This BBQ Thang has been keeping me pretty busy lately, averaging about 11-12 hours a day M-F. I could easily work Saturdays and Sundays too, given all the construction and deconstruction going on in the Lakeview area. But while the money would be good, I figure it’s best to keep to some kind of regular schedule and to take weekend breaks to step back a bit. It’s schizophrenic enough five days a week, living here on “The Island,” then having to go face the moonscape each day. But things are improving.

I’ve spent the last couple of months parked on neutral ground in Lakeview, selling BBQ to the workers and to the increasing numbers of campers who’ve come back to work on their houses and businesses. Things are a long way from even resembling normalcy, but day-to-day improvements are easy to see when you park in the same place every day. The Whitney Bank near Canal Blvd and Harrison is about to reopen, once they get phone service. Dolly’s Deli and The Bulldog have been open for a while, serving limited menus, and there are some other small businesses slowly beginning to peek their heads out of the ground like prairie dogs.

My customers are mostly the contractors, though each day brings a few more neighborhood workers and/or residents weary of driving out Veterans to stand in line for 90 minutes or paying $20 for lunch in the FQ. And I gotta say these out-of-state contractors, for all the bad rep they get, are generally a good group of folks. They might not know the traffic rules and they might be in it for the money, but this city would be hurting a lot more than it is if they weren’t here. And so many of them ARE local folks (or close by — like Houma, Hammond, etc). The guys who are most fun to watch are the Mastec dudes — who set utility poles and similar work. Most hail from Minnesota and Wisconsin and they think it’s freaking summer vacation down here, with highs in the low 60s. During lunch, they pull out footballs and golf clubs and all kinds of things on neutral ground and really enjoy themselves for the full hour. They talk funny, but hey — ain’t this the home of talking funny anyway?

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5. Living “over there”