New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana has given me an unshakeable mix of anxiety, confusion and disgust. The streets brimming with travelers and alcohol, the sidewalks broken, depleted. If you’ve traveled to New Orleans, Louisiana you’re in search of one of two things: a week straight of drunken sex-crazed nights or trouble. Trouble lines the streets here more potently than the tourist traps. You can smell the trouble: feel it soaking into your alcohol laced skin as you dodge sweaty families, unshaven homeless. Around seven o’clock in Louisiana the temperature drops to eighty degrees and everyone in the neighborhoods can be found lining their front stoop, smoking cigarettes and yelling across the narrow streets. In Louisiana, everyone is family. People call out to you as you walk by, some of it friendly, some of it predatory… the risk is in your reply, no matter what keep that scowl on your face, your scowl is your best defense.

Every house and every building in New Orleans bleeds the history of two hundred years. In these buildings you see the oppression, the triumph, you see the blood, you see the mystery. New Orleans makes quite a bit of money on its mystery. An unaware traveler will be drawn in by the stories of voodoo and magic, common sense has told them these things are a farce, New Orleans presents reasonable doubt.

When you’re walking the streets of New Orleans in the evening you’ll hear a myriad of things-- you’ll hear people in loud, jolly conversation, young men calling out the windows of cars at the girls walking downtown, you’ll hear chickens and cats and drinking and laughing. In a New Orleans evening you’ll hear the unmistakable rumble of an oncoming night, the hot day is over and everything is about to happen. The drinks will be cold, the band will be loud and the people will be beautiful and fresh again. A downtown New Orleans night screams chaos and excitement, there is jump and bounce, a whoop here and hello there, everyone is out, everyone is alive. All senses are stimulated as you swoop and dodge through an enthusiastic crowd.

But here, on a quiet walk through a French Quarter slum, before the evening madness has truly begun, you feel the stir of excitement, and the peace of the night. Here you will feel the wonder and the mystique of a place so laden with fable and myth, that you’ll almost forget the poverty of the buildings around you, the struggle of the few remaining locals. A Louisiana night captivates the mind in its magical history, in its unforgettable charm, in its lonely struggle to stay alive. It’s falling, falling through the cracks of a society as broken and confused as it’s sidewalks, a society hypnotized by corporations and Hollywood, a society that may never truly grasp the beauty of a place this unique, rooted in the very basin of a country wrought by the ordinary and common.