We are BR! New Orleans: Proud to crawl/swim/call it home. Louisiana: Third World and Proud of it! Save/Pave LSU. Vote for the crook, it’s important!
“You didn’t know Louisiana was dysfunctional? Have you ever been to Louisiana? It’s a miracle the state’s name is right on the license plate!”
-Jon Stewart, addressing Michael D. Brown
When I was younger, I never thought much of being Southern, or being from Louisiana. I had radical leftist thoughts in my crass female brain in a termite and roach-ridden house that didn’t fit the cotillion mold. In high school, all I wanted was to get out of Baton Rouge and Louisiana and go to college far away, but instead I ended up at LSU, thanks to TOPS. It wasn’t until college that I learned more about this home of mine, where progressives have always had a number of hard fights on their hands, and where beyond the surface of archetypes and stereotypes lay squirrelly rabble-rousers–writing about injustices, organizing and participating in various subversive actions, putting the ‘grass’ in ‘grassroots,’ promoting progressive social policies and politics, filing lawsuits against corporations or, to protest hurricane taxes, sending a pair of checks to Entergy with the words “for jack shit” and “for corporate bailout—you’re welcome” written on the memo lines.
After college, I moved away without a clue as to where I would end up. The two-year teaching commitment I’d made was a perfect escape route, however I soon found myself bitching about the bland food at restaurants serving “Louisiana cuisine,” banging my fist on the table and speaking crudely and laughing loudly in response to others’ reticent and Protestant demeanor. Every time I listened to jazz, its sound was empty, soulless, out-of-place. I called in sick and shelled out hundreds to fly home for Spanish Town Mardi Gras. My hair fell flat without 100 percent humidity. I looked to the sky and missed the colorful, cloud-filled sunsets billowing in from the coast. I missed the inspiring exuberance of friends who see a blank or forgotten spot and create a desired reality in place of it. I missed the romance, the river and lakes, New Orleans being a stone’s throw away, and the lush, bluesy, boozy sexiness of it all.
So after my two-year commitment was up, I resigned without resignation and came home. Within a week I fell into a job that has given me a second-row seat to the circus of school reform in our city, the ideal place for me right now. My best friend, Erin, and I moved into a Spanish Town apartment with no back exit, lead water pipes, dirty and leaky heating pipes and an asbestos roof. It’s a death trap but the location is just right, and as such it’s a microcosm of this polluted state we are in. I love coming home to the creaky floors, but every time I fly up I-110 at sixty-five miles per hour, day or night, my view is clouded by refineries on the close horizon. A few years ago, Erin gave me a gift she procured at the LSU pottery sale, a poorly constructed ceramic cup. On one side is the phrase “I love BR,” and on the opposite side is a rectangular image of these same smokestacks. It sits on my dresser and holds my incense, both a few feet and mere miles from the wistful, significant, damaged reality it comments on.
This is where I come from. The people I love most in this world, I came to know in the crossroads of this state and this town. This is why I owe it something—some reverence, an attempt at change, or at least credit where it is due. I owe it a fight. I owe it consideration. I have daydreams that all of these people I love so much, who left like I did to gain experience and knowledge and advanced degrees, will eventually come back to commune, brainstorm, love and fight. I know, though, that dreams and reality often remain distinct for reasons both valid and disappointing. It is these same reasons that make me afraid that one day I too will feel the need to leave and not come back. I don’t want it to come to that. This is where I come from, and I would like it to be where I am going.
Poverty. Failing schools. Environmental degradation. Corruption. Waste. Ignorance. Insufficient cultural access and awareness. Violence. Prejudice. Incompetence. This city and its troubled state have a lot to make fun of and run away from. But it offers a challenge, a scrappy fight. I decided to come back to do what I can with my talent and skills (okay, and for the good parties). I came back to add a viridescent thread to the translucent layer my generation is stitching over a checkered past and through a checkered present, and every day, from neighborhood parks or streets or my kitchen, I find myself face to face with a dingy skyscraper by the river that is a symbol of all that I love and all that I fight against.
Usually, if I get involved in a relationship that causes me such an amount of frustration, pain and insecurity, I cut it off to maintain my sanity and eliminate as much drama as possible from my life. But it appears Louisiana has a hold on me I am not ready or willing to escape. So I turn to cathartic expression doubling as documentation. This is my platform on which I plan to prop up my musings for public view. They may comfort or discomfit, but either way their presence here will give me an outlet I’ve lacked to this point. Keep it bottled up, and it will explode. In the order of order, I present to you my punctuated, effusive mess.