After a brief writing hiatus...I'm back:

When I was in elementary school I used to walk home every day. On my way I'd come across a sprinkler every few blocks, and I'd make a game out of dodging the water droplets by staying right outside of where they fell. I'd mock the sprinkler-sometimes even out loud when nobody was around. But one day, while I was dancing around a sprinkler, the wind blew. And I got wet. Soaked, really. I was only halfway home, and it was cold, and all my books were wet. And even when I got home and dried off, I had to explain why I was drenched. it's weird because I had no idea why this is such a vivid memory of mine. Even today, when I walk past a sprinkler, I always revert back to that feeling...cold...wet... It's not particularly horrible, but it's one of those things that made me wonder what it was all about-what underlying effect was placed upon me that day. But I think I figured it out. It was probably the first time in my life that I was set outside of my comfort zone. On my own do deal with things how I thought fit. And it was cold, wet, and uncomfortable. And really not until now did I realize...that sometime or another, everyone has to step out of their comfort zone...and into the falling rain.

-David

The Homeowner's association in the neighborhood decided to sue a man who owned the first house at the entrance of our neighborhood. Post-K, he headed off to Arkansas never planning to see his Slidell home again. It was already grody. He didn't treat it well, and many real-estate agents claimed that the entire neighborhood's value would go up if they tore the thing down and fixed it back. Many thought it couldn't get much worse. But lots of things that people thought were kind of disproven after Katrina. This was one of them. It is a nasty place now. All of those rats that the news claimed to have disappeared apparently came to this specific home...I'm pretty sure that there are four or five different species of termites breeding inside of this place. The homeowners association was definitely in their right mind to try to sue this guy into shape.They took the guy to court, and after lots of arguing and legal mumbo jumbo, the judge ordered him to clean up the place.

And he did.

Kind of.

He painted a dashing array of colors across the side of his house. It faces right into the open street. The best way for me to describe it is that it kind of looks like a scene from a song from The Beatles in their LSD-induced years. Or an episode of The Teletubbies...It has purple squares, blue circles, green rhombi, all with an incandescent shade of red-orange in the back ground.

"Queer-eye"  would not be happy.
 
It's common knowledge that art is pretty subjective. But I'm pretty positive that this is not art. I'm pretty sure that nobody on this expansive Earth believes that this is art.  Barf, maybe...but not art.  It turned out that he was just pissed off about the whole court ruling thing and decided that he would just get back at the neighborhood by working on his incredibly amateur art skills on his wall.

Now there is a silent coalition rising amongst the neighbors. We plan to sneak out in the dark of night with some good ol' fashioned gray paint to cover it all back up. We've even got a solid back-up plan. Because of all the new police activity here in Slidell, we can tell any cops that question us that we were cleaning the "grafitti" off of the dude's wall.

It's foolproof.  It's just. It's an earnest build-up of justice being persued by the citizens...

 But more importantly, 51 weeks later, it's one more case of Katrinakrazy.


-David McDowell