Keith Pyburn\r\n1/23/08\r\n\r\n\r\nSelf Destruction\r\n\r\n\r\n My life in the summer before hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana was one filled with effortless happiness. I had just purchased my first house in old Metairie, I had an incredible summer job, and a really good relationship. The summer before Katrina was one of the happiest periods of my life. I was really just enjoying life too much to really comprehend what could and did happen. I remember the night and the moment that I realized that this storm was going to hit. It was the Friday night before Katrina hit, and I was at a bar with a couple of friends and I remember thinking about how the school would shut down for a few days and I could have a long weekend. This is really an immature thought process, but all of the other storms that I have lived through did not really cause any major damage and they had not affected me or my family directly.\r\n\r\n I left with my girlfriend on the Saturday afternoon before Katrina hit. I went to Tampa, Florida with her where she attended school, and with UNO canceling classes for a few day, I could help her move in and wait the storm out there and have a little vacation. My thoughts about the storm were still not on any level of concern. Around the second or third day of being in Tampa, I lost contact with my parents who had gone to Baton Rouge where my brother had a house and attends LSU. I would receive most news reports from CNN and started to get an idea of what was going on, but I didn\'t really have a real good idea of the devastation. When I saw footage of the looting and the military mobilization that was taking place I started getting an idea of how bad the situation was. I finally got in touch with my parents, and one of the first things that my father said to me was that me and my girlfriend might want to think about getting a place together up there and that I should enroll in a school in the area. I was planning on graduating that year as was my girlfriend and then attending law school in New Orleans, and she would move back to Louisiana and attend graduate school and live with me. After one week in Tampa my mother said that she desperately wanted to be with her and that she would want me to enroll at LSU.\r\n\r\n I flew to Houston, cause there were no commercial flights to Baton Rouge or New Orleans. My father picked me up at the airport, and he looked destroyed. I had only seen this look on my father once before, and that is when his mother died. He came up and hugged me, which was strange cause we don\'t really hug.(not cause we don\'t like each other. We are just men.). On the way from Houston to Baton Rouge I could see all the charter buses bringing people to Houston and all military vehicles were heading the direction we were going. My father filled me in on how miserable Baton Rouge was and that my brothers house had no power and hardly any water. He also explained to me that he was quite sure that his house and my house had been flooded. Both homes are in Old Metairie. I didn\'t believe him due to the fact that when it floods in our neighborhood, their house doesn\'t get water while the neighbors do. At first I thought that going to LSU was just going to be one big party and that I could have a huge senior year with all of my friends that attended LSU. Tailgating parties and all where I wouldn\'t have to drive back to New Orleans with a hangover after game days. I couldn\'t have been any stupider. Baton Rouge was hell. I remember going out to bars where friends worked at and having a great time and I would drink till two in the morning and go to late night parties, but I would always see adults in these notorious college binge drinking pits, and they would have a look of complete desperation, anger, and sadness that I couldn\'t understand it. After being in Baton Rouge for four days, my father said that just me and him would try to go to my parents house to see what was left and what we could salvage. This trip would come to change my life in a terrible way.\r\n\r\n We had to park about 6 blocks away from my parents house due to the fact that the water was too high to drive a car any closer. We ran into a doctor who lives across the street from us with his wife. The doctor had waders on and I had hip boots, so we found a small aluminum boat on Metairie road and carried my father and his wife in it. The destruction in the house was unimaginable. What hadn\'t been submerged, had mold on it. It was not at all what I expected. Me and my father grabbed a few items that my mother wanted and decided that there was too much else that we could do at that moment. While I was carrying my father out in the boat he asked me to take a picture of him in the boat in front of the house and he did it with a look of amusement on his face. As we were heading back to Baton Rouge I asked him how could he have that type of look on his face, and he responded that they were just possession and that his mind still worked fine, so he could obtain these things again. I wish that this attitude had been instilled in me, but about 20 minutes outside of Baton Rouge I became overcame with anger and disgust.\r\n\r\n While in a parking lot of a Rite Aid in Gonzales, Louisiana, I lost myself. My father was getting supplies for us to clean ourselves off with, and I started yelling and hitting the car. Remember this exact feeling kind of scares me to this day. I have been in fights, and I have had anger in my life before, but I have not ever experienced rage like this. The totality of the storm and the life that I had just lost hit me completely in that instant. When I got back to my brothers place, I nearly killed my brother because he made some smart remarks to me. I instantly left and started drinking. After two days of this behavior, me and my father came to the conclusion that staying in Baton Rouge wouldn\'t be the best thing for me. I moved to my uncle\'s house in Covington, that he no longer lived in. It was quiet house that was on a golf course, but was really too big for me to stay in alone. For the next month I started to travel around the south the see friends in various cities, but really it was nothing more than excessive drinking and self loathing. I began ignoring my girlfriend and cheating on her. I didn\'t really think that she understood what was happening in Louisiana, even though she was from here and her family had suffered as well. It was me that didn\'t understand other people, as I began engulfed in my self and self loathing. I forced her to break up with me nearly three months after the storm had hit, at the time I really didn\'t care about it, but I didn\'t blame her, I was a completely different person than the man that she fell in love with. I dropped out of school that fall semester and began working with a contractor on the demolishing of the first floor of my parents house. I soon became a supervisor for migrant workers at my parents house and other homes that had hired this contractor. I worked scarcely, at best. My drinking and other self destructing acts had truly taken priority in my life. I moved back to New Orleans in December after the storm and got a condo in the Warehouse district, thanks to my father. Someone had quickly bought up my house which had been completely devastated with nothing to salvage. I only returned to my house once after the storm, as it reminded me of the life that I had lost. I went back to school in the spring, but really I would only take a class or two. My drinking began to take a massive toll on my body and mind state as I would sometimes lay in bed all day and only get up to grab a beer. All thoughts of law school and graduation were non existent. I continued on this trend of self destruction and self loathing until the spring semester of 2007. I took an internship with the Orleans public defenders office as an investigator and assistant to various attorneys. \r\n\r\n I feel ashamed of myself for how I acted years after the storm. My blight from the storm was far from the worst. I would see and still see so many people that had harder roads than me, and they persevered to and triumphed. I plan on graduating this semester and hopefully attending law school next fall. I have regained joy in my life, but I still have an overwhelming feeling of disgust that I can not shake despite my best efforts. I realize now that it is not the storms fault that I folded and became a miserable person. I used the storm as an excuse for my regression, instead of using it as a challenge like so many people did and achieve greater goods. I have admiration for these people and I hope to achieve like them. I believe that I\'m heading towards it, but I still have vices. One thing that I do know is that I will continue trying.\r\n