Welcome to day 3 of Isaac aftermath. 80% of the city is
still without power, I’m short on rent, my living room’s ceiling fell in,
assorted other minor inconveniences. Civilization broke down pretty fast. And
by pretty fast I mean not at all, people here are just doing what they do,
yanno.
It’s pretty ridiculous, though. The power company out here,
Entergy (New Orleans’ only Fortune 500 company), has had a response to outages
best described as “lackadaisical.” Most recent update for today, August 31, is
that power will be restored with emphasis on areas where lines are lightly
damaged moving towards the more heavily damaged folks, with an estimated date
of having 90% of outages fixed by September 6. That’s next Thursday. About a
week. Thankfully most of Chalmette and New Orleans East and the French Quarter
and the CBD all have power, so we’re not all totally fucked or whatever. I am
in fact writing this from the inside of Flanagans, which has power and internet
and plugs and has thus been pretty much packed since the storm eased up.
All told, it’s really not a huge dealio. People here are going to be more or less okay. It’s creepy as all hell driving around in the darker neighborhoods that don’t even have sporadic lights, but life continues more or less unabated. Buncha queers are in town ready to party for Decadence, most everything in the quarter is operating as more or less normal, though with less supplies. It looks like the play is getting cut short, since the whole area by the venue has been without power since the storm. The director is doing the whole “show must go on bit and holding out hope they’ll be able to get lights on today before 8 or whenever we’d be running. If it does work out, I might end up running up and acting.
Because writing is a time-lapse process and I took a break to check the internet and drink a reasonable amount of alcohol, I know now there will not be a show. Thank the lord, I can cut my hair now. One theme that runs through this storm is meeting people I haven’t seen in a while cause they’re hanging out outside or something. I’m really very proud of my social circle. I don’t associate with many people that fled the city. I made friends with sterner stuff. And everyone’s been pretty good about doing the whole “coming together” stuff, though enough people are also doing a fair bit of the “coming apart” stuff also. I went out with Jo cab driving last night, which was an interesting experience in dealing with the lack of streetlights and dispatch being on generator. The passengers were appropriate to situation, one being an on call nurse headed up to ochsner, another a woman headed home from Ochsner, a third a drunk guy trying to get home from the burbs to uptown.
Like I said, I’ve run into a small crowd of people I know here so far. The people I’ve played magic with, school friends, some people I know from steampunk stuff or Noiseco. The haunted tours that run usually are running tonight, of course. Them being closed for almost a week is a good reason to start that stuff back up again, gotta make some kind of money. It’s been great so far.
Yeah, it’s pretty crazy that a storm can come along and
basically throw everyone out of whack for about a week or so. And we just live
with it. It’s no big. It’s harder for the impoverished of course (it always is)
but this has still yet to be outside of the normal experience of a New
Orleanian. I cannot tell you how much I love this place.
