Long Weekend

It's been a long week.

I've been watching the hurricane coverage, of course, and reading about it and hearing about it on the radio and I just...can't, anymore. Layers and layers of human suffering and impossible tasks and total helplessness, and covering it all over is this thick slimy coat of good god, how did this HAPPEN? How did it come to pass that in the year 2005, in the richest nation in the world, thousands and thousands of people can be left to die like that? For nearly a WEEK? How can it be that scientists have said for years that this would be inevitable, that entire treatises have been written about exactly how bad it could be, and yet no one seems to have had a plan for how to deal with such a catastrophe--how could it be??

Then I read the messages at nola.com, all the pleas and cries for help, and I'm sitting here in Chicago, nothing I can do...You all know what I mean. I've done what I could; I gave money to the Red Cross and to an animal-rescue charity, but it all seems so woefully inadequate in the face of all that suffering. And then there's all the "shoot-the-looters" bullshit, and the graphics showing black folks and white folks doing EXACTLY the same thing except the caption says the black people are "looting" but the white people's caption says they're "finding food"...

Look. There's a limit, isn't there, to hate? To what people can do to each other? There is, isn't there?

I can't watch it anymore. I can't read about it anymore. I don't even KNOW anyone there and it's breaking my heart. And I have nothing new to say, no insight to offer, nothing more than a few bucks to throw into this huge abyss. Those poor people.

And then, when I stop reading, stop watching, and go out into the world, somehow the gas prices have risen fifty cents in the space of two days. There's no way the distributors would be feeling the pinch--if there is one--that quickly. But we're supposed to shoot looters, though, right? Maybe the corporations aren't "looting"--they're just "finding" a crapload of profits.

And this weekend, they're going to be "finding" a bunch of them from LJ. That's right: it's a holiday weekend, one of the most-travelled and most-dangerous holiday weekends, and gas prices are at their highest level in history, and my dear brilliant man has chosen this particular weekend to rent a car and drive to Minnesota. I don't so much care about the money, but I've explained to him that if anything happens to him, out there on the road with all the drunk drivers and the holiday maniacs, that I will haunt his ghost. He, of course, says he's gonna be fine. He always says that. I hope he's right.

The benefit of this, of course, is that I get the house to myself for a few days, just me and the kitties. Nobody flopping around in the bed in the middle of the night or snoring in my ears; no one leaving the seat up or monopolizing the TV. I love him dearly--things have been going a little better lately--but I still like the solitude. Even though he's rarely here on the weekends anyway, I find I seem to get more done when I know he's not coming home. This weekend, I think I may paint the front porch; lord knows it needs it.

Of course, I might just sleep in and spend the whole weekend in my pajamas, too...