Just wondering….
…if anyone else has met as many seriously screwed-up folks as I’ve met in the past two years.
By “screwed up,” I don’t mean those who are just your garden-variety whack jobs. This city is and always has been full of them, and it’s part of why we live here. When you look at any historical narrative of yesteryear Anglo-Saxons describing New Orleans, they’re usually filled with descriptions of the godless, the heathen, the French, the Spanish, the mulatto, the quadroon, the pirate, the drunk, the fighters and any other non-, well, well-ordered Anglo-Saxon you can name. New Orleans as Another Dimension — as seen by Those Who Just Don’t Get It. I’m entirely cool with that.
I’m also not talking about the folks who are trying to deal with the New Reality, but are having serious questions about whether to stay. We’ve all had to deal with that in our own way over the past two years and we each have our own ideas about whether to stay or to go. The city isn’t working right now. The job situations have changed. Many neighborhoods aren’t what they were. Rebuilding, be it physical, emotional or whatever, is a six-foot-tall, short-skirted, gold-plated bitch. Practicality is, well, practical. It’s stressful and everyone has to make choices — and it can make you crazy. Or at least to feel like you’re crazy. It’s okay.
…but what I’m talking about is different.
I’m talking about the formerly easy-going neighbor who’s now so seriously wound out on some kinda chemical(s) that he’s unapproachable anymore. Or the post-Katrina arrivals who are so flushed with the freedom of this city that they ignore any internal rheostat they might have had and have gone back to being a 14-year-old in a 35-year-old body. Or the staid retiree couple who now spends way too many hours in the neighborhood tavern trying to recapture their Deadhead days on the jukebox. Or the hipsters who are just way too freaking coked-up all the time.
Some of us want to rebuild a city. Some of us have work to do and futures to create. Some of us want to create jobs and end How It Used To Be. But, though we don’t want to be anywhere else, we feel like we’re pissing into the wind — that it’s blowing back over us. It gets old.
It’s a long-term battle. But sometimes goals are hard to keep in focus when dickheads keep throwing stuff on your windshield. Forgive me for venting a bit — but I can’t help but feel that our little Creole cottage in the Irish Channel isn’t the only one facing the same challenges. We’re in for the long haul — but we could damn sure do with less shit from the posers, the stupid and the inept.
Just wondering.
Related posts:
The Robert Strong who was shot on St. Charles Ave last week is the same Bob I have known from La Crepe Nanou for many years. This is the feeling I can’t shake . . the, ‘who’s next?’ as a victim of senseless violent crime. I feel like thug rulery is the real reality and it’s hard to keep any other perspective. It could be any of us hardworking citizens.
Bob was out getting some groceries near his house, probably at Williams. It was 9:30 pm, he handed over his wallet and was, nevertheless, shot by thugs. I feel like we’re back in 1997 with the violence, and sometimes feel like all our work in rebuilding has been for nothing.
The fact is, the violence in New Orleans is worse than ever and it’s getting harder to reconcile the real risk along with the daily annoyances the city is putting on residents, while also trying to permit myself to be happy about the charms of the city. It’s enough to make anyone, as Jack says, “batshit fucking crazy”, about now.
http://www.wdsu.com/news/14525057/detail.html
It’s not even the crime that bugs me. It’s obviously there, of course, but it’s background noise to me. Stuff happens — and sometimes nearby — but we’ve been lucky to have not been personally affected much so far.
Example — Friday night, in our block of Magazine, there was an art opening at Perrin-Benham, a comedy show at Kun Flama and a big CD release party at the new Putumayo office. With all these folks converging on the same block, TBK and I set up in front of the restaurant and handed out soup to all the passers-by. When the soup was gone, we visited all three places and socialized, bought some art and generally enjoyed a nice evening.
What made this particularly nice was that we were adults being, well, Adults. We didn’t have to worry about anyone stumbling to the ground in a stupor, about drama from some giddy idiot, about some stoner working to complete a sentence or about a redneck cokehead arm-pumping and shoving his way through the crowd. We ate, drank, laughed, then went the hell home. It just seems that times like these are getting harder to find — that our world is shrinking.
Maybe we’ve just had a run of bad social luck lately, I dunno.
Definitely, I understand exactly what you’re talking about. For me it’s two general types of crazies. At work I contend with women who are so zonked out on prescription anti-anxiety/depression meds that they are almost completely incapable of doing their jobs, this is definitely a post katrina thing. And then there are all the angry PTSD folks who probably should be on medication but just get drunk and coked up instead. most of these folks were probably crazy before the storm, but katrina made things a lot worse.
I think its important to remove yourself from people who have lost their fucking mind lest they should pull you down. I just recently pruned some of the crazy from my friend tree and I feel better already.
Crazy people are like crabs in a bucket, if you don’t get rid of the people who’ve lost their mind they’ll pull you down and stomp you on the bottom.
It sucks, but if a two minute conversation with someone ruins your whole day then you have to run like hell.
Oh, this is just great. Your local (Jack Ware) registered, BIPOLOR nut is giving out advice.
God help all of you.