Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: The Political Lie, in reply to Alex Coleman,
I sometimes think they are not very honest people.
I would say that to their credit, they do seem to believe their own rhetoric.
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Hard News: Three months after, in reply to Russell Brown,
I imagine it's possibly how junkies feel coming down after an enormous high and not being able to get another hit again! We are in the cortisol situation now, which is the nasty side effect of too much adrenalin.
I'm wary of looking to make my brief impressions the story, but I got a really strong sense of the shock and subsequent silence in the city.
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Hard News: The Political Lie, in reply to Steve Barnes,
I would call bullshit on that. The first Australians are still having their land grabbed for the benefit of the powerful.
I think you're talking about quite different things.
The neolibs are always implying that we'd become more like Australia by surrendering regulation and taking a brutal approach toward labour relations. This simply isn't what Australia has done.
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Hard News: Three months after, in reply to Sacha,
That may count as disabled. It's a perfectly natural part of ageing.
Yes.
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Muse: Hooray for Wellywood (Really!), in reply to Craig Ranapia,
OK, I'm going to be offline until late tomorrow morning but would like to thank you all for the restrained (for the most part) and thoughtful discussion.
And thanks in turn for wading in.
The swill that's landed in my e-mail is quite another matter, but has been dealt with.
Ugh. I don't seem to get the hatemail any more -- even though you, Emma and the saintly Dr Haywood do. It's as if they eventually ran out of puff.
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Hard News: Three months after, in reply to Isabel Hitchings,
Those who are merely miserable would still benefit from support and a listening ear but, as things improve, so will they. The truly depressed may not even notice things getting better.
I worry about the people who were already vulnerable, and who are over-represented in some of the worst-affected suburbs. Think munted roads and paths, emptied-out neighbourhoods and closed shops and supermarkets and consider how it must be for, say, disabled people.
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My friend is reading the thread:
Just went through to the link. Wow, that certainly got a lot of response! I'm quite chuffed to think you consider me "tough" btw :-)) Please reassure the poor chap(?) who thinks I'm clinically depressed and need counselling that I'm not that dire - Tuesday was just a really bad day when I wrote that. And as you and others have commented after that post, it's how so many people here are feeling and it's not an internal, clinical depression it's just a natural human response to having to deal with too much uncertainty, change and (the real biggie) the come down from the adrenalin rush we had not once, but twice in a six month period. I imagine it's possibly how junkies feel coming down after an enormous high and not being able to get another hit again! We are in the cortisol situation now, which is the nasty side effect of too much adrenalin. Actually, it kind of reminds me of the simmering anger post 1999 and 2007.... but a thousand times worse!
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Hard News: Three months after, in reply to Sacha,
Do you think Council/CERA might be up for this?
Great idea. Contact them and suggest it. City won’t be productive or liveable unless people’s immediate emotional wellbeing is addressed.
Yes. The idea of mental healthcare on a mass scale seems right to me. I got a strong sense of how pervasive the shock is.
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Hard News: Three months after, in reply to 3410,
I’m not surprised. I honestly think she needs real help. She probably thinks she doesn’t have the right to ask for help because others are having a harder time, but this sounds like someone who’s on the edge.
But this is the thing: there are tens of thousands of people feeling this way in Christchurch. My friend is tough, intelligent and has a job and a house and friends. I dread to think how many people are just falling out of sight.
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A friend of mine read the blog, and sent the following to a list we're both on. She doesn't want her name on it, because she worries it'll disturb her friends. But it's something that needs to be heard:
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It's three months on, and in that time nothing has changed. The Red Zone in the CBD is still fenced off. We, as residents of Christchurch, are not allowed within the Red Zone to see what it looks like - only the vacuous Rachel Hunter, meathead Russell Crowe and other "celebs" get to wing in from afar, flit around for photo ops in front of the now iconic ruins (though we've only seen them on TV and in photos), and then bugger off again into the sunset after making the appropriate mumblings of sympathy.Absolutely nothing seems to be happening in central Christchurch, nobody will make the calls to demolish buildings that just sit there on various angles of lean, with broken windows like poked out eyes, in an area that seems more akin to an abandoned movie set than the centre of our second biggest city. CERA seems as hamstrung as its predecessor, whatever that was. There seems to be a plethora of overseas architects making out-there suggestions at how we can rebuild our city, to be some awesome statement like a phoenix from the ashes - but edgier. Give me a break, you halfwits. We need a city rebuilt, not a bloody architectural showcase.
What these celebs and "experts" don't get to do is sit in endless queues of traffic on the few main roads that still service the city, even having changed my work times so that I leave at 7.30am and start the drive home at 4.30pm does not help avoid the gridlock that is now the northwest.
The last few times I have been to the supermarket - and I've been to three different ones within 5km of my house in the last month (and I'm lucky they are that close to me, as some people have to drive to the other side of town) - I can't get in there because the car park is full, due to all the people in this city now having to shop on this side of town. It irritates me that they are on my side of town, and at the same time I feel a deep shame for having that feeling. But I still have it.
Because every day now is a bloody battle. Even in the weekends. You get up extra early just to battle the traffic. You get to work and start doing something, and then wonder what the bloody point is - assuming you had anything more than 5 hours sleep due to aftershocks or just the inability to relax and get to sleep these days. You can't even go down and get a coffee in Lincoln now without having to queue for 10 minutes because there are an extra 400 displaced people from the CBD now working in various makeshift offices and previously empty spaces in the once sleepy township. On a Saturday it now takes two hours to run an errand that previously would have taken you 15 minutes, because the streets are still gridlocked, there are no carparks even at the mega centres, and when you do get in there the queue at the tills is about 20 people long.
Every day is the same. There is nothing to feel joyful about. Nothing to look forward to. Nowhere to go to do all the things you used to take for granted. I used to love running up on the Port Hills. I'm too scared to go there now after all the rock falls. You think about taking a break away somewhere, but know the whole time you're away you'll be worrying that there will be another "big one" and you are away from your family and friends. You see your parents and your friends' parents lose their confidence, they find it hard to make decisions, they are forgetful, they look perpetually worried and tired and seem to have aged an extra 10 years. My father won't go near town because he gets too upset at the devastation. Children don't run and shriek with delight anymore, they are constantly looking for their parents and keeping an eye on them so as not to be too far away in case it happens again. Relationships are strained, some friends are still waiting to get into their business premises because they are in the shadow of the Grand Chancellor, others are doing battle with Fletchers about the repairs to their homes.
Every sudden loud noise still makes us jump. The sound of helicopters brings back the memories of the first week after Feb 22. Getting to Saturday sports is like preparing for an assault on Everest, although at least we don't have to cart drinking water in from out of the city now. But it still takes twice as long to travel across town to sports grounds, because the roads are closed, there are detours, and there is the traffic. And the dust. I forgot the dust. It's on everything. When you drive around town your car gets coated in a fine layer of it. The dashboard gets a fine layer of it. Even plants in my garden (in the outer northwest of the city) get a fine layer of masonry dust on them when the wind blows from the east.
The roads are still "munted" around the river and on the eastern side of town. Raw sewage is still going into the Avon and Heathcote rivers, and the estuary. It stinks over there. They have been repairing one sewer on Ferry Rd for over a month now. There are no petrol stations or supermarkets open in the worst affected areas, and it may be another 12 months before they do. Which means another 12 months of everyone being on my side of town, and more endless congestion.
Which may make Aucklanders laugh, but at the end of the day there are some things you do in your daily life that are deliciously subconscious - driving to work via a familiar route in a standard amount of traffic is one of those. When it changes, when you have to vary your travel time and route and navigate traffic that is five times heavier than you used to drive through, it's stressful. Because it's just one more thing on top of the million other things you are now having to deal with, and it's just unbelievably tiring.
The damage to my place (negligible that it is in comparison with so many others) won't be seen by EQC until probably December this year. So that means I have to put up with a garage door that threatens to take my head off because one arm is bent and broke the spring in the Boxing Day quake. It's great fun on dark, wet nights. Add to that the header tank in the roof space that has shifted slightly and occasionally starts leaking because the ballcock is positioned on the now lower side of the tank so it sometimes doesn't shut the water off until the level is much higher than the overflow pipe and it starts spilling out onto the ceiling and trickling out the man hole cover into the hallway. It's so much fun to be going up a ladder at midnight to try and bend the arm of the ball cock, all the time praying that there isn't going to be another big quake while you're up there with your torch.
Ah, torches. I've slept with my torch and transistor radio under my pillow since Sept 4th. I'm not sure I will ever not sleep with them there. Even when I left town at Easter. I have no doubt I will bring them to Auckland with me in October.
There are days I literally feel like I have lost the will to live because the enormity of what we've been through and still have to go through is just too much. You're constantly tired, you get angry that nothing appears to be happening three months down the line, then that makes you tired all over again because it takes a lot of energy to get angry these days. Despite the fact we've had warm, sunny weather the last few weeks people are getting really bad colds and coughs in much larger numbers and for far longer than we would have got even in the middle of a really wet, cold winter. I hate to think what it's going to be like in July.
And the hardest thing is that you can't complain. Because everyone is in the same, or worse, boat. I didn't lose my home, I never had to use a port-a-loo, my water isn't heavily chlorinated now, my neighbourhood still looks the same as it ever did. But we simply can't deal with other people's stress anymore, so you have to suck it up and take it, and offer support to those that need it the most. And all the time we just wait for the next really big one. Because I defy anyone who is still in Christchurch to say that it's not in the back of their mind every day, all day.
One thing did make me smile today though, and it was a comment from someone who said "but at least we won't have a Wellywood sign!". Ha.