Posted June 26, 2008
We returned early, early Monday morning, and the truth is, I haven't known where to start, what to say, how to sum it all up. I'm not sure I know even now. Really, how many different ways can I say, "today we worked on drywall" or "today I took a 16-hour bath in my own sweat".
Instead, I'll say, here I am, a week older if not wiser and I haven't a clue what the next step is. MY next step. Or I do, but don't know how to get there. Here I am, with a permanent black and ocher NOLA-shaped heart on my sleeve and all I can think these past few days back home is, "I don't want to be here."
It was the people I met, the people I barely got to know and may never see again, the woman at Mother's getting a good 5-minute kick out of my name being called repeatedly. Always, the city itself and how it gets in your bones and won't let go. It's been taking little bites of me since I was sixteen, roaming Bourbon intoxicated for the first time on much more than cheap booze, confused and eventually deeply hurt by something that started there the next year while trying to recapture the magic of the year before. It took me over ten years to get back, bitter finally diffused, left only with the sweet, sorrow and love.
This happened before, this clinging restlessness, when I moved back home after moving to L.A., the time before it became a more permanent situation. You think you're making the right decision, flight over fight, but your motivation turns out to be merely safety or fear, or both. So you take three months, or one, depending, and you sort this shit out, and get back out there. Yet what seemed merely exciting at 20, is a somewhat more serious issue at 30. But I've never been one to make highly responsible choices or to worry about age (though, lately, maybe I should. ya ha!), especially not when it feels like the Earth is a wet, flea-ridden dog, trying to shake us all off with earthquakes and storms, chewing the pests off with floods and fires. Apparently, we could all die tomorrow from a volcano long past its due date. So what the fuck, y'know.
And if I fully realized anything this past week, it's that I'm not a journalist and I don't fucking want to be. I can drop f-bombs, I can personalize, and I don't give a flying crap about demographics(human oughta just about cover it), angles, and being entirely objective. I can talk about my feelings and say things like, "New Orleans breaks my fucking heart and I love it, every dirty, mucked up, honeyed and hacked up corner of it" or "Today, I just needed to be alone for a few minutes. So I took the car under the guise of getting more bourbon and drove East on Claiborne, just drove and drove and drove with the music blaring and me crying because I couldn't find the fucking end to the destruction and I can't imagine living like this." But it's a lie, because I can.
New Orleans doesn't make sense. It's a city that shouldn't even exist and yet there it is, there it has been for a few hundred years, and there it damn well should be for a few hundred more, at least until the wet, mangy mutt shakes us all off entirely. All I know, is that before that happens, I want to have lived, loved, and helped others without fear or regret. And if that means scrambling at the last minute, giving up on a few things, and the ability to forget the whirling vortex of me-centric thinking to focus on something bigger, all the better. Right now, my only regret is that I took so long to realize how short a week, or a lifetime, really is.
Incidentally, the quote in the teaser is from the book 1 Dead in Attic by Chris Rose. Don't let the title fool you, like most things New Orleans, there are always many dualities, levels, contradictions.
The first batch of photos are here. These are just the digitals, the snapshots, the rest need to be developed.
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