LaurieWrites

New Orleans, this year

"I never forgot New Orleans." 

                                                                              ~ Anne Rice

I went to New Orleans for the first time almost five years ago, in May, 2006, just shy of a year after Katrina. 

People told me I wouldn't get it, that it was such a shame I hadn't been there pre-storm. I wouldn't be able to know it the same as those who had been there before the levees broke, before the SuperDome went far beyond football, before images on a loop of people on rooftops and the National Guard. 

Maybe not, certainly not, but all I could say to them after I got back was that when I went there, my heart changed. I don't know exactly how much or in what direction it shifted or what difference it makes, but in some fundamental way I have never been the same beyond the usual way you're not the same after the chemical shift that travel and new experience cause.

I remember flying in low over the tops of RVs attached to houses that I'd see just minutes later from the cab on the highway. The water lines were unbelievable. The still-ravaged neighborhoods. Everything on the television was real. 

And when I made it downtown, it was the people. The soul and pull of the people were realer than hurricane water. 

I went on a so-called "disaster tour" put on by a tourism company, because I was told not to go to certain areas alone and I generally trust the locals with a little help from the concierge. The guide was a hustler, but beyond that a man whose home was destroyed, who spoke his particular Cajun truth into a boxy microphone while a desolate block drove me to tears. 

If I'm honest, it was at that moment where my forehead hit the window and I wept silently into the glass that this city sprang through me like resurrection fern through cracked concrete. I never saw it coming. I don't know how you could. 

I knew that man's loss as much as I possibly could for an outsider at the end, as he punched the steering wheel and cursed the tourists who didn't tip him on his drop-off rounds through the Quarter. I prayed I'd given him enough. 

I go back at least once a year to this city now, lucky to have a friend with a house where I can stay, just up on higher ground. It is one of my favorite places in the world, some of my most comfortable streets to walk, music, food, vibe, air.

I get to go back tomorrow. 

I don't know if how I saw this place when I finally did is how I would have seen it pre-storm. Maybe, maybe not. I obviously can't say. But what I do know is that only New York lives in me when I'm not there like this place does. New Orleans is my heart and New York is my soul. New Orleans is my soul and New York is my heart, either way.

My pictures talk back and tell me I love it, that I see its very best side. 

And that's something I don't question. That's something no one else can know. My eyes are open to its challenges, to its darker edges, to the rough road many of its people walk.

But that's not all of it by a long shot. Thank God it survives, that it's still there, as water be damned it will never not be, not in general and not for me.

Head Like a Hole

It's my third week off and I am restless. I am also keyed up and ready to do something except I'm not sure what it is. There are too many loose ends and options right now and it is imperative that I remain calm. I am compulsively looking for freelance jobs which is taking up a great deal of my mental space and not helping me make the most of any kind of relaxation/down/woohoo I don't really have to go anywhere today time.

It's not going so poorly, actually, the making contacts part. I am just out of practice at quantifying my skills and experience because I've just been dawdling along doing a whole bunch of things with no pressure for the past five years and now here we are. Well, except for that whole journalism school thing where I had to justify every fact of my existence every single day for almost two years. Hey, yeah, come to think of it that was pretty stressful. And also I've been on deadline for something real or imaginary in my brain pretty much every minute of every day since 2002. I am not so much about the mental vacations.

So, okay. Scratch the no pressure. But, really, what can I say when people ask me what I can do? I can write things, a lot of things, effectively. I can speak coherently. I can help you figure things out, tell you what looks good where on your website or where all of your typos are, really quickly. I can take pretty pictures.

That is not specific enough, I'm afraid. And so I re-learn how to package this package that is me, and that makes me nervous because I'm constantly red-penning everything, especially myself, and I'm out of practice with resumes. I have watched some really terrible television. I go for the occasional walk. I try really  hard not to spend money, which, in the summer? Ugh. So I've been staying home a lot, in a house in a city that decided to skip May and head straight for August and our air conditioner is broken.

I did go to New York for a few days, on the Bolt Bus. That was really fun. I saw a really good, old friend who let me stay with her at her conference hotel and some newer blog friends and spent time kicking around the city. It felt good. I have pictures for months backed up or I'd show you some of the better ones, but here's my  new favorite bar near Union Square from my phone.

The bartender was standard issue no-nonsense New York pub but he talked about the oil spill and made me cry.

I can't really look at many of the pictures of that, speaking of which. I feel like I'm not witnessing but I have to really limit myself. I found myself calling up some of the images in my head while I was driving yesterday and it is hard to drive when I'm crying. I am unsettled by the state of the world in general. I don't know how you can't be. I want to write something for the Love the Gulf project (via DebontheRocks) but I'm having trouble finding the words. 

I want a new blog. I need to carve out a few days to understand SquareSpace.

Speaking of walking, which I believe I did up there somewhere, the exercise is going so-so and that has been the big come-to-Jesus this week. When my routine changes things tend to fall apart in that department. I had been going to kickboxing at L.A. Boxing three times a week for over a month. The scale wasn't really moving, although in either direction so that was almost okay, because I was loving it. It wasn't boring and I felt like I was getting back in some kind of shape, then I stopped working and one excuse led to another and there I was on Thursday night, blocked and afraid to go back because I knew it would be so difficult. I cursed myself because for the thousand-millionth time in my life I'd done it, I'd fallen off of an exercise schedule that was really working, that was making at least one part of my life feel in good, stable shape, and I'd blown it.

Stupid schedules. Stupid brain. Stupid stuff that I can't break through sometimes no matter how hard I try when the inertia takes over.

So I went back to the gym, doing the thing I know I need to do in this mind over matter situation and got in the car in spite of the fact that I didn't want to and didn't feel like it. It was hotter than it is in my house in there but I got my favorite bag in the corner and kicked out a lot of the stress and frustration and anxiety of the week. And I didn't die. I felt a little less stressed, even.

Look, face all sunshiny like the hand of HEAVEN blesses exercise.

Not really. Just flare.

I felt a lot weaker during and after class than I had felt even two weeks ago. I need to go back regularly. I need to recommit. The instructor looked at me quizzically but didn't ask me where I'd been and I still felt compelled to babble an excuse at the end, anyway, like he was my platoon leader or something. I take things too damned seriously. But how many times have I said that I can't stop because then it's so hard to start again, unlike other things that I can't stop if I tried forever? How many times has this happened? I know I'm strong. I know I have endurance. I know this isn't even entirely about my body, that my mind is so much better off when I'm burning off all of the nervous energy and feeling good about meeting physical challenges.

And yes, it is a kick to see my arms have some definition.

I am mad, I am so MAD that I've gained back 23 pounds, even though I know how hard it is for me to lose, I know how much harder it is, even, for me to maintain, no matter what the motivational police say. This is a difficult, difficult process for me. I know it. I know it. I know I can't get all negative and crazy about it or I'll stay on the downward spiral. The shame diet, as some idiot broadcaster said on the news the other night, does not work for me in any way. But still? Mad mad mad.

And then my sister and my mother reminded me of a race we'd been planning to do for awhile. It's tomorrow in Annapolis, with a bunch of our friends. It is a 10k that my mother and I -- at least -- will mostly walk, but it's a 10k anyway. My nurse practitioner (who is way better than any doctor I've ever had besides the one who fixed my face, by the way) said a few weeks ago that I should walk every day for 15 minutes just to remind myself that I was moving forward, or maybe just so I could say that I was. I haven't been following that direction either and I'm not sure I can make it all up in one day, though.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ten kilometers. Tomorrow. I don't even know how many miles that is.

But you're reading some ramblings of a sucker who's about to get into her car and drive to Annapolis, yeah you are.

On forgetting whether or not I ever told my blog that I danced to I'm Every Woman with Jane Fonda.

Seriously. 

I'm going through my photo archives for another day in a row, putting together some images for a friend of mine, and wow. The things you don't really forget but don't actively remember. Like this: 

That's my mother on the far right in this one. She looks like we all felt.

 

This is what happens when you follow Dylan McDermott into the W hotel in New Orleans because you figure that's where the party is because his stepmother just happens to be throwing it. And then somehow you end up in the party yourself (**coughpresspasscough**) standing a few feet away from an open bar and Rosario Dawson. 

 

 Dudes this is still funny, almost two years later.

 

That will never not be funny to me. That ain't no On Golden Pond. 

I have no idea what I said exactly to get us in those doors but I will never be sorry. Like Ferris said, life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. 

Whole set here. Fabulous trip. 

Day of the Dead

I spend time in the cemeteries every time I go to New Orleans. Lafayette No. 1 is right up the street from my friend's house in the Garden District, so it's easy to shoot there. I spent most of my time downtown on my August trip but I stayed out on St. Charles on my last night and day in town.

There are more in the set here, and in this one from the April trip, with shots of Lafayette No. 3,
downtown.

These places - their history and this way of remembering generations of a city - fascinate me. The mix of grief and joy is something so difficult to understand about how we leave the people we love behind, but as far as monuments go, I've not seen anyone do it better than New Orleans. I think you have to understand loss deeply in order to process it and represent it well, and it makes sense that the people here get it.

 

Gustav

Update: I volunteered to edit the Animal Rescue page on Andy Carvin's Gustav wiki. Please e-mail me at laurie@lauriewrites.com or find me on Twitter at @lauriewrites with any news you see about the pets and animals left behind in Louisiana and Mississippi. Thanks.

Hurricane Gustav is shaping up to be a Category 5 storm.

First of all, please God may it spare New Orleans.

Second of all, lots of people are blogging about it, with preparation and preemptive relief efforts. Please visit them and find a way to help, if you can. Even if you don't think you can because you're far away or don't have the means, even writing about it is very, very important. If anything was learned from Katrina (and my ignorance at the time was great, but not so much in the years since) it's that silence is a fatal action in this case.

Katrina recovery was a major theme of the early part of the week at the DNC and I find the timing of the RNC quite apt. If the world pays more attention to this than that event in St. Paul, it'll be a good thing whether the storm hits or not. And if it does hit, the question must be asked of the administration that this candidate is trying valiantly to distance himself from: WHAT IN THE HELL ARE YOU GOING TO DO DIFFERENTLY THIS TIME? And of the candidate, I might ask: What in the hell would YOU do?

Here are some links:
Gustav Resource Center (via @waynesutton on Twitter.)

Excellent headlines and updates from @jazzychad on Twitter.

Official government weather updates on Twitter: @GustavAlerts