Where was I?

I'm going to stop worrying about writing the right post, and just write one.

Chevelle doesn't like Edith Piaf, apparently.

I'm still not getting out much, relative to my what I would like, but Sarah is my new roommate, and she had been having practice at the house with a lot of great musicians. This doesn't always work well with the dogs, though. More on a related theme next week, I expect.

I've been sick a lot lately, and it's been hard enough just to get to work, so I haven't been doing a lot. I've still been getting out to see music, but I haven't been dancing, and that's been frustrating. I know I'm forgetting things, backsliding when I could be progressing. The whole situation is rather depressing, and it becomes a multi-faceted viscious cycle.

Work itself is not the most unlifting thing. It never feels to me like I'm really doing anaything meaningful. I'm certainly not saving the world like I thought I would when I decided to do preservation. There's also always the question of when we will all be let go-- not if. This is now tangled up with my new-found role as arts patron. I'm happy to be able to give Sarah a place to stay and work while she splits her time between here and Abita Springs. Shani also needs a place. This makes home a much more pleasant and lively place to be, though I had come to kind of like living alone. The trick is that when my job ends, I will have to vacate my palatial apartment. Even with roommates it would be too much. I think it will be tricky to find a place as good, and I don't know what my budget will be-- probably small.

Work is also surreal, as the remaining sense of adult supervision fades. I've been realizing that if I spent my day just following my own whims and not actually showing up for work, it might take them a while to even notice. Everyone would just assume I was working somewhere else.

It has been harder to do as I get to know the city better. I see more and more holes in the city, and most of those holes are now ones that I know individually, since I had to survey the buildings before they disappeared. I watched a demolition yesterday and even though there was nothing really noteworthy about the building and no question at all that it had to be demolished, it was still affecting. The building had already largely collapsed and was beyond help. Removing it really was a help for the neighborhood. Yet, it was still not a positive thing to watch it come down-- It's hard to explain what I mean. It was not an intellectual reaction. There was just something about the dumb violence of the excavator tearing it apart that made one feel stressed, unhappy, unhealthy. And there was something of a battle. The building was far past the point where it could put up much resistence, so it tried trickery instead. Despite the operator's best efforts to bring it down neatly and carefully, walls and porches went leaping off in directions of their own choosing. It was lucky that the building next door was also listed for demolition, because it got hit hard a couple of times by pirouetting walls.

I think I'm having some sort of quiet philosophical crisis about what it means to live in New Orleans. Nothing too serious, but maybe a sign that the newness and excitement has work off. It is being replaced with more knowledge of the place and maybe a different kind of comfort. It's been interesting to talk to Sarah, who is a native. She has a lot to say about the changes and about all the new arrivals.

I've had some great meetings out doing fieldwork, too. There was the guy who saw me taking pictures and told me about a tree with some fungus growing out of it that would make a cool picture. There were some sad men in the ninth ward worried about what was becoming of the nieghborhood and the world. And last week there was Miss Hannah.

I was surveying in Broadmoor, and Miss Hannah came out asking about-- actually, I don't even remember. She wanted to show me the mysterious life form growing in a crack in the FEMA trailer that she was waiting to have taken away. Then she told me all about the neighborhood-- about the man who had a farm there when there was nothing, and about the house he built a little later. she showed me where "1929" was scratched into the concrete on that house where a column was missing, and told me about how people came in to build houses after than and make some money. I wish I could remember half of what she said. She told me about the only other people on the block and how they were no good and were staying there illegally. She told me about how her relatives used her address to make claims with FEMA, so that she couldn't get any FEMA money. (I've heard this a lot...) She told me about the guy who watched houses to see that they are truly abandoned, then fixes them up a little bit and rents them out... all over the neighborhood, apparently. She just couldn't believe that, but it's a good scam, I say. She said he was also trying to sell the house from 1929, though it's not his. That seems less feasible.

No matter the madness here, though, it seems less crazy than the world at large. I've been reading the endless articles of how the rich and the overextended middle class are changing their behavior in the face of the looming depressing. Meanwhile, there's some complication about thanksgiving because my uncle is renovating his 20 year old house. Again. Here, on the other hand, the coolest thing seems to be living and looking like you just stepped off a WPA work site in 1935.