It's been a while since I last had a "where the hell is everybody" post, so where the hell is everybody?

I know where most of you all are, but in order for everyone to not need to keep asking everybody else how or where other people are, let's all just dump it right here.

As for me I've been living la vida bore-o here in picturesque Hammond, LA. If you're wondering what Hammond looks like, picture an entire city made up of sunbaked Airline Hwy intersections, populated solely by strip malls with nothing in them and prefab sheetmetal buildings. All of which is surround by poor, trashy, rural people and trees. Tis truly a sight to behold.

I hate this place and its ilk with the heat and intensity of a thousand burning suns, and I'm probably buying a house here.

So, how are you all getting along?

We here in Hammond have been experiencing quite the little cold snap as of late. Normally this would be welcomed with open arms if it weren't for the fact that I don't own a single article of clothing with long sleeves. Nary a jacket or sweater.

In fact, I don't have anything. I own a computer, a new gun, an old gun that is basically a meteorite of corrosion, a few pairs of jeans, a handful of shirts, and some Nintendo gear. That's it.

I've known this since the flood, it's just that I've been living out of a hotel for the past month and a half so I really haven't needed anything. It wasn't until the moderately cold weather hit and wanted a jacket did I finally digest the fact that I no longer owned anything. So when I finally do get back on my feet, I'll have a place with absolutely nothing in it. Not a TV or a couch or a bed or a plunger. Not a trashcan or forks or glasses or towels or a table. No refrigerator, no washer, and no dryer. I could go on and on like this for hours and I'm sure as could many people I know.

I didn't mean for this post to be some sort of pity party, just wanted to throw my thoughts up here for all to see, because that's what you're supposed to do on your internets pages.

Goodbye earthly belongings, hello federal aid! Actually, I don't know if I'll get any, but we called and and opened a case or got a ticket number or whatever the hell happens.

Anywho, they said we'll be hooked up with an "adjuster" who we'll have to meet up with to survey the "site" to which Brenda added, "if you're going to send him soon, make sure he has a boat." I put adjuster in quotes because word around here is that FEMA's adjusters are 80-year-olds with one foot in the grave that don't survey damage as much as they just stand there and say, "yup, looks like ya got some water in here."

Which I suppose is understandable, I mean, whenever the President declares that a place is a disaster area, it's really not the time to be trying to figure out whether the water damage to your carpet is due to flooding or wind blown rain. I suppose they just send them out to perform a perfunctory check and make sure that all your shit actually got fucked, and ours did. Boy howdy.

Ok, just to have a place that everyone I know can communicate, I'll post some info on what I know:

Cell phone usage is useless ANYWHERE in LA/MS. Text messaging seems to work perfectly. The water is continuing to rise in the city, a whole day after the storm. The water will be there for at least a week if not weeks. Now, here's what I know about our peeps.

• Scott and Alison: Baton Rouge (I think), but they're ok.
• Kim: Somewhere in Texas, but OK.
• Jason, Rebs, and Jude: Went to Baton Rouge, then kept going to Shreveport to get farther away.
• MC & Colleen: After saying he was going to stay, MC is now safe in Arkansas, and I ran into Colleen and PG on the street today here in Natchez, MS
• Pete, Christine and Max: We texted Pete and he said he was OK in Vicksburg, I can only assume Max is with him, and Christine is either there as well, or at Touro where she's just as safe.
• My Parents and Little Brother: Ok in Baton Rouge.
• Feasty, Niki and Shane: My parents said Niki and Shane evac'd with her parents and Feasty was planning on staying. We haven't heard from them since before the storm.

Please check in and tell us what's happening.

During my entire childhood I was told I was a "gifted" child. I consistently scored above my class on placement tests, had a healthy appetite for reading, and I picked up things like memorizing the Gettysburg Address and learning my multiplication tables rather quickly. I spent so much time as a kid hearing about how eff'ing smart I was that it naturally became part of my self image. It didn't matter that I was a chronic underachiever who never got higher than a C average, I was a fucking prodigy, and I had the test scores to prove it.

The problem with being a child prodigy is that once you are no longer a child, you're no longer a prodigy either. You're just some dipshit with an over inflated self image. You've grown into your smarts like a pair of your brother's hand-me-down jeans and having the problem solving skills of a High School Senior, while amazing at 10, is considerably less amazing when you're a High School Senior.

By the age of nineteen this was a lesson I had yet to learn. I was young, virile, and in my opinion, possessing an immeasurable intellect. Looking back I imagine I wasn't too far off from how intelligent and invulnerable just about everyone thought they were at that age, but it didn't help coming from the background I just described. The icing on the cake was that I more or less a "goth" around this time period, which only added to my belief that I was a horribly misunderstood genius.

It was around this time that my friend Matt's band was playing one night and after the show he suggested that a bunch of us go have drinks at his place which happened to only be a few blocks from the venue. It was not an unusual night, a group of around eight of us sat around chain smoking and marathon drinking, talking up the great ideas we have for the bands we're in or the importance of some irrelevant factoid that we thought would make us seem deep if we waxed philosophical about it, usual nineteen-year-old bullshit.

Anyway, one of Matt's friends Clint was there. Clint was a few years older than us and I had only met him once or twice before, but he seem pretty agreeable. He was thumbing through a Beavis and Butthead book Matt had lying around, and reciting various funny things that he came across. After about ten minutes of him reading and us discussing which Beavis and Butthead moment was the most hilarious, he tossed the book onto the coffee table and said, "You know, this is sad. We can sit here and hold a ten minute long conversation about Beavis and Butthead, but I bet not one of us could say what started World War I."

I was pretty offended. I mean, here I was, a fucking genius for Christ sakes, and he thinks so little of me to try and stump me with such retarded trivia. I was just about to shut him down by giving him an extremely long winded and exhaustive history of World War I when I realized I was thinking about World War II. I sat there and tried to dredge up any memory I could possibly find that had anything to do with World War I and kept coming up empty handed. Who the fuck was even in World War I? At this point my brain was just spasming:

There were Germans in both I think, but the second one was about Jews. Or something. What did the Germans do in the first one? Were they all about killing Jews in both? Wasn't there a treaty called the Treaty of Ver-something? Did that end the First or Second one? I know Japan was in the second one, but were they in the first one too? What did they even want in the second one? Did the French surrender in both? Didn't I learn anything in school?

I was floored. How could I expect to be a misunderstood genius when I was a complete moron? Without the genius part, I'm just misunderstood, which is another way of saying retarded. This did not bode well for my self image.

Of course, while I was going through this inner turmoil, Scott was busy supplying Clint with the actual answers involving the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, by the Serbs.

And that's when I discovered that you actually need to learn things in order to appear intelligent, it's not something that just happens out of force of will. I'd spent the majority of my formative years having everything come to me so easily that I never really learned how much went into actually learning things. Since then I've made myself extremely familiar with the events surrounding the major conflicts of the twentieth century and will be prepared if such a situation presents itself again.