Disaster

(This is a house in the ninth ward of New Orleans, badly struck by storm Katrina, and still hanging on by a thread several years later.)

My heart is kind of breaking right now. Thinking about all of the people in Haiti, and feeling so helpless, unsure of what more I can do beyond donating money or supplies. I woke up earlier than usual this morning, despite going to bed much later than usual, and was in a mild funk upon falling asleep. Something so trite pestering me away from the tranquility I was hoping to find while laying there, staring at my ceiling.

I had dragged some friends to a Haiti relief event yesterday to donate some funds and try to watch the film "The Agronomist." After we left, we were approached by a very eloquent homeless man asking for money for a fund to get more folks off the street as the cold weather will inevitably return in our fare city. I gave him some cash, as he chatted me up, and he thanked us for engaging with him, and treating him like a human being. There was something so compelling about the way he spoke with me, hearing the horrific stories of finding six homeless men that had frozen to death in the past two weeks.



















(This is the interior of one of the main churches in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, completely gutted, and abandoned...)

Then this morning, I turned on the tv, while I got ready to begin my writing for the day. It is a rarity that I turn the tv on this early in the day, but as the picture came on, I saw that it was that documentary about the levees breaking in New Orleans during storm Katrina. I left the doc on quietly as I began to type away. Suddenly, I became transfixed, and my writing absorbed some of the images I was capturing on screen, recounting images that I had taken myself while in the ninth ward a year ago. These are all photos that I took while exploring all of New Orleans for the art Biennial there last year.

My heart is breaking as I reflect on all of the impossible traumas this world has suffered over the past ten years. It seems like at least once a year we collectively experience some terrifying "natural" disaster that kills infinite amounts of people innocently in the path of those tragedies. These storms and quakes, floods and fires appear to be of biblical proportions. Now, I'm not religious in the least, but it is making me wonder if that whole apocalyptic spin might have some truth to it. Or if the Mayans were on to something saying that the world was going to end in 2012.












(This was a shot I took of the interior view of the tread from a bulldozer. It was stripped from the machine, and left unraveled on the side of the road in the Ninth Ward, after many structures had been demolished. It felt like a skeletal carcass found in a desert, just a hint that some sort of life form once existed there...)

Here I sit, at my laptop, in my little well of anxieties or the minutia of my day. And I feel like such an asshole for being so privileged, for having so many opportunities, and yet I still fret over whether this woman or that woman may like me back. I want my life to be more than a summation of crushes, and relationships or rejections. I *need* this life to have more meaning, more weight, more relevance than just: "I'm a tranny, can I get a date?"

I am trying to shed my skin, peel back the layers of false veneers, and sift through the metaphysical wreckage to see what still exists in me, and how I can make that core essence truly radiate all of the fiery passion, compassion, and drive to actually make a difference in this world. Not like in a Miss American pageant sort of way, claiming to want world peace one pretty girl at a time – but in a radical, heart-full manifesto kind of way.

My heart is breaking for all of the people who are suffering right now, for all of the people that have suffered from Katrina, the huge tsunamis of the past few years, the insane forest fires, the inescapable earthquakes... Yes, it's been incredible to see how quickly some people are to step in and do whatever they can to aid people in need, but the apathy is also as heartbreaking as the traumas themselves.

How do we squelch the source apathy, and plant the seeds of compassion and true change? How can we all be fully realized human being, when we still have got our own shit to deal with...? You'd think with all of these disasters, we'd be faster to learn that by now...

Please do what you can to help, and let me know if you've got any insight about how to change the world.