[P]eople haven’t been taking the prize as seriously anymore. By selecting exotic token choices and veteran compromise candidates, all the selection committee has succeeded in doing is to put literature editors under a lot of pressure to find anyone who knows of or can even remember the winner after the judgments have been announced in Sweden. - Uncle Sam Has Bigger Problems, Spiegel, October 2, 2008

While this article is ostensibly about the politics of American authors winning the Nobel prize, it comes from a European paper, and this paper may be less willing to look at how authors worldwide seem to have much less to say of import.

I wonder why.

Literary periodicals ought to be the dam against the ever-rising flood of bad and unprofitable books produced by the unprincipled scribbling of our age. With the incorruptibility, judiciousness and severity of their judgments, they should scourge without mercy all patchwork put together by incompetents, all the page-filling through which empty heads seek to fill their empty pockets, which is to say nine-tenths of all books, and thus work against triviality and imposture as their duty dictates; instead of which, they promote these things: and their abject tolerance allies itself with author and publisher to rob the public of its time and its money. Their writers are as a rule professors or literati who, because of low salaries of poor payment, write from need of money: so, since they all have a common aim, their interests are in common, they keep together, mutually sustain one another and speak in favor of one another: this is the origin of all the laudatory reviews of bad books which constitute the content of literary periodicals. Their motto ought to be: Live and let live! - Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena

The weekend discoveries bring the total number of deaths nationwide from Hurricane Ike to 67, according to The Associated Press. The 600-mile-wide storm caused flooding as far north as Illinois.
…
Aerial spraying has begun to fend off massive numbers of mosquitoes that make search options almost impossible.

“A great deal of debris was washing out to sea, and some of the missing may never be found, unfortunately,” Reed said. - Grisly finds put Houston-area Ike death toll at 32, Houston Chronicle, September 30, 2008

The mosquitoes have manifested here as well.

They are about twice the size of normal mosquitoes, which is probably a result of spending their larval state in nutrient-rich pools, and they attack clumsily like zombies.

But they are aggressive. Swat one and it will bounce back, and keep charging right at your heart.

They make working outside very, very unpleasant, in part because they don’t care if you use mosquito repellent. They are like guided missiles, albeit dumb ones.

It can make your throat cough, eyes itch, head pound, or leave you alone.

The menace is mold, and it’s ravaging water-damaged homes and buildings all over Galveston in the island’s latest battle wrought by Hurricane Ike. - Mold has gotten a head start, Houston Chronicle, September 29, 2008

Not just in Galveston. You can smell it here on the air, half of it coming from homes and garages that were ravaged by stormwinds and rains, and then not dried out because power was out. When mold gets a beachhead, it takes a lot to kill it.

We went through a couple bottles of bleach on exterior walls and even inside the house. I respect bleach, but I don’t like it. It is caustic and horrible, but when you are dealing with resilient dumb lifeforms, caustic and horrible is what you need and will enjoy. Bleach is biochemical napalm.

There are still giant piles of dead vegetation everywhere. The town next door has not banned outdoor burning, which might be cool for getting rid of a few piles of leaves here and there, but it is being abused now. People who are taking money to accept lawn detritus are burning it in half-acre piles, with five or six going at all times, so the air is constantly spicy and irritant with smoke. This has been going on since the storm.

A temporary burn ban might be a really good idea, especially since these guys are not checking too carefully and seem to be tossing lawn debris including caustic plants like poison ivy into the mess. Fire doesn’t clean as much as people think it does, and if even a little bit of plastic or paint gets in there, the smoke gets even worse. It’s also thick because the vegetation is still wet, and hangs in the air because it’s humid, although that’s changing as fall creeps around the corner.

The vegetation reminds me of the single biggest reason why this storm has been so bad. Over the last decade, the services our city uses to trim trees back from power lines have declined in quality. They used to use lawn and tree care people who were experienced. Now they’re getting people who stumbled into the job and will work it cheap.

Their method of trimming trees back from lines was to clear-cut vertically on both sides of the power lines. Problem: while this makes the lines look clear of limbs, as any experienced tree maintainer can tell you, this makes unstable trees because they are unbalanced. They will not necessarily fall toward their heavier sides. In fact, because they will lean to the heavier side and then whip back, they may fall in the opposite direction — toward the power lines.

If you want to know why most of Houston lost power for over a week, it is that we “saved money” in trimming trees. There’s a management lesson in this, which can be summarized simply as: if you don’t do a small job right, it becomes one of those details you stumble over when you least expect it.

With the washing away of the old, decaying of the feeble, and introduction of new growth in their places comes new bugs. This praying mantis has obviously been around for awhile, but I haven’t seen a specimen this large or this beautiful for some time. Color me impressed. I apologize for my profoundly mediocre photography.

When I was visiting family some time ago, one of these guys — a little smaller than this one — landed on my chest and spent about ten minutes with me while I consumed ice cream. It was a surreal bonding moment. They’re a lot like us, just buggier and leggier. And in tribute to nature’s brilliance, they eat all the bugs I really dislike.

Schiff defines “middle-class millionaires” as those with a net worth of between $1 million and $10 million who earned their wealth rather than inherited it. They are people, the author says, who live a fundamentally middle-class life, yet are exerting powerful influence on society.
…
Folks who are succeeding in America are knowledge workers, in financial services or creative services, where their brain is their No. 1 asset.
…
They on average work 70 hours a week and take fewer vacation days…They observe information in a more savvy way and tap into the flow of information capital, and they know how to leverage this enlightened self-interest.
…
These are people who have had an average of three career setbacks, and three quarters of the group we surveyed said that each time, they’ve come back in a different way.
…
They work hard every day because they want their kids to grow up in a financially stable environment and have opportunities. Middle-class millionaires are people working on behalf of their families. - Who Are the ‘Middle-Class Millionaires’?, US News and World Report, May 2, 2008

Peter Drucker predicted long ago that the future belonged to the knowledge workers. The reason is that while most people are trained in a skill, they lack knowledge of how to apply that skill, which involves awareness of context and market as well as the skill itself. Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had other skills, but their ultimate skill was as leaders, where marketing, product design and technology converge.

I think the rise of these middle class millionaires — called by the less politically-correct “the upper middle class” — have been around and acting like this for a long time. They are goal-oriented people in a world of people oriented toward entertainment, social status, religious iconography, and who knows what else. The ones I knew when growing up worked always, even when they were relaxing. They liked getting things done and had re-programmed their brains to enjoy the labor required to get there.

The cost of being middle class instead of what the Europeans call “working class” is rising. As our labor costs drop, the cost of quality labor goes up as it gets rarer, and consequently so do the rewards for being quality labor. This in turn drives inflation faster and requires you to have more cash in order to escape the vicious cycle, and so on.

Out of my twelve readers, I think one of you is independently wealthy, one of you made himself independently wealthy, and the rest of us are working toward this goal, so I post it for your enjoyment. Articles like this never go out of style, because they give us insight into the people who succeed not by the long shots but by the slow and steady, which is more likely to return value and so is probably a better path than something with a low statistical average of success (rock stardom, criminal kingpin, best-selling author, nuclear terrorist).

Cloud computing – where IT power is delivered over the internet as you need it, rather than drawn from a desktop computer – has gained currency in recent years.
…
But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

“It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign,” he told The Guardian.

“Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it’s very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.” - Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman, The Guardian, September 29, 2008

I’ve written in the past of my opposition to cloud computing and skepticism about Software as a Service (SaaS).

I know people want backups over the net, and I know they want the ability to buy, download and reinstall software over the net, but the elephant in the room is DRM and persistence. Will I be able to get the same software again, or forced to upgrade? Will I be given only five chances to install, and then it becomes worthless?

As Stallman points out, the fact of the matter is that most of us want a physical product in our hands because we’re aware of how quickly business and infrastructure can shift strategy. Think about it: if you own Windows XP on a CD, you can install it any time you want, and have it work. If Windows has a DRM or registration policy, or you have to log in to download, it’s not so certain.

One thing Stallman attacks in this article is Gmail. How can that be? you think. Gmail is a nice service, and it’s a lot simpler and more consistent than most email clients. But if tomorrow Google stops allowing you to download your mail, you’re out of luck. I think this is what Stallman is talking about, and although his vision is a bit extreme, he’s logically correct and we should pay attention.

I was sorry to hear of the recent suicide of David Foster Wallace, a talented novelist who battled depression for most of his life. He reminds me of others who have passed on in similar ways: polymaths, very much invested in being aware of their worlds, very much in love with life, highly intelligent and sensitive people.

Having lost several friends this way, I would like to say that I think the solutions offered to us by the philosophers and spiritual leaders of our time are not addressing our problems. Intelligent people who love life kill themselves generally because they see no point in going on because they feel the outside world is doomed, and it feeds their inner depression, which quite frankly we all have somewhere.

I think we should pay more attention to these suicides. The best artists do not design their lives as art works, but these lives and deaths are nonetheless instructive. David Foster Wallace showed a great commitment to life, to giving a darn about how things turned out, and toward a respect and reverence for life itself. If he turned away at the last minute, we should get some answers and not nebulously blame “depression” and change the channel.

He walked into a crowded exam room and opened fire before shooting himself in the head. He was taken to hospital with series (sic) head wounds and died later.

Kauhajoki mayor Antti Rantakokko confirmed that nine people were killed.

The rampage came almost a year after another gunman killed eight people and himself at a school in southern Finland, an attack that triggered a fierce debate about gun laws in the Nordic nation with deep-rooted traditions of hunting in the sub-Arctic wilderness. - Police questioned student day before massacre, The Independent, September 23, 2008

Why does this keep happening? I think literature itself can give us some answers:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. (William Wordsworth, 1807)

Imagination has taken a distant second place to what we can “prove,” with financial charts and out-of-context scientific studies. We treat life itself as a product. (Literature in turn has sadly followed this pattern as well with the rise of “literary realism” and “workshop writing,” but that’s another story.)

We should pay more attention to the works like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which hopes to show us through similar ideas in unrelated disciplines that there is an order to our universe and a way of living that complements it. I hope he rests in peace and we can remember him for what he gave to literature.

As a third of Houston-area residents enter an 11th day without power, they face a slowing pace of recovery and what seems to many an inexplicable process that restores electricity to some homes while others nearby remain dark.

As summer-like temperatures returned, some customers’ lights and air conditioners came on while neighbors as close as next door were without power and without much information about why the power is still out and when it will come back.

Fueling the heat Monday were reports that unidentified elected officials have promised their constituents a better place in line, said a spokesman for CenterPoint Energy, the area’s largest power transmission company. - Tempers rising as outages drag on, Houston Chronicle, September 22, 2008

Houston’s experience in Hurricane Ike offers us a management lesson: when faced with product failure, how to handle the customer?

Like most of life’s more serious questions, this one does not have a magic solution that involves turning on people faster than the work can be done. But there may be an intermediate work-around that avoids the worst of the crisis. I’d summarize this answer in three steps: 1. Inform. 2. Research and offer substitute. 3. Expedite work process.

People want to know when they can plan to use this product again, because invariably other needs depend on it. Give them some form of reliable information, including the unexpected. “We came to fix your neighborhood, but there were thirteen trees breaking your power lines, and two downed towers, so we need a bigger team and we don’t have those people right now,” is more acceptable than silence. Let people know street-by-street what the status of their request is. You can divert administrative staff to this request since they aren’t able to do their normal job functions, and should sacrifice even traditional important customer communication tools like phone hotlines to do it.

When you asked a Houston power customer why he wants power back after Ike, he may give you all sorts of answers, but if you keep hammering, he’ll distill it to two essential functions: air conditioning and refrigeration. He needs to keep food ready for his family, since he won’t be out hunting and picking vegetables every day like our forebears did, and he needs to keep his family out of the 90-plus-degree heat that saps energy in the day and steals sleep at night. This is the actual need, as separate from the many needs people will list off when you ask them why electricity is important.

I am not a power company experts, but there may be alternatives here. Temporary wiring, while dangerous, could alleviate enough of the problem to keep people happy. So could rented generators on flat-beds, with a flat charge to the neighborhood on next month’s bill. How about discounts on hotels? All of these cost more money but keep the wave of negative public relations at bay and let you focus on solving the problem.

Any good leader coming into this situation knows that she or he will have to doubly motivate slightly depressed work crews. As these work crews were driving to work, or driving into town, they saw the devastation. They’re not pleased either. You need to convert that negative emotion into a positive one, like “Look at all the people you’re going to put back on track to happy survival.” One major reason to get the PR process correct in this instance is so that negative feedback does not filter down to your employees, making them disillusioned and less likely to give a job the extra 10% of mental focus and effort that is all too frequently the difference between FAIL and succeed.

Offering incentives for those who work weekends, nights, and the more difficult jobs is a priority. Normally, workers want regular shifts and try to avoid the more difficult tasks, because those are more likely to be screwed up and to cause their own careers a ding. Motivate them toward these difficult tasks instead, and take out the hardest problems first, and then as your crews are getting exhausted, they’ll have the easy stuff to tackle.

Finally, get your PR flaks out there to run interference. If people have questions, they need to get to talk, preferrably in person, with a representative who can find out what’s going on. Your customers will understand if their neighborhood was harder hit than others, but only if you tell them how, and show them if possible. They are more forgiving than you think, but they don’t like being left in the dark.

Another little tidbit: focus first on the customers who are going to be able to help others. Traditionally, companies focus on those most likely to complain, or those who seem to have the greatest number of obstacles facing them. Instead, I suggest focusing on the customers who have businesses and services themselves to run, as getting them back online will help everyone else with a trickle-down effect.

Never promise what you cannot deliver. After Ike hit, authorities in Houston offered vague statements when asked about power coming back on. They were counting on Ike being “Houston’s Katrina” to make most people think they were in such a disaster they shouldn’t expect power for another month, and so business can proceed as usual. As a result, they issued either apocalyptic statements predicting up to two months without power, or told us it would be done on Monday — two Mondays in a row.

Instead, they should have launched an aggressive campaign to inform people and show them why some parts of town faced a different storm than others, and should have shown them the progress toward fixing it — and used that information to supercharge their own performance.

We’re OK. We have no power, and the city warns us that our heavily chlorinated water is not necessarily safe to drink, but we’re drinking it. The main problem is that in the next 24 hours, our temperature will rise 10 degrees. We’ve been lucky in that it has been unseasonably cool, in the low 70s, since the day after the hurricane, and that has kept us all sane. That will change and with it, by necessity, we will as well.

My last big hurricane was Alicia in 1983. I remember thinking that it wasn’t such a big deal, because after a few hours of storming, the power went out with a bang, branches fell to earth, glass shattered on the streets and then we slept until morning and rebuilt. It took a week to get power, and the people across the week got it a week later. People helped each other a lot — the street was divided by orange extension cords running across the concrete.

Houston has grown to probably twice the size it was in 1983. It’s still a town with two major industries: finding and refining oil, and constant building of more Houston to take advantage of the money flowing through. We like to joke here that some day Houston will expand to contain the entire world, and we’ll refer to Paris, France as a subdivision of Houston. This ouroboric process defines how Houstonians see the world.

This hurricane was something else. I didn’t notice it being much worse than Alicia, but because it swung to the east, it hit more of the city and so widespread damage was intense. There were other changes, too: there’s more concrete on the ground, so water has nowhere to go, and we both haven’t had a big storm to trim away limbs and people seem more lax about it.

The following is a log of our hurricane experience. Here are good places to get official information — City of Houston website and the Houston Chronicle.

September 11:

This was the Great Patriotic Holiday, and The People(tm) celebrated by listening to televisions which told them how Hurricane Ike might be the end of the world. Of course, since our televisions said this about the last fifteen tropical storms to blow over the city without rearranging a single leaf, we ignored it and wrote it off as panic mongering. As it turned out, it was panic-mongering, except for Galveston, which was about to face a firing squad of nature’s most merciless executioneers. The mainstream media may have been wrong about how bad Ike was, because it really wasn’t bad, but they forgot to mention something important which alert readers probably already have guessed.

September 12:

The storm hit. At 7:30ish, a dark greeny sky unleashed a ton of water and wind whipping through trees began to cover everything in a fine layer of small clumps of leaves. Power died at 9 pm and at the time of this writing has not been restored. The storm blasted all night long, save a brief calm from 5-8 am when the eye passed over us and it was almost calm. The first half of the storm was more rain than wind, and the order reversed on the other side of the storm.

Honestly, the storm itself wasn’t a big deal. Wind, strange thuds in the night, waves of water. Don’t go outside and it sounds like one of our many summer thunderstorms.

What was most interesting were the hours of Friday afternoon and evening. Everyone fled work because any excuse is a good one. Then, as if whipped by a frenetic hand of panic, people moved in a dreamlike slowness. They drove like grannies on Xanax. They bought food obsessively, talked on their cell phones with an umbilical addiction, and spread panic to each other by being seen acting with the subtle but recognizable signs of losing it. Anywhere a TV was on, people got bug-eyed and flew to it like moths. For those of us just looking for ice, it was really annoying.

September 13:

Morning dawns and there’s no power, at least for 90% of the city. We hear rumors that Galveston has been flooded because, although the storm surge was less than expected, the rain was worse because the storm yanked to the northeast like a scimitar twisted in Houston’s gut. We started eating our way through the hurricane, since without power, everything in your freezer has an imminent mortality, so eat like a pig before it all goes to rot. There’s always time to lose pounds later when all you have are saltines and peanut butter.

Neighbors collaborated to clean up. Or at least, ours did. At this point, my narrative gains some of a tale of two cities. Like most subdivisions in Houston (subdivisions are planned neighborhoods — this city was built after the car and air conditioning because normal — and are the smallest practical division of Houston, generally sharing utilities within each subdivision) ours has a whole bunch of homes, some small and some big, and then a school, a fire station, a convenience store and two apartment complexes.

The two cities are the homes and the apartments. The homes are the hard-fought refuges of the hard-working above average but not wealthy family,and the apartments are where you go if you’re starting out or have no cash. There’s some resentment between the two, because if you don’t mind me taking some liberties here dear reader, this country has been in the midst of a grim class war for some time. The homes are those who are going upward to the 1/5 of us who make per household above the magic figure of $138,500 a year that means they’ll have access to the best services and education and all that good stuff. The apartments are those who are going to settle for what’s left and make do, and depending on who you talk to, it’s because they’re unfortunate or incompetent.

The homes were quiet throughout the hurricane but hummed during the aftermath. People boiled out of the doors and into the rain, and began cutting the limbs that fell on each property, patching holes in roofs, etc. These people meant business. The apartments were the opposite: they had rockin’ hurricane parties that went late into the night by the glow of generator and hibachi, and the next day, were silent until well after noon. In fact, if you wanted to party, the apartments were where it was at, since all the units were close together and people shared food, booze, drugs and each other. It was sort of a hippie wonderland, if you ignored the crashing of fallen limbs in the background.

We heard through the neighbor grapevine that 4.5 million people were without power. We helped each other. At one point, when I was about to despair for the sheer weight of limbs in the front yard, five boys from two nearby homes showed up and cleaned the yard entirely, freeing me to hack apart the bigger limbs in the back. There was lending among the homes, too, but it was power saws and electronics. People here had a one-track mentality: protect my kids and house, and later, wine and song, etc. We went to the house on the corner because they had a generator and fired it up every couple hours so we could see the news, which was literally of zero value. They repeated the same five video clips of the storm hitting, and told us how important it was to stay tuned, with no real information. It rained for the first half of the day, and when night fell, a second storm showed up to make recovery even harder.

September 14:

Cigarette rationing began today. Apprehension grew: we had survived the storm, but what about the aftermath? How long would it last, and what would we do in the meantime?

Luckily, an answer immediately presented itself: continue cleanup. Three large branches fell off one of our trees, each the size of a small tree, and so I had to hack them up and store them in a huge heap in front of the house. One side yard was flooded, and there was no shortage of fallen stuff on the house, on the driveway, on the lawns, in the water, etc.

The newspaper we got at the one convenience store that was open, running off generator power, was almost entirely useless. It had about three paragraphs of real information distributed between sensationalistic headliness, human interest stories, and endless warnings about using generators, drinking water, going out after dark and so on. I have never been so disappointed in the news, nor has it ever been clearer that the reliance on wire stories has completely made bulimic the local papers to the point where they can’t even digest a good story if it comes their way. Maybe the internet gutted local papers, but I think it’s mainly because local papers turned tail and refused to capitalize on what made them great, which was their writers and editors.

Although the day before was hot and sweaty, cool air came in, reeking of fall and encouraging us. We could live through this. Maybe it’ll take another 24-48 hours for power, we thought, because that is what everyone told us. “It was this way during Rita, wait another couple days.” Some people in the homes began to join the storm party, setting up canopies and civily drinking wine into the night. The people I’ve come to trust — the DPS guy on the corner, the radically honest and generous Christians across the street, and the dark haired anarchist who somehow gets along with the very Republican DPS guy — would have none of it. They were constantly active, fixing the homes, cleaning stuff, preparing food for the kids and climbing giant trees to keep roofs clear. One family whose home got bisected by a giant pine just fled.

The first of the generators started running constantly. Generators are small engines whose rotors spin wire coils through magnetic fields, producing electricity. Imagine a riding lawnmower running on high idle constantly, with no filtration for its exhaust, as it it sits in the garage next door. Sound good? Multiply by three and you can imagine what we were hearing and smelling at this point.

September 15:

A cool front brought in a Southern California style day. Nostalgia, and then back to splitting wood.

I’ve decided I love my neighbors. In theory, we have very little in common, and I look too college boy for the taste of some, but we share some really basic values. Protect families. Make nice places to life. Respect nature and teach your kids to respect it. A real man is the man who takes a stand for something and doesn’t back down. Life is a giant gift just waiting to be unwrapped. And we don’t care how they do it in Hollywood or New York. I’m just not going to talk politics or music, since I’ve given up on the former and have almost no compatibility with the latter.

The apartments are still rockin’. They have no power. The party has gone from 1970s futurism to a sordid kind of 1990s grunge dinginess. Grubbing your last cigs off each other while trying to scrap together enough bucks for another six pack kind of makes it all a bit pathetic. Similarly, the wine parties are wilting. How many times can you tell the same witticism before you feel like a socializing automaton?

September 16:

We’re starting to call it “mandatory vacation.” There is nothing to do — or rather, nothing to be done. The electricity which brings us air conditioning, hot water, computers, and the rest, has become necessary for the way we live. Without it, we’re grateful for smashed branches and flooded drains to give us something to do. On the plus side, there’s no TV. I’m not a big fan of TV but when you have a family, it’s often on in the house. What has replaced it is conversation while staring into the reflection of candle flames in the big mirror I moved into the main room. We talk more. We touch more. This hurricane has brought some positive changes.

Ice has become more valuable than money. We’re all trying to keep the contents of our fridges from rotting. A couple bags of $5 ice can prolong that for another 48 hours if you don’t let the door flap open and shut like it does in most homes. We in the homes are concerned with feeding our wives, kids, dogs, etc. In the apartments, the mood has gotten sour, because the party food has run out and people aren’t able to cook. Domino’s is delivering so constantly, since they’re using gas ovens and generators, that they might as well just move the franchise.

The strip mall across from us is dead without power. We went out today looking for some specialized supplies including ice. Several intersections are without power. The fire station just got power. People are driving very aggressively. They don’t know how to cycle at lights that are out — we always used to cycle to the right — and so there’s dangerous chaos as tired people tried to navigate motor vehicles. A lot of it is really pointless. People are either spaced out and passive, and kind of let you navigate around them, or are really pounding the road and aggressive. The result is a massive inattention surplus.

We have so far seen zero evidence of: FEMA; the City of Houston; our power company; looters. The cops are posted at the entrance to our neighborhood, and are turning people away. They are also arresting anyone found after dark without a clear destination. “I’m going to get ice for my family back there,” is acceptable but “I was just looking around, and I don’t live here” will get you a night in jail. In general, the cops are rounding up anyone who looks unstable enough to cause problems. Shocking myself, I’m all for it. Looters would introduce paranoia and really make this unpleasant.

A constant stench of burnt gasoline and hot rubber pervades the air. Welcome to how it is when normal people try to use generators they once may have in passing read the instructions for. Apparently, there have been a dozen or so fires across the city as homes have exploded with generators, and several other people have gassed themselves with carbon monoxide. I am unaffected and it doesn’t disturb me. I am surrounded by thronging humanity, each pushing onto me their own need and the need of the mass at large. It can make you misanthropic, especially when you see how clueless these people are.

September 17:

We consolidated cleaning supplies between bathrooms and kitchens, and prepared for a long haul. We threw out anything that was outdated, depleted or not useful. We also began the lugubrious task of emptying out the fridge, since our ice melted down at this point. It all went into three big black tash bags, and I have a tub out front full of tupperware containers soaking in three different soaps. We threw out all our hopes that hadn’t been eaten and tossed aside all of the crap we had meant to clean for the last couple years, so it was both a sad and happy day. I did not weep to see the gift jams and jellies that no one liked, the archaic beers, and antiquated condiments and nearly petrified frozen leftovers pass into oblivion. On the downside, we lost the top of our wedding cake which by some weird tradition we’re supposed to keep frozen for a year, and then eat — yuck. Maybe it wasn’t such a downside.

The apartments are not looking nor smelling so good at this point. People are still partying as they can, but it’s sporadic, like a cheer for a losing team that loses energy quickly. People are starting to clean up the wrecked limbs even though they don’t own the property. But the trash decomposes, and all those beer bottles scattered about are starting to breed mosquitoes.

Talked to my family. They have no power either, and the city is warning that the water supply has lost pressure and so might be fecally contaminated. Apparently, 65% of the power company’s customers have no power, which is something like 1.3m households. They were out of town and their neighbors helped them clear the debris. I like people helping people. I don’t see much of it in the apartments, or some houses, but the people who look like they have themselves together tend to be the same everywhere: helping those who will help themselves. This theme would take on weight as the days went on.

Our idiot mayor made some bold statement about how if even one customer does not have power, he is not happy. This has sped up power restoration by approximately 0% and has had zero effect on the wellbeing of the city, except for my drunk neighbors who think it’s brilliant and manly.

I am reflecting on panic. First, how we got told to leave NOW before the storm, but there was no prep for the aftermath — it’s easier to say we should leave than acknowledge that most of us aren’t going to abandon our homes, especially since we get a dozen hurricanes a summer and they tell us to leave for each one. Second, how hard would it have been to get some trucks with supplies ready before the storm? Maybe if we know people are going to be hard hit, we should plan for the aftermath, not plan for whether or not we tell them to leave. Finally, why are people still driving around with nothing to do? At the apartments they watch TV obsessively, drink and eat; in the homes, we fiddle with every bit of cleanup we can do and obsess over whether we have enough food and water for our loved ones. People are driving to nearby family and sharing. It’s encouraging.

Gasoline is scarce. Lines of eighty cars stretch out of both stations that have it, and people are running out of gas in line. We conserve instead. Ice is still scarce. Kroger is rationing the number of bags we can purchase. Of course, Kroger also sucks, but it’s what is nearby.

I am heating ginger and cinnamon in water to clear the smell of generator diesel, rotting vegetation, dead food and sweat from the house. The neighbor’s dogs have discovered that our fence is down and have begun leaving fragrant deposits as well. We know it gets hot Friday, but we have no family in town who have power. We collected more food at Target, and have become aware of good and bad sources of calories. Good: beef jerky (Jack Links Organic). Bad: snickers and mainstream granola. We forget to check one bucket of granola and find out Target quite happily sold us one that expired on September 6. It is rancid.

I’m noting how neighbors break down into several groups. There are helpers and leaders, like the guy across the street. There are passive people who take care of their own stuff, and hide away, usually with generator and DVDs. And then there are the uncoordinated, who exist among the houses and apartments. They sort of take care of their homes, sort of prepared, sort of know what to do, and are often getting drunk. I’ve heard a few really loud arguments with the wife and kids, and one near the apartments that if there were more cops about would probably be a domestic violence call. Scary.

We are down to four cigarettes. We have decided that instead of waiting for power, we’re going to clean the house without it, and it has improved our spirits. We’re in limbo. We know what we can’t do, but are unaware when “civilization” returns, so we’re forever unsure of what we should do. There is nothing to do but give up caring about control and instead try to fix what we can change, which means cleaning the house, fixing the fence, washing cars and so on. I am beginning to understand why they made Islam about submission to God, because this is what it must feel like. The direction is in someone else’s hands and worrying about it does nothing and worse than doing nothing, takes energy. Give up and get to work. It reminds me of what I’ve heard about 12-step alcoholism programs and how they teach that addiction comes from resentment of reality, and that the first step is giving up on the stuff you can’t change, and focusing on what your hands can do. It reminds me of the hermetic discipline of thought which teaches that if you lack something, to focus on how you would enjoy it instead of how you lack it, as that will make it come more quickly to you.

More of the houses have learned this lesson than the apartments, which are starting to get loud. Battery powered stereoes, constant generators, basketball games, a loud drunken party or two. I’m starting to walk past quickly. I am glad we are not there. It looks like people driving each other mad with inconsideration. The homes are better, without about 75% just waiting it out, but the remainder include many who run their generators too much and poison the air. I’m learning the value of silence. Sometimes nothing in the air is a lot better than something that just reminds us there are other people there, without showing us their good sides.

No news. The newspaper is now ignored by everyone in our neighborhood because it sucks. It just has no news and a lot of hype, again and again. The radio stations are playing the same general programming, which is people calling in to talk about their impressions of the storm and to complain. There is no news of practical value. Like the response of the city, I feel it has been profiteering. The mayor profits by appearing to be strong while doing nothing. The power company is enjoying talking about how bad this one, and giving us 2-4 week estimates for power. The more you make it sound terrible, the less people expect, and that’s a form of profit. The stores are shoveling charcoal, lighters, starter fluid, food, ice and candles out the door as fast as they can. It shows me the short-sighted and selfish in human nature. I am disappointed in humanity, or more accurately, in human demographuics, that the self-deceiving could outnumber the good.

Some hilarity: the city has told us that for further updates about the power situation, we should see the web site. Problem: there is no place nearby with power and internet. It’s as funny as the radio announcer who told people in Galveston to “stay tuned” even though the people she was speaking to were six feet under water. There’s a peculiar American panic in all of this. We know every aspect of our lives is making someone profit, so we don’t trust, but we need to trust somewhat in order to live a normal live like our friends. So we’re nervous, paranoid like a Thomas Pynchon novel, but desperate for any way to claim we got the better end of the deal. “Dude, look at these sweet steaks…”

The first UPS and Fedex trucks appear in the neighborhood. Memo to future past self: order steaks, ice and generator before the storm. Wild Stallyns rule!

I think all of us have matured through this. We’ve moved from method-oriented thinking to goal-oriented thinking. For example, I don’t want to rake the lawn, but I want the result of the lawn being raked, so I rake it. It’s a part of the maturing process that is often absent in our modern time because we can just change the channel and tune out or click on a different page. People are a lot leaner in the face after even a few days. We do what we need to do and without constant distractions from our TVs and computers, we have to look at things that actually make life better for our families, who we’re rediscovering since we have only conversation, books and activities. I’m learning to like this card game, “Crazy Eights.” Only ten days ago I would have found this idea ludicrous.

This whole situation reminds me of how my parents appeared to me in boring 1970s America. Always doing dumb practical stuff. But now, I can see how that stuff was more real, and I’m feeling nostalgia for that boring, wholesome, wonderful 1970s America, in the un-hip suburbs where we didn’t know or care what bands or movies were new.

September 18:

My throat burns like an acid attack. The generators went back on sale at Lowes and Home Depot, and so more people are running them, constantly. The people I tend to like have small generators. The real idiots get giant generators and run them constantly so they can be safe in the blue flicker bath of the television. In addition, people have begun to burn leaves because we all know the city isn’t going to pick them up. We have not seen any City presence at all to date. Rotting vegetation and the stench of trash cans filled with the contents of de-electrified fridges finishes the problem; someone down the street stacked his fridge and freezer at the curb, as they were too far gone to salvage, apparently. My eyes run and the air smells like smoke. It reminds me of Mexico City: a constant haze, lots of small engines, no regulation and everyone trying to get away with something to the detriment of all of us.

I got up at 4 am and explored. The moon is a pure hole punched through the sky to the light of other worlds, surrounded by a miasma of clouds and brachitic sigils of the upper branches of trees. I wonder what everyone I know will die of. Having a lit window is the new status symbol. We’re all desperate for power, so we can continue our lives. We need to be effective to feel justified in surviving, and now we’re in the purgatory of having no idea when civilization will return. People are getting testier. In the meantime, I am learning how less is more: with almost all the houses dark, moonlight is much brighter and I can navigate at night without a flashlight. It feels like eternity at the nape of my neck because I am both vulnerable and empowered in being silent, invisible, and yet blind.

The phrase “I’m over it” takes on a new meaning. Where on September 16 it signaled our frustration, now it indicates our submission and determination to see this through. We are adapting. This has been a good experience, to lose control utterly of one’s environment, and so to resent the scales of self::world, to have more self and less interruption/distraction/habit. I am seeing how there could be a third city in addition to the two whose tale I have partially told, and this third city is based on cooperation centered in a control-less self. If we stop trying to find promises that seem right, and start realizing how little control we have, cooperation becomes more important than having the bigger cash flow or niftier gadget than the guy next door. This third city might only exist in my heart for now, but as a smart man said, “You must become the change you seek in the world,” so it’s a start.

There was a rumor the convenience store had ice cream, so we went, because I love ice cream. Having a goal felt good. We got there and the gasoline line was short, so we hopped on, and filled the car. A sense of power. There was no ice cream, but I didn’t care. The having of the goal is more important than its realization. Just knowing there’s a direction, there’s something for which you stand, and you won’t back down, come hurricane or hostile demons or some television telling you that you’re crap compared to some celebrity or another, and you should buy something to fill that hole in yourself, to have a sense of control. Give up now. Give in to the void. I have embraced the void during this storm and I am thankful to Ike for that. I feel I am a more loving person as a result.

September 19:

I am at the library. I just took pictures of the downed power lines; we’re not getting power any time soon. Our best hope is a nearby relative, and we’re going to shoot for it. It has, when all panic subsides, very little risk. Still it feels risky, since we have adapted to this powerless world for now.

They’re showing the Muppet Show on the television in the library on constant rotation, and there are about forty people here, as much for socialization and air conditioning as the internet access. I’ve come down with a cold thanks to the burning air of our third world city. It’s like a beach town. We’re all wearing sandals, shorts and old tshirts, unshaved and we don’t expect anything to work. It’s as if everyone is out to lunch.

I am not pleased with the city of Houston or our power company. We see them in the day, but not at night. Some fat guy with his mouth hanging open, talking on his cell phone the whole time, drove his truck through our neighborhood and did an assessment. It seemed OK until we realized that he had put us down on the triage list, and we’re going to be told nothing, but it’s probably another five days before we have power. We see crews during the day, but not at night, and they seem to be working on the principle that this is regular hours, not an emergency. Some of the crews are quite excellent, but the majority seem to be ineffective, either wasting time with ineffective activity or ending the day early by citing some obscure union rule and heading home. There is not the sense that we are all in this together — instead, it’s business as usual, with many emergency tasks being treated as just a job, most people in no hurry to get back to work, and so on.

School is postponed until next Thursday. As you can see from the enclosed pictures, we have power lines that are not just down but smashed, and we’re awash in vegetation. We investigated yesterday and it made our decision clear: we need to bail this area for some place with power. The kids are getting surly after a week of bad sleep in the heat. Adults don’t know what to do with themselves. The alcohol party has started back up at the apartments, and one of our neighbors is organizing a prayer circle for kids in Indonesia, like they care if we pray for them. There is a kind of sublimated, passive, nearly invisible panic that pervades everything.

Tonight it will be one week without power, and so we head into the wilds to fare as we can. This week taught me that really we are powerless except for what we do with our hands and hearts. My family and I are safe, and not all of the big pretty trees are dead, so tomorrow cannot be so bad. Turn off your television. The news isn’t as bad or as empty as they say. It may be they’re trying to control you.

September 20:

Still sick. Headache, nose and eyes a bloat of infection, temperature high and a ratling cough. I hear cremations are still suspended, so I can’t die for another few days at least.

We drove through a dark city last night on a freeway where most people drove slowly, ears glued to phones, seemingly oblivious of what lane they were in. Also, about half the stoplights are out, and people don’t know whether to treat them like four-way stops, or to use the official protocol for dead stop lights which is I believe to cycle to the right. While people cower in confusion, the greedy zoom on ahead and lines double. I’ve seen it happen many times. The many pay for the sins of the few, and just because we do not recognize a sin because it is a sin of omission does not mean that it is not deadly.

Right now, we’re staying with family in a distant part of town. Most of the people here don’t have power, but there are fewer generators. People are spending their evenings at Barnes and Noble, Randalls or the movie theater, and then going home to take a cold shower and sleep through as much of the night as they can. You can see exhaustion in the daily stupefactive sonambulism that passes for interpersonal interaction. People mistake what others have said, pay with the wrong change, drive on the wrong side of the road, and make bizarre decisions. They are past mental clarity on the downward slope of sleep deprivation.

There’s a motion you see people do called “the drift.” It’s exclusively for hurricane survivors. First, move very slowly. Second, notice anything that comes your way, and stop moving to do it. Finally, have no real objective. Amble. Wander. Peripateticize. Drift. If you wonder why it took twenty minutes to check out your groceries, or get gasoline, or even just get through the last intersection on your way home, it’s people in the midst of the drift. People are getting on each other’s nerves, and since there’s no common cause among us except getting back to work, we don’t have as much of that fellowship feeling except by neighborhood. It’s international politics on a small scale.

Without this fellowship, there’s a laziness about the rescue efforts. It seems like the big houses get electrical service last, which is weird because you’d think that these big houses contain all of our bosses and we need to get back to work. There’s a smoky waft of a grudge. The two cities aren’t ever going to see eye-to-eye, so we self-defeat. Houston is right now a self-defeated city. The damage is not actually extensive: outside of roadside billboards, it is limited to vegetation and the power lines it took out, which could probably be fixed relatively quickly if we had some focus on it. A friend suggested the Army Corps of Engineers, and I can’t think why we wouldn’t do this, but our mayor is content to flub his fat lips on the television and buy votes with his brave, bold statements.

It’s odd because the tale of two cities shows us two groups who are committed to the same outcome, even if not by the same action. After all, the imprint of an action in its situation and context outlasts the action itself, so an inversion is the same result. “Linear and inverse vectors merge in zero…Critical mass is at zero… - Why, you could say it’s spiritual.” The division between our two cities here in Houston has come to bite us on the posterior region. As a way of life, it failed us for this storm, and we should rethink it because a storm is like any other kind of stress or disaster, and those don’t occur just every 25 years.

Plenty of people are getting sick now, too. The big problem of no A/C in this climate, unlike in Southern California or the Midwest, is that Houston has 98% relative humidity, so after a few days everything in the house is perma-soaked. Even more, your body gets used to this condition, so the first time you walk into a store — and they’re all trying to lure you in with the free ice and air conditioning — they freeze you, subject you to the germs of millions of others, and then send you home with lots of stuff to carry so you sweat and alter your body temperature even more. So probably every third person is sick.

In this frigid climate, at a local library, I’m posting this and answering your emails (because you are indeed that important to me, although I can’t promise I will get to each one today). Cell phone access is sporadic; the lines are overwhelmed, the towers leaning and let’s face it, Sprint wasn’t that competent in the first place which is why they’re veering toward bankruptcy anyway. I apologize for how long and off-topic these musings got, but if you wanted the full story, I hope I came close to delivering. Maybe Edward R. Murrow is somewhere in a symbolic heaven, smiling on all those who told it as it was, even if it pissed off someone with big pockets or lots of friends.

September 21:

Giant, fast, carnivorous mosquitoes cover the walls of our houses and workplaces. Why? Giant piles of dead vegetation retain moisture and enable them to breed, which they can do in a puddle the size of a quarter. When the female mosquito bites, she retreats nearby, squeezes the extra moisture from the blood (leaving behind pinkish micro-droplets) and then digests and lays her eggs in water. Those hatch into swimming worms with eyes which eventually become airborne. The whole thing takes only a few days. This is why the best weapon against mosquitoes is the clearing of detritus. The soil dries up, and they reproduce at lower numbers. The exact opposite is happening now.

From the big piles in front of every house, these mosquitoes surge forth in big clouds. They line up outside doors. Unlike normal mosquitoes, which get offended and retreat if you swat at them, these welcome the challenge. They’re like, “Oh, there you are, let me rape you of your blood,” and charge right at you — again and again. The only escape is for one of you to submit. I won’t bother describing the welts they leave in detail, but they fade quicker than most mosquito bites, which suggests these guys have fewer random bacteria living in them, which to me suggests they’re being churned out factory-style by the post-hurricane environment.

Profiteers are coming by to remove the junk. One guy asked for almost $700 and seemed offended when I laughed at him. This isn’t how it was during Alicia. There were profiteers, but they were the five percent, not the seventy-five percent as they seem to be now. These guys are hellbent at making a killing doing this. Is everyone just trying to milk the middle class for all they’re worth, before they vanish into history in a long chain of wars, government subsidies, bureaucracies and bank failures? Hi, I have a truck, and I see you have a house, so you must be rich. I would like several hundred dollars per hour to remove these chopped up trees and leaves. (I also have a Shamwow(tm), Viagra and a 9/11 commemorative $20 bill for ya.)

People have given up on any sense of order at the lights which are out. They’re treating them like chaotic four-way stops, which means everyone is always confused, because in order for that to work, you need to be able to observe how five lanes in each of three directions (two each one, one left turn) is rolling toward the intersection. The result of this chaos is a type of high-stakes, civilized game of chicken that reminds me of nuclear war. I roll toward the intersection… do you, there, in the Ford F250 that weighs twice what my car does sopping wet, checkmate me by punching your own accelerator? You do… do I in turn challenge hegemony with the detente of threatening to tangle up your engine fan as my small Japanese car passes through your radiator grille? Maybe you aren’t so confident… or I’m not. Help.

Some local businesses have been generous. One real estate firm is offering free internet and coffee, 8-5 daily. That’s nice. A local restaurant is offering free coffee. Domino’s Pizza is giving baked vegetable fat and soy meat on a piece of cardboard to relief workers. It’s all part of the commerce cycle. I now know why that Jesus guy was so adamant that when you give, the right hand shouldn’t know if it’s the left giving… every free offer has a logo attached. They fit in nicely with the signs advertising cheap dump fees ($6.00/square yard), debris hauling, tree trimming, lawn cutting and so on.

Apparently some fellow here shot a wild boar roaming about after the storm itself. They live in the low brush and mesquite that hugs the earth like some kind of supercharged moss. From an airplane it probably looks like moss, and we probably look like crickets. Hot, sweaty, irritated crickets. At least one of those crickets is sniffling. Maybe a good night’s sleep will knock out the cold.

September 22:

Rockin’. The cold has moved on. In its place: hives. Apparently, something I was exposed to that created the “cold” was some kind of super-allergen. Others have noted their own symptoms, usually dryness of the throat, and there are the usual rumors that it’s all the evil chemical stuff that Katrina hauled out to sea, stirred up and mixed for our convenience, and now blasted back in on winds that at 98% humidity, retain all ugly chemicals. You can see smoke hanging in sheets over the streets, trapped in said humidity and stillness of air, as generators below exude it in oily, drab, acrid coils.

Today is the second-to-last day before “officially” most people are supposed to have power. Their first announcement was that because this hurricane was Katrina-style bad, it might be 2-4 weeks. Most people wanted to vomit at that thought, but the weather was pleasant, so we all shrugged it off as best we could. Next announcement was that last Monday was D-Day for most. The one useful item in today’s Houston Chronicle was that only 33% of our city is now without electricity. Tell that to last night, which was like driving through a nuclear winter, albeit a hot one — no lights, no action, no desire to move in the baking steamy night.

Amazingly, as of last night, we have power, as does our entire street. The breaks which served us badly (see pictures) also cut off half of our part of town from having juice, so they went in and cut out all the vegetation, then fixed the poles and lines, and finally, reconnected individual blocks. It took another four hours and two phone calls to get cable television and internet back, but we’re now 100% returned to normalcy. Of course, we’ve got our work cut out for us in the house. A week of high temperatures, high humidity and bad air has left a house with a toxic miasma clinging to its walls. I could hug our air conditioner, but it’s just as nice to be able to read after dark. Read…after…dark. I feel again like I’ve conquered my environment, but like the first time your favorite rock star (at age 16) says something you recognize as stupid, this faith has been de-virginized. It is no longer a hermetic seal. Now, it is tape, holding together a potentially infinite mass of punctures. Please call and sing lullabyes.

Getting beyond that silliness and cowardice, I am less afraid of society without oil, energy, electricity, computers, etc. now. Alternate methods exist, and while they’re more of a pain in the ass, they offer a life that is less dependent upon the social graces and manipulations of others, which has its advantages. Your brain begins to speak plain and obvious truths that others are unwilling to face, and it makes them crumble in your eyes like the fallen rock stars of acid-stomached teenage years. You realize that most of the time most of the people can be fooled, and are in almost all circumstances except those where an exceptional individual or circumstance motivates them. Life is not a question of what fits you best, but of how you overcome looking for a fit and drive yourself to become the next Beethoven, or Pynchon, or Rimbaud, or Spinoza. It’s concentration we want, not the right mixture of stuff we own or know.

This feeds into the question of what the Ike postmortem will be. Who should be blamed, if anyone? I still maintain that Ike was not a big storm, but it touched off a big disaster in that we were not prepared for the aftermath, nor were we good at maintaining our city. The line crews they send through to keep the trees off of the telephone lines tend to just cut away whatever limbs reach within ten feet of the lines, leaving unbalanced trees that, as we saw, fell whichever way the wind blew and often took out lines. We can blame the way this city tenuously links wide-flung neighborhoods with cheap but unreliable aerial lines, when buried lines would work much better. We could even blame the design of this city, which encourages a lot of driving and so a lot of ground to cover in an emergency. Although we were unprepared for this crisis, I think all of these problems have a common origin, which is that our city grew too rapidly without paying attention to being a community first and foremost.

I suppose this blog entry can come to a gentle death now, since for me, this hurricane deprivation extravaganza is winding down. There are sheets, walls, floors, doors and tools to wash. I need to contact a bunch of people and thank them. I need to call back everyone who called and asked my voice mail if I was dead yet. I would like to find the guy who shot the boar and see if he has any sausages left. The list goes on. But speaking of lists, I want to summarize again what I have learned from Hurricane Ike and his/its inopportune rampage in Houston, Texas:

1. An event and its aftermath (effects) are inextricable. Don’t plan for one without the other.
2. You don’t need modern society. Its technology just makes life less painful and more efficient.
3. Cooperation really is better than having a riot squad to attack dissenters.
4. Every great city, and every great nation, has its day. After that point, expect delays in getting power back.
5. Hurricanes clear the dead wood so you can make something greater in your heart or mind.

Parts of this entry were influenced by D.T. Suzuki’s excellent introduction to Zen Buddhism, which came complete with the liner notes of some graduate student who so completely grokked Zen that he switched his degree to accounting and is now probably fatly, happily, innocently retired somewhere.

September 24:

Texas is home to many fascinating, wonderful, awesome, terrifying bugs. One such bug is the cicada killer. These giant wasps fly around until they find a cicada resting on a tree branch or bursting out of its carapace on the ground. Then, they sting it, paralyzing it and laying their eggs in it. They haul it off to an underground burrow, and when the eggs hatch, the offspring feast on the zombie cicada. Grim? It’s a lot like the relationship between television advertising and your offspring, but that’s a story for another time. Click the image for a bigger version.

These bugs are big enough to shoot, but they rarely bother you. Unlike some other stinging bugs, with these you want to move back quickly if they approach, because your only danger is being mistaken for an object on which there might be cicadas (obviously, don’t pick up a cicada killer to show to your friends). They are single-minded in their purpose, which in the odd paradoxical methods of nature, is love: they love their future children, and to feed them, they’re going to slaughter zombie cicadas. It’s also love for cicadas, and not just as a food source. The cicadas around here seem to be getting smarter about camouflage and staying alert with these big wasps buzzing around, talon-like stingers at the ready.