When your home becomes a bucket of dirty water

New Orleans, seedy, dark, witchy town. A town, the subject of crazy stories of voodoo, full of bourbon bars and Cajun history, is full of water.

There are 20,000 people in the SuperDome. No air conditioning, no toilets, no comfy quilts, no pets, no cold water, or good books. Just people and heat and smells. Floodwaters block the only way out.

The whole "evacuate the city" plan seemed a bit unrealistic to me. How do you evacuate a city of 1 million people? How do you evacuate people attached to oxygen, who don't have cars, who have multiple children, no credit card, pets they love, etc. etc. How do they go? Where do they go if everyone they know is right there and their funds are limited and the highways are crowded and the buses and planes aren't running.

As I was checking out of my hotel in Houston last weekend, the woman behind me was worried about getting a room. She'd just arrived from New Orleans. She started telling me how the highways were so backed up and how scared she was and she broke down and started crying and said, "There's so many poor people there, where will they go? How will they get out?"

I can't get those people out of my mind. I can't get all the pets out of my mind either. I can't stop thinking about all the animals in the New Orleans zoo. I can't stop thinking about how evacuation shouldn't be an option, we should keep each other safe. We should all be there to help people who don't have any where to go or know how to get there.

Red Cross shelters don't allow pets. I understand all the reasons. However, for every problem, there is a solution, we just don't seem to get beyond "it would be hard".
Would I leave my dogs behind in a disaster? Of course I wouldn't, I would take them with me.
In a disaster, I would take my family, the dogs and cats, and as many neighbors as I could gather as far as we could get to safety. Being a white, educated and credit card holding citizen, has its perks. It just shouldn't matter.

Minutiae in miniature

I think the reason it might be fun to be Pope is that you wouldn't have to deal with the minutiae of life. Things like picking up the mail, filling up your car with gas, feeding pets, grocery shopping, dealing with people being weird, technical malfunctions, plumbing, electricity, all the systems that keep the world going every day.

The minutiae are multiplying around me. Another day, another 10 things that need my attention. Now. It's time to bring out the minutiae machete. The best way to get past the little beasts is to simply ignore their existence and watch the world continue on its merry way without giving a rats ass. That's my favorite way.

Until I do that, which isn't without cost, the most common for me being huge amounts of guilt and extraordinary concerns about 'dropping balls' I will feel like I'm hovering around something, prepared and ready and too preoccupied. However, the costs in getting caught up them are so much greater. Here's a few:
-Deciding that it really is more important to do your dishes than write down that line you thought of for your poem/story/script.
-Getting rid of something you love to make room for something you think you might need some day because it's practical. (I bought a piano from a woman whose husband wanted to by a pool table...the piano had been in her family for 5 generations, but she decided pool was more important...oh and they had a 4 car garage.)
-Not being present when people you love and are related to are trying to talk to you.
-Self absorption - easily one of the most terrible traits in humans.
-Not doing what you were born to do because you're concerned about all the things you're supposed to do.


Tonight I went to Screen Door, Barney, my sweet little short doc bout the toilet seat artist played, along with some other truly wonderful short films. My favorite was "Fake Stacy". It's about a girl who played two sisters in a sitcom, one, Sami, was perky and happy and the other, Stacy, was the "wise, doesn't really give a shit about perky, smart one". Sami was credited with the actress's name, Stacy was given a made-up name to hide the fact that she was played by the same actress. A Fake Stacy movement started and everyone became enamored with who played her and why the character wasn't "real". The actress has an existential crisis and somewhere in 15 minutes, a fine little film emerges.

Since, whether we admit it or not, we're all complex human creations, wearing one of a collection of personalities depending on the situation, we all have "Fake Stacy"s. Some we wear by choice, others people put on us according to our social role. It's a bit of a problem, isn't it? What if we could all just see each other a little more clearly, for even 5 minutes?

a Cowboy love story...

Okay, so here's how the story begins...Cowboy is a homeless man, tall, rail thin, a former rodeo guy. His wife and his toddler son died in a car accident when he was in his 20's. It broke his heart into many pieces, and I would guess that it's been broken ever since. Cowboy is almost 70 now and he still cries when he tells the story. Wouldn't you?

Cowboy came into the shelter where I was volunteering back in early spring. He was wearing black boots, black jeans, a black shirt with pearl snaps, a black vest, a black leather jacket and a black hat and he carried, you guessed it, a black bag. He was tired, weathered, at the end of his trick rope.

We moved into the little chapel, no one ever goes in the chapel much, it's quiet and still there and it's small, and the chairs are comfy, it's a good place to talk. Cowboy told me he'd been walking all day, he was homeless, he gets a check, his on disability, he's old, after all. Still, that little check won't even pay for a cheap motel room and even if it did, a cheap motel room is about the loneliest, saddest, dirtiest place in the world. It's a room that carries every sad story it ever saw forever, even thought the floor is swept and the sheets are changed sometimes, the stories stick to the walls like some kind of insect trail.

I called a place I'd heard about, I didn't think they could help, most of the time the places I call are full, or they don't accept certain kinds of people, like cowboys, or they only accept people on Wednesdays at 3 in the morning, or on Fridays at 3 in the afternoon.

You see, the homeless resources are a tricky maze, you think you're close to a solution, an end is in site and you learn that you have to go to the beginning and start over.

Anyway, this time, they had a space, he fit the profile, he was old enough, damaged enough and it was his lucky day. I drove him to his new apartment after we closed the shelter for the day. He couldn't believe his luck, a brick apartment with a little park and hot water and cooking stuff and his own room.

Cowboy was happy that day. Now, it's been six months and Cowboy, like all of us, wants more. He's looking for love again. I suggested he go to Senior dances, he says he has two left feet. Then, I said, "one word, Cowboy,BINGO!" He hated that idea. So, I need help with this one. Where can an up and coming old man find a gal who's got a little cowgirl in her, a girl who likes Nascar and good coffee and tall men?
I'm open to suggestions.

radio head

I was on the radio for 10 seconds today.
It was weird to hear my voice on the radio...I sounded so serious, I should have perky.


I was a DJ in college for a morning Jazz show. That was fun...but even funner...on holidays, I filled in for the Onda Chicano show. I was in my second year of Spanish, and as anyone knows who speaks Spanish, textbook Spanish is nothing like spoken Spanish. I did my best, I hobbled it all together for $3.35/hour.
On at least one of the shifts, people would bring me their new record to play. Usually the records were yellow or turquoise. There were always lots of requests and dedications. Unlike the Jazz listeners, who called in mostly just to tell me I'd mispronounced someone's name, Onda Chicano show fans called in all the time, just to talk.

days like white elephants...

remember those days when things were slow and easy?
rare...
haven't had one in ages and it seems to upset a lot of people that I'm busy and preoccupied so much of the time.
I don't like rushing...I do like activity, action, movement, adventure.

Today I had some time to stare into the distance and I watched my little Dogumentary for the first time in ages. I was never truly happy with it. It was pushed out the door before it's time. So, I sat and I worked all day, doing what I'm trained to do: Developmental Editing, Structure, Organization...all of that.

I've got people coming to see it on Saturday and it plays in Houston on Sunday and maybe in Fort Worth, too. It just need that extra little polish, the milestones.
It feels much better...

big days...and yes

We got a big yes today.
jumping was awarded $5,000 for post production from the Texas Film Maker's production fund.
Congrats also to friends and filmmakers Nevie Owens, our wonderful editor, David Lowery, our friend in Dallas and Heather Courtney, the brave documentarian.

I feel better. Excercised today, started to get my groove on again.

Talked to my friend Maggie who says, "The Mayan calendar says the world will end in 2012, so what? We still go ahead, we still enjoy, we still work toward the future, the prophecies are so often wrong."

We've got so much to look forward to with jumping.

I'm also looking forward to finding my homeless friends again and letting them tell their stories. Today, at the gym, Tracy and I saw a woman, outside, sitting in the heat. As we talked, an EMS truck drove up, two men got out, walked slowly toward us, obviously no one was in serious danger...They asked if we'd called 911...nope, not us.
Then we saw the same woman come out of the gym. She'd called them. She'd just left the Austin State Hospital, they'd told her not to come back and now she's dehydrated, etc. The EMS guys had seen this before, asked her, "St. David's or Brackenridge?" She replied, "St. David's" and off they went to the E.R.

I know the State Hospital is underfunded, sadly so. I know the woman was probably sent away for a good reason. I know that she's probably got some mental issues...and a bed in the hospital is better than no bed...still, can't we do better?


Evil and despondency will have to collapse of their own weight.

it's august?

school starts tomorrow, the summer has gone.
My to do list keeps growing. It's good news, it's just new things to add to a growing list.
If I could just get one day where there weren't things that had to be done, I would feel better about all of it...I'm not at the day dreamy place, yet. I'm kind of drained of energy and stressed and mopey. I don't really know who I am anymore either.
We wrapped production, which is great.
We had our wrap party, also great.


Now the next stage begins, post production, usually a fun time. It's stressful, if you look at my little picture to the right, and add some grey hairs, a troubled expression and maybe a bald spot, or two, you'll get a more accurate image of me.
I'm dumping DAT tapes, I'm filling out expenses and budgets. I'm talking to people about bills. We have to have a rough cut by 8/31, so Nevie, Kat and I are working double duty. It would be fine, if there had been just one day of a break in there...

I also need to run Rescue Me one more time before I show it to the subjects on Sat. It's got a showing in Houston next weekend and then there's the homeless project. I need to write...f**K I need to just sit and stare into the distance and work on a Stacy project. (Not that JOB isn't a Stacy project, in case KAT is reading this.)
What I need is a producer...a clone of myself. I can get the clone to do all this paperwork and dump all the DAT tapes (that Sound couldn't get to..ya know) and I can hang with my daughter, work on my scripts, write a book or two and shoot video of the homeless.

I'm in serious need of fun.