Oh, I got them facial hair blues again mama...

Playing Bill Sikes has required me to become scruffy-looking. As the run of the show has gone on (we've added another weekend after labor dabor--road trip to Memphis anyone?), however, the beard has moved from the scruff department to the beard department. As a result, I believe I am in the market for a beard trimmer.

Does anyone have a recommendation? Do the beard flowbees work? I don't think scissors (which I normally use when I have an actual beard) will provide anything like an even level of stubbliness.

Also, I shall from henceforth tag all entries with suspected neologisms contained therein.

On the one-year anniversary

Technically, the destruction of New Orleans didn't really happen until one year ago tomorrow--still, a year ago today I remember being terrified that the hurricane that would wipe New Orleans off the map might happen during that night. When I lived there back in 1995, a minor storm blew in and hit Lake Charles, and I remember coworkers (who'd never experienced a hurricane) showing their hubris and machismo about the threat of the storm. I'd lived through Frederick in 1979, and knew that it was both boring and very very dangerous.

And so it was. Katrina hit on the Mississippi side of the state line, and Gulfport, Biloxi and Ocean Springs got the full force of the storm surge and wind. Places I'd been to earlier that year were wiped off the map. But New Orleans was spared the storm that was supposed to destroy it.

Then we heard reports of the levies breaking, and water in the streets. Again, I'd lived there in 1995, and one wild spring morning we had a rogue storm blow up out of the Gulf of Mexico and drop 12 inches of water on the city overnight. No hurricane, not even hurricane season, but the city shut down for a week. I'm sure millions of dollars in flood damage to homes and cars. I was working for a millwork company at the time, and we had door and baseboard orders until well until the next year, so I knew it could be bad.

I didn't know, however, that the city was being ignored, and that the feds looking the other way as people drowned and died in their homes or in the streets would be forever etched in my mind as the one true legacy of the Bush administration. New Orleans as I knew it was gone--vanished from the map like Pompeii. The place I think about doesn't exist anymore, really.

Yes, it's still standing there. You can go visit. daybreaker and candiceanne live nearby. But the people that made the city what it is have largely moved elsewhere--Austin, Memphis, Houston, Mobile, Atlanta, Chicago. When I return, it will be to a significantly different place--half of its former size, with different objectives and dreams of its former self.