Some things you don't forget, images that become emblematic of a certain time. 9/11 easily tops the list, but I left downtown with the rest of the evacuees knowing I'd be home soon. I was in Shelbyville, Kentucky when Katrina made landfall two years ago today. I was at my Auntie Dorothy's, her son Danny is the guy who took the photos of me on the business card you see on the sidebar. Now, I know that house so well I can maneuver in the dark, but its still surreal watching a different television, seeing different views from outside kitchen windows. Tuning out Geraldo Rivera describing the flooding as a portion of "Dante's Inferno." The dick that he is. The one other time anything of import (at least to me and all Chicagoans) was when I was in Arvada, a suburb of Denver in the spring of 1992. I was at the Little Bookshop of Horrors, Tomi Lewis (who sadly died from breast cancer a few years later), is here posing with my first "book dump," my name spelled Wan-ye by mistake, just as Ashley did when she was younger. Ed Bryant showed me a copy of the Rocky Mountain News. Richard Speck was dead of a heart attack, having outlived his victims by a quarter of a century. After Gacy, Speck was the city's biggest cock-knocker. He was the guy that made us lock our doors and not sleep on the back porch on hot nights. The strangest thing in that headline is seeing "Illinois prison," as if I was in a place I might never go back to. I felt detached for the rest of what should have been a momentous weekend for me, as Roadkill Press (run by Doug & Tomi Lewis) had also just published FOR YOU, THE LIVING. I felt desensitized with Katrina, because I knew more about New Orleans from James Lee Burke novels and two visits for conventions too long ago to admit to. Yet, there was the strangeness, the couch not being mine, my border collie not there to pet. I took Greyhound home a few days later and the rain from Katrina followed Interstate 65 all the way to Crown Point, Indiana. I still mourn The Big Easy....Wayne
