(Sounds like an Elton John song parody, the subject line.)

I wrote to a friend in New Orleans to invite him and his wife to come stay with us in the hills. We’re going to get a direct hit, but we live on high ground, and there’s no flooding around us. He responded:

We’re going to hunker down and cook seafood, in case the generator fails and the freezer goes. It’s shaping up to be a pretty routine storm – the kind we wouldn’t have paid much attention to before Katrina. But we’ve all got PTSD now, and though this is a lesser storm than Gustav, we’re jittery with all those maps showing N.O. as the target. Realistically, tornados are the risk, and that risk is not much worse here than anywhere south of about Jackson.

The problem is that when we evacuate, the government won’t let us back in after the storm passes. Sometimes it takes days – that made sense post-Katrina, but not for the relatively minor events since then. We’re overstocked with pro-bidness Republican politicians who scream about individual rights and private property, then as soon as there’s a storm, they all become nanny-state Democrats, telling us that we can’t come home because there might not be electricity and we might have to sweat like people did for the past million years.

But of course, southern nanny-state officials have weapons, so they blockade all the roads, threaten to arrest anyone who walks off of their property, and treat returning citizens like potential terrorists. Evacuating is one of those the-cure-is-worse-than-the-disease deals for all but the worst storms.

I guess another term for “southern nanny-state officials” is “fascists.”

Yeah, this storm’s got me a little tense. I better not lose cable. I need the distraction.

I told him that was an amazingly tense reaction, and asked him if I could blog it. He responded:

Good grief that was a tense email from me!  Yeah, blog it. It’s a pretty accurate map of emotional landscape right now. Seriously, I’ve been through at least a dozen storms like this one. But they feel different now. Oddly, Rita brushed us here and did moderate damage, but that was so soon after Katrina that my emotional roux was not yet done cooking. But now the adrenaline gumbo is … Okay, now I’m worked up again. Got to go bring some stuff inside.