From the category archives:

Essays

The Broken Piece

Essays
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“All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.” -Peter Pan Every now and then I grow restless and panicky about living here. I usually brush it off as normal for living in a place that’s a crime ridden, hurricane attracting, oil soaked roller-coaster of drama. But last night the real reason [...]

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Reservations: Parents in the Closet

Essays
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I remember it percolating in the back of my mind. But it wasn’t until last autumn… I was snuggled on the sofa on a Monday night with a glass of red wine, watching the last few minutes of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations show (one of my favorites of all time), and then it hit me [...]

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From The Archives: Hurricane Gustav Dispatches

Essays
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Shops on Magazine St, boarded up before Hurricane Gustav, August 2008. I’ve had a few people ask me what happened to my old blog posts. Basically, I wrote on Blogger here from 2006 – 2009. When I decided to transfer all of my data to WordPress last year, I closed all of the content on [...]

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Crude Summer

Essays
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BP station on the beach, Gulfport, Mississippi. Last weekend we drove out to Mississippi’s coast with the kids to play on the beach. Yes, I’m aware there was a big oil rig that blew up, sank in the gulf, and has been gushing oil all over the southern shore of the United States for 2+ [...]

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A Season in the Treme

Essays
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Warning: This post contains spoilers. I trudged through Treme. The first episode made me crawl and squirm inside so badly I wanted to rip open my old leather sofa and get inside with the decomposing cheerios and wine stains. At first I thought it was the forced dialogue – overt references to red beans on [...]

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Goodbye, Warrior Fridge

Essays
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In 2004 we finished renovating our house. Mostly. Part of that was buying new appliances, and I had the coolest new stainless steel mega fridge available. But… One year later I stared at it in horror. No, it wasn’t out of style. It was full of maggots. Hurricane Katrina came and went, and spared our [...]

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Staying Home

Essays
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Recently we had a “we might have to leave New Orleans” scare. This is a well-known fright among the populous. It’s when you have to depart the city for things like work, education, your family, or other responsibilities. We shudder at the prospect. What do you mean, leave? Can you imagine living your whole life [...]

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Reflections From Oz

Essays
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“New Orleans is Oz, and everywhere else is Kansas” -Unknown Bourbon St, hours after Superbowl 2010. “Sunday night, Bourbon St. was like a capital city of some country after a dictator has been overthrown”, said the NY Times on Monday morning. And I thought, no, that’s what we did on Saturday. To outsiders, New Orleans [...]

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Cried Wolf (#18)

Essays

I knew it: Stay or Go?Some La. residents rethinking evacuating And of course, the most tragicomical: Nagin worries residents could stay if Ike threatens. Well, I don’t suppose it could be YOUR fault Ray, what with the crying wolf dramatics like “mother of all storms” and “900 miles wide”. And of course, FoxNNbc is totally [...]

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Gustav #17

Essays

At about 6pm last night we got electricity back. We were convinced it wouldn’t last, but started cleaning up the inside of the house anyway. We swept out the leaves on the floors (from having the windows open for almost three days), turned off the generator, picked up the fans, reconnected the refrigerator, etc, etc… [...]

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