lootin and shootin

life is very different in the moments and days that follow the destruction of your home. i remember an incident after the first mudslide that destroyed our family’s house, (we lived through three major ones in the hills of los angeles). a mudslide had filled our entire house with water, my dad and brother nearly got buried (bret shot some super 8 of it i wonder where it is) and my mom and i nearly got killed by a downed live power line that i stepped on, slogging through a 6 foot pile of very wet and very fresh mud. i was 13.
we were driving in the toyota truck trying to get out of the neighborhood while we could, because there were only two roads out, and one was completely blocked by the aforementioned 6 foot deep slide. some of LAPD’s finest had a roadblock set up at the other end of the road, and as we pulled up they told us that we couldn’t go out that way either. the road on the other side, though not blocked, was not safe according to the officers. they were blocking our only route of egress from a much more dangerous situation.
my dad floored it around the barricade. the spinning rear wheels of the truck splattered a bunch of mud on one of the cop’s uniforms and they all started yelling angrily about sending us the drycleaning bill. my dad yelled at the cops to fuck off. they were yelling about arresting him. we just kept driving.
i remember this tonight, (probably not exactly the way that it happened), because i was reminded of it when i read how “disappointed” some people are with the looting that’s going on in louisiana and mississippi. when you have just lost everything, your world is in complete chaos, and you are in survival mode, things like obeying orders from police officers, or not going into the market to get food because there is no person to take your money and that’s illegal…a lot of the rules we usually abide by don’t have much weight in that situation.
man, that is one fucked up place right now.