Coquetting Tarradiddles

What It’s Really Like To Survive A Historic Hurricane, For People Who Think They Know But Don’t

This post is dedicated to those who made it through Hurricane Laura everyone now because climate change is making a habit of turning every storm into a historic storm, but it’s meant for everyone who has never been through one. If you live in the affected area, send it to your friends and relatives who don’t live here and might mean well, but whose earnest advice and make-believe empathy are anything but helpful.

I wish people who don’t live in a hurricane zone could remotely understand what it’s like to go through a historic storm. Every hurricane is terrible in its own way, but the really bad ones – the historic ones – are on a whole other level.

Everyone affected by this storm – which is everyone who lives anywhere in Southwest Louisiana (and parts of Southeast Texas) – has gone so far past exhaustion at this point, there’s really no word severe enough to convey just how over it all of us are. We can’t do it anymore. We’re past the breaking point. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter.

Hurricane survivors don’t get to burn out and take a break because there are no breaks. There is no rest, no brief respite from the million things that have to be done, no distraction from the devastation all around us. If you’re lucky and your home is livable with power and probably/maybe clean water, you have to worry about when you can get to the store during their limited hours, and what might be available so you can scrape together some kind of dinner every night – assuming you have cash to pay with because no internet means no digital transactions (no debit cards, no credit cards, no checks). You might have power but your neighbors don’t, so the generators are still running 24/7. Sleep comes hard, if it comes at all.

If you were less lucky, you’re still trying to dig out whatever bits of your life you can still excavate from the rubble of what was once your home before you have to say enough’s and enough and write off anything left as unsalvageable, even when all that’s left are mementos and memories that can never be replaced.

Most people are somewhere between the extremes, with severely damaged but not entirely destroyed homes, which means trying to work while meeting with insurance adjusters, sitting on the phone while calling contractors and listening to hours upon hours of terrible hold music, only to hit one dead end after another, with this claim being denied, or that appraisal being too low, or wait, you still need to find a place to live for the next year or so while you wait your turn in line for a roofer or plumber or electrician.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world has moved on and expects you to behave as if nothing at all has changed. As if you still have a complete home, with walls and a roof and electricity and clean water and internet access so you can finally file your TPS reports with corporate and get Karen in Accounting off your back.

Bill collectors start calling. They’ve sent you several notices they insist you should’ve received despite your house being off its slab and you not having a mailbox. All the promises different companies made of discounts and grace periods during the storm go flying out the window as just so much PR hot air when you can only get as far as some dude named Peter in India who has no idea what you’re talking about and can only help you with setting up a payment plan for a modest penalty fee.

The other day, I paid for a full month of electricity I did not use, a full month of internet I still can’t use, and a month’s insurance to a company that has yet to give me a penny. A post in a local Facebook group for hurricane recovery popped up last night with a guy renting out campers – yes, campers – for $200/day or $5,000/month, and I’ve already seen rental properties renting at twice their pre-Laura rates. These are the kinds of things we’re dealing with and will continue to deal with for months and years to come, all while trying to piece our lives and homes back together as we continue playing along with the rest of our obligations as if everything’s fine.

Then we get to listen to all the people who’ve gone through anything stronger than a thunderstorm tell us they’ve been there and know how we feel. That they know, somewhere where the climate is moderate and they don’t even need air conditioning to survive, what we’re going through. That they actually understand what working and sleeping in 100+ degree heat and 97% humidity every day, never able to escape it, is like. That they have even the slightest concept of mosquito swarms so thick and so bad, they’re literally killing off herds of livestock.

Life goes on everywhere but here, where we just experienced the strongest hurricane to hit the Louisiana coast in 150 years, but everyone around us wants to act like it’s not really that big of a deal while comparing it to this storm or that storm they went through without ever having set foot in a city like post-Laura Lake Charles and seen the unprecedented level of devastation across not only our entire city but the entire region. It’s the same everywhere: barely any structures came through the storm unscathed, with nearly everything taking some level of damage from the moderate to severe and straight on through to catastrophic.

I’ve lived through every named stormed to hit the Gulf Coast since 1975, so I can speak on this with at least some level of authority, and I’ve never seen windstorm damage of this magnitude at this scale. Sure, I’ve seen the same level of localized damage, and I’ve seen widespread lesser damage, but never this much complete destruction over this large an area. That’s the difference. That’s what we’re dealing with that people who’ve been through other storms haven’t. When I say “we” I’m not talking about me, my family, our friends, or our neighbors. I’m talking about an enormous swath of land and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people all hit the same, all at once, with everything being affected across hundreds of miles. No, Karen. You don’t know what it’s like.

The only people who think they’ve gone through a hurricane remotely similar to Laura are people who didn’t go through Laura.

We barely have power back, with much of what’s been done being piecemeal temporary fixes just to keep us going until more permanent repairs can be made. Clean water is still hard to come by, and internet? What’s the internet now in Southwest Louisiana but tin cans tied together on a string we make squeaky-squawky noises through and pretend like we’re doing something. Seriously, there is no internet access here. All most of us have right now are our cell phones or mobile hotspots (if we’re lucky enough to score one before the latest shipments sell out), with the bandwidth of functional cell towers maxed out as everyone tries to get work done or stream movies at resolutions so pixelated and blurry, we’d be better off just reenacting our favorite scenes on the front lawn where our living rooms used to be.

On top of everything else, we’re still in the days of COVID-19. And, despite how you might feel about our country’s (and state’s) response to it – and a lot of people sure do feel all types of ways about it – the fact is, like it or not, we’ve all been under Phase Something-Or-Other since March. The economy is in shambles, we haven’t been able to go out and socialize or do anything normal for months, and here comes the most devastating hurricane I’ve ever personally witnessed. Even if you’ve been through an awful storm, did you do it during a pandemic? No. No, you did not.

Well, unless you’re reading this after Sally and probably Wilfred or Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, and Zeta hit after we run out of names because this year is a legit Greek Tragedy and just can’t seem to stop getting worse.

UPDATE: It got worse.

Anyway, the point is it’s rough. It’s been rough for weeks and it’s going to stay rough for more weeks. And months. Maybe years for some. A lot of businesses won’t rebuild. A lot of locals will move somewhere else or just plant roots in whatever city they evacuated to. Renters are going to have to figure out if staying here is worth it after landlords send rent skyrocketing to profit off insurance companies willing to pay outrageous rates for their policyholders to have places to live while their actual homes are being repaired or rebuilt. Everything is going to get more expensive, wages aren’t going to go up to compensate, and large swaths of the city will be entirely remade by the powers that be, their populations removed and relocated through the power of economic policy.

All that said, the future is not as bleak as it seems right now. Communities are coming together to help each other. Volunteers are jumping in to lend helping hands where they can. There are lots of resources and plenty of information available. Yes, there will be a lot of greedy people exploiting the situation, but good people will always be there, helping each other. Will it be enough to rebuild everything just like it was? Probably not. Can we build something better? Hopefully.

I wish I had more pictures to share with people who haven’t seen the devastation firsthand, but the roads are still difficult to navigate, there’s still debris to dodge (roofing nails and other sharp, tire-puncturing hazards are everywhere), and whenever I get out on the roads, I’m too busy driving and trying not to die at four-way intersections nobody knows how to properly react to when the stoplights are out to take photos. (There’s this nice gallery from a local photographer over on Facebook, though.)

So to everyone who wants to help but doesn’t live here or who has never been through anything like Hurricane Laura – and very few of you have – then maybe instead of trying to identify or one-up us with your personal natural disaster stories, just listen. Listen, maybe nod in agreement here and there, then offer to help if you can. If you can’t, then sometimes just listening is enough.

As for the rest of you who aren’t actually interested in lending a hand and just want to either talk at us or demand we just get on with our lives as if nothing is wrong, we’re doing the best we can with next to nothing and every chip stacked against us.

Give us a break.

Smart Outside Bones

Because I’m a great husband, I drove Brittany to the dentist this afternoon for what was supposed to be two simple wisdom tooth extractions which I, having more than a lot of experience with dental procedures myself, anticipated would take about half an hour, but ended up taking more like an hour and a half because there were complications with one of them and now she’s basically barely alive and miserable. So that’s nice.

After the dentist, I took her over to CVS to get her prescriptions filled, but they were somehow out of one of them, so we had to go to another pharmacy and wait an hour for them to count out a couple dozen pills on I what I can only assume was the world’s slowest pharmacological abacus or something, but we eventually got everything she needed and made it home.

Then, while taking her pills with a Boost at the kitchen sink because she hadn’t eaten all day and needed something in her system, the liquid slid into one of the extraction sites and she almost died but managed to stay on this side of the river Styx by way of shouting at the devil or, more accurately, cry-yelling at the ferryman until he decided she was too much trouble and backed off.

She finally made it into the bed where she still hasn’t fallen asleep, but being a good parental figure, I made homemade chicken strips for dinner because hey, Trey and I didn’t experience any invasive dental trauma today and we were hungry, too. This proved nice for us but because I’m an awful husband, turned out to be a new form of torture for the poor woman starving in the bedroom as the scent of it all flowed down the hall and mocked her inability to chew.

This all started at 3:00pm and ended about an hour ago when Trey discovered a YouTube video of, like, fourteen deleted Hamilton songs they started watching together as I left the room to finish up work for the day.

Everything is done now though, and I just split the last chicken strip between our two dogs who have both developed emotional doggie whiplash by rapidly alternating between extreme concern for my wife’s well-being and the overwhelming urge to eat all the everything I cooked.

The house is finally calm again. Trey is talking with his friends over Discord in his room and one of the dogs is curled up on his bed while the other is curled up at my feet as I type this up and prepare to go play a video game for the next, oh, twenty eight minutes or so until I hear a slight whimper coming from the back of the house building into a one-woman chorus of ultimate suffering as her painkillers wear off in, oh, I’d say about twenty seven minutes now.

Twenty six.
Twenty five.
Twenty four…

Secret Cabals of Satanic Pedophiles Are on the Rise. Again.

Let me say this right upfront so there’s no confusion going into the rest of this: Pedophiles are real. Kidnappings and abductions are real. Sexual predators are real. However, highly organized satanic pedophile rings? Not real.

Got it? Great. Now, if you’re still with me or just want ammunition to fire back at me about how wrong I am, keep reading and I’ll tell you all about how this thing got flipped, turned upside down. It’ll only take a minute, just sit right there…

Organized child abuse by sinister, secret forces is nothing new. Well, I should say, the idea of it is it nothing new, and it comes around in cycles just like brand new diet crazes that were brand new diet crazes thirty years ago and again thirty years before that. Wait a generation and you have a whole new bunch of people to con.

Back in the late-’80s, the McMartin Preschool Trial was in full swing. If you’re too young to remember that far back, it was the Pizzagate of the ALF era. Basically, they were allegedly abusing and torturing children at their day care facility, which came complete with underground tunnels and rooms. You know, like with Pizzagate. Weird. I guess satanic pedophiles have a thing for digging.

You can go read the Wikipedia article on it if you want, or just Google “McMartin Preschool Trial” and click on whichever conspiracy site floats your boat. There are plenty.

Around the same time, we also had the Franklin Child Prostitution Ring which more or less amounted to the same thing as the McMartin case but added in layers of intrigue with the rich and powerful sneaking kids away from Boy’s Town to be sex slaves in Washington D.C. for the night, then it was back to Nebraska. A documentary was made on that one, which you can easily find on the internet if you’re so inclined.

Both cases had no such satanic pedophile cabals or anything, though. Some unsavory characters in the mix, sure. But a highly organized clandestine sex trafficking ring? Nah, dawg. Didn’t happen.

Now we have Pizzagate and the Wayfair Scandal and whatever other nonsense QAnon is rehashing, especially in light of the #MeToo movement and Jeffrey Epstein. Here’s the thing, though. Abuse happens. It happens a lot. It happens often. And it happens everywhere – except in the dramatic, exciting, cloak-and-dagger ways these stupid conspiracy theories portray it.

I’m not gonna bother trying to debunk any of these conspiracies because smarter people than me already have, but believing in this crap breaks your brain. There’s really no other way to say it. A perfectly ordinary person of reasonable, even advanced, intelligence can find themselves slipping into these conspiratorial patterns of thinking and, before too long, they’ve been dragged deep into a web of sinister organizations out to rule the world.

Which would be fine, I guess. Whatever makes life worth living for you. It’s just that believing in nonsense when it comes to the sexual abuse of children tends to blind people to the very real sexual abuse that happens every single day across the nation.

The only high-level conspiracy going on as it relates to pedophilia is in the Catholic Church, but people don’t like talking about that – and, even then, we know about it. It didn’t stay hidden forever. Some of us have known about it longer than we’ve (collectively) known about it, too. Sinéad O’Connor lost her career trying to bring awareness to it way back in 1992, right around the time many people were ready to believe in outlandish, cartoonishly-evil satanic pedophile rings. They just weren’t ready to see it so close to home yet, and definitely not in their churches.

Yes, hundreds of thousands of kids go missing every year. That’s a true statistic the conspiracy theorists love to cite. However, what they leave out is how most of them are found and returned home just fine. Those who aren’t are usually abducted by a friend or family member, not random sex trafficker snatchers who scoop them up at the bus stop one day before renting them out to a senator on the black market the next.

Seeing these theories go around pisses me off because people would rather believe in some vast, global conspiracy than the mundane abuse they choose to ignore. The uncle who’s a little too friendly with his nieces or nephews. The family friend who has an awful lot of little boys hanging out at his place on the weekends. The kindly priest in your parish with the glint in his eye. The youth pastor with the spiky hair and the cool goatee and the extra grabby hands. (I wrote a book with stories directly addressing this shit. Abuse is very real and very raw and always awful, and none of it has anything at all to do with paranoid conspiracy fantasies on YouTube.)

This is where abuse really happens. But yes, there is plenty of abuse in Hollywood. The #MeToo movement has shown that beyond a shadow of a doubt. Are kids abused in Tinseltown, too? Of course they are. That town, that whole industry, exists to use people until they’ve run their course and it spits them out. I can’t think of any reason why it wouldn’t do that with kids as well as adults.

Does that mean it’s an organized cabal, though? Nah. These things are always limited to a small circle because anything larger without, say, the resources of the Catholic Church to help keep things quiet, tend to attract attention and the truth comes out. Sure, some of you might be saying that’s exactly what we’re seeing happen now, but it isn’t. What we’re seeing now is the same thing we saw with the McMartin case and the Franklin case and Pizzagate and anything you hear about “the elite” doing awful things with children on a grand scale. It’s all bunk. It’s all distraction.

Dig deep enough, and these things are like mystery religions in that they withhold the “truth” until you’re fully committed to the cause. They most often have their origins in racism and bigotry, usually aimed at “international bankers and the wealthy elite who run this country” who, when you keep digging, almost always turn out to be Jewish families. Weird, huh?

These days, the surface level of “elites” most often means liberal democrats, since the latest conspiracies are being touted by far right ideologues. But keep digging, and I’m sure you’ll hit bedrock at the Rothschilds. It’s always the Rothschilds.

Do people born into dynastic wealth get up to some freaky shit? No doubt. When you can do and buy anything, eventually the only exciting things are all the things you’re not supposed to be able to do or buy. I get it. But do they control a secret sex trafficking network so they can ritually abuse kids for their dark lord Satan?

Prolly not.

Quick sidenote: I’ve always found it odd that Christians are quick to label atheists as Satanists. A friend on Facebook recently posted some miracle conversion from a wannabe actor/musician who left behind his “atheist Satanic lifestyle” to follow the baby Jesus and cash in on his recovery with eBooks and sponsored YouTube videos. Whatever. More power to him, I guess. Make that money, yo. Still, atheists don’t worship Satan. They don’t believe in Satan. That’s why they’re called atheists.

Look, I know some of you have the best intentions. You just want to protect kids, and what could be wrong with that? Absolutely nothing! That’s a great goal to have. Just don’t let these conspiracies drag you down into the nonsensical depths because then the only people you’ll be helping are the ones shoveling the bullshit.

Social media and conspiracy theories break your brain. They really do. Occam’s Razor goes out the window and you suddenly start seeing the most complicated, convoluted, ridiculously complex solution as the only probable one. To put it another way, that’s the exact opposite way reality works.

See? I told you this would get flipped, turned upside down.

Want an example? ‘Course ya do! Here’s one. Ask yourself why it’s more likely leaders across the entire world conspired with every doctor and scientist and healthcare professional in every country on the planet to invent a hoax virus to keep Trump from being re-elected than it is to just believe shit happens and then we have deal with it.

Even Epstein didn’t have an intricate sex trafficking ring going on. He did what pretty much every abuser does: he identified vulnerable kids, groomed them to accept his advances, then moved on with the abuse. Now, could he have involved other adults? Of course. He did, probably more than we’ll ever know about. Still a small circle though, not a complex satanic ring of pedophiles who torture kids to drink their adrenalized blood. (Yeah, that’s a thing they do, apparently. Those wacky satanist, y’all.)

That last one actually has its roots in the UFO community, specifically on the David Icke branch of the family tree, but that’s another essay for another time.

For now, if you want to help kids, keep an eye on the adults in their lives. If you see something suspicious, let someone know. If you get a bad vibe off that creepy uncle, let somebody know. If a kid comes to you with an allegation, listen to them and let somebody know.

Real abuse really happens.
Let somebody know.