More Water
Traffic is picking up here in New Orleans, even in the devastated areas. The devastation is not what you might expect, after all the hype. It's not the debris piles, or all the shut businesses, or the occasional gravity-defying leaning structures, or the diminishing water lines that even a month ago, before a couple of cleansing rains, more clearly marked all the empty structures around here. In part, the devastation is most defined by the recovery. There is already a house on Napolean Ave. that has been raised five feet, and sits now on concrete pilings, surrounded by so many houses just waiting, for what? None of us know. There are houses in Mid-City with their electricity turned on but they are invariably surrounded by many many more structures that most people would consider un-livable. There is that so-called unaffected strip of land following the Mississippi River which includes Bywater, the French Quarter, and Uptown, and many of the restaurants and bars in these areas are open, but most of them are cash only, and almost all of them have something from their previous menu that is not available now. And when you leave these areas, to go back home to the campsite formerly known as "your home," you are assaulted with that mix of relief and what what? You can stay busy if that makes you feel better or you can just slack and the end result, to my slacking self, seems about the same.
The area Universities and colleges, Tulane, Loyola, Xavier, UNO, Delgado, are starting up in another week or two, with a general 50 percent cut in staff, and a few of the many area high schools are up and running, and a charter school or two are schooling the few children here...and then a pipe burst under the house at the cottage on the Virginia property for which I am absentee caretaker, and I'm dealing with that now...water, water, and more water.
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Traffic is picking up here in New Orleans, even in the devastated areas. The devastation is not what you might expect, after all the hype. It's not the debris piles, or all the shut businesses, or the occasional gravity-defying leaning structures, or the diminishing water lines that even a month ago, before a couple of cleansing rains, more clearly marked all the empty structures around here. In part, the devastation is most defined by the recovery. There is already a house on Napolean Ave. that has been raised five feet, and sits now on concrete pilings, surrounded by so many houses just waiting, for what? None of us know. There are houses in Mid-City with their electricity turned on but they are invariably surrounded by many many more structures that most people would consider un-livable. There is that so-called unaffected strip of land following the Mississippi River which includes Bywater, the French Quarter, and Uptown, and many of the restaurants and bars in these areas are open, but most of them are cash only, and almost all of them have something from their previous menu that is not available now. And when you leave these areas, to go back home to the campsite formerly known as "your home," you are assaulted with that mix of relief and what what? You can stay busy if that makes you feel better or you can just slack and the end result, to my slacking self, seems about the same.
The area Universities and colleges, Tulane, Loyola, Xavier, UNO, Delgado, are starting up in another week or two, with a general 50 percent cut in staff, and a few of the many area high schools are up and running, and a charter school or two are schooling the few children here...and then a pipe burst under the house at the cottage on the Virginia property for which I am absentee caretaker, and I'm dealing with that now...water, water, and more water.
- jimlouis 1-04-2006 9:02 pm