left off — tempting though it may be — but, rather, of continuing on the journey but in the place where I was happiest.

I don’t kid myself — I don’t think that this blog could ever be anonymous again, but I just hated blogging under MyNameDotCom.

What even made me decide that today was, in fact, the day to move over here was that I had too much traffic at the other place. Hah! You mean to tell me that enough people stop by to read this worthless drivel that I’ve exceeded my bandwidth? Day-um!

Anyway, Caterwauling is like moving back into a bigger place (i.e., more bandwith) and Maddie and Kadi are right next door. And as I prepare to be displaced from my beloved apartment due to renovation-induced eviction, my Web space is truly my only permanent residence.

Sadly, my first post here isn’t scintillating, but I’ve got a LOT on my mind. Like, what am I going to write about for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November? Do I continue the series I had planned when I started participating in the challenge last year? I only got halfway through the book (and it was all exposition anyway, damn it — I’ve been thinking about my fiction series since I was 14 and that was a LONG time ago). Do I write those management allegories that have been swirling around in my head for five years?

What else? Oh yeah, I passed a gas station in my ‘hood today, and the cheapo gas was listed as $3.39 a gallon. Three fucking thirty-nine dollars?!?! The hell? The day I pay that without a tantrum is the day it comes with a side of orgasm, thankyouverymuch. Shit, I got three-quarters of a tank elsewhere in my city tonight (and I couldn’t find a single station below $3.05 a gallon), and it set me back WELL above $30. Thank you Hurricane Katrina, you raging hormonal Tasmanian devil of a tropical storm.

I remembered that one of my blogrollers is down in N’Orleans — Trish had sent me a king cake a few Mardi Gras ago to thank me for my (minimal) help on a project she was working on. So whenever I hear about the Big Easy, I hope that by some miracle, she was able to escape. I worry that I may never know either way and I hope the e-mail address I have for her is still valid and that she will answer me when she can. And I know another blogger whose family in that area is safe, yet generations of heirlooms that were to be hers are probably no longer in existence.

The day the hurricane hit, I watched a man on the Fox News Channel in hysterics over his wife being washed away to sea — it was like “Titanic” but without Celine Dion screeching in the background. He said she was holding onto him, but she declared she couldn’t hang on anymore and that he needs to take care of their children and, eventually, their grandchildren. *gulp*

And maybe I am being sacreligious or something, but I was wondering if she’d set her mind to holding on, would she have been saved? Did she give up too quickly? Could she have hung in longer than she did? Granted, the answer is probably no, but I thought about how hard it is to keep the faith during seemingly impossible times, and I wonder could the story have had a different ending had she maybe hung on with both hands or whatever could have changed that outcome.

The lesson I take from it is that I’m always hanging in there by one hand — I toe the line between expectation and doubt and perhaps that’s why my life is in this weird limbo right now between an uneasy peace and raging discontent. I try so hard to hope and envision and to really allow myself to want better things, yet it’s so hard to picture them when I don’t know what they should look like. But I do have faith that I will know them when I see them. I just hope our neighbors to the South will be able to recover from losing everything, when the rest of us are simply trying to learn how to function after just losing a piece or two of ourselves here and there.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 1st, 2005 at 10:06 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.