Note: Usually I post these in the early evening of the Friday of Netroots Nation. What with the Deluge and Kim and Him waving nuclear wee wees at each other, I’m not sure there’ll be a Friday this week, so I’m opening the sour grapes bar a day early.
Once again, your faithful diarist is, like most of us, unable to attend the annual Progressive Pow Wow, though it’s not far away this year. Point of fact, I’ll be passing through ATL in a couple of weeks. Nor will I make it to the Mount Mitchell get-together, despite being scheduled to pass Asheville on the same run.
And, this year, it’s not even lack of funds or time preventing me from enjoying the fellowship of my Great Orange Satanists, but something more banal.
The End. Gottendammerung. The Big Blowoff. Armageddonouttahere.
No, not the Second Coming or nuclear war (no guarantees on that last, though; depends on how “bellicose” Himself is feeling). Nope, despite the Lord’s promise to Noah, it is again the Flood this time.
Last Saturday, as you may have heard, it rained like a sonovabitch and the pumps failed and the water rose and thousands got flooded. The previous Saturday, it rained like a sonovabitch and the pumps failed and the water rose and thousands got flooded.
At three this morning, both cell phones and the landline started screaming with a dire weather-related alert: the power station powering nearly all the pumping stations on New Orleans’ East Bank burned up. Except for the West Bank and a couple of spots over here, our below-sea-level burg has essentially no pumping capacity whatsoever.
And the forecast? You guessed it: rain like a sonovabitch. Conditions are very similar to those that brought eight inches Saturday. Schools are closed today and tomorrow and the prohibition on parking on curbs and neutral grounds (medians to the rest of the world) have been lifted.
The system is not without accountability. The head of the Sewerage and Water Board, responsible for drainage, resigned this week as word broke that the Board’s claims that all pumps were working Saturday were revealed to be false. And today we learned he’ll have to get by in retirement on a measly $175K a year pension.
Thickening my personal gumbo, many of my neighbors are currently out of town and, as The Guy with the Keys, I’m in charge of policing their houses, getting the electronics and antiques and fabrics off the floors, opening up D’s gate so that neighbors can get their cars off the street into her yard, etc.
It’s stressful and triggering (we had some flooding issues a while back, y’know), but mostly… boring. I’ve been through a few apocalyptic adventures—wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, a tornado once, even a gang turf war in my neighborhood—and they can all be quite scary.
But not when they come every week. There comes a point when the terrifying just becomes the tedious. So much so that I really would rather be playing bar trivia with a bunch of kossacks.
But I’ve got some cars to move.
For your apocalyptic listening pleasure: