the phones are down

[katrina's a bitch, fellows]

I read something today that very nearly made me cry, and is very-nearly causing me to cry as I think about it.

Colby’s alive. I’m certain of it- I know she has got to be because she lives in Mississippi. It doesn’t matter that she hasn’t contacted me. She can’t possibly live in Biloxi. So while I’m worried, I’m letting the statistics control me.

The phones are down.

Read this: http://claytoncubitt.com/blogs/usedfuture/2005/09/sisters-and-me-and-fats-domino.html#comments

To understand the following post, and why I’m lamenting.

The phones are down.

I have previously stated the ill feeling that makes ulcers a likely prospect even at this age. That deep-set, uncontrollable flower of anxiety, quite similar in nature to the three-foot-round ‘flowers’ in jungles that smell like rotting flesh. It overwhelms you, or worse, it does not.

It stays there.

Bothersome, cold, influencing everything you think about or do. Makes you tremble when you watch the news and see a corpse wrapped in cloth, makes your heart beat an increasing tempo, ever so slowly. So, slowly. It is a strange feeling, that fear. A sense of inevitability accompanies it, perhaps, the bass in a wicked orchestra.

It doesn’t matter what it is. It varies, and it is a fear I have not quite experienced so vividly. The last time I remember feeling this sense of… wrongness, was when I was seven. I’ll explain that later- but not even that compares, because it was a nightmare I had, one that still bothers me though.

The phones are down for Colby. I want to believe this. I want to believe that Linda Cubitt, Clayton’s mom (in the post I linked earlier) is having phone trouble as well. It’s a good, calming thought. And it’s also very likely- the phones are down everywhere in the areas affected by Katrina.

But for some, the phonelines are no longer down.

For some people, that thought is gone. There are those that have visited mortuaries and lifted the sheet-

Seen the dead eyes of one they knew, someone they quite possibly loved- never to open.

Don’t believe the people that say “It looked like they were sleeping!”, because I have been to a wake and a dead person does not look asleep. My great-grandmother died on September 11th of last year. She was a wonderful woman but I never knew her- I knew her, per say, but Alzheimer’s had taken it’s toll.

I don’t suppose I was really affected by the coffin. I was thirteen, man, on top of it all. I was mildly sad- but for my grandfather, really, because his mom, his Lizard, meant so much to him. No comments on her nickname, please- he’d call her Liz and Lizzie. I don’t know why, her name was… Damn, I know it but it’s evading me. I always called her Gramma Medd or Gramma Liz. She’s not named Liz, that I remember though.

And she was dead. I remember it now and it affects me more now, because she was not peacefully asleep. She was dead.

Her wrists bloomed with maroon bruises, because the dead are fragile. Her hand- her flesh- was chilling.

I touched her hand… The child next to me kept poking at her and I nearly beat the girl, I swear. If I had been this way then I would have beat the girl. Because life is suddenly thrown into a contrast.

I understood death before this, but no one ever fully understands it. And every once in a while, life bitchslaps us and gives us an epiphany, a greater understanding. I, for one, would like to remain a blind grub.

There are now thousands dead, and thousands more who mourn them. Others do not know, and that ignorance is not bliss. That ignorance is hell.

I know this didn’t make sense. It doesn’t need to. It makes sense to me.

The phones are down, readers, and they won’t be back up for quite a while yet. But the floodwaters will recede- and every time I see a worker on a telephone line, I’m going to praise the Lord for that person.

Colby’s alive. She lives! in Mississippi, and Mississippi wasn’t hit quite as hard as New Orleans. Our country is helping- not as fast as some would like. India is helping. Colby is alive… But others aren’t. Donate, maybe save a life. Offer your support- even if it’s not monetary. Words do a lot.

And off the proverbial soap box climbs Tenn, in a rare state of intellectual-ness.

Yeah, that last word killed it.