Excuse me for borrowing the title of this entry from Outback Steakhouse. No, I don’t eat there — but a billboard I saw on I-10 someplace in Florida yesterday made me think of the slogan and how appropriate it is these days for those of us who live here.

TBK and I have spent the last couple of days on our sailboat in Panama City. We had to go over that way anyway to take care of a few things, so we figured we might as well make a mini-vacation out of it. We hadn’t left South Louisiana since late March, so we figured the break would be good for us.

But I gotta say that it’s Just……Freaking……Weird to go back to someplace in the Real World anymore. Things are so clean Out There. Streets are smooth. Trash is picked up. There seems to be some kind of organization to things. Traffic lights work. On the other hand, food is bland. The coffee’s weak. There’s sooo much country music on the radio. And there’s all these damn rules to follow — no smoking, no alcoholic beverages past this point, no dumping, no parking, no loitering, no stopping, no how, no way, no, no, a thousand times no.

All this leads me to wonder how suited we New Orleanians are to living anywhere else anymore. I mean, our city was broken in so many ways before the storm — but there was real fun in the dysfunction. These days, leaving South Louisiana is like going into this soulless Pleasantville — where all these kids get on all these school buses and yards are mowed and hedges are trimmed and rules are followed and sidewalks are flat and it’s just understood everything is going to work. The boredom would kill me.

However — one rule IS being enforced these days in New Orleans. You can’t turn left off Magazine onto Jackson. I got a ticket Thursday morning for doing so. I make the turn and a female cop at the Shell station holds up her hand and motions me to stop. Who knew? But she called me “baby” a couple times while writing out the ticket and argued with me briefly when I told her I was 52. “Nuh-uh, baby — you ain’t no fiddy-too.”

Thanks, dawlin’. I got a ticket, but you made my day.