Mood Surgery

So I'm sitting here at home listening to my band being interviewed on the radio. I waited nearly 45 minutes for a cab, until I gave up and fucking cancelled the thing. The interviewer chick sounds hot too, dammit.
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Ever get the feeling that someone "up there" has a really snarky sense of humour?

Tonight at work I injured my wrist. Hardy-har-har. Up yrs, Poetic Irony.

Anywaaay... someone I didn't know read Mood Surgery brought it to my attention yesterday that someone else I didn't know was a reader gave this little baby thingy a plug on their somewhat larger, more established and well-populated thingy. Neat-o. Who'da thunk speiling about semi-public masturbation would bring me such esteempossiblyslashridicule? I have no idea what the custom is in such circumstances, but I suppose some sort of reciprocal plug would be in order. So yeah, swordfight. Sex, drugs, death and erudtion, (mostly) Halifax-style. Plus, it's like totally scene, dewd (damn you Cara). The Fucknuts among you might remember citywidemarkblackout, who writes there now, under a slightly less unwieldy moniker.

Raf (does Raf read this?), Hot Action is totally you.

Actually, Phillip, the fellow responsible for swordfight, deserves a portion of the thanks/blame for the existence of this here thingy. After getting banned from NN2S, I started going a little bughouse in my idle time, what with no public outlet for my pointless rambling (such a strange vanity), and, in a fit of drunken int0rnerdiness, solicited a blogspot in his operation. Being vague acquaintances at best, he directed me here instead, which worked out quite nicely. It still doesn't look or feel quite like how I picture it, but I'll deal with that the next time I have fifteen hours or so of spare time.

Anyway, I gotta go to bed like three hours ago if I wanna be well-rested for TMWSD's stupid radio interview later today. Check it out @ http://ckdu.dal.ca/

Four o'clock for me. No idea what time for you.
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I jerked off in a bathroom stall at work tonight.

My job gives me waay too much time to think. For reasons that remain beyond me, tonight I ended up reminiscing about the first time a girl gave me a handjob. She was skanky and annoying and, quite frankly, pretty damn unattractive, but I can still vividly remember the rush of rampaging pent-up teenage hormones that shot like electricity through every part of my body and mind the moment she touched it. It didn't matter that she was icky and gross, a girl was touching my wang! I think her name was Brenda somethingorother. Hell, it wasn't even a real hand job, per se. She mostly just stroked it through my jeans, but technicalities be damned, as far as I was concerned, this was bona fide contact with the opposite sex. I was, perhaps, not gonna go my entire life without intimate (well, maybe I'm stretching that word a bit, considering we were seated at a booth in a Burger King...) female contact after all. I was in the game... sorta!

To appreciate the magnitude of this momentous event in my life, you gotta understand just how sexually frustrated I was as a teenager (hell, I'm still a sexually-frustrated teenager at heart, just with a couple pregnancy scares and a bout of the clap under my belt). I never masturbated to orgasm until after I got full-on laid for the first time, and that wasn't until I was seventeen, which, at the time, felt like... well, if you hadn't gotten any by then, you probably never would. Seems awfully silly now, but I was the last person in my group of friends (all also various shades of loser/outsider) to dig the ditch, as it were, and that basically meant, to me, that I must've been certifiably unappealing to the opposite sex, and would remain so for my entire life. Anyway, after my first time (a story in and of itself worthy of a separate rant), I was like "that's all there is to it!? Hell, I coulda been doing this myself all along!" and promptly took up masturbation as my calling in life.

So anyway, up until that point, I'd never had an orgasm outside of wet dreams (which I seemed to have an awful lot of until I discovered jerking off...), so you can only imagine the ball of sexual frustration that was teenage-me before then, and how significant some gross poofy-haired chick giving me a pseudo-handjob in the corner of a deserted Burger King was to me.

So, with this in mind, I jerked off in the bathroom at work tonight, fantasizing about a girl who probably now has rotten teeth, and wears sweatpants and a Wrestlemania t-shirt on a daily basis. It was great. I haven't masturbated in a risky public place in years. It makes me miss actual sex in risky public places, and, by extension, almost regret breaking up with Genevieve way back when. She loved shit like that.

I thought I was doing the good and proper thing when I broke up with her, but I'm not so sure anymore. That was a long time ago. It was basically a three-or-four month summer fling (longest relationship I've ever survived though), that started to become serious... maybe moreso than I was comfortable dealing with, I dunno. Her dad had some kind of contract with the local mining company, and managed to get her on a work term there for the summer semester. Blah blah whirlwind romance... you've heard the story before. As her work term was coming to a close, she started musing about not going back to school, and sticking around in my crappy nowhere hometown to be with me instead. Freaked the hell outta me. I ended up breaking up with her on the premise that I didn't wanna be the reason for her not going back to school, but upon reflection, I think I was maybe letting a couple of my friends' opinions of her get to me a little more than I cared to admit to myself. Lame. She was a flighty conversationalist, but that's a pretty minor grievance, and the only one I'm hard-pressed to come up with. She was smart, creative, had decent taste in music (Dead Can Dance was her favourite band to fuck to) and an understated sense of style that I adored, and was sexy like nobody's business. We never had a single fight. She liked to drink. She came from money, but was more than happy to hang around with scummy, chainsmoking, dreadlocked, tattered-clothes, living-in-a-shed-with-no-bathroom-facilities me.

She had major anxiety attacks (puking, hyperventilation, the whole nine yards), and I had no idea what those were at the time. Deep inside, I think I thought they were just cries for attention. I really regret not being more supportive now that I understand what panic is all about, and I have her to thank for eventually researching the matter myself. I understand myself a little bit more thanks to that.

She ended up not going back to school anyway. A few months after I moved to Hali, and over a year since she'd gone back to Montreal, I got really drunk and called her. Turns out she'd landed a job selling expensive lingerie at some swanky upscale boutique. D'oh. Tried looking her up once or twice since then, but she moved outta Westmount, and isn't in the phone book. Just as well, I suppose, 'cause dwelling on the past is a waste of the present. 'Nuff said. I just needed to get that off my chest. Cheers Gen, wherever the fuck you are.
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Fuck.

I slept through my alarm tonight. Woke up at 10 pm instead of 6, with the alarm blaring, and about a zillion calls on my phone. Went out to get pizza and beer. Realized when I got back that I was supposedta buy dog food today, but by that time all the grocery stores were closed. So I put on a pot of rice to feed Java (I mix it with tuna- she loves it), and headed to the bathroom to shitshowershave double time. Halfway through shaving, the smoke alarm went off. I run out to the kitchen, and there's smoke EVERYWHERE. Something was on the burner, and it made a nasty cloud. So I'm running around in my underwear frantically opening doors and turning on fans and waving a dishtowel at the smoke detector, with my poor dog barking and freaking out at my feet. Once the thing finally stopped, I went back to finish showering, and made the rice when I got out. Fed the dog, and got ready to hit the town. Then she puked all over the carpet. (I can cook, fucktards- she has stomach problems). Then I looked at my watch, and realized that both the show and the party I was gonna go to tonight were probably over.

Yay, saturday.

Here's another picture of TMWSD:



I'm the ghost in the background with the skull-and-crossbones guitar strap.

The new Pretty Girls Make Graves album is really good.

Holy crap! My computer just updated its clock for daylight savings time. An extra hour! Later fucknuts, I'm heading to the bar after all.
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The one and only time I ever ended up in court, I was paid to be there. No, I wasn't a narc.

The summer after high school graduation I recieved a lot of money, courtesy of a lot of relatives I don't ever recall meeting. Pretty cool. I partied it all away, mostly on acid and vodka and the seedy strip joint just across the Quebec border. Since I'd decided to take a "year" off between high school and art school, I started halfassedly looking for a job in late August. I'd never had a legitimate one before, so I made up a bullshit resume, and gave one to every goddamn store in town that didn't ask if you "wanted fries with that."

The next day I was smoking a joint on Grande's parents' patio, mid-afternoon, when my mom calls to tell me I got an interview, and that I should head down there lickety-split. Turns out that the one place I dared not hope would call me, called me. Blah Records, man. My "interview" consisted of the owner talking about music with me for maybe three minutes, and then handing me a calculator and receipt booklet, and taking off to leave me alone with the store for three or four hours. I got the job. I spent most of this impromptu first shift looking through the stack of resumes on the counter. I still have no idea why he gave me the job. I was way unhip, and there was a three-inch stack of resumes more qualified than my own, which was full-of-shit anyway.

So yeah, first job ever, running an indie record store. 10 am to 4 pm, monday to thursday, $200 a week. No shit. THAT WAS MY FIRST JOB, EVER. My, how things have gone downhill. I lost it when the owner hit a moose on the highway with his expensive new sports car, and had to quit school, thus rendering my job moot. He later ventured into nightclub ownership, but that's totally another story.

Running a tiny record store in the heart of a relatively small town revealed all sorts of new things to me, not all of them musical. We had homeless people! All six or eight of them spent most of the day coming in and out of the store, bumming cigarettes from me, and occasionally fetching me coffee. God, I remember when M usedta skip school to come clean up the store for me, and sit on my lap for the last half hour or so, telling stragglers to fuck off in the cutest voice ever.

Anyway, one of the "regulars," as it turned out, was a relative of the building's janitor, and they had... issues. I hadta tell him to leave at closing time pretty much every day, and he was always pretty cool about it. The basic ritual was to kick everyone out (except M, of course), briefly make sure the records were in order, lock the door to the store, and then lock the main entrance. So one night, I'm locking up, and about to leave the building and lock the main door, when the janitor asks me not to 'cause she's gonna take off in like two minutes anyway. "Ok" says I, and I think nothing of it.

A week or so later, some pudgy guy in a bad suit comes into the store, offering me $30 to testify against one of the regulars. I was hesitant at first, but once I heard the premises for the case, I didn't care. Thirty bucks is thirty bucks. Turns out buddy had hidden downstairs after I'd locked up the store, and laid in wait for janitor-bitch. He tried to strangle her, and she tried to pin it on me. She testified in court that she'd asked me to please lock the door for her safety. I'm not sure what good that would've done, what with the guy already hiding in the basement, but whatever. It was a bad lie, and the only interesting thing that came of it was my sticking my gum under the witness's chair. Court is really fucking boring. I almost wish he'd killed her. At least then it might've been interesting.
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The one-armed junkie paints his face black with shoe polish, and robs a corner store with a butcher's knife. The standoff with the police outside lasts over an hour, and culminates with him spitting into the lens of the news camera while being handcuffed and thrown into the back seat of a police car. He is trying to bite the police, like a rabid dog.

Clever boy that I was, I wrote a poem about it called "One-Armed Robbery." I never showed it to anyone. I'd have been reviled for it.

I never got to see the footage, but I'm told an acquaintance has it videotaped from the 11 o'clock news. I have no problem visualizing this absurd scene though. It almost seems logical, knowing the one-armed man as well as I once did. I knew him when he was sane, and sharper than a tack. I knew him before his arm died in an OD coma, and everybody wanted to be him. He was, in a different lifetime, what I would've called a "best friend." One year, we got it in our heads that our mothers, both being single moms, and "outsiders" of sorts, should befriend each other. So we all spent Mother's Day under the same roof, as he and I stumbled around the kitchen, out of our minds on PCP, cooking clam chowder for our distraught and bewildered mothers. I can't imagine what they must've thought. Or what the chowder must've tasted like.

The crazy thing is, from time to time, I find myself feeling intensely nostaligic for the years I spent living life in an hallucinogenic haze. It was like an art, toying with dysfunction like that. It was rewarding in its own way, and I regret very little of it, but that's because I got out when the time was right. I stepped down a few notches into benign alcoholism, the majority of my friends settled into the quintessential pothead lifestyle, and some stepped up into harder drugs.

I have a habit of glamourizing the past to myself. After we'd drifted apart a bit, my first time seeing him post-coma, I visited to help him move out of his mom's house. He'd lost the use of his right arm after ODing less than a month before, but had already worked out an elaborate method of poking with just one arm. He cinched the belt around his arm with his teeth. Most pathetic thing I've ever seen, and I've seen my share of pathetic shit. That image is all I need to snap me out of romanticizing my drug years.

Oh, and aparrently Elliot Smith didn't just kill himself any old way, he fucking stabbed himself in the chest. Hari fucking Kari. The word is he was on smack too.
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Apparrently Elliot Smith killed himself yesterday. Bummer.

I am just emerging from a week or so of intense anxiety. Other people I've known who've had similar problems usually have short attacks of extreme intensity, whereas I tend to have long, drawn-out periods of throbbing unease, punctuated by nervous, antisocial "lows" wherein everything seems disturbing and fundamentally wrong, and wired fight-or-flight "highs." I suspect a lot of people are misled into self-diagnosing themselves as "depressed" when dealing with an emotional "disorder" like mine, but this is no sadness. This is an intense, irrational cocktail of trepidation and damnation. I'm more than willing to talk to people when I'm sad; in the grips of whatever this is, I'm incapable of even looking a stranger in the eye. I am afraid. It's rarely much of a problem though. I pride myself on being stable, and, chances are, you'd never even notice during a conversation with me that my heart is racing a mile-a-minute, and the world around me feels broken and evil and out to get me. I've always hated flakiness, and fucked if I'll let my stupid emotions let me succumb to it. Don't think I haven't come close. But that's the difference between me and the friends I've had that ended up bughouse. Madness is only tempting when yr willing to compromise yr reality. Mine might suck, but I'll be keeping it, thanks very much. It's most likely all some sort of delusion anyway.

So yeah, my computer's fucked up, so I might not be online for awhile. Swarptar.
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Three things I have decided today:

Japanese food is a ripoff.

At the core of my being, I am a nihilist. I believe in nuh-zing. And tomorrow we come back und we cut off your chonson.

I need a bicycle.
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I'm smoking hash in the fold-out backseat of a Chevy pickup, in the middles of winter and the sticks. 1992, maybe. I'll start playing in bands soon, and a new world will open up to me. Right now it's probably a school night, and holy fuck is it freezing outside. There're three of us, and I got stuck with the back seat again. We're parked at the end of some access road, in the rural nether regions of nowhere, 'cause the city cops are on to all the places in town to go be a loser dope-smoking teenager. Four feet of snow on the ground. J fills the pipe again, and we all cough our little nowhere lungs out toking, 'cause he went way overboard loading the bowl like always. Couchman spills the pipe coughing, and burns several more roach holes in his ratty Doors t-shirt, and coughing slowly morphs into stoned-nowhere laughter. If the engine died right now, we would all die of exposure before daybreak, but we either don't know or don't care. I don't remember exactly which. Laughter turns into giggles, and after a few minutes of this, we're all in pain, and can't even remember what we were laughing about in the first place. Subsides into silence. The good kind. The antithesis of a pregnant pause. Nothing is loaded, and nothing needs to be said. Absolute trust, however fleeting. A song comes on, and someone, probably me, says to turn it up. So we sit, stoned, silent, surrounded by snow and wilderness and unbearable cold, listening to unbelievably loud music. It is our transcendence.
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I can do no right. You've cast me as a villain in this little mind game melodrama, and I cannot escape the role. So be it. Too much, too little, too this, too fucking that. We wanted the same, then I wanted more and you wanted less. Fine and fucking dandy. Now I'm out of line for toeing it. I know what you think, little girl, and if I didn't love you so much, I'd set you straight like the fucking asshole you seem to want me to be. There's no point in my proving you wrong though, as wrong as you are. I'm obviously of more use to you as an object of hatred than a friend. If demonizing me helps get you through the day, then more power to you. Just pack yr fucking emotional baggage and get the fuck out of my life. All I wanted was for things to be right between us, regardless of my feelings, but you've made it painfully apparrent that it ain't gonna happen no matter what I do, and that my feelings are no concern of yrs anyway. Just go away and leave me alone.
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Homies, homies, blah blah blah blah blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
Homies, homies, blah blah blah blah blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
Homies, homies, homieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees!

Sweet mother of fuck! Who fucking wrote this song anyway? I couldn't write a more obscenely annoying song on purpose! I formally nominate this fucking atrocity as the worst peice of sonic fucking dogshit to ever come within 100 miles of a recording studio. Buddy in the aisle next to me has taken to playing this song like three times a night, and, to put things in perspective, among other crimes against humanity, he plays a liberal mix of Bon Jovi, Treble Charger, Def Leppard, and some mallpunk band that covers Everything I Do by Brian Adams, and that fucking Homeez song eclipses it all in utter fucking godawfulness. This song needs to be systematically eradicated from existence. If aliens have been monitoring our radio transmissions, they are surely on their way to eradicate what they must only have deemed the most obnoxiously irritating sentient race in the entire fucking universe. If that song is any indicator, they'd be right. AAAAAARRGH, GET IT OUTTA MY HEAD!

I fucking defy anyone to come up with a worse song than this. IT HURTS.
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Oh yeah, I forgot: .
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I have so much backed-up correspondence that I'm just gonna write in here instead. I'll deal with everyone else tomorrow. I had an incredible urge to write in the first few days of the aftermath, but necessity, chaos, absolute darkness, and the utter madness that work became (and still is, to some degree) prevented me from even doing so with pen and paper. Now it's been too long, and I don't have the first fucking clue as to where to start. I'm just gonna speil, and hope it makes sense.

I've been in the pitch black before, without comforts and amenities. In fact, I generally bemoan my current inability to make the odd escape into the middle of nowhere, just to be away from people and lights and convenience and cars and all that urban shit that some people waste too much time railing against. I love this city. I'd just love it all the more if I could get out once in awhile, and boy did I want out this week. Anything other than the total absence of man-made light would be incongruous deep in the woods, but in the city it's just danger surreal. Walking home through the Commons from work (I was at work throughout the thing- that's another story still) in the still-dark morning after the storm was like being on acid. You've never seen a city until you can't see it. In all directions, just black. Police cars flying past the distant edges, like angry fireflies. Between sirens, the kind of silence that makes you notice the inaudible ringing in yr ears. A ghost town with real live ghosts.

I tripped over a lot of unidentifiable debris in the Commons. Emerging into more darkness, I started down Cornwallis, at first picking up every wastecan, moving every chunk of siding off the road, but it didn't take long to realize I'd never make it home if I kept being that good of a samaritan. At the corner of Maynard, I saw the old couple that runs Pat's corner store sweeping glass outta the entrance to the store. I figured it was a busted window from the storm, but it turned out they'd been looted. Still, they insisted I take one of their flashlights. I tried to say no, but they weren't having it. It's a good thing, too, 'cause I'd probably have been royally fucked without it in the days to come.

When I got home, there was an uprooted tree in the driveway. I don't know where that tree came from.

I got home to no power, so Java and I went for a walk to the front of Citadel Hill to survey the wreckage downtown. I couldn't see shit, but I thought it was pretty interesting that at every end of the city, atop every blackened highrise, every single corporate logo was still ablaze. Aside from a few lights in what were obviously emergency staircases, and, for reasons that escape me, the string of xmas-style lights around the Liquordome, these were the only lights in existence. "Hurricane Juan, brought to you by CIBC!" Priorities, priorities. I still had no idea how bad things really were.

My boss called me the next afternoon, wondering if I wanted to go in, and I was already happy to just get out of the house. Priorities turned out to also be way fucked-up in my store too, and our single backup generator conveniently provided excellent lighting as we tossed out several hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of perishable food that was apparently not enough of a concern to route the backup power needed to toss it out into the refrigeration units instead. I cannot express how absurd it felt to be systematically throwing out many literal tonnes of food, while gangs of people roamed about the neighbourhood searching for unspoiled food. Most of the guys I work with have families and kids and shit, and they were all feeling way guilty about how we were getting to feast on semi-spoiled pastrami (we all still have the shits from that) or whatever while their wives and children were at home watching all their food go rotten, with no way to cook or save it. Now more than ever, I'm glad I'm not a big meat eater. I've talked to people who've lost hundreds of dollars worth of steaks and shit. I lost a couple slices of pizza, and a few condiments. Fucking lucky.

Some areas were beginning to have power restored by Tuesday, so my oldgood friend Mark - also stuck without power way up in the north end - and I struck out in search of a fresh meal, and, on my part, beer. We succeeded on both counts, and parted way with plans of heading downtown later on. I ended up at an impromptu sidewalk party on darkest Gottingen for awhile, and it lifted my spirits a bit about the state of human nature in trying times. I only later found out about some of the bad shit that was going on in the 'hood.

So I hooked up with Mark again later on, and we went out to the dullest fucking Tuesday ever. He fucking sipped on the shot of Jager I bought him at the Khyber. Guess I can't blame him. It was that kind of night. Bo-ring. Some chick at the Seahorse hit on him for a bit, so I suppose I'm glad I drug him out, anyway. Walked around for a bit, surveying some of the destruction, and we parted ways at the top of Cogswell. Agricola was still completely black at the time (maybe it still is, I dunno), so I gave Mark my flashlight. A couple minutes after we parted, I realized I hadn't mentioned how I'd been carrying a weapon the whole night. Agricola isn't a bad street, but it adjoins a few questionable ones, and this power outage shit has allowed the bad neighbourhoods to extend their tentacles into all parts of the city. Anyway, he got mugged, and, to some extent, I feel responsible. He's no fool, but he's not the most street-savvy guy, and I feel like it's my fault for not warning him to carry a big stick (hell, they're everywhere anyway), or something, anything to defend himself with while walking into the corridow of utter blackness and lawlessness.

Anyway, he's ok, other than seven stitches above one of his eyebrows. Dude, chicks love well-placed scars anyway. I feel like such a douche.

Waking up Wednesday, I knew immediately that I hadta get out of the house. I was fucking filthy from work, and resigned myself to a shower, freezing cold or otherwise. Turns out I must have the best fucking hot water tank in the entire goddamn city, 'cause there was enough hot water left for a quick no-frills shower. Lucky again. I drew a basin of water, and shaved old-school style in the living room, where there was daylight coming in through the window- to the tune of Neimo's tapes being played through my little hand-held tape recorder. I'm more grateful than ever for that thing too. I'd heard most of the downtown area had had power restored by then, so I struck out in that direction in search of food. The day before I'd eaten at Freeman's - who were cooking off of four propane grills, and offering a choice of spaghetti, stir-fry, and chicken noodle soup... they must've made a fucking killing, being quite possibly the only restaurant open in the entire HRM - and the place'd had the unlikely air of a soup kitchen. I had just enough cash money to pay for my meal, and I woulda been fucked afterwards if I hadn't, in yet another stroke of freakish good fortune, run into Pretty Man on my way out. Pretty Man carries a huge wad of cash with him everywhere he goes (don't ask), and offered to front me as much as I wanted. He tried to insist I take more, but I thought $30 would be plenty. I shoulda taken his advice, 'cause I promptly ended up lending more than half of that out to my coworkers, who were hurtin' more than I. All the money in the world is pretty fucking useless when it's stuck inside a powerless ATM machine.

So yeah, anyway, Wednesday saw most of downtown with power restored (I think at this point, somewhere around half the city's households, mine included, still had no foreseeable power restoration in the immediate future, to keep things in perspective), so I headed out in that direction in search of food. I ate the worst salad, and the best seafood of my life, in the food court of Scotia Square, and sat around in there, writing, for an hour or so. I bought a newspaper (I hadn't had a radio or anything throughout this- sweet mother of god, a connection with the world at large!), and started walking south. Judging by the pictures I've since seen, somebody musta been working double-overtime cleaning up Barrington, 'cause it was relatively free of debris. The Khyber seemed like the right place to go, so I went in there and had coffee (HOT COFFEE!) and then beer (COLD BEER!), and read the paper as I creamed myself repeatedly. It seems the world-at-large either didn't know, or, more likely, didn't give a flying fuck about our little city's armageddon. Talked to Dave Page for a bit, and it turns out it was his roof (!) that took out ALL FOUR of the transformers for the Agricola street power grid. The night before, I'd sat forlornly at a table outside the Bella Muse, watching those very same power poles slouch deeper and deeper into the street, as dusk turned into lawless night. He'd spoken to NS Power that day, and at that point the area was not expected to have power restored for another eight days to a week-and-a-half. I went three and change, and I was starting to go certifiably stir-crazy. You might be reading this going "you fucking pansy, you can't even go a week without creature comforts without whining", but you don't understand what it's like to be trapped in the fucking city during something like this. I couldn't begin to explain. Besides the thousands of uprooted 150-year-old trees (makes me want to cry- Point Pleasant and the Public Gardens are fucking toast), mostly-superficial damage (one building fell, a bunch of boats sank), and wreckage everywhere, the city looks relatively normal in daytime. Night is when everything goes to shit, and I'm thankful that there's been a lot to do at work, 'cause I'd otherwise have gone bughouse by now. There are kids on Gherrish street hiding in the dark rooftops shooting passersby with bb guns. There's a gang of skimask-clad Clockwork Orange-style ultraviolence-seekers roaming the Citadel laying beatdowns on anyone unlucky enough to be walking through there. I've never been so thankful to have a dog. I pity the gang of fools that fucks with me when I've got Java along. Most people aren't lucky enough to own sociopathic dogs though.

It takes electricity to pump water upstairs. I know at least the highrises on the St Mary's campus were (still are?) without backup generators to keep water flowing. I wonder where all the highrise people have been shitting. First time in my life I've been grateful to live in a basement. Sheer luck, once again.

So yeah, try and imagine a week and a half of that. With no roof. I was going nuts, and I had it easy. As of last night, I was still carrying my lead knuckles and flashlight with me everywhere.

I just woke up, so I don't know what state the city's in today. The worst is definitely way over, but we are still in a nationally-declared "state of emergency". The world media hasn't even noticed. The NYTimes hasn't even made a blurb about it.

I'm going back to bed.
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Hurricanes are assholes.
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