When It Rains, It Pours.

New Orleans, I love you. Watching you go again and again under the surges is torture, like knowing that a loved one is at war.

New Orleans, in a couple of early spring nights, you taught me what music is, what food is, how darkness laughs. Your sorrowful trees were brilliant with left over mardi-gras beads and your cemetaries marked with mysterious red Xs, and your tinfoil slums, moist and deformed and pulsating like something from the set of a horror film, were waiting to be knocked down by the waves, by the governement, to be torn apart by the ghosts of St. Charles Ave. trollies.

Then, surrounded by Telleman's tafelmuzik at the Commender's Palace, you fed me turtle soup. Turtles are endangered, New Orleans! that's bad karma. You too are endangered, devoured again and again like baby turtles that have just hatched. How many of them make it safely to the sea? How many bewitched cities like yourself can survive the lashes of history? Perhaps none, we should let you go and learn to have do with Atlanta.