Author: Dane Lowell
Submitted by: redadmin

Chapt. 163 – 2082 words
Columns :: The real tragedy of New Orleans

MOSCOW, September 1, 2005 -- Comments:   Ratings:

New Orleans: nature’s first big hit
New chapter in Zhorik fairy tale
Olga pays me in advance and
Zhorik heads to St. Pete
But Sergei stays here
Cash crisis ends at last



MOSCOW, September 1, 2005 -- Katrina’s savaging of New Orleans is leading the TV news broadcasts here, and this is one time the newscasters don’t seem to be exaggerating.

Apparently it’s also being discussed on the streets of Moscow. My student Anton, for instance, just informed me that he heard there were sharks in the streets of New Orleans! Considering the fact that the water is coming from Lake Pontchartrain, I’m rather disinclined to accept his news at face value.

In any case, it’s a horrible tragedy – apparently the worst “natural” disaster in U.S. history! New Orleans, America’s French casbah, where anything goes – or went. “The most fun city in America.” I’ve been there twice. I know I had a good time, ’cause I came back with the clap both times.

The Associated Press says Katrina has turned “one of America’s most charming cities into a vast cesspool” afloat with toxic waste, raw sewage¸ coffins – and human bodies.

Will New Orleans ever be again the charming, romantic, no-holds-barred paradise of sin that I remember or has nature done to the “Big Easy” what terrorists – with or without the complicity of the U.S. government – did to Twin Towers? My friend Tom Robinson likens it to “Nature’s Pearl Harbor.”

Why, O Lord, why hast thou forsaken me? The city cries. And then we discover the answer: New Orleans is a city that should never have been built! It was a disaster waiting to happen. It’s below sea level and to keep the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain from flooding it, their conquerors built a complex system of levees and dykes and banks and a network of pumps that go night and day every time it rains!

Why this superhuman effort to conquer nature? Because New Orleans was such a perfect location for a waterfront trading post and shipping port. There was a lot of money to be made here. It was a gold mine for commerce.

But we have discovered too late, the New York Times reports, that the landscape of South Louisiana depends on the very floods they snuffed out to build their port city. The earth the city stands on is comprised of loose Mississippi River silt which firms up and sifts down as the silt compacts.

Only regular floods of muddy water can replenish the sediment and keep the landscape above water. But the Rube Goldbergian engineering projects shoot the river's revitalizing sediment straight past the city and out into the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico for away from where it’s really needed.

Although early travelers realized the stupidity of building a major port on shifting mud in an area regularly ravaged by storms and disease, “the opportunities to make money overrode all objections,” according to historians.

And now geologists tell us the entire delta region is sinking, with the sea rising around it at the rate of a third of an inch per year, 10 times the average rate globally

What really needs to happen is to let the Mighty Mississippi do what comes naturally and return to periodically flooding the delta of which New Orleans is a part. But this would destroy the great port city, and there’s already too much invested to cut and run.

Sort of like America in Iraq.

They’ll have to keep rescuing and restoring and pumping until the next hurricane wipes it all out again. And again. And again.

Because Katrina may only be “a terrifying warning of worse to come,” say global warming specialists. Future hurricanes will likely be as violent or worse because the added heat in the Gulf of Mexico from global warming is as explosive to hurricanes as gasoline on a fire. The heat rachets up the power and might to awesome dimensions, as we saw with Katrina.

Katrina began as “a relatively small hurricane that glanced off south Florida,” only to be “supercharged with extraordinary intensity by the relatively blistering sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico,” notes one contributor to the EnergyResource web site.

This “natural” catastrophe is in fact not natural at all, he notes: “What we are seeing in these catastrophes is the result of our tampering with natural systems.”

The more global warming advances, the hotter become the surface waters of the world’s seas, and the more violent grow the hurricanes.

But what does all this have to do with Russia? Russia’s on the same globe, and the same profligate burning of fossil fuels, in warming Russia too, is in fact starting to melt the permafrost in Siberia (Chapt. 159), releasing methane in enormous quantities to heat up the frying pan even quicker.

And who do we have to thank for America’s latest contributions to this process? Clue: He sits in the White House except when he’s dodging Cindy Sheehan on long, long vacations, and he still insists global warning is only a theory concocted by pointy-headed liberals.

Note to Dubya: You can only dick around with the forces of nature so long. I hope you’ve enjoyed your turn at bat.

Because nature always bats last, and she just had her first big hit.


My – er, so to speak – Zhorik fairy tale continues to write itself, and the ending toward which we’re moving just keeps looking happilier and happilier. Dare we whisper “ever after”?

When he again came to bed at 5:30 this morning, he lay on his stomach. I gently massaged his back as usual, and he soon turned onto his back to give his stomach, tits and belly button equal time. After my unrestrained fondling spree of the last two days, I decided I’d give him a break and not press my agenda this morning.

After a few minutes he turned on his side away from me in the fetal position. I snuggled up behind him and put my arm around him and let my hand rest on his chest. Despite my resolve of a few minutes earlier, I decided to go exploring and see what would happen.

I found it right away. It wasn’t hard, but it was identifiable. When there was no flinching from Zhorik, I began massaging through his shorts. Then my thumb wormed its way through his fly and I continued massaging, with my thumb on the top of the naked shaft and my fingers on the dorsal surface through his shorts.

It began growing bigger and harder. And harder. When he obligingly rolled onto his back. I inserted my full hand into his shorts and put my fingers around his fully erect dick. I gently massaged the staff and the head, then began jerking gently. I pulled his shorts down so that his entire stiff cock was exposed. I fondled and massaged his cock, then took his balls into my hand.

He didn’t move, but there was no question that he was fully awake, and that he was aiding and abetting!

I began jerking. Bone stiff, it was slimmer than the twins’ and probably not as long, but oh so beautiful and responsive.

I lifted my head off the pillow and brought my mouth to his dick. I let my tongue slide down over the head, and then massaged it with my lips. My mouth slid halfway down the shaft. I could taste the pre-cum!

I shifted and deep-throated with two or three thrusts. Suddenly, he began pulling away and drawing his knees up. He rolled away from me onto his stomach.

I think he was on the verge of coming and wasn’t ready psychologically to acknowledge to himself that he had been sucked off by a queer, so he “pulled out.”

I kissed his back. “Thank you, honey,” I said, and kissed him again. One second later my 6:45 alarm rang. So I probably wouldn’t have had time to nurse him to a climax anyway! But a few seconds later in the bathroom, it only took a minute to nurse myself – the third time in four days for which he has provided the bountiful inspiration.

So what’s the scorecard now? Well, let’s see: He first let me massage him to orgasm through his shorts; then he acknowledged it was fun; now he’s let me pull his shorts down, play with his naked dick and balls, and deep throat him.

When I was teaching Methodist Sunday School to a group of teeny-boppers in Orlando 40 years ago, Pontiac had just come out with it’s gas-guzzling muscle car, the Grand Prix, obviously named after the French auto race. One of my wide-eyed, foreign-language-impaired, nubile little hotties repeatedly told me how much she was liking the Grand Pricks!

“Me too, honey,” I would agree, eyes rolling in my head. Hey! I wasn’t going to enlighten her about the object of her infatuation. Besides, maybe she was telling the truth!

Another time in the ’70s, my ex, Jim, and I were driving out Wash., DC’s 14th St. extended, an area of slums, violence, one-story glass storefronts, and weird religions. One plate glass store-front church proclaimed itself “THE ONE-NESS OF JUJU.

“The O-Nay-Ness of Juju,” Jim laboriously articulated as we passed before we both burst out laughing at his mistake.

So in my quest of the o-nay-ness of Zhorik, only the Grand Pricks is left: the convulsion of orgasm deep in my throat and the massaging of what’s left of my tonsils in his post-coital spasming.

It’s got to be only a matter of time.


Former Alfa-Bank student Olga called me Monday wanting to start lessons again. We agreed to one hour a week, starting yesterday morning. To my utter surprise, as we were winding up the lesson, she announced that she had decided to have two lessons a week and handed me $ 300 in advance for the first ten!

My immediate thought: Zhorik can go to St. Peterburg after all!

Even though when I got home about 9:20 he had only had a little over two hours’ sleep, I jumped on top of him!

“Honey, you can go to Peter!”

I knew he’d be happy, but I was still afraid he might be harboring guilt, anger, or resentment from the what had happened between us just a little over three hours earlier, and that his gratefulness would be begrudging.

Instead, he was ecstatic. He kissed me on the lips – many times during the day!

But when I went to the train station to see him off on the 10 p.m. train, he again recited the mantra: “I love you, Dane – but only as a grandfather. We’ll talk about what happened when I get back.”

How many times have I heard that, and how many times have I ignored it, and how many times has he let me go just a little further just this once?

“But it is fun, honey,” I countered.

What I really want to do is suck him off just one time. If after that, he decides he doesn’t want to play boy-toy anymore, I’ll bow out. But I don’t think that will be the script. He is, after all, still 18 and an orgasm is an orgasm and something for which an 18-year-old will usually lay aside his macho convictions -- at least long enough to come.


Impetuous, volatile Sergei has changed his mind again – at least for a day or two – and says he’s going to stay and live with me and not go back to Stavropol. He doesn’t want to see anybody from Svetlograd or Stavropol for at least two years.

“What’s happened?” I asked Zhorik yesterday evening.

“I don’t know.”

“Is he pissed off at people in Stavropol and Svetlograd?”

“I guess so.”

“How do you feel about him living here?”

“I don’t care one way or the other. It’s okay.”

“Honey, I think we have to make up our mind about Moscow or Stavropol independent of Sergei. He changes his mind too often.”

“I’ve already told him that we’re staying here until I finish the university.”

Okay. So that’s settled.


My money crisis is over. In addition to Olga’s 300 bucksi, I got $ 400 from British Forum yesterday and will get another $ 300 tomorrow. I still owe Katz about $ 75, but he’ll take that out of next month’s Golf editing fees. School #69 owes me about $ 300 for teaching I did in July, and my vacationing students will be returning next week. English Exchanges owes me about $ 200 for some editing, and to top it off, Long Seryozh came by last night and paid me the $ 70 he owed me.

I’ll finish paying Rod and Nadya next week and the crunch will be over. No more loans ever again except the one I’ve already promised Yegor in January.

Unless….No! This is absolutely, positively final!