Here it is 8am on a Saturday and we’re watching the (badly needed) rain and looking at what promises to be a pretty long day. I’d love to say I could loll around much of the day and watch football, but there’s work to do and I’m not much of a football slug anyway (though time for the Saints games is usually blocked out. We all have fatal flaws).

In reading the T-P this morning, part of this article jumped out at me. It’s from Rob Couhig, the former- mayoral-candidate-turned-mayoral-advisor….

“The city is beginning to move, but it’s not because of government. It’s because people who are here have decided: I’m going to make things happen because I live here,”

Ya THINK, Rob?

I’ve done quite a bit of walking around the French Quarter in the past week (looking for work, by the way — at least a lot of the restaurants are still reasonably healthy) ) and I could practically hear the sucking sound of small business having all the wind pulled out. It’s a lot the same on parts of Magazine St. and in other enclaves, where so many folks just can’t make it anymore. For the first time, this past week, I honestly wondered what life might be like elsewhere — an image I’ve been pushing wildly and rebelliously from my mind. As if I could afford to move anywhere anymore — TBK and I are now bound to this city without choice. We’re victims of our own stubbornness and our own belief that we can make a difference. Our bad, we know.

In our case, we’re trying to forge a partnership with an outfit up in Gonzales. We feel this can be mutually beneficial, keeping our business alive and injecting needed capital and cash to keep us in this house in Orleans Parish. In return, the partner gets new products to sell, some good marketers to sell them and some new markets to sell them in. Everyone wins, right?

We’re lucky in getting an opportunity too many others simply won’t get. I’m not saying it’s a done deal, either. But, even if it does work, Orleans Parish and the proud City of New Orleans are going to be losing badly needed revenue and yet another local business is going to be moving a little farther down the road. It’s only a couple of parishes, but our presence here would be residential only. This bothers me greatly. But you gotta do what you gotta do.

In the meantime, we’re still trying to patch together enough income to keep the lights burning. The midday part of the day will find us pitching our own products at the Uptown Langenstein’s. Tonight, you’ll find me working a kitchen shift at Dick & Jenny’s. Nice place. Good people. Come early. I’ll be the old, bearded guy in the kitchen, desperately and cantankerously trying to create something where, for too many, nothing exists anymore.