Leaving, coming back, blinking and deciding
Though the calendar won’t admit it yet, it’s summer in New Orleans and that means a series of things. Hot and humid, of course, touching off snarky arguments that escalate more quickly. It also means the sidewalk traffic on Magazine and elsewhere in the city drops off the table like a 16-pound bowling ball. Many of the city’s restaurants are offering special deals to those who are to venture out, while others will simply close up completely for a month or so. We’ve opted to close for two days in the middle of the week — giving us time to actually leave the city last week and visit our sailboat over in Florida for the first time in nearly a year. It was the first time in seven months we’d spent a night away from the house. We returned two days later — sunburned, sated by simple goodies we can’t buy here (Yuengling beer! Whataburger!) and, though we loved the break, thrilled to be back.
I gotta tell ya — it’s w-e-i-r-d out there, y’all. Smooth streets, you can call City Hall and a real, competent person answers, sidewalks are bizarrely clean. Stuff like that.
Anyway, I brought back something new from this particular trip. I returned with much less patience about How Things Are. Much less tolerance for That’s Just How It Is. The 50 or so hours we spent outside of New Orleans (and returning to the headlines of the latest Jefferson family indictments) provided the final impetus to push me out of my self-imposed New Orleans Acceptance Bubble and into being a more proactive individual. Not that I’m going to go all Falling Down or anything. But I’m now a lot less willing to simply accept the trash on the street, the crackhead stumbling down said street, the utter loons we continually put into elected office, the decrepit, rat-filled, derelict houses in my neighborhood, the incompetence of “public servants” and the overall throw-up-our-hands posture that’s a way of life for too many in New Orleans.
….so I’ll be bitching a bit more about stuff and being more Out There now that I’ve got a couple of days off each week.
…just so y’know.
Yeah.
…and thanks for the bump, Rayna.
OH, so you mean it’s not the Center of the Universe? http://blog.nola.com/chrisrose/2008/02/letters_from_the_center_of_the.html. I’m glad to see you’re getting irked. I have sort of been waiting for it but I once shared your frame of mind.
I have been rolling a post about the impact of the dysfunctional aspect of New Orleans that has been wearing many of us down around in my mind for some time. The reason I don’t post it is because there is so much backlash against anything contrary to this being Heaven on Earth. There is a large subset of people who can’t afford to leave and who aren’t ‘cheerleaders’. However, they have no voice. A great many people I know who have lived here their whole lives are bailing . . . they are very quietly putting away pennies and trying desperately to get out. There’s no FEMA program for escape right now.