This is gigantic, just gigantic

After 9/11, I felt like I could do something useful from here. I shut down the main part of my website, which at the time was getting 3500 to 4000 hits a day, and replaced it with tenant lists and maps of the Towers so that people could have some idea of where someone they knew might have been. A small thing, but people said it helped them.

New Orleans and the entire area trashed by Katrina is something completely different.

This is what it'll be like when the end of the world comes: everything human breaks down at once. You can't find food, and if you do find it, you can't cook it because there's no water. There's no water because there's no power. There's no power because the crews can't get in because all the roads are trashed. The roads will take months to fix.

And in those months, nobody can get any food, and even if you can get it...

The cops can't and won't stop the looters. They can't call for backup because their radios are either out of batteries or their communications towers are trashed. Nobody can get more batteries or charge the ones they have. The cops are running out of gas. So, basically, when the lootable stuff runs out, the looting will stop.

I was talking to a friend last night, and we agreed that in These End Times, it makes some sense to go and take what food there is, since the stores can't ring any purchases up without electricity and without refrigeration any perishables will go bad. However, I have a really hard time seeing a justification for these these assholes you see on CNN, taking Nikes and DVD players.

Dudes, the Nikes will just get fucked up when you wade through the water. There's nowhere to plug in the DVD player and won't be for months. All you have now is worthless extra crap to haul around with you. If you can't eat it or drink it (booze not included), don't steal it, OK?

Even having written that, I realize it's meaningless: no one to whom looting is a real issue can see it. They're too busy trying to figure out what to do next.

For me, frustration comes from seeing what needs to be done and being able to do nothing about it. Frustration and depression tend to travel in close company in my head, so it should be no surprise I can feel the antidepressants kicking in hard, the way your anti-lock brakes kick in when you have to stop harder than you thought. You still stop, you just realize that you actually needed ABS after all. So for me, for all those days where someone else might have said, "shit, I feel great today, I'm not taking my pill," well, today and the days to come will be my justification for taking that little coral-pink capsule every day. Most days, I don't "need" it, but on the days I do, I really, really do.

We don't know it yet, but this event -- this storm -- is going to change the way we live in America for decades, in the same way 9/11 did. Only bigger.

Gas prices will go up. Heating oil will go up. The economy will slow, and them go into recession. Housing prices will flatten out and then decline. Telecommuting might at long last be a realistic option for me, rather than burning six gallons of gas a day. The 2006 election will probably bring in a new crop of politicians who will try to undo the mess the Bush administration has made of environmental and energy policy.

And something else and New Orleans and Mississippi: in some situations, there's a shortage of available help from the National Guard. Why? Three guesses, and all of them pretty much boil down to, "because they're dicking around over in Iraq and aren't available to help at home." Well, that and the fact that NG enlistment has been problematic for most of the last two years because of Bush's abuse of Guardsmen by sending them on overextended duty "over there" instead of funding the regular Army.

Things I hope will happen, but probably won't: voters will realize that the only people Bush has cared about since he was elected was his oil-patch buddies and the Saudis, none of whom can really help in a positive way with Katrinaland, but all of whom are, or will be, profiting massively (gas in Frederick went from $2.75 to $3.17 in one day yesterday) and will vote all of his cronies and sycophants out, everywhere. I also hope people might actually realize that this "global warming" shit is for real and it's at the root of why the weather has been so screwed up: drought after drought in the Midwest, storm after storm in the East. See also, "Bush refuses to sign Kyoto Protocol."

Even without those substantive changes, Katrina did, and will do, a hell of a lot more than blow down some casinos and flood the French Quarter. It's going to blow down a lot of people's faith and trust in the humanity of American society and flood our insecurities.

And people wonder why I won't live in cities. Watch, and learn.