Day 10 without power. Surviving and thriving in New Orleans.

 90’s with high humidity every day and your house never cools down enough to sleep comfortably at night. I’m now making deliveries of ice, food and other supplies around the neighborhoods, so much that everyone in three neighborhoods knows my truck on site and comes out when they here my 60’s rock music blasting like I’m some sort of free ice cream truck, which I am, only I give out ice, batteries, tarps, water, snacks, MRE’s and other goods all day. I’m also now acting as liaison between four different distribution hubs, all within a mile of each other, who refuse to cooperate directly or combine efforts due mainly to ego issues. Ridiculous. So I gotta play Henry-Fucking-Kissinger and make things work smoothly since I’m the sole independent mobile resource that any of them have to get supplies in and out. I leverage this power to make everyone play nice and share and move surpluses to shortage areas so that in the end, everyone in the neighborhoods gets what they need. I’m also the knowledge base of which greedy opportunists are moving from hub to hub, taking large amounts of supplies from all of them every day and doing God-only-knows what with it. We’ve got about a dozen such individuals I’ve had to put on a ban list and educate each of the hubs’ multiple volunteers about. I’m also the rapid response to these hubs for medical issues and disturbances and when not otherwise engaged I scrounge iced coffee by the gallon from the few places that are back open and deliver it to the hubs. All in all, I’m staying pretty busy.

In return, these groups are keeping me supplied with more than enough gasoline, food, batteries and anything else I might need, so I’m not complaining  I’ve created a pretty decent paying job for myself here in Barter-land and as much as I’m rooting for the power to come back on here, I’ll also be a bit sorry when it does. I’ve got a good thing going here and I’m actually turning a fair but respectful profit in surplus supplies in addition to having all of my needs met. The ironic thing is that each of these four hubs is openly anti-capitalist, running the gamut from Socialist to Anarchist, but they each have to rely to a large extent on me, a proud Capitalist, to get their work done and I’m making bank off of all of them.

Seems like there should be a lesson there somewhere.