Today is the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

Anyway, it’s been like a full 25 minutes since I wrote ‘Today is the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’ and I’ve basically just been staring at the screen ever since. It’s weird to think about how communities can experience events that are so monumental that it breaks time for them–things are forever defined as Before and After–but for everyone else it eventually becomes just a sad thing that happened. There have been some really beautiful recollections and reflections recently from people who experienced Katrina; this is one. That’s not what’s happening here today. You’re getting some very random-ass memories (fun fact: this originally read ‘random ass memories’ which is a very different thread). Seriously, get your onion belts ready, kids; you’re gonna need ’em. Also, as an aside, if you’re interested in checking out the story linked above, you may want to do it soon; it’s from the Smithsonian Magazine, so who knows how long it will last before it’s purged because of wokeness.

Two things I think it’s important to remember about the actual event before we move on:

First, I think it’s important, and appropriate for the PT, to remember that what happened in New Orleans was the result of a series of catastrophic failures of government. The ones from after the flood are the ones that tend to stick in peoples’ minds, but the flood itself was also a governmental failure on the part of the Army Corps of Engineers–gonna quote this little gem from the conclusions of a government investigation (emphasis mine):

Some levees were overtopped either because they were built to withstand a smaller storm than the one that actually occurred, they had settled below their design elevations, the consequences of the design storm had not been adequately estimated, or a combination of these effects. The levees that failed even before they were overtopped could not withstand even the water levels for which they were designed. All of this suggests major deficiencies in the procedures for the design and construction of the levee system around New Orleans.

Second, a lot of the focus today/this week/whenever will be on New Orleans and Katrina the manmade disaster. That’s completely understandable, but I do think it’s important to remember that there were other places that were hit severely by Katrina the natural disaster. There were parts of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, for example, that were basically annihilated. So if you’re thoughts and/or prayers-ing today (non-derogatory), spare some for those folks too.

Honestly, you know what I remember more than anything? It’s the smell. If you’ve cleaned up after a flood or a hurricane, you probably know it. I think it’s from the guts of peoples’ houses out on the side of the street, but it was everywhere. Like you’d get within a certain distance around New Orleans, and you would just start smelling it, even on the interstate. And, like, there are a lot of songs from around that time that will take me back, but nothing, nothing, will bring me back like that smell. Some people have madeleines; some of us have hot, wet drywall, I guess.

I don’t have a lot of things from pre-Katrina. I lived with my mom at the time, and her house was one of those houses that wound up with drywall and possessions and basically entire material lives piled up outside. There’s a picture of us outside of the house from around that time, but I can’t remember if it was taken before or after the debris was taken away. In it, we’re holding up our cans of FEMA water, provided (as it said on the can) by Anheuser-Busch. We thought that was hilarious, it still kind of is. My mom has since moved houses, but she still has one of those canned waters on the shelf in her kitchen.

You know what did survive in that house? The pack of Virginia Slims menthols in the bowl on the kitchen counter where she kept her keys. We walked in after a couple of days of staying in a hotel in Shreveport and a maybe a week at my grandparents’ house down the bayou. The roof of the house was just plywood at that point, and pretty much everything else was shot, but those cigarettes? Fucking pristine. Like the gods themselves were knew we were gonna want those. That was when I finally fessed up to my mom that I also smoked. Also menthols, which is weird because I never snuck her cigarettes. (We both quit a very long time ago, in case you’re wondering.)

I do have some random post-Katrina relics, though. To wit:

On the left is a flyer from a show that was scheduled for 20 years ago tonight. The store where I worked had flyers on the counter; when we came back–it must have been early November?–the flyers that were out when we closed for Katrina were still there. I find myself interested a lot of times in artifacts from those last, blessed moments of normality before something (anything) catastrophic happens–a photograph, a video, whatever final pieces of evidence that there was a time before everything went to hell. This flyer is one of those.

The headlining band later played in Memphis. I went to that show with my displaced friend Kim and a bunch of her new friends from Jackson, Mississippi. I don’t remember a ton about the show itself, but I do remember they introduced me to Lucero’s Last Night In Town, which is a goddamn great album. They also introduced me to the joys of putting ‘Since U Been Gone’ by Kelly Clarkson on repeat and singing along with it at the top of your lungs, like, eight times in a row.

A week or so later I went with Kim and some other friends to see the Slackers at the Maple Leaf in New Orleans. I don’t think it was that long after people started being allowed back into the city on an unrestricted basis. That show felt like a metaphorical light in the darkness and was also a literal light in the darkness–there were still huge swaths of the city that didn’t have power, including right up the block from the Maple Leaf. It was so unbelievably dark; in my memories sometimes it feels like it’s trying to swallow me. That’s another show that I don’t really remember much of. Most of my memories are of hanging out outside, smoking cigarettes, and sharing Katrina stories. It was good. Sad in a lot of ways, unsurprisingly, but good. I think up until that point, I could feel that I had survived as a person, but that night at the Maple Leaf, with everyone coming out the darkness to drink and dance and sing and feel– truly feel–like every single person in that bar was a loved one, that was the first time I felt that we had survived as a people.

The shoes on the right belonged to my friend Charlene. She gifted them to me the night we packed up her apartment for her move to Louisville. They’re a half size too small and I didn’t care then and do not care now. Maybe I care a little bit because I have tailor’s bunions now. I think I’ve told this story here before, but Charlene used to say that her three heroes were Dolly Parton, Endora from Bewitched, and Nellie Olsen from Little House on the Prairie. 20 years later and it’s still kind of a goal to live my life like those three ladies are my holy trinity.

The crowbar at the top is my guttin’ crowbar. It was my grandfather’s. Helped gut my mom’s house with that crowbar. Helped pry doors open and lever heavy things off other things when I went with my friend Ellie to her and Kim’s house (Jackson Kim; they were roommates) to see what was salvageable (their house got like 11 feet of water and somehow everything floated to the most inconvenient goddamn place possible). Theoretically, I also used the crowbar to bust out the windows on Kim’s totaled hatchback that in the front yard (where it had floated from the driveway), because why not at that point, but it turns out that’s way harder than it looks on TV.

The tablecloth isn’t a relic or anything; that’s just part of my ongoing project to make my house look like the Chicken Ranch.

I’ll leave you with this song, ‘Dear Molly’ by the Zydepunks. This came out a few years after Katrina, and I’m hard pressed to think of a song that better captures the love, the loss, the hope, the surrealness (surreality?) and, well, the booze of life after the storm. It’s the last lines of this song that give the header it’s title, and I find they’re still pretty useful these days, albeit for different reasons:

Don’t tell me this is the end
We’ve been through worse and we’ll be back again
We’ll have a drink for each other
In the 9th Ward

Be nice to each other today. Please. Be nice to the mods. Don’t threaten Mayor McSquirrel. Also, it’s forget_it_jake’s birthday today! If you see them around, be sure to send them some birthday wishes and tell them how great they are, which is pretty damn great!