I haven’t been sleeping well. But that’s okay. As funny as it sounds, I know I’m in a good place when I can find more time to think(and honestly enjoy the extra time in my head..or maybe nowhere near my head but milling around in the heart, jitterbugging on the linoleum there).

Last night I had some gin/lemonade with my roommate and her friend on the porch, met a neighbor and watched a band roll in to crash for the night. The same band I heard playing from a second story window hours earlier in Lawrenceville. I was walking home from Tait’s house post-dinner and heard the beautiful noise of strings, bass, shouting singers. Nice to put faces with the moment. I went to bed and listened to my neighbor playing the saw in his backyard for a while. Sleep did not find me for some time, but the gin helped.

I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to say: I can sleep less, and be okay with it. Being tired is being something.

Maybe we are in a constant state of release. Maybe you wear through memories until they are the softest thinnest fabric and something tells you to stop because any more wear would mean tearing the sucker in two. Maybe making new ones becomes more important and then from there it isn’t a question of where your mind is—it is right here, it is processing what comes to it..pull from what you know. You learn to let go in the sweetest way. Maybe you finally become what you believe in. Maybe once that happens, you start to sleep less.

First, there is this:

These tourists from Oklahoma drink on Bourbon St. and say they are “playing it by ear,” regarding a possible evacuation as Gustav enters the Gulf of Mexico. Nagin said mandatory evacuations would begin if the storm becomes a Category 3 hurricane.

against this:

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered the city’s more than 239,000 residents to evacuate on Sunday in the face of powerful Hurricane Gustav, which he called “the mother of all storms.”

The evacuation order issued on Saturday was the first in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina devastated the historic Southern city in August 2005.

“This is the mother of all storms,” Nagin said of Gustav, a monstrous Category 4 storm that could approach the central Louisiana coast just west of New Orleans on Monday.

“You need to be concerned and you need to get your butts moving and out of New Orleans right now,” Nagin said at City Hall. “This is the storm of the century.”

The evacuation order, which will not be physically enforced by officials, will start with the city’s low-lying West Bank starting at 8 a.m. CDT (9 a.m. EDT) on Sunday, followed by the East Bank at noon CDT (1 p.m. EDT), Nagin told reporters.

Residents have the choice to remain behind and weather the storm, but “that would be one of the biggest mistakes that you could make in your life,” Nagin said.

He said people might have to chop through the roofs of their houses to escape rising waters if they stay.

“Make sure you have an ax,” he said.

But one day after the third anniversary of Katrina, many had already decided to abandon the city, much of which lies below sea level.

Thousands of people fled New Orleans earlier on Saturday. Hoping to avoid the 2005 spectacle of desperate city residents crammed into the New Orleans Superdome, the government lined up hundreds of buses and trains to evacuate 30,000 people who cannot leave on their own.

About 10,000 people left the city by bus or train on Saturday, Nagin said. The rest of the 20,000 people that had requested evacuation assistance would leave on Sunday, he added.

Many evacuees were issued wrist bands with bar codes that will allow city officials to track them.

Gustav crashed across the Cuban mainland on Saturday and could hit the U.S. Gulf Coast as a Category 4 storm, the second-highest on the five-stage Saffir-Simpson scale, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

SIGNIFICANT FLOODING EXPECTED

In the Lower Ninth Ward, plunged under water by Katrina’s floodwaters, hundreds of residents packed belongings into cars and trucks and left. Some had returned home only a few months ago after fleeing Katrina.

“After Katrina, you’ve got to leave,” said Ruby Hall, a longtime resident, pointing to the place on the timber frame of the porch where Katrina’s waters rose. “I’m not going to chance it, not with my grandchild.”

The city’s West Bank was largely spared by Katrina but could see “significant flooding” because its 10-foot (3-metre) levees are no match for Gustav’s storm surge, which could top 20 feet, Nagin said.

Katrina’s massive storm surge broke through protective levees on August 29, 2005, and flooded 80 percent of the city. New Orleans degenerated into chaos as stranded storm victims waited days for rescue.

The hurricane killed about 1,500 people along the U.S. Gulf Coast and caused $80 billion in damages, making it the costliest U.S. natural disaster.

There was bumper-to-bumper traffic on highways leading out of the city on Saturday, and six low-lying parishes — the Louisiana equivalent of U.S. counties — issued evacuation orders.

All major Louisiana interstates will allow only one-way traffic away from the coast starting at 4 a.m. CDT (5 a.m. EDT) on Sunday. The last flight out of the New Orleans airport is scheduled to depart at 6 p.m. CDT (7 p.m.) on Sunday.

In all, 11.5 million people are in the path of Gustav, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Walter Parker, a security guard who was trapped for eight days in his apartment during the Katrina flooding, lined up outside the Union Passenger Terminal as families with bags packed and children in tow waited for transportation.

“I don’t want to see another Katrina, with dead bodies floating in the water,” Parker said.

(more…)

Greyhound screwed me and I didn’t get to head home for the weekend. Left with an uncomfortable amount of frustration, I decided to destroy something.

Now I have some wonderful scraps for art projects.
Now I have a room that looks like the afterbirth of an ice cream social for tornadoes.
Now I need a new dresser.

And now? I feel pretty damn good.

I’d like to thank the summertime, for some very pretty storms.
(more…)

By GREG BLUESTEIN

ATLANTA (AP) - The tireless tongue already controls taste and speech, helps kiss and swallow and fights germs. Now scientists hope to add one more ability to the mouthy muscle, and turn it into a computer control pad.

Georgia Tech researchers believe a magnetic, tongue-powered system could transform a disabled person’s mouth into a virtual computer, teeth into a keyboard - and tongue into the key that manipulates it all.

“You could have full control over your environment by just being able to move your tongue,” said Maysam Ghovanloo, a Georgia Tech assistant professor who leads the team’s research.

The group’s Tongue Drive System turns the tongue into a joystick of sorts, allowing the disabled to manipulate wheelchairs, manage home appliances and control computers. The work still has a ways to go - one potential user called the design “grotesque” - but early tests are encouraging.

The system is far from the first that seeks a new way to control electronics through facial movements. But disabled advocates have particularly high hopes that the tongue could prove the most effective.

“This could give you an almost infinite number of switches and options for communication,” said Mike Jones, a vice president of research and technology at the Shepherd Center, an Atlanta rehabilitation hospital. “It’s easy, and somebody could learn an entirely different language.”

That’s quite a contrast to the handful of methods already available to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who are disabled from the neck down.

The “sip and puff” technique, which lets people issue commands by inhaling and exhaling into a tube, is among the most popular. But it offers users only four different commands, limiting their options.

Control systems that use sophisticated pads to measure neck and head movements are also widespread, but using the hardware can be tiring, and frustrating on smaller electronics like computers.

And while newer innovations that track eye movement are promising, they can be costly, slow and susceptible to mixed signals.

The tongue, though, is a more flexible, sensitive and tireless option. And like other facial muscles, its functions tend to be spared in accidents that can paralyze most of the rest of the body, because the tongue is attached to the brain, not the spinal cord. (more…)

[above: steel building swaddled in fog on friday morning; midnite snake/brain handle show..some of the crowd(and this was taken fairly early); the wind; grocery run; reflecting times with Abacus]

next on the agenda, some of this:

Soccer team causes surprise by coming home
FREETOWN (Reuters) - A boys’ soccer team from Sierra Leone won silver at a tournament in Sweden, but were hailed as champions in their poor West African homeland — because they all came home.

Sierra Leone is bottom of the U.N. development rankings and its athletes frequently vanish when traveling abroad for sporting fixtures in order to seek asylum, meaning many Western countries now simply refuse to let them in.

“It’s rare for a whole team of Sierra Leoneans to go abroad and come back,” Kweku Lisk, legal adviser to their club, FC Johansen, told reporters in the capital Freetown Friday.

“It goes to show what Sierra Leone can do when it puts its mind to it. We have managed to stick a feather in the cap for the country,” he said.

More than 250 teams entered this year’s Mittnorden Cup in Sweden, but Freetown’s FC Johansen was the first African team to compete in the tournament’s 27-year history, thanks to the club’s main supporter, the eponymous Swedish Honorary Consul Arne Johansen.

The club is made up of underprivileged children, many of them orphaned during the country’s savage 1991-2002 civil war.

But Johansen assured authorities in Stockholm he would take personal responsibility for their safe return, and Sweden agreed to waive its ban on issuing visas to Sierra Leonean athletes.

“I didn’t want to disappear, I want to come back here because I like my country and I want to play for the national team,” said Issa Koroma, 13, who lost both his parents in the war.

Having scored six goals, Koroma was the tournament’s top scorer.

“I got the golden boot, and it makes me want to play more,” he told Reuters on his return. “They were good goals … I want to be like (Brazilian footballer) Ronaldo.”

The stress of a fragmented week found its peak on Friday evening after work, when I found myself sitting in the basement with a taken-apart bike, crying in frustration. I cried harder because I had black dirt and grease all over my hands up to the wrists and couldn’t shove the tears away. Fixing the bike was just snapping the back of a camel with already-shaking legs. I called Katie and broke down again, trying to explain the anonymous dread and stress eating at my heart but of course I couldn’t find the words to fit best, and so gave up. She kept calm which I love her for, told me to just walk to her place and meet up for the Bob Log show. I said okay and then went to the mirror and told myself okay and made myself clean up, get ready, and go.

Katie, Carrie and I split a giant bottle of wine and talked for a few hours before walking to the pub. I love those ladies, I do. We arrived during the Wye Oak set with warm bellies and a slight buzz from the Yellowtail bottle(left behind on Katie’s kitchen table, empty). I found the Wye Oak set to be downright inspiring. I fell for every song they played.

Oh, Bob Log.

(more…)

Tiny 10-year-old bullfighter sparks debate in France
By ANGELA DOLAND | Associated Press Writer
August 8, 2008

PARIS (AP) _ He’s a tiny torero, a bullfighter with a baby face. But 10-year-old Michelito has become the symbol of a debate much bigger than himself. French anti-bullfighting campaigners say the boy, who came from Mexico to perform, is risking his life in the ring. Local authorities in southern France canceled two demonstrations where he was set to appear. Other performances have gone ahead, with Michelito — who has big brown eyes and a floppy bowl cut — showered with flowers by fans.

It’s all part of a bigger battle: French animal rights groups vs. bullfighting, which is a tradition in southern France as in neighboring Spain, and which has a small but passionate French following.

For Michelito Lagravere, the passion started young, about as soon as he could walk. Born in Mexico to a Mexican mother and a French bullfighting father, he started playing at being a torero — using a dish towel as a cape — when he was just a tot, his father said.

He was 4 years old the first time he faced off against a month-old calf. Now 10, he has fought about 60 animals to the death, his father said. Videos on the Internet show him in the ring with injured, staggering calves — not to mention Michelito being trampled.

“Am I afraid?” asked his father, Michel Lagravere. “I’m afraid like all fathers are afraid for their children. … It’s like all other sports. It’s more dangerous than playing chess, if that’s considered a sport. But I don’t think it’s more dangerous than horseback riding and riding competitions.” (more…)