Katrina stories....

Today I shot with a guy from 10am-4pm. Don't know if you know me, but that is a huge feat. I general, I get really bored with shooting after about two or three hours....It's usually both a mix of ADD and general boredom. I'll come up with some random excuse to go back to my place and sit around reading books all day. Books are food for my soul.

The secret to shooting
for more than three hours?
........Change of scenery.
Shooting more than one setting, breaks the shoots into mini shoots -
and therefore, I am more apt to being able to model longer.
There are new things to mingle with, new areas to work....

Katrina stories.
The photographer today had a Katrina story...

... which led me to think that for people down here, Katrina is pretty much equivalent to the Twin Towers falling in NYC. Everyone down here remembers where they were, what they were doing, how their life changed....

He survived the storm, only to find out that the Levee had broken and that water was making its way into the city - both him and his wife, who is the head nurse at a local hospital, helped vacate their hospital .... over 20 cars, evacuating patients who were on respirators and couldn't evacuate themselves..... both him and his wife returned to help a local Hospice which needed help, 1/3 of the patients there had already perished because generators had failed.... To get to the hospice, they had to take buses with an escort from a bunch national guardsmen.

Aside from his story, while he was in New Orleans during Katrina.... he took some really amazing photojournalistic photos...... Not that CNN counts for anything, but some were even shown on the news channel. This one is my favorite.... There was a guy who went around saving people who were stuck in their flooded houses.... He paddled in a canoe from house to house. While passing by a rich guy's place who had evacuated - he found some keys and borrowed the rich guy's bass boat. Eventually the water dried up, and written on the side was, "This boat saved 400 people." How fucking cool is that....

I love stories.
People are nothing but stories.
Your life is one big story...
It really is.
I bet you could tell it from the beginning to the end
Whether the beginning was when you
fell off a stool when you were two
or if the beginning started when you
just missed getting hit by a car last week.
And it ends when you blink....
Stories stories stories.....

Anyways........I liked the photographer's story so much.....I set out on locating some more. I jumped into my car and headed to some random cafe a few streets down. Started up conversations with lots of strangers at the bar.....

My favorite story of tonight was this one girl. She vacated her house in a nice neighborhood - packing her husband, two kids, two dogs, three chickens (two which died on the trip), and an iguana.... to a hotel in Arkansas. And she lived there for 5 months with the chicken eating crackers on the bed, cocking it's head to the left, while watching TV (she acted that part out, and it made me laugh... because it was very chicken-esq). Anyways, She said when she got home, she barely recognized her house. Her grass was 4 feet high. And her refrigerator - which she didn't even open, had crab legs, hamburgers, and pork inside it for 5 months in 80 degree heat. She had her husband tape it up and put it out on the street..... She's a college student, really pretty, about 30, working as a secretary, really really poor..... FEMA sent her a $2000 check total for her 5 months in Ark-whatever-it-is, and now they are sending her letters....asking her to pay them the money back. They believe she misused it because she bought a new refrigerator with it....... She sums it up best, all southern like....., "So I wrote them a letter back and I said, 'Well I'd like to pay you back. Here is my bank statement for the last 5 months - lets see you squeeze blood from a turnip.'" Ha.

Tonight I didn't need to read a book - I got the best stories ever.....
I mean, a chicken watching TV.... I love it!

Speaking of TV. After hanging out at the cafe, I drove over the lake, and sat in a little patch of grass, right across the street from all these condos (just like the one that I am staying in).... and 13 out of the 19 that I could count were watching TV.

Don't be like the chicken.....
Stay away from the blue light of the TV.... it's poisonous.
It will suck everything that is meaningful from your life.