Houston, We Have a Monstrous Problem

Here, along the northeastern passage of the Gulf Coast, weather is something that holds a mythic grip on the people who call this area home. My family was one in so many others who made the exodus to Houston, Texas in the oil-booming eighties. Texas holds not only a certain poetic allure to those who are unfamiliar with the hyper-conservative xenophobia that pervades her, but also the promise of plentiful work and cheap housing. That you might find this place as harsh and unforgiving as the climate is something that usually only happens once you are firmly entrenched in this marshy swamp fifty miles from the Gulf of Mexico.

And so, if you travel those fifty miles to the coast, where you end up is Galveston. Galveston, once the jewel of the Gulf Coast, is now a tourist island in as much as it is a refuge for outcasts and misfits of all stripes. Galveston is a sort of voluntary penal colony for the Texas undercurrent of unique personalities and catastrophically unstable beachcombers.

To take it one further, take the small hop over on the ferry up the northern edge of Galveston and you find yourself on the Bolivar peninsula. Bolivar is like the wild west in comparison to the already unpredictable lunacy of Galveston. On the peninsula is a small town called Gilchrist, and it is in Gilchrist where this story takes a tragic turn.

Summers here in Houston are long, sweltering, and quite-simply brutal. Each year we labor through the endless days and nights of high nineties temperatures and a cloying, soup-like humidity that ensures that even in an otherwise acceptable eighty degree day, you will still be sticky and stifled and begging for a break. This goes on pretty much from about the beginning of June through about mid-October, and after nearly thirty years of it, it hasn't gotten much easier to endure.

Better still, because of both our excessive heat and our proximity to a large body of tropical water, we are prone to one of the ugliest and ferocious things that nature can produce: hurricanes.

In 1983, Houston was set dead in the sights of a Hurricane that formed after a bit of unorganized weather weirdness left the mainland and headed into the Gulf whereupon is very quickly reacted to the favorable winds and water temperatures and before practically anyone had time to prepare, became not only a hurricane but a major category three storm capable of catastrophic damage in the area closest to the eyewall.

At the time of hurricane Alicia, my family was still reeling from the effects of my parents divorce. My mother had just sold the family house to my father, and then she had moved my brother and I to League City, a small but growing town directly on the water and only a few miles from the NASA space center in Nassau Bay.

Within weeks of our moving in to our new condominium, Alicia came to life just off the coast and set her sites on the Houston/Galveston area.

I remember having to evacuate our brand new home and head back to my dad's to ride that storm out, not knowing if we would have a home to go back to when it was all over and done.

Alicia was a relatively small storm, though she packed a strong punch. And once it was all over, it became apparent that all those strong winds ended up playing havoc on the trees and power lines of the Houston area.

I still remember the roar of the wind and the way that my dad's place shook with the gusts. I also remember watching the bayou across the street for signs that it was going to overflow its banks and head directly into our ground floor. I also have a very clear memory of going out into the yard once the eye of the storm passed over our yard and helping my father pick up debris and fallen fencing before having to rush back indoors to ride out the second half of the storm.

Our League City home sustained no real damage, only a little water leakage, and before long, life was back to normal. But things for me were never the same now understanding what was always out there, threatening our livelihood at anytime during the summer months.

In 2005, hurricane Katrina changed the way we all thought about hurricanes in this country. How could it not with its devastating effects on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and the nightmare that occurred when the New Orleans levee system failed to hold back the rising levels of Lake Pontchartrain and caused unprecedented flooding in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans as well as most of the rest of the small, crescent shaped city? The response, or should I say the lack of response from the federal government as New Orleans literally burned, people died from heat exhaustion and looters ravaged the city in search of food and water revealed just how wide the divide between rich and poor was in this country and just how vulnerable we all were in times of crisis.

Just a few weeks following the debacle of Katrina came Hurricane Rita. Rita hopped over the Florida Peninsula and worked her way through the Gulf of Mexico gaining strength seemingly by the hour. By the time Rita was in the middle of the Gulf, she was, at that time, the most powerful storm ever recorded. Rita was, by the Wednesday night before landfall, a massive and terrifying category five storm with winds in excess of 160 miles-per-hour and gusts into the 180s. It was time to make a decision. Rita was heading directly for the Houston/Galveston area, and it was pretty clear what would happen if we were to take a direct hit. Worse still, nobody wanted to stick around and find out how Uncle Sam unintended to handle the situation. So what happened next was a disaster unto itself.

The Gulf Coast areas in the direct path of the Storm began issuing mandatory evacuation orders, and with so many people using so few routes out of these coastal areas, the traffic was horrendous. Added to that was the panic-induced flow of Houston area residents who rightfully feared a real motherfucker of a Storm coming in and really devastating the way life functions in this, the fourth largest city in America. The freeways were gridlocked and with the tough Houston heat, things went from bad to worse. Cars began running out of fuel and overheating and the passengers in these cars began to reel from the effects of heat exhaustion. Sick and elderly people began to get sicker and many ended up dying in the severe heat. And then a bus transporting elderly nursing-home patients to safety caught fire. Before anything could be done, the bus was an inferno and 24 people were dead.

In the end, the storm took a small hop to the east at the last moment and Houston was almost miraculously spared the worst of the storm.

This year we were not so lucky.

Hurricane Ike first made landfall in the Caribbean, trashing Haiti and Cuba without mercy. Lives were lost in the ill-prepared and impoverished island of Haiti, and in Cuba, five-story waves washed up over Havana's sea-front buildings. First landing as a category two hurricane, Ike weakened over land to a tropical storm before hitting the open Gulf and quickly regrouping to hurricane status with its sights set directly on the Texas/Louisiana Gulf Coast.

The National Hurricane Center hit it right on the money as the storm remained a very respectable strong category two that ended up making landfall as a direct hit on the Houston/Galveston area.

The Friday before the night of the storm we rushed about town finding cheap available groceries and gas (which was no small feat considering the level of fear already whipped up locally). As the evening approached we bunkered into our apartment to ride the thing out.

We watched as Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula quickly became inundated and unapproachable by land as the surge rushed in a good twelve hours ahead of landfall.

By dark it was already getting windy around our place and Galveston was getting more or less hammered by heavy winds.

By midnight Galveston was being trashed and things here were breaking down fast. Somewhere around three A.M. we began to get something close to hurricane force winds, and all the while I couldn't help but keep checking the huge tree directly over our bedroom. I was exhausted at this point and decided to get some shuteye. In order to tune out the howling outside I put in earplugs (standard for anyone who ever played in a band as retarded as mine have been). I was rewarded with about three hours of sleep. By the time C woke me up the worst was over. It was still insane out there, but the steady 110 mph + winds were finally gone. By sunrise the winds were down to a mere tropical storm level and we were able to go outside and survey the lunacy.

As it turned out we were fairly lucky. We had almost no damage at all. In fact, all we ourselves had to deal with was some water that leaked into our window, water which had been propelled horizontally into the the side of the place for hours.

Beyond that, there was some flooding from a small incident wherein I was filling the bathtub for water to use to flush the toilet in anticipation of the power being out for god knew how long. In my agitated stupidity I forgot that the water was running and only figured it out once I stepped into Lake Bedroom. Nice one. It wasn't too bad, I cleaned it up in shame and went about my night.

Our complex also fared unsuspectingly well with the only damage I saw being the tree over the carport right by our back door. That thing was blown onto the carport (which it trashed). Otherwise, we were good.

Next up came the worst part: the power outage.

With predictions of power being out in terms of weeks and not days, I was a little concerned that we would be sweating profusely and hating one-another in no time. And to be sure, being without power is only bad when it lasts. We turned out to be among the lucky ones. Our power was only about for about three days. As I finish this interminable and tedious post there are still over a 100,000 customers in the area without power, and as we have learned, forget getting new power turned on anytime soon.

The thing about the power being out is this.

For the sake of argument, the entire fucking fourth largest city in America was blacked out. That means that when you go outside at night for a walk down, say, San Felipe, a large and important thoroughfare here in Houston, it is a fucking ghost town. There was no one out, not a soul. Maybe a car every few minutes and that was it. No lights, no stores, no cars, no-fucking-one.

I expected to run into Will Smith at any moment.

And as I went back out to show C the apocalypse, a funny thing happened. The cops that were passing by so feverishly stop in my general vicinity and start flashing their spotlights around. They appeared to be looking for someone.

Great.

We're out in the badlands, strolling, and the cops are itching to put a bullet in someone just because they can.

Better still, a fucking cop helicopter flies overhead and guess who gets spotted from their eye in the sky? Yup. We do.

Now we're on the radar. I can't explain how creepy it is to be followed by a police helicopter, how much it reminds you of 1984.

At this point we are walking rapidly -- but trying to do so without looking scared --
back to the safety of our place.

Yes, we pulled it off.

Every night after that until the lights were back on our street endured a late-night phalanx of cops parading the street, spots ablaze, letting everyone know who was in charge. The whole spectacle was disturbing.

About town, signs were blown out, trees were down everywhere, almost all light signals were out or blinking, everything was closed, no gas was available, stores were closed, and it was all a very bad movie.

Through this we all just did our thing and rode it out. It was less a crisis than an event. Houston is a big goddamn place, and during that week following Ike, we saw a lot of her.

We found food in several small foreign grocery stores filled with curious Arabs. We found someone an apartment in the midst of all this craziness. We spent a very tense night in an emergency room (don't ask), and we thanked whatever an atheist thanks that we had each other through all this ridiculousness.

We came up with the idea of holding signs on the street corners that read: "Satanist, Need Goat," and then never executed it. It would have been great stuff.

Had this storm been as strong as these things can get, we would be in a world of hurt. Any major city that gets hit with a category four or five storm, however unlikely, is in deep shit. Ours was a strong two, and things are very, very far from normal for huge swaths of our area. As bad as it is, it could have been so much worse.

Maybe Houston can learn from its unpreparedness and fare better next time with more effort put on limb trimming and dead/weak tree removal. Crappy signs should be removed, and perhaps those that live right on the fucking beach should be forced to do so without any insurance since the question is never "if" with storms like this, it's "when."

If you have never been through one of these storms, it's quite an intense experience, and as an adult with all the ensuing responsibilities, things are even more tense. Thrilling as it may be, I won't be upset if I never have to go through that again.

Something tells me I won't be getting my wish.

This post has been an albatross for me. I know it sucks, but I had to write it to move on.

So much has happened in the last three weeks of my life that I can't even begin to comprehend the importance of it all. And on top of all of it, last night was the two-year anniversary of my mother's death and I don't miss her any less than I did the day I got the call.

Next week I have to go to Florida, spur of the moment, and finish wrapping up her estate. I am not looking forward to it, but it has to be done. It will be the first time I will have entered her home since her death and probably the last.

Milestones, changes, paradigm shifts and epic battles for sanity, happiness, and survival. All in the waning days of summer. May the fall bring peace and calm. Now that would be a real shocker.

The Blind Butcher is still cutting away. Are you still reading it? There is always more to come.

Contribute. Join the fray. Take a swing. Whoever you might be.

Or don't.

Guest Post: Doug Dillaman

Today I found out David Foster Wallace hung himself on Friday. And I feel sick.

Speculation on his motives is impossible to avoid but useless and unproductive. There has always been more than a melancholic edge to his work; even his funniest pieces (such as his trips to a State Fair or on a cruise ship, both contained in the indispensable A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again) wallow in self-deprecation, mortification, and tragedy.

David Foster Wallace may have been the author with whom I felt the strongest affinity. Words like "best" and even "favorite" seem rather useless to me in rating authors, but I really connected with his dense, heavily annotated prose, a unique style that was most certainly not without its critics. I chafe at the word "pretentious" at the best of times, and I particularly chafed when people called David Foster Wallace pretentious. Possibly because I felt like they were calling me pretentious for finding something so loquacious and seemingly complicated so emotionally direct. Or possibly because I would write the way that David Foster Wallace did, if I could, if I was as smart and knowledgable and funny and trenchant.

Clearly, the accumulation of these virtues, not to mention the achievement of writing what is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest contemporary novels (Infinite Jest), was insufficient for achieving even the modest level of happiness to keep rope a safe distance from one's neck.

I knew little of his life, but today I discovered he was married, and he hung himself at his home, presumably in the knowledge that his wife would find him. This is not, to dramatically understate the case, an admirable decision. It would be easy, I suppose, for many to say, in the words of the commenter on one message board:

fuck this bastard. Seriously. Suicide is selfish enough, but to do it in a fashion that assures your wife will be the one to find you is down right despicable.

I can't really argue with that as such, but I suppose I have a different viewpoint. Which is this: I imagine that David Foster Wallace - and somehow, and this is neither here nor there, I cannot bring myself to abbreviate his name - was a rational person making what he considered to be a rational decision under massive amounts of psychic pain and with incredibly clouded emotional judgment.

To make the rational decision to commit suicide (in a situation that's not a quality of life issue, and at 46, I'm pretty sure he had many many years left) requires a belief that every possible benefit you bring to everyone around you is not worth the cost that either you pay directly yourself or that you impose on people, by letting them down, by ruining their lives in whatever real or imagined ways.

And I have some sense of what that level of internal pain becomes to reach the point where you even consider that calculus, and it is horrible to think of anyone having to suffer through that, and certainly someone that I consider something close to a hero.

In reading about his death, I learned that suicide is something that David Foster Wallace had struggled with before, and said this about the time when he was so low he checked himself into a hospital to be put on suicide watch:

"In a weird way it seemed like there was something very American about what was going on, that things were getting better and better for me in terms of all the stuff I thought I wanted, and I was getting unhappier and unhappier."

And this is what no one that I know knows how to solve: how to make an unhappy person permanently happy. It would appear that, if you are lucky, you can allay the pains and fears for a time, but then they return, en masse.

And stay.

Until you go.

Goodbye, DFW. I hope you are at peace now, and I'm sorry you couldn't find it here.

What's the Tale With Obama?

Ever since the somewhat loopy histrionics of the Republican Convention last week, it would appear that Barack Obama has been fighting an uphill battle for the emotional soul of American presidential politics.

Watching the ebb and flow of electioneering as the final two months tick away in this year's race, it is simply bizarre to watch and to try and comprehend just how unpredictable the voting politic can be when things come down to the wire.

When Sarah Palin, a virtual unknown on the national level was named as McCain's running mate, we were all caught with our pants down trying to find out just who this person was and what she would bring to the game.

As the GOP had their bash up north it became clear that although her record seemed to belie a gross lack of experience if not knowledge of national and foreign issues, nonetheless, America was shitting itself in order to make way for the historical aspects of her nomination.

Her confidence and attack-dog demeanor seems almost the perfect foil for Obama's calculated coolness. At a time in which so many Americans are concerned about how to make simple ends meet, these same Americans are apparently more than ready to make that leap into the land of political blind faith and go for their hearts over their minds.

As the political barometer began to swing so deep to the right in the last eight years it became practically customary to regard those with even moderately liberal views as almost being radical, now that things are beginning to level out, thanks in no small part to the extreme right doing as much as it could to sabotage its own mandate and turn in on itself, the drift back toward center makes this race tighter than ever.

Let me explain.

As unique a candidate as Obama is, when you look at his politics, radical is not the sort of word that comes to mind.

The same goes for McCain, who while being an unconventional and singular man in any party's definition, is also fairly moderate in many of his views regarding American politics.

Yes, both men are more or less firmly in their respective spectrums when it comes down to their beliefs, when you take, for example, Obama's view on gay marriage, you will find that being extreme is not exactly the way you might care to characterize him. (He is against it, for the record.)

I'm no pundit, but I am aware of the process at work here, and I am aware of the machinations that push and pull opinion into dark and predictably unpredictable alleys that divert attention away form what people really need to know to make an informed decision about who they want to support as the leader of this crazy, fucked-up country for the next four years.

With Palin, McCain has managed to pull off something of a small miracle. On paper, she is someone who seems so utterly incapable of handling the magnitude of what her job could possibly entail as both vice president, and, gulp, were things to go horribly wrong, president. And yet, this is America, a place in which damn near anything is possible, and also a place in which pop theater is often the most beloved form of entertainment. And more importantly, America is place in which every four years we cook down the issues and the personalities and the political climate and the way that we feel into a flavorless stock that has just the bare amount of nutrients to sustain us through our blind butchering of our country's future.

Barack Obama might want to listen to what the media is saying about the hearts of American voters right now, because while he is busy playing righteous and claiming the straight and narrow as his path towards political salvation, McCain is going for the gold, and while our current president is a fine example of a Republican who has done a bang-up job of ravaging our constitution, our souls, and our asses, McCain won't exactly leave us all feeling rosy when his time is up. Mark my words.

Can Obama make it happen if he takes the job come January? Lesser of two evils maybe? I hate partisan politics and the way they hijack our country in the name of control, but as far as the two-party system goes, Obama might not make a bad choice for once. If he can figure out how to regain his mojo, he won't have to rely more on the electoral college than popular favor to pull it off.

The Night The Lights Went Out in Houston

We here at the Blind Butcher have been in a touch of a pickle over the past weekend. As it turned out, and much to our bemusement, we were the unhappy recipients of a full 24 hour power outage.

Apparently the wiring to our apartment building (at least the underground main stuff) has been doing its thing since back in the 60s. In the intervening decades time has had its way with our poor little electrical mainline and it all came to a head on Saturday night.

This would maybe not big so big a deal if, say, it was winter, and if, say, the place wasn't full of children. Of course, as it turned out, it was a balmy summer night when it all went black, and there were kids galore.

I would have to categorize the following 24 hours as strained.

It was 85 in here that night and there was zero air circulation. Bad mojo.

The tards at the management office were short on relevant information, and once I hunted down the repair crew(s), they weren't much better.

And as the hours turned into a day, the estimates for completion grew and grew and grew.

The "These things happen," consolation tossed my way by the unibrow repair man did little to placate my discomfort.

C'est la vie, I guess.

In the immortal words of Cinderella (the band, not the little tarted-up congenial Miss Royal Pants), you don't know what you got until it's gone.

Sage advice.

I could hang with the lights being out, though having no Internet access was a bit daunting on my electronic jones, and I could hang with the dead silence of there being nothing running in the entire chunk of our block. What killed me was the stagnant air and the stickiness that clung to us like leeches.

My poor daughter couldn't sleep, like me, and so we both spent the night on the floor, tossing and turning. She kept waking up and trying to walk around in the dark, so I was unable to actually fall into anything too much like actual sleep since she kept walking into things in the dark.

Adventures abound, I guess, and you just have to do the best you can with what you have.

Right? I mean, that is right, isn't it?

Holy Christ, I hadn't considered that I might be wrong about that.

The Ballad of The Late Summer Hellfuck

Living through a Houston summer is like living through a months-long trip through a molasses shower and sauna torture chamber.

It's hard to imagine why anyone would ever want to live in this fucking godforsaken place whenever another one of these interminable and sweltering summers rolls around.

And like clockwork you can find me writing about my waning tolerance as the season rolls on into its fifth and sixth month.

It is totally abnormal to have to suffer through month after month of 95 degree weather with drastically high humidity.

Every year around this time I have the same thought. How the hell did the original settlers to this part of the world endure this weather?

I mean for fuck's sake, imagine being here without air conditioning? What happened to them on those days when they overdid it and suddenly found themselves in a situation where they had nowhere to go to cool down?

What then? Did they just get heat exhaustion and die, because I assure you that there was plenty of back breaking work to do damn near every day and if you didn't do it then it didn't get done.

Some days, as in today, you feel as though there is no way to escape the stickiness that seems to coat you like a lather. Here I am riding home from work today in my tiny little Korean car and I feel like I am surely going to keel over at any moment. My air conditioner has been doing the work/not-work dance for a couple years now and I guess today was a not-work day. Special.

So I am sitting there, catching every light, and thinking to myself that if anyone so much as looks at me I will get out of my car and shit directly on their hood.

Once home, the air is on, the fans are spinning, my bed beckons, it's time to lay down and forget this day ever happened.

Until I do it all again tomorrow, that is.