Well, taking the good news first (and I trust that y'all will understand the need to address y'all in 'y'all' mode, under the circumstances), this e-mail is being written from a very high, dry, comfortable, and familiar place, WAY inland and about 600 miles distant from my South Louisiana home. I'm sitting at the computer room of the Athens-Clarke County Main Library, in good old Athens, Georgia…

Great library, great town, and we're staying here (after bailing out of New Orleans well ahead of Katrina and enjoying a surprisingly smooth evacuation) as guests of my two wonderful nephews and their equally wonderful wives…

…We escaped with our first-string car, our important documents, and more than a month's worth of medications. I even found some good news in THE NEWS: Houma, where we left our 2nd-string car, appears to have escaped serious flooding, so that vehicle may still be intact.



As for the other kind of news... that's what I've been sitting at this computer reading online. And as I piece it together, and kind of try to wrap my mind around it, I keep thinking of that Cole Porter song, one of the great standards of jazz players the world around: "You'd be so nice to come home to." In the key, unfortunately, of wistful irony.

Basically, everything I'm gleaning from online news-reports and official government announcements indicates that it might be a long time before we're able to return to our home, and that even then, there might not be a whole lot to come home to. It's easy enough to bail out of an impending disaster, but a lot harder, I fear, to bail your apartment out after one.

For all the media's inane rejoicing about the French Quarter's having survived with little damage, the places in metro New Orleans where people actually live (as opposed to the little area where tourists frolic) are, to use the technical terminology of the damage-assessment professionals, royally fucked.

…The Governor and all the state officials are urging all of us refugees to stay the hell out of town; in fact they're closing all roads into town to incoming traffic... even in the rare cases where those roads are otherwise passable. So, along with a million and a half or so others, we're left in a kind of limbo.