Smells Like Katrina

I helped Jeanne move into the apartment at 8330 El Mundo Street in Houston at the end of July, 2005. It was a very hot month. We stayed together for two blissful weeks and then, because I thought I had to go back to work, I heavy- heartedly boarded a Greyhound bus bound for the Big Easy.
As it turned out, however, I no longer had a job in New Orleans. The school board had decided that it was against the law for Audubon Montessori to hire its own staff, like us teacher assistants, and so we were all laid off. Whenever a voice in your head tells you that you need to do something, my children, you should at least listen to it. A month before, as we were loading all of Jeanne’s possessions onto that Penske truck, a voice told me that I should have loaded all of mine on it too.
Fast forward to Sunday, August the 28th.
It took me 14 and a half nightmarish hours to flee from the horrid, colossal beast that was Katrina. It was a drive that should have only taken six at most, but with every motor vehicle in the New Orleans metro area choking the I-10 West, it proved to be a slow and grueling exodus. When my dad told me the storm was a category 5 that morning, a guttural, instinctive feeling gripped me: run. Get the hell out and don’t look back.
Traffic crawled at best. Cars broke down. Cars stopped. People and animals got overheated. Tempers flared. Drivers got out of their idle vehicles and stared westward down the I-10 in frustration. And looming over everybody’s head was the constant fear of the needle pointing to E.
My father had insisted that I evacuate the night before. I had thought that it would turn out to be another big scare much like Hurricane Ivan the previous year, and even if it did hit, I would ride it out like we had done in the past. My dad wasn’t leaving- he planned on staying in Chalmette because my grandparents, as always, refused to leave.
At 11 AM that Sunday, I set out in one of our three old cars, the Lincoln Continental, at the request of my father and out of my own animalistic urge to flee. I felt a little bit like baby Kal-El being stuffed into the space capsule before the destruction of Planet Krypton, only not so heroic and without such flashy clothes. I turned around to wave back at my father who was standing in the driveway as I embarked on my journey, and the idea occurred to me that I might never see him again.
I arrived in the great metropolis of Houston at 3:30 AM on Monday the 29th of August. It would still be about another 4 hours before Katrina would wreak her historic havoc upon my native city, and I was finally back in my beloved Jeanne’s arms after the longest car trip of my life.
At this time I had no cell phone. For years I refused to get one because I thought they were a pointless nuisance. Thus, I could not communicate with my father or with Jeanne for the duration of the voyage. They each had heard the horror stories of some evacuees who got stuck on the road and died from the heat. When I finally got to 8330 El Mundo, and knocked on the door of 814, Jeanne regarded me as if I were a ghost.
If nothing else, my attitude toward cellular phones had changed completely.

Most of my family chose to stay. My mom and my step dad, wary of another media-hyped Ivan–level scare, also stayed in Chalmette. They had evacuated at the urge of the local government and media when Ivan was a threat in 2004. For them, as it was for many, the evacuation caused by Ivan proved to be more of a catastrophe that the storm itself. They even had a safe haven with my sister who was living in Baton Rouge, but chose not to go. Evacuating with three dogs and a cat was not an easy thing to do for the second year in a row.
Cowardly and selfish as I felt to leave them behind, they were all adults and they had made their choice. Moreover, they all had vehicles able to get them to safety. This was no time to be a hero.

While I was reunited with Jeanne at last, our joy was diminished in the weeks to come. We watched the news everyday. We saw the aerial photos of an inundated Crescent City. This was horribly, unbelievably bad.
New Orleans had drowned.
People were stranded in their attics, desperately waving down any passing helicopter to come and fly them to salvation. Those who did reach dry land had no water, no food, and no sanitation. There were corpses floating in the water. Mayor Ray Nagin was at his wits end, exploding at the federal government’s slow response time (as was St. Bernard Parish President, Junior Rodriguez, but that wasn’t as thoroughly documented). To save face, Bush the Second flies in on a helicopter, has his photo op hugging a little black child, and waves to the cameras insisting that the United States has enough money to both help the people of New Orleans and keep killing the people of Iraq.
Every cynical teenage thought that I ever harbored against authority was immediately validated.
But life had to go on. As a refugee in America’s fourth largest city, I had to get by. I signed up for food stamps. I got rental assistance from FEMA. I assisted Jeanne in her early days of graduate school at the University of Houston, to help take our minds off of the tragedy.
Most people in Houston said nice things to us; condolences and offers of assistance. May God bless such citizens of Houston, who knew the right things to say or to do. Many a Good Samaritan made himself know during this crisis, like the nurses who put up my father, my uncle, and my grandparents in a hotel near the Astrodome.
Others made snide comments and mean remarks about these poor, wretched souls who arrived en masse via school bus to their Astrodome, getting much needed food and supplies from their supermarkets on the government dollar. To these people, I emphatically say, “f__k you”. Houston never was, by any means, a crime-free utopia with streets of gold before the arrival of the Katrina refugees, and it never will be even years afterward.
And a very special “f__k you” goes out to all of those ignorant evangelicals everywhere who said that Katrina was God’s vengeance exacted upon the people of New Orleans for their wicked ways. No matter which part of New Orleans you live in, there is bound to be a church of some denomination within walking distance. There was piety in this ancient city long before there was the depravity you rail against. It is a city no less devout than any other in America.
I soon found employment at Texas Art Supply in the Montrose area. While this ensured that Jeanne and I could make an honest living, our minds still could not rest without knowing the whereabouts of my family and the situation back at home. It was some time before I learned that my dad’s side of the family was staying at a Super 8 Motel and that I could return his car to him. My mom and my step dad were taken first to Dallas, and then to Tulsa, Oklahoma before renting a car and finding an apartment in West Houston. Each of their stories was full of hardship and misery. I thought about my 14 hours on the road to Houston and felt as if I had gotten off easy.
Katrina killed my hometown of Chalmette. No news coming out of St. Bernard Parish was good news. Not a single house or business was left dry. Most people lost everything, myself included. One of the storage tanks at Murphy Oil Refinery topped over and was punctured, adding more toxic chemicals to the already deadly flood water.
Many people lost their lives. Many more lost their livelihoods. Many pets died, including Chee-Wee, the Chihuahua who was part of my family for over 15 years. No loss of life, no matter how small, needed to happen due to this storm.
Everything I knew, if it hadn’t been destroyed, was irrevocably changed. To this day, Chalmette has still not fully recovered from Hurricane Katrina. I doubt it ever will.

Saturday Morning

Thank you for the gentle breeze and the cool shade that made our morning walk more pleasant. Thank you for the brief reprieve from the August sun that bakes the poor, misguided earthworms on the pavement. Thank you for Saturday morning.
Even as late as 9 o'clock, I still hear the almost mechanical hiss of the cicadas in the oak tree above my roof. Even now, as I sip my coffee, I still feel soiled by this past working week. But I am, above all else, very lucky to have a job.
Yes, I am grateful. There isn't much more to say. I know how much it doesn't matter. I haven't even drawn any pictures to upload here. But I can still express my gratitude for everything that I have, and who would blame me?

I went from having a boring job to a job where I bore people. I don't really know what I'm doing, but I can act like I do. I'm just a piece of raw meat, uncooked and unseasoned. Can I go from a quarter pounder to filet mignon in only one school year? When young minds are the casualties of my ineptitude, it is not time to speculate, but to find out.
This is my confessional. I would never admit to the kids that I don't know what I'm doing. I can only admit it to myself, and to whoever made it this far into my writings. I find that typing is becoming more and more how I pray, as if some kind-hearted benefactor on a transcendent plane is reading these words and being motivated to act on our behalf. If writing really is a form of telepathy, then we are linked right now, cortex to cortex.
Belief is mystery. It is better to be mystified than certain. Certainty can lead to narrow-mindedness. A mind really is like a parachute, it really does work only when it is open. "Transparent to transcendence". Yes, better to let the Light shine through than to be opaque.
Help me to be more than just a dud. Help me to inspire, to motivate, to encourage. I have 26 different young lives intersecting all at once, and I have to give them a sign post. I can't treat it like something unimportant, I can't say that it doesn't matter.

The sketchbook is closed. Maybe it too can only work while open. You don't read a book simply by staring at the cover.

Woofoink!

The original 'woof' and 'oink' components in this blog's title.




A 2008 rendition of the first Chimera hybrid freak to serve as this blog's mascot.




The current incarnation of our Woofoink mascot who doesn't have the same anatomical issues of his predecessor.



It all started, as many things do, one day when I was bored at work. It was back during the Houston years (2005-2008) while I was an employee in the Internet shipping department of Texas Art Supply. I was on my lunch break, and I had my miniature sketchbook with me. The two plastic figurines you see at the top were at my work station, and I decided that I would sketch them along with captions that read 'woof' and 'oink'. The resulting portmanteau became first the title of that little sketchbook, and later the blog of the same name.
This is, of course, the second blog to have the title, Woofoink. The first was a casualty of the rise of Internet 2 (it's still there, but Google won't allow me to make posts on it anymore)and this one has had the drawing in the middle as its mascot for a little while.
Fast forward to August of 2010, nearly two years since our move back to New Orleans, and the drawing on the bottom is Woofoink's new official mascot! He's bouncier, cartoonier, friendlier, and yet still subtly creepy enough to represent us. And best of all, he makes a lot more sense than having a seal in a fur coat with human hands as the header image.




Say goodbye to our old header image! We went with something that makes a lot more sense!


And so, a new chapter in the history of this widely read and highly reputable web log has begun! Make sure to join us as we forge new paths along the frontiers of creativity while discussing the vital issues that plague our minds in this information age. We here at Woofoink are happy to have you along for the ride!

Excelsior, true believers!

This is not the age to bare your soul. We have made an alien of the poet, a sideshow of the artist, and a spoiled brat of the performer. We communicate in beeps, clicks, and tweets, effectively saying nothing. Yet many things remain to be said, and i might as well be the one to say them.
I offer no apologies for what I posted last night, but i am willing to lucidly elaborate it further. What I was trying to get at, in a less than coherent fashion, was that I am tried of having to hold back my thoughts for fear of others' disapproval or apathy. i am tired of suppressing the small things because they aren't grand enough, and believing, just like everybody else does, that something has to be terrible and overbearing just to be important. Here it is and it is what it is. i can write and you can read it or not.
Selfishness and anxiety are horrible reasons not to share my thoughts or my work. Even the most random of squiggles takes on a certain potency if it was rendered out of boldness and love.

All You Need is Love (seriously).

Trust in the conquering power of love. William Blake was right when he said that "if a thing loves, it is infinite." Love is the gradual wearing down of all the bullshit barriers telling us that we are separate from one another. The more you love someone, the more the barriers erode. The more this happens, the more you merge. Love is like water. Water wishes to merge, but the land keeps it apart or the sun burns it away. But it always finds some way of reconnecting to itself, like in cool gentle rain upon the surface of a koi pond.

There is very little of value in the things that I make, but if only one can appreciate it, then it has served something of a purpose. I think that I have been stunted artistically. I still want for everybody to like what I do, but I am beginning to realize that this is not possible. I am basically a small child fastening his drawings with magnets to the refrigerator door, hoping to win praise from mommy and daddy. But if mommy and daddy are strangers, then why would they care?
This is why to me, it is futile to create works that do not inspire love. If it does not inspire love, then it is not infinite. Love is a cycle just like water is a cycle. It is always in your best interests to perpetuate love because when you do, it comes back to you. It just works that way.
Why not make work just for the people I care about? Who cares at all about a whole planet full of haters? They can't even perpetuate themselves since they're so busy bringing one another down. When they set about destroying someone else, they take themselves down too. And the saddest part is, most of them will never want to change until it's far too late!
i don't do things in an orthodox way. I don't pray in an orthodox way. Prayer is an act of giving something up, something precious like secret beliefs, and it is having full trust and faith that your giving will not be in vain. I think that's a prayer. You can recite familiar words, of course, like an Our Father or a Hail Mary, but those words don't mean anything without being given from the heart. They can be. These words, too, can be.
Words spoken, words thought, lines written, lines drawn, they can all in their own ways evoke the feeling of love. Music can evoke a feeling of love. It is easier than ever now to publish your own words, so why not do it generously? Why be stingy with what you have to offer?

Waddles, Mascots, and Folk Singers

This is our last full week of summer vacation before having to go back to school. I can't gripe about it because I am glad that I have a job. Between getting ready and painting murals, there hasn't been as much time as I would like for sketching. I made the most of Jeanne's eye doctor appointment this morning and drew Chuck up there. The other two drawings have been worked on since last month.
Aren't turkeys gross? The only magazine in the office that had interesting stuff to draw was the same outdoors magazine that I referenced last time. Everything else was a lot of 'Better Homes' crap, or worse yet, Golf Digest.
For those of you who are just joining us, WoofOink, The Mystical Pig-Dog is this blog's official mascot. WoofOink's new look is a much cartoonier synthesis of pig and dog that doesn't have a head on either end. The thought of how the poor creature would actually poo was keeping me up at night!

I guess the reason why I like to draw and paint so much psychedelic hippie stuff is because I sort of wish that it would have worked- I mean their whole ethos about a more peaceful and loving world. I wish that it would have worked, but obviously it didn't.
There aren't any real hippies left today, unless you count all the ones who actually lived thorough that time period and are probably all grannies and grandpas by now. The people who define themselves as such in this century are either being superficial or delusional just like I was ten years ago.
Not to say that there aren't people in the world today who share those values, yet don't call themselves hippies. There are people with good souls and people who place much importance on their dreams. Just because they don't reek of patchouli and wear a tie-dyed shirt doesn't mean they aren't children of the revolution.

Fly your freak flag!