last trip to new orleans.

walked around the french quarter with all the tourists.
it felt like tourism. which is good, surely. their first real xmas season since the storm. i imagine it will be a much needed jump. but saying good bye to the city, there is also a part of me that realizes my chance to have it "to myself" is just about over. i know people who live here still feel a certain zombie-ness in the city. everyone still talks about almost nothing but the storm and i still hear locals talk about leaving cause they're too depressed living here. but especially with xmas bringing more business-as-usual, i can feel the city approaching its normal self. and very soon indeed you will have to look very close to see any differences (except, of course in chalmette, the 9th ward, and lakeview. still i imagine in well under 5 years even there will be relatively normal feeling. )

but the 'normal' new orleans is what i've fallen in love with. the storm stuff feels significant and historical and is the reason i finally did come back, but the city as it has always been is what i will soon miss.
i'm sitting in a cafe, on what has become my favorite street--oak street, and reflecting on traffic. the tattooed and peirced youth often loud and obnoxious, next to a dude who could be a homeless drunk, next to some academic looking older woman. today in the french quarter there was an old guy with his white ponytail died purple. not even in venice do you see a white haired person take advantage of the opportunity for vibrancy nature has afforded him.
the gothicness, if that's what you can call it. everything feels old. and has a darkness to it. fresh paint, but there are still bricks and iron and shutters--i mean, the kind that function. and skeletons and cemeteries are as acceptable here as oak trees and trumpets. they are proud of the way they dance with and around death.

and EVERYONE in the quarter rides bikes. all the locals know better than to try to drive there. it was made for horses.
you see more bikes locked up than in austin.
and black people. i'm gonna miss the black people. LA feels so segregated compared to here.

i spent the day walking around trying to take pictures to remember the city by. no image seemed to do it justice.
there were dudes with trumpets on every corner, but without the feeling of the vibration of their sounds...whats it worth?

so i'm sitting here, trying to just absorb as much as possible. maybe i'll actually come back for mardi gras. it's been 8 years.
and there are weddings and whatnot that will draw me back soon enough,
but i am sad tonight.
sentimental. contemplating the cost of rent here. or a purchase. for the future. hopefully the attention the city has gotten this year will attract the right kind of people. creative, energized, open-minded people. not that that's what makes the city rich. and not that i believe very much will change here, but it deserves to be guarded. physically and culturally.
period. end of story. it does.
so says i.

see ya later alligator.