Byrne this Note XXXVI (Rocking like a Hurricane) © 2015

There was only one gas station in town that worked. It was located in Bayou View off of Washington Avenue. Cars were lined up for two miles. Around the South many gas stations illegally raised their prices astronomically. One of these gas stations was near Hattiesburg. It’s still there with its $5.00 per gallon sign. It’s abandoned now. The closest place to get gas was in Pascagoula. I’d walk around neighborhoods helping friends put tarps on their roofs. Remember seeing a man with a shotgun in one hand and a gas can in the other. 

I remember seeing spray painted symbols on the outside of houses and buildings that indicated how many had died inside houses. There were empty boats in the middle of highways. My stepfather and father lost their businesses to Katrina.

I’d wake up in the morning just knowing it was the “End Times.” Wasn’t able to get everything cleared out of my grandma’s yard before she came back. Went about three weeks without electricity and water. Being without water didn’t make sense to me because their was plenty of it in the Gulf of Mexico. Stores were looted some of em’ even by choice of their owners. One day at school, I was warned by a fellow teacher that the principals love to put the heat on you to see what you’re made of. Their pressures included included coming into my classroom and taking over my lessons. They’d yell at me and correct me in front of my students.

Around this time I started writing My Megalomania at Midnight. It started off in a grave yard taking pics for the website me wanting to play guitar.

The weather channel was giving warnings of a storm coming. Many of the residents of the Coast didn’t take it too seriously because we had been warned about other storms that never came. When it came closer my father and step mom, my grandma (my mother’s side) left town. My sister, step father, myself and my mom buckled down and stayed. My new girl left town with her parents.

I was waiting to see something kewl. I’d joke with my friends that I made my first girlfriend Katrina so mad at me that she sent a hurricane after me. I remember at 24^th Avenue AA meeting I compared the presumptuous impending doom to Big Book
"The alcoholic is like a tornado roaring his way through the lives of others.  Hearts are broken.  Sweet relationships are dead.   Affections have been uprooted.  Selfish and inconsiderate habits have kept the home in turmoil.  We feel a man is unthinking when he says that sobriety is enough.  He is like the farmer who came up out of his cyclone cellar to find his home ruined.  To his wife, he remarked, "Don't see anything the matter here, Ma.  Ain't it grand the wind stopped blowin'?"  --  "Alcoholics Anonymous" (AA's Big Book) Chapter 6, 'Into Action,' pg. 82 Yes, there is a long period of reconstruction ahead.

http://www.aa.org/

Two days before it came I sent off my writings to a contest in the UK. I had learned about these contest through Dee Rimbaud. http://www.rimbaud.org.uk/

It came a little before dawn with its train sounds. I went outside with a disposable camera and took a picture. Everything had a pale green glow to it. Just like the greenish pale of the decomposed corpses that I worked on in Richmond morgue. I was alone in my grandma’s house. Slept and tried to sleep through most of the morn. Thought of one of my rebellious students. How I’d talk to his mamma about his negative behaviors. Told her that me and him were both underdogs. As I heard the trees snap into pieces in the back yard I wanted to hide underneath the bed. I knew there wasn't enough room. At around 2 pm I put on my Army boots, grabbed an axe, and went to my step father and mother’s house. It’s about a quarter of a mile away. The winds were still very harsh. Everything outside looked as if a bomb had hit. Houses with holes in the roof, trees and power line poles mangled, live wire on the streets, cars with trees on em. This included my stepfather’s Jaguar with a big oak tree limb in it.

I took that axe and chopped my way through to their front door. They were all okay. The winds continued at around thirty miles per hour. So powerful that when me and my sister drove around Bayou View I opened the door to see how high the water was and the winds bent the door backwards. Every house that was near water got flooded out. every beautiful mansion homes on the beach (highway 90) was destroyed.  The highway looked like someone had stepped on it breaking it in two.

Charles’ parents were wise enough to move all their cars to Bayou View Junior High parking lot. Everyone else on Bayou View Drive lost their cars to the flood. I remembered a reoccurring childhood dream. In the dream my comics were buried in the acres by my child hood home. Also a great flood came in this dream destroying all of my comic books. In reality, my comics were safely in boxes and wrapped in garbage bags underneath grandma’s bed. What did losing the comics in the dream symbolize?

I remember driving around at 5pm. The storm was almost gone. I went by Charles parents house. I remembering calling him three hours prior and he told me water flooding his house "Dude that's so kewl." "No dude its not kewl."-wrote about this event in my book My Megalomania At Midnight purchase here $1.00 http://www.amazon.com/Megalomania-Mississippi-Fantasies-Disasters-Hurricane-ebook/dp/B00CTD2NNI Excerpt © 2015(Katrina-

            By now the train has passed the tracks and as they roll over the tracks in their van she can’t hold back her tears any longer. Her mother has to go back and hold her tighter than she has in years. Hasn’t consoled her like this since Katrina was a four year old child crying for her to protect her from an invisible monster.

crying still

                        and I’m thinking about a line from a Bob Dylan song “Behind every beautiful face there’s been some kind of pain.”

            My phone rings again; it’s Chuck. He’s telling me that the water is coming up to the third story. With a giggle I exclaim, “Dude, that’s kewl.” He replies slowly and aggravated, “Dude, no it’s not cool.” I turn around and that’s when my ship came in literally.)-end of excerpt.

. Flipped grand piano. In the same room with Charles I tried to call him and my call didn’t come through from his ATT phone. My Cellular South phone went through. Because of this I still phone with Cellular South (link in.

Every night I’d go to sleep with the windows open. The night breeze gave little reprieve from the heat. I’d hear and see helicopters flying overhead. Booze and cigarettes were easier to find than food. I’d been through worse conditions when I was drinking and drugging. I would boil my water to cook food, wash clothes and take baths.

I missed her tremendously. She had left with her mother and father to Asheville North Carolina. Their house, in Discovery Bay in Pass Christian, had been destroyed by Katrina. And I just had to see her. 20 something September I went to Asheville North Carolina. Stayed there about a week around the mountains. They were living with her father’s mother in a big two story house in the mountains. We went to a couple family functions. I felt like an outsider. Couldn’t get passed that feeling that I was just some sort of fling.