It’s · not · the · fall · that · kills · you, · but · the · sudden · stop.

I hate to commemorate such a day, but 29 August in a huge deal for those of us who live on the South Coast.

For Mississipians, it was the day that a natural disaster hit.

For New Orleanians, it was the day that the federal government wrote us off.

All our lives changed, but I wonder who suffers more. Not that it's a contest, but is it worse to lose a state's entire coast due to a four thousand foot wave of hell hitting it, chalking it up to God's Mystical Magical Malice, then building again, or is it worse to know that the country to which you pay your taxes doesn't give a damn about you?

For the last four years, I always remember that moment on the lake in New York, two days before the word "Katrina" meant anything more than a bitch I knew in high school. (It would become a much more bitchlier word.)

I was floating on a raft in my coveted lake, reading a book, thinking in these very words, "Nothing can possibly go wrong. Life is so beautiful."

Taunting fate? MUCH? Perhaps *I*, and not erstwhile prez Bush, is responsible for the failure of the federal levees. I mean, who thinks things like this and believes they can get away with it?

Here I am, on 27 August, 2005, floating in Lake Keuka whilst dragonflies alighted on my kneecaps to fuck.



I still look at this picture with the same morbid fascination I look at Jackie O. in Dallas in her pink Chanel suit. You just wanna scream, "DO SOMETHING! TRAGEDY LIES AHEAD!"

It was weeks before I saw my husband-elect. When we finally met, in Nashville, and had the most tumultuous sex I've ever had in my life, I was thinking, "Okay. Things can get back to normal. I mean, after we break through the National Guard barricades to save our cats, things will be normal.

That was never the case. I got a whole hell of a lot sadder and a lot wiser that summer. That wisdom was too expensive, however, and I want my money back.

Something core and base and concrete crumbled in me. Things I thought I could count on proved as ephemeral as my early-20s ideals. And having that foundation rattled to its core has changed me as a person — I can't say for the better.

I'm on Crazy Pills now, for example — a thing I vowed I would never do no matter what life threw at me.

Even on the perfect day, there are stressed muscles all over my body. I cringe like an abused puppy at everything startling. And I don't know how to pull myself out of this.

So. Happy 29 August, y'all.

I'm going out to get drunk.