!Getting to the end of the world --- agk's diary 28 August 2025 @ 05:04 UTC --- typed up on GPD MicroPC on vi via puTTY amid the crickets --- manditory evacuation of New Orleans: 8/28 1400 UTC ~80% of New Orleans' 1.3 million people evacuated landfall: 8/29 1110 UTC storm surge/levee fail submerged 80% of New Orleans ~1,000 to 1,900 dead in 7 states, mostly Louisiana federal disaster declarations covered 230,000 sq km --- Hurricane Katrina made landfall twenty years ago. It redirected my life. My nose finally forgot how to tell rotting dog from rotting man. My fingers fully remember placing acupuncture ear needles in vast circles of National Guardsmen; my hands, writing in composition books data from the free clinic my friends started, 200 patients each 23 hour day. We sweated and stumbled, providing the first civilian primary care in the lost city of New Orleans. My body remembers New Jersey State Troopers who drew down on us clinic workers in the night air behind the clinic after curfew, AR-15s, safetys off, fingers in trigger housings, trembling with fear. We were just four blocks from Will Tanner's car, burned on the levee by New Orleans police with Henry Glover's charred body inside. I remember triumphs, disappointments, slowly sinking in morphine's molasses quicksand. The 2008 documentary *Trouble the Water* was the only one to feel like my experience of Katrina. I gave up separating heroism from nihilism. I'll let my cousin tell how we tramped without heroism into apocalypse. She called herself Sybil and me Maybe in her 88% true story *I've Got a Time Bomb* (2009). A fragment follows. --- 25 hours later they caught a ride south in the back of someone's long mobile home. 49 hours later the mobile home was stuck at the north end of a 480-km- long highway accident traffic jam that would take half a year to clear. It was raining hard enough to kill a large dog. Lightning blasted nearby trees to splinters, floods visible down the mountain ripped up houses and piled them up where the valley narrowed. The wind was deafening. Maybe played with a shortwave radio, repeating flood news flawlessly, word for word. She was smiling widely, turning around the dial without looking. Everything south of Tension, between ATL and Texas, was completely gone. "It's everywhere! Millions of houses sinking and being ripped apart. Run out and let the flood clean you! Every horrible mockery of man erased by the water we came from." She grabbed both Sybil's hands and locked their eyes together. Then she broke her stare, looked at her hands, wrung them, looked up and started talk- ing urgently to Dr. No, who nodded, and hummed, and made some phone call to this org he was linked to, based in Portland. Turned out they were running a volunteers and supplies charitable help-the-flooded convoy of old clothes and blankets made out of lint and he could get a place driving. He winked at Maybe. They had developed a plan for hiding naked in the back of a van for hours and breaking into a flood zone. Maybe squeaked. Just then a bolt of lightning hit a tanker truck full of diet cola. Brown foam splatted every car for a half-mile. Maybe laughed and laughed and ran from one end of the mobile home to the other for 20 minnits. Finally she got tired and curled up next to Sybil. Before they fell asleep she said, "I prayed for the inside of my mind to not be so unlike the world everyone else lives just fine in. This is not at all what I meant, but it's the answer to my prayer. This world makes sense. We have a very big respon- sibility, Sybil. It's the end of the world. We made it to the edge of the end of the world." *** Sybil laid with Mary-Belle curled over her back, both of them in just panties. Each other's sweat washed over them like it was coming out of a hose or a cappuccino machine. Sybil felt Maybe push her body into her back, felt the last of the ice melt- ing as she compacted the bag to water. Maybe showed Sybil the chunky man's watch, too much band slack on her wrist. It had 4 faces. One said 11:18 AM, one said September 6, one said no moon tonight, and the final face said 112 degrees. Sybil and Maybe had been buried under an entire vanload of bales of thrift-store clothes. Dr. No popped one of the bales to bury them 40 minnits ago, before entering the alert zone. Maybe was already crying from heat dementia. If she could have moved she'd have collapsed and imploded. The now only slightly cool bag of water was a placebo, nostalgia. Syb laid one finger on her hand to pray for strength. Maybe winced and, barely audible, hissed that her head was cooking. Voices outside the van asked unfriendly questions. The back door opened. There was almost-inaudible talking, then it closed. The van sat for 2 minnits until No was called to fill out forms inside. 5 minnits went by. Then the back door opened again and someone started prodding about in the clothes bales. They didn't search very hard. They seemed to leave with the door still open. There were a bunch of their voices out there. Sybil felt Maybe's hot breath and crying on her back and helf-secretly relished it. Maybe had her guard up all the time. The only time she let Sybil in for real was when they were eluding capture together. Finally the guards got bored and shooed them along. Syb and Maybe erupted from hiding 28 seconds later. Time: 1 hour, 48:29 encased together underneath 140 kilos of artificial fabric in 44 degree heat. They were dumb lucky: that was the last inspector for 500 kilometers. They rolled through ruined palm trees, roofs blown off houses, cars in creeks, and skyscrapers with half their windows shattered. There were dead dogs and cats everywhere, a dead blue heron wrapped around a traffic light that didn't light. Syb ripped the bag of fever-temperature water in half and dumped it over both them. She fished in the cooler for any piece of ice, and drunk out the cooler cuz that was all the water they had left. Then it was gone, and they were still less than a third the way from ATL. *** Maybe sat up front with Dr. No, gossiping about emergency response cult drama. Lots of people were calling each other hypochondriacs in this scene. Maybe was wearing just her white undies drenched in 3 liters of both their sweat, a cheap gold-green plastic Mardi Gras necklace, and a muddy trucker hat with an illegible fishing and bullshitting slogan on the brim. She had picked it up at a mud- crusted dead gas station they stopped at 100 kilo- meters into the flood zone. It was a normal highway small gas station. Flood mudslides ruined it, then the water receded leaving it intact. The door was jammed open by 50-cm-deep mud. The fridge full of beer had heated up and the beer cans popped, feeding excitable clouds of fruit flies. A dead dog was glued to the gas pump with mud. Fish eggs filled the bed of an abandoned old pick-up truck, laid there a week ago at the flood's apex. That was how it began. Syb and Maybe's first looting run. Entering the destroyed gas station in only their undies, grabbing toxic, flood-bleached racecar t-shirts and fishing hats. All the lighters and flashlights were ruined. Sybil picked up a cheap gas station whisky smeared in oil and caked in rotten leaves and carried it to the van. They took back roads, avoiding the highway, which was filled with National Guard Hummpers. They drove down service roads and past auto body shops with their insides pulled out. They passed hundreds of school buses up to their headlights in water. They passed a ruined coffee warehouse that stunk of 20 million liters of coffee brewed by a hateful sun. More dead dogs. Stalled trucks with the window fogged up and "help trapped inside" written back- wards in the grime. The first time No saw that he had to stop and check. Eventually Dr. No pulled into the parking lot of a mall with just a few abandoned cars, frozen in mud since 7:01 am, 6 days ago. By now their trio was suffering from heat-exhaustion-dehydration. They went searching for something to drink and some how to shed heat. There was a destroyed beauty salon. Weaves full of mud. There was a Japanese sushi place full of mud and dead fish. The grocery store, now a centimeter and some higher than the flood level, had greenish slime slowly trickling out its front door. The entire grocery store had been left to rot in 40-sumthing heat for 6 days. A complex ecosystem of maggots and flies, golf-ball-sized flying roaches, cat-sized rats, and feral-dog gangs developed. An unlikely pack of German shepherds, pit bulls, pugs, collies, and one orange-black cat blocked Sybil at the door, threatening as a single 12-dog-1-cat- shared-consciousness to chew her to death. Maybe gazed down the streets, which were under at least 50 centimeters of water. She could see a kilometer and a half away as good as binoculars, but to do it she had to stare and scrunch her face a lot. The water got deeper north and south of her. The roads above water were full of Guards. No said he would leave them there. He had sympath- etic, community-activist, black-panther-small-bizz- association contacts hidden around here somewhere, holding out, that he had to go find. He drove off and Syb and Maybe watched him go. The place looked deserted but every so often you heard voices 1 block away, saw peripheral shadows, inhaled live human pheremones steeped in adrenalin.