Hunker Down (pt.1)

Saturday 09/13

How about that, my first hurricane…

Presently we’re at Tiff’s parent’s house. Ike is smacking a whole lot of rain, wind and depending where you’re at, a whole lot of debris. The power is out and up until a few minutes ago of this writing. I had nothing to do, other than to just “hunker down” as the saying goes. Oh yeah I can’t get a signal from my phone. I guess it’s good in a sense; I won’t use up the phone’s power calling and texting everybody every few minutes. Being the thinker I am, every thought I have to mull over. I’ve gone over a hundred times. The house has good size to it, so while we’re all holed up in here. Nobody is on top of each other. Tiff said since we’re “techie kids” we’re going to loose our minds-or something like that. My thing is I’m good so long as I have paper and a pen available. It’s about 10am and Ike just seems to be hanging around. But I believe by this evening (as do the meteorologists) Ike will have moved on. The next phase; seeing how bad this power outage is… I’d like to head back to Tiff’s place, catch a shower and make my way back to my place. And see whatever it is I’ll see once I get there; here’s to positive thinking.

Right now I’d imagine the local news stations are showing images of Galveston. Shit-before Saturday morning arrived they were pretty much underwater. I’m thinking of this new clip I saw yesterday. How some folks in G-Town decided to stick it out… They all had the same reasoning,” we’ve survived Carla, Alicia and other storms…”There was some guy along the seawall in a mascot custom. I wonder how that jerk-off fared. Now with these “surges”, they’re flooded. Houston is also known as “the bayou city”; those pockets of still water are around residences and commercial properties. It’s not likely, but the possibility is there for these bayous to overflow, thus causing a serious flooding problem for the rest of the Houston area. Word on the street is flooding has taken place downtown.

Right about now though, cabin fever’s a bitch. Some greenery would be a nice party favor to get my hands on. Just sit out front the garage and cloud that bitch. We’d eventually drove around the subdivision to see how bad things hopefully weren’t. There were huge, powerful trees uprooted; some lying in front of homes, on vehicles, some even leaning on houses. These folks seem pretty resilient though, coming out with chainsaws and checking on their neighbors. The sound of generators will be heard for awhile and on occasion; somebody will come to your door and ask if you care for a cup of coffee-thoroughly appreciated.

Its 7pm, the rain has stopped and people are cleaning up, removing all the knocked down trees and debris along their curbs. I went w/Tiff back to her place to check and see if everything is ok. That and she wanted to get her truck. I had to move my car from in front of her garage. I had parked there before the storm hit. Damn-the engine wouldn’t turn; I’m thinking somehow the rain got into my car. She ran fine until that moment; great-here comes the rain again. I’ll find out where she’s really at when I jump the engine. We head back to Tiff’s parents and I’m thinking aint this some shit-forget calling this 3^rd coast, this is a 3^rd world. On the radio they said 99% of Houston was without power. But what do we see? a few gas stations are starting to open as well as some of the fast food places. Back at Tiff’s parents they’re fixing food. I discovered this stuff called potted meat. It looks like deviled ham except smoother. Ol’man Cheapie-Tiff’s dad; let me know that since I’m not West Indian I wouldn’t know of this. Eh-that’s cool…I refer to it as West Indian pate. I passed on it and made a couple of turkey sandwiches and grabbed some plantain chips.