The Death Of Mangroves

 When I wrote 'The Death Of Oranjes', it was to say goodbye to a brief, yet, life-changing period of my life. I used it as an avenue to thank all of the people that became a part of my Orlando-life. It was filled with secrets, poorly-worded homages, and half-assed placation that has had nearly no reach on my life in New Orleans. This New Orleans-life has few; almost no intersections. This has as much been a visit as rife with ghosts as the city I inhabit. It's been my frenetic failure from a selfish, collapsing, inhuman; to a married parent crafting the world of another; straight through to the transparent collapse of our lives thanks to Covid and an unforgiving conglomerate. Not because of this, but in spite of this, something new is afoot.

In time, I will be able to decide if New Orleans is only the first chapters of a longer novel (let's call it the Thomas Wolfe) of my life. Or, if, as I suspect, New Orleans for me is the tired cliché that so many people before me have turned into brilliant flames of unforgiving works. My flames are brilliant, because I stoked the flames so perniciously; failure after failure, after failure. Maybe New Orleans is my (O' Henry), a short-story with kings, chaos, and curated culture unique only to these pages. I too, ran from my indictments and I too became someone else.

Since I mentioned him, it's time to say this. If you are going to have a bookstore, maybe the finest, or perhaps most revered used bookstore in all of North Carolina, and your store is on the corner or O' Henry Street... maybe you could keep a copy or two of some of his books in stock? Guess who's grave I took time to find while I was visiting Asheville? 

Tomorrow, I load a U-Haul with 2/3 of our belongings (I hope I get that much), and on Thursday, I drive that U-Haul to West North Carolina. It will be one of two hauls to our new home, the latter taking place in November. I'm not at all excited to find out how one gets a U-Haul loaded with records up a mountain, but I can't change the circumstances, so I'll do my best to not worry about it. Surely, someone is on YouTube to explain this to me. My head is stuck in the hurdle of the move, and I'm struggling to visualize what it looks like when we are there. There's the crush of settling somewhere completely new and having to find work quickly. It will be Thanksgiving rolling down a hill to Christmas with most of our stuff in storage, and every dollar as precious as the blood in my veins.

And why is this happening? It's painfully as much about New Orleans, as it is Asheville. A gumbo of car-shattering streets; corrupted systems propped upon the bones of history; the inadequacy of a city to elevate its poorest citizens while using those same citizens as the caretakers of the inebriated royalty that use our oldest neighborhoods as toilets and a feckless pursuit of fun that ends in sugar-saturated-strong-armed-robbery and statistic-burying tourist board. You, who bought those plastic beads, and only remember 1/3 of the days you were here - are for whom this city provides a red carpet. It is this monarchy, and our intervals of daunting heat, massive rapidly-intensified hurricanes, and an electric, water, and sewage grid that predates cars...vs. an unknown nestled between mountains covered in lush greenery, summer nights that relieve and relax and aren't as hot as the clothes coming out of a dryer, home ownership, and fuck, I hate saying it, but it's clean. This very moment, 1-month after Hurricane Ida, in a city that, at worst, suffered power loss and wind damage, there are still trash piles taller than a human and longer than a city bus all over the city. This is the life you adjust to when you make New Orleans your home. Schools are almost all terrible, crime is rampant and increasing, all of the available jobs are in sales or in the service industry, and it's expensive to live here. The good, however, is such a varied menagerie of the unique that it's heart-breaking thinking it won't be a part of my life going forward. This is a dysfunctional relationship.

I have so much to share about my time here, so much to say, but I think I am leaving feeling unfulfilled. An opportunity I had to get buoyantly lost here was taken for granted and subjugated to work responsibilities. Alas - another day. I need to get some rest, U-Hauls don't load themselves... why isn't Elon working on that?